A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (57 page)

Edward arrived in Newcastle on 1 March 1296 to meet the giant English army he had summoned. The Scots, who had been ordered to present themselves on the same date, unsurprisingly failed to appear. The king therefore marched his host along the Northumbrian coast and drew it up at Wark, a castle on the River Tweed, where the English lord had decided to join the Scots on account of his love for a Scottish lady – a nice reminder, at this critical moment, that the Tweed was a political boundary between the two countries, not a cultural one. Edward’s arrival at the Border coincided with the start of Holy Week, and so, with proper respect for Christian piety, the English army sat and waited. During this time, the Scots made an attack on nearby Carham, and on Easter Monday they tried, unsuccessfully, to take Carlisle. When the festivities at Wark were over, therefore, the English king had all the justification he needed for his invasion. As the end of March approached, he crossed the Tweed and led his army in the direction of Berwick.
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Berwick was one of the three towns whose surrender Edward had demanded by proxy the previous year, and that demand was now repeated in person. The citizens again rejected it, throwing back insults, taunts and gibes at the king, and even – according to one English chronicler – baring their buttocks at him. Such bravado was quite surprising, given the size of the English army, and the fact that Berwick’s defences at this time amounted to no more than an insubstantial wooden palisade. The assault that followed, however, seems to have caught both sides unprepared. The king had drawn his forces up in front of the town and was engaged in the pre-battle ritual of creating new knights – a display perhaps intended to persuade the Scots to reconsider their position. But to the English navy lurking offshore, this military activity looked like a cry to arms, and they duly began their attack. When the sailors in turn got into difficulty and several ships were set on fire, Edward was obliged to sound a general advance. His troops rapidly breached Berwick’s flimsy defences and poured into the town, putting many of its stupefied citizens to the sword.
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The king has often been criticised for his behaviour at Berwick, and stands accused of having ordered the indiscriminate massacre of the townspeople. In fact, Edward’s tactics and the killing that took place – however reprehensible they may seem to modern sensibilities – were entirely in keeping with the conventions of medieval warfare. A town or city that refused to surrender left itself liable to be sacked in just this way. That Edward was operating squarely within the usual chivalric norms at Berwick is emphasised by his treatment of the 200-strong garrison who holed themselves up in the town’s castle. To these men the king offered generous terms of surrender: safety of life and limb, the right to retain their lands and possessions, and even the right to go free, provided they swore never again to bear arms against him. It was a most magnanimous package, which the garrison wisely chose to accept.
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The mistake of the Scots, arguably, was to behave with the same kind of chivalric propriety in response. Having taken Berwick, Edward remained in its smoking ruins for a full four weeks, improving the town’s defences with a great new ditch, reportedly eighty feet wide and forty feet deep. (The king, demonstrating his sureness of touch when it came to popular gestures, wheeled the first barrow of earth himself.) How long he could have remained there though, holding his expensive army together, is an open question. As it was, within days of Berwick’s fall, Edward received a formal message of defiance from John Balliol, in which the Scottish king renounced his homage and fealty (‘extorted by your violent pressure’). Then, as the end of April approached, the Scottish army abandoned its raids in northern England and offered the English battle. The setting for their encounter was Dunbar, some thirty miles further along the coast from Berwick. Edward had sent some troops under the earl of Surrey to capture the castle there, and the Scottish host soon materialised with the intention of raising the siege. The result was a total disaster for the Scots, whose inexperienced and undisciplined ranks collapsed in the face of a well co-ordinated English assault. Scottish foot soldiers perished in their hundreds, and several Scottish nobles were taken captive. The next day Edward himself arrived, Dunbar Castle was surrendered, and more prestigious prisoners – including three Scottish earls – were taken. The war was barely one month old, with just one city and one castle conceded, but already the Scottish resistance was in tatters.
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What followed was therefore more like a victory parade than a military campaign. From Dunbar Edward marched back to the Border, where he swiftly secured the submission of Roxburgh and Jedburgh – the two towns besides Berwick demanded in 1295 – and where he finally joined forces with the Irish magnates, who had arrived two months too late. Then it was north to Edinburgh, which surrendered after a siege of just five days. Stirling, the king’s next target, put up no resistance at all. By the time the English army arrived, the castle’s garrison had already fled.
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It was now mid-June and those Scottish leaders still at large were looking for a way to come in. John Balliol, a man bullied from above and bullied from below, had long since come to rue his promotion to ranks of royalty, and pined for the days when he had been a mere English magnate. He had also been in London and had no doubt seen the severed head of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd on its spike. Hence, when the bishop of Durham, acting on Edward’s behalf, proposed to him the kind of deal that the late prince of Wales had proudly scorned, Balliol leapt at the chance. He would resign the Scottish kingship and become an English earl. ‘Then he would go out of the realm of Scotland, to England, to dwell there in the ways that used to be his, and would hunt in his parks, and do what he wished for his solace and his pleasure.’

This idyllic vision, alas, proved to be fleeting. For reasons that remain unclear, Edward himself soon decided that the deal was off. Possibly the English, having taken Edinburgh, unearthed documentary evidence of the Franco-Scottish alliance to suggest that Balliol was more culpable than he had claimed. Whatever the case, by the time the king of England caught up with his disobedient vassal, he had devised for him a different fate. On 8 July Balliol and his supporters, having already confessed their crime of rebellion by letters, gave themselves up at Montrose, a town on Scotland’s eastern seaboard. And there the Scottish king, created by Edward less than four years earlier, was ceremoniously and humiliatingly unmade. Balliol resigned his regalia, and suffered the personal indignity of having the royal coat-of-arms ripped from the tabard he was wearing (hence his popular nickname, Toom Tabard). Together with the other Scottish leaders, the demoted king was then dispatched into England, not to enjoy an earldom, but to endure a period of captivity at the Tower. Later he was conceded a less strict confinement in Hertfordshire, where he was at least allowed to do a bit of hunting.
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Edward, meanwhile, was completing his tour of Scotland, taking hostages and homages, and travelling – as in Wales – further than any English king before him. By the end of July he had reached Elgin, the northernmost limit of his progress, and by the end of August he was back at Berwick, where his campaign had begun just five months earlier. A parliament was held there, to which the Scots came in their thousands to swear fealty to their new, direct overlord, and Edward sat to decide the future governance of the country he had conquered.
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One thing was certain: Scotland was to have no new king, at least not for the time being. At the outset of the campaign, the Bruces had been optimistic at the prospect of belated promotion. The elderly Robert Bruce, erstwhile competitor for the Scottish throne, had died the previous year; but his namesake son had kept up the family tradition of collaborating with the English, and had joined Edward’s army in the hope of supplanting Balliol. Once expressed, however, the hope had been immediately crushed. ‘Do you think we have nothing better to do,’ the English king had asked him, ‘than to win kingdoms for you?’ It was a put-down so withering that the poor man retired to his estates in Essex and never set foot in Scotland again.
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There remained, of course, the possibility that other disappointed candidates might be tempted to try their luck, so Edward had taken the trouble to remove temptation from their path. In the course of his victory tour, the king had confiscated the ancient Stone of Scone, the seat on which Scottish monarchs had been made since time immemorial. Like the relics and regalia of Wales (and, indeed, like the other regalia of Scotland), the Stone was dispatched into England, the latest addition to Edward’s now impressive collection at Westminster. The king even had a special cabinet made in which to display this new trophy, the so-called Coronation Chair.
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For the time being, Edward decided, he would rule Scotland directly. A new, English-style administration would be set up, based at Berwick – the ruined town would be rebuilt, like a bastide, with the help of experts like Henry le Waleys. From there, the country would be governed by a team of English officials, in charge of a new, nationwide network of sheriffs, soldiers and constables, overwhelmingly English in their origins. In charge of the whole operation would be the earl of Surrey, who had led the English to victory at Dunbar. In September, as Edward returned to England, he formally handed over the seal of Scotland to its new colonial governor. ‘A man does good business,’ he exclaimed, jokingly, ‘when he rids himself of a turd.’
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As their conquering king returned south, his English subjects sang in praise of his astonishing victory. Soldiers made up ribald rhymes mocking the incompetence of their enemies at Dunbar. Monastic chroniclers composed more stately eulogies to celebrate so great a triumph. The reaction of Peter Langtoft is worth quoting in full:

Ah God! how often Merlin said the truth
In his prophecies, if you read them!
Now are the two waters united in one
Which have been separated by great mountains;
And one realm made of two different kingdoms
Which used to be governed by two kings.
Now are the islanders all joined together
And Albany (Scotland) reunited to the regalities
Of which king Edward is proclaimed lord.
Cornwall and Wales are in his power
And Ireland the great at his will.
There is neither king nor prince of all the countries
Except king Edward, who has thus united them
Arthur never held the fiefs so fully.
Henceforward there is nothing to do but provide his expedition
Against the king of France, to conquer his inheritances
And then bear the cross where Jesus Christ was born.
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In these last lines, at least, Langtoft was entirely right. The war with France was once again at the top of Edward’s agenda and, more than ever, Gascony stood in need of his help.

The second force sent to the duchy had fared no better than the first. By the autumn of 1295, when Edward had twisted enough aristocratic arms to elicit the necessary enthusiasm, the main expedition was already a year behind schedule – and even then it had not left on time. Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s appointed captain, had fallen ill, and had not recovered until after Christmas. It was not until January 1296 that the much-delayed fleet had finally set sail. Once arrived in Gascony, their luck had not improved. The French, having been left unmolested for so long, were found to be well entrenched. English attempts to retake Bordeaux, and even the smaller towns along the Garonne, came to nothing. Eventually, as his money had started to run out, Lancaster had been forced to abandon his efforts and had retired to Bayonne. There he had once again fallen sick, and died on 5 June. Henry de Lacy, the ultra-loyal earl of Lincoln, had taken command of the demoralised English forces.
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News of his brother’s death had reached Edward while he was still in Scotland, just days after he had received John Balliol’s resignation. Orders had been sent out immediately for masses to be said for Edmund’s soul. The king spoke of his devastation, and enjoined his churchmen to pray for ‘our dearest and only brother, who was always devoted and faithful to us, and to the affairs of our realm, and in whom valour and many gifts of grace shone forth’. It was almost certainly with Edmund’s eternal salvation in mind that Edward had summoned his next English parliament to meet, not around the feast of St Edward (13 October), as was usual, but one month later, around the feast of St Edmund (20 November). For the same reason, the venue was not to be Westminster, but Bury St Edmunds, where his brother’s saintly namesake was interred. The local chronicler confirms that, when the king arrived in the town in November, he and his great men solemnly kept St Edmund’s feast.
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The principal reason for calling the parliament, however, was financial. War on all fronts was forcing Edward to disgorge unheard-of sums of money. Even before he had set out for Scotland, the king had spent something in the region of £250,000 – that is, considerably more than the cost of his crusade and the conquest of Wales combined. In January, as a damage-limitation exercise, all royal building projects had been cancelled, with the exception of Caernarfon, Beaumaris and the murals in the Painted Chamber (an indication that, in Edward’s mind, the crusade was still a priority). The conquest of Scotland had demanded tens of thousands of pounds in addition; the recovery of Gascony would require a sum many times greater. Somewhere, somehow, more funds must be found.
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