A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (66 page)

The king’s frustration, with the walls of Stirling in sight, is understandable, but his inclination to blame his officials was (as before) quite unfair. In one of his letters, dated 11 October, Edward informed the exchequer that he thought they should be well supplied with funds from the new parliamentary and papal taxes. Yet the collection of both these levies, as he must have known, had not been scheduled to begin until this point in the autumn; indeed, the king’s orders to assess the fifteenth had been issued only three days earlier, on 8 October. The failure to reach ‘an honourable and satisfactory conclusion’ in 1301 lay not with bureaucratic inefficiency, but with executive impatience. Edward had tried to deliver a knock-out punch but had only had time to draw his fist halfway back.
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It remained to be seen whether anything could be salvaged from the campaign’s wreckage. In October the prospect seemed extremely bleak. As the king candidly admitted in his last letter to the exchequer, the desertion of his army left him ‘in danger of losing’ what he had won. Already the Scots were regrouping in Selkirk Forest and around Glasgow, while elsewhere newly established English positions were coming under direct attack. At Turnberry, the castle lately captured by Edward of Caernarfon was being besieged by a Scottish army, and the new garrison at nearby Ayr feared that they would be next. As for the prince himself, he could offer no assistance. His own army was now also dissipated, and his Irish allies had long since sailed for home. By this point he was back in Carlisle, unable to contribute anything beyond the news that ‘the castles of Lochmaben and Dumfries are feebly garrisoned, with troops lacking in victuals and other provisions’. Moreover, in addition to all these discouraging reports coming in from the field, Edward received intelligence in October from abroad. John Balliol, it transpired, had been released from papal custody and was at large in northern France. Rumour had it he was raising an army and was coming to reclaim his kingdom.
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Given that Balliol had been detained at the pope’s pleasure, his release might naturally be interpreted as the pope’s own handiwork – a fresh and provocative expression by Boniface VIII of the unequivocal support for the Scots he had first voiced some two years earlier. In fact, however, this was almost certainly not the case. Boniface was by this point endeavouring to remain neutral on the subject of Anglo-Scottish relations. Although Scottish ambassadors to Rome were encouraged by the audience they received during the summer of 1301, so too were their English counterparts. The pope, for example, had declared himself much impressed with Edward’s historical justification of his position in Scotland (composed with the aid of the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, this celebrated letter had cited, among other proofs, the well-known fact of King Arthur’s superior lordship). Genuinely impressed or not, Boniface was certainly aware that his new and mutually beneficial financial arrangement with England was just about to take effect. He was not, therefore, going to rock the boat by taking any firm action in favour of the Scots.
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Balliol owed his liberty in 1301 not to papal partiality, but to French pressure; which is to say that, while the pope no longer posed a problem for Edward, the king of France continued to be a major pain. Philip IV was still playing the Scottish card for all it was worth, insisting that he could not agree to a permanent peace without his allies, knowing that Edward would never agree to this, and calculating that in this way France’s grip on Gascony could be maintained indefinitely. No sooner had the English advanced into Scotland in 1301 than French ambassadors had arrived on the scene, trying to broker yet another truce. Balliol’s release, procured more or less simultaneously, was part of the same cynical ploy. The army that was reportedly going to restore the former king was to be provided by his French backer.
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The only conceivable way to read Edward’s reaction to this persistent interference is that he decided to play the French at their own game and call Philip’s bluff. In late October the king moved from Dunipace to Linlithgow, established a new headquarters and announced that it was his intention to remain in Scotland during the coming winter (‘to annoy his enemies,’ as he explained in letters sent out a short while later). At the same time, he sent his wily chief minister, Walter Langton, to France, in order to negotiate
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As the year drew to a close Langton proceeded to arrange a remarkable treaty, the essential feature of which was that it invited the king of France to put his money where his mouth was. Under its terms, Edward agreed to a nine-month ceasefire with the Scots, and Philip agreed to enforce it. All the territory that the English king had captured in Scotland during his current campaign was to be handed over to French agents for the truce’s duration. Of course, for this to happen, Philip would have to do what to date he had not, and actually deploy some troops in aid of his Scottish allies. The English were obviously banking on the assumption that he would ultimately balk at this commitment. It is certainly impossible to believe, bearing in mind Philip’s previous form over the ‘temporary’ custody of Gascony, that Edward had any real intention of placing so much as an inch of territory into French hands.
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Nevertheless, in Scotland this cynical exercise was taken seriously, with deeply damaging consequences for the patriotic cause. The fact of Balliol’s release lent credence to the far-fetched idea that Philip IV was about to sponsor the former king’s return and thereby effect the Scots’ salvation. In some quarters, of course, this was a cause for celebration – the Comyns imagined they were about to regain the lost leader in whose name they were fighting – but for Robert Bruce and his supporters, it marked the end of the road. Bruce had already seen his fortunes decline of late. The previous year he had been nudged out of office as a Guardian; the past summer he had seen his lands once again wasted by English armies and his castles occupied by English troops. The prospect of Balliol’s restoration, which could only increase his grief, proved too much to bear. At some point during the winter of 1301–2, Bruce rode to Lochmaben Castle and turned himself in.
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At the start of the new year, therefore, Edward’s decision to sit out the winter in Scotland had been almost entirely vindicated. In spite of the ongoing shortages, he had managed to sustain an impressive show of strength at Linlithgow, being joined there for Christmas by his eldest son, the prince of Wales, and also by his queen (lately delivered of another baby boy, named Edmund). Now there was much more to celebrate besides. News arrived from France of the truce’s successful conclusion, which meant he could leave Scotland knowing his recent gains would remain secure. News arrived from Lochmaben of Bruce’s surrender: at last his enemies were beginning to weaken and acknowledge his authority. The king was clearly in a jubilant mood as he prepared to leave Linlithgow. On 20 January, a ‘Round Table’ tournament was held at nearby Falkirk – another brazen display of power, staged on the field of his earlier victory.
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The best news of all, however, came a few weeks later, when Edward was paused on the Border at Roxburgh. On 16 February, according to the recent treaty, the French were supposed to take possession of the recent English gains in Scotland; as predicted, the date passed without a Frenchman in sight. The king’s bluff had worked, and the essential emptiness of the Franco-Scottish alliance had been duly exposed. Edward was left completely free to tighten his grip on his newly won territories. Even before the king had re-entered England, Master James of St George had set out for the north.
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Of course, exposing the emptiness of the Franco-Scottish alliance was one thing; persuading the king of France to abandon it was another. Although he had signally failed to assist the Scots, Philip IV was unembarrassed about continuing to use them as his excuse for retaining Gascony. When French negotiators reappeared in England in the spring, they still insisted, much to Edward’s annoyance, that no final peace between England and France could proceed unless Scotland was also included.
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What eventually solved this seemingly intractable diplomatic problem for the English king was an unexpected and dramatic turn of events in Flanders. Four years earlier, when he had cut short his Continental campaign, Edward had left his Flemish allies to their fate. Philip IV had soon moved in with his forces, occupying Flanders and removing its ruler in much the same manner that Edward had subjugated Scotland. Now, in the summer of 1302, the French king was to suffer a similar patriotic backlash. When the citizens of Bruges rose up and killed their French occupiers, Philip dispatched a large French army to quell their rebellion. On 11 July it met with an opposing force of Flemings outside the town of Kortrijk (Courtrai) and was completely annihilated. This was no ambush, of the kind that humiliated the English at Stirling Bridge. It was rather as if the Scots had won the day at Falkirk. At Kortrijk, the elite cavalry of France were wiped out by an infantry army of Flemish townsmen. Hundreds of French lords fell, including several counts, and the king’s chief minister, Pierre Flote. So many rich trophies were stripped from their bodies that the encounter became known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs. It was a victory so worthy of remembrance that it is still commemorated in Flanders today.
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In England news of the French defeat, which happened to coincide with a parliament in Westminster, was received with ill-disguised glee. ‘Much was the weeping and sorrow/In all of France, both young and old,’ crowed one English songwriter in a ballad celebrating the battle. The news seemed all the more propitious in that it coincided with an almighty row that had recently erupted between Philip IV and Boniface VIII. In response to Philip’s maltreatment of a French bishop, Boniface had delivered a damning indictment of the king and his government; Philip had retaliated with his own poisonous propaganda, publicly denouncing Boniface and questioning his fitness to hold office. As their quarrel escalated into one of the greatest Church–State conflicts of the Middle Ages, each side became increasingly anxious to ensure their stance had sufficient international backing. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be friends with the king of England.
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Edward, therefore, having done very little since his return south beyond hunting, spending time with his family and visiting his favourite shrines, found that the tectonic plates of European diplomacy had shifted decisively in his favour. In an effort to win English support for his struggle with France, Boniface dropped the Scots like a stone. In August he wrote to the bishop of Glasgow, Robert Wishart, chastising him for encouraging the patriotic cause, and at the same time sent letters to all the other bishops in Scotland, enjoining them to be obedient to the English king.
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Similarly, when talks with France resumed in the autumn, the English negotiators found that their French counterparts now spoke with an unaccustomed sincerity about their desire for a permanent peace: Edward was actually invited to visit France so that a treaty could be finalised. This suggestion, however, was rejected. The king of England would be staying at home, it was explained, to crush the rebels in Scotland; for the time being, France would have to settle for another truce. Nevertheless, that a decisive shift in French policy had taken place was plain for all to see and Edward made sure that it was seen by giving it widespread publicity, especially north of the Border. When the truce was renewed at the end of November, it was an exclusive, two-way affair: of the Scots there was no mention.
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With the papacy now actively condemning the Scots for their rebellion, and the French having forsaken them as allies, Edward’s chances of succeeding in Scotland looked stronger than ever before. In other directions too, circumstances seemed auspicious. England remained politically quiescent; parliamentary and papal taxes approved the previous year had now been harvested; for the first time since the war’s outbreak, royal receipts exceeded expenditure.
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Success, however, was by no means a foregone conclusion. The apparently ceaseless conflict had ground down the goodwill of the king’s subjects in England, who were resisting royal demands for prise and the provision of ships. As a result, English resources in Scotland were stretched perilously thin. Nothing illustrates the weakness of Edward’s grip better than the sorry predicament of Master James of St George, who had been charged with the construction of new fortresses at Selkirk and Linlithgow. To cement the conquest of Wales, James had been allowed virtually unlimited funds, and had, in consequence, created some of the greatest castles in the world: even during the crisis years of the mid-1290s, the exchequer had found him £250 a week to build Beaumaris. Now, by contrast, he was expected to make do with just a twelfth of that sum – a mere £20 a week. Such budgetary constraints explain why there is no Conwy or Caernarfon to be found in Scotland today. At the end of his career, the king’s great master mason was reduced to the ignominy of working in wood.
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