Edward II: The Unconventional King (16 page)

Only three of Edward’s earls accompanied him to Scotland. One was his brother-in-law Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, who had drawn closer to Edward since Gaveston’s death; the second, his nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester; and the third his cousin Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke. The earls who did not attend said that, because Edward had not received the consent of parliament to lead an army to Scotland, they would not accompany him, ‘lest it should happen that they infringed the Ordinances’.
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Many Scotsmen fought for the English king, including young John Comyn, who had good reason to hate the man who had stabbed his father the Red Comyn to death in the Greyfriars church in 1306. David de Strathbogie, earl of Atholl, whose father John had been hanged by Edward I in November 1306 but who was loyal to Edward II, did not participate in the battle but attacked the Scottish stores at Cambuskenneth, and the earl of Angus and his brother fought for Edward.

Edward did not fight on the first day of the battle, Sunday 23 June 1314, a series of skirmishes which went the way of the Scots. The earls of Gloucester and Hereford, respectively constable of the army and constable of England, quarrelled over who should command the vanguard, which tellingly demonstrates Edward’s lack of leadership skills and control of his own army.
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Gloucester was humiliatingly unhorsed during a clash, Hereford’s nephew Henry de Bohun was killed by Robert Bruce himself, who cleaved Bohun’s head in with his battleaxe, and the advance party of Edward’s army, led by Robert Clifford and Henry Beaumont, sustained heavy losses against the schiltrons of Thomas Randolph. Schiltrons were formations consisting of a few hundred men in concentric rings, kneeling by pikes facing outwards. The pikes were about fourteen–eighteen feet long, made of ash with a sharpened steel point, and positioned at the height of a horse’s neck or chest. Schiltrons can be visualised as a forest of pikes sticking out in every direction, a kind of enormous and deadly hedgehog, and were extremely effective against knights charging at them on horseback.

Edward awoke early in his silken pavilion on the morning of 24 June, and his squires dressed him in hose (leggings), a shirt, a gambeson or aketon – a thickly padded jacket – and his chainmail. A wrought-iron great helm protected his head, and he carried a sword, a mace, perhaps a dagger, and a lance, couched under his arm. Sir Roger Northburgh acted as his shield-bearer. Edward mounted his war-horse, which had armour and padding to protect its face and chest, and was dressed in trappings – material embroidered with the royal arms of England, which covered most of the horse except its eyes, chest and lower legs. Riding in the last battalion of cavalry, the royal banner of three leopards flying above his head, Edward went out to face the Scots. The evening before, Edward had had a heated row with his nephew Gloucester, unjustly and unreasonably accusing him of treachery and deceit for his suggestion that they take a day’s rest and allow the army to recuperate. Desperate to prove himself, crying out ‘Today, it will be clear that I am neither a traitor nor a liar’, and also keen to take precedence over the earl of Hereford, twenty-three-year-old Gloucester galloped full tilt towards the Scots without waiting for an order from Edward to advance, his retainers riding close behind him. They expected the Scots to break ranks and flee on seeing hundreds of heavily armed men and horses thundering towards them. They didn’t, and Gloucester and his men hit one of the Scottish schiltrons full on. The young earl came off his horse and ‘was pierced by many wounds and shamefully killed’, having made the horrible mistake of forgetting to put on the surcoat which identified him as a great magnate; had the Scottish soldiers known who he was, they would have captured him to raise an enormous ransom.
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Many of his men died too, as the rest of the vanguard, following closely behind, couldn’t pull up in time, and crashed into Gloucester’s men, pushing them onto the pikes. Robert, Lord Clifford was probably also killed during this first assault. The schiltrons advanced, and the English cavalry advanced towards them, but were unable to make headway against the deadly forest of stakes. Horses reared in fright and screamed in pain, throwing their riders onto the ground or the pikes, and the battlefield became a nightmare scene: the cavalry continued to press forward, those behind unable to see what was happening at the front, pushing the men in front into range of the lethal pikes. Dead bodies, of men and horses, began to pile up before the schiltrons; riderless horses ran around, adding to the terrible confusion. Within minutes, the battle had slipped beyond Edward’s control.

Edward, showing great courage and foolhardiness, was right in the thick of the mêlée, attacking ferociously ‘like a lioness deprived of her cubs’.
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At one point, his horse was killed beneath him, and Scottish soldiers rushed forward to capture him. His shield-bearer Roger Northburgh was captured, but the king managed to mount another horse. Again, Scottish soldiers pressed forward to try to capture him, grabbing hold of his horse’s trappings. Edward ‘struck out so vigorously behind him with his mace there was none whom he touched that he did not fell to the ground’.
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After perhaps no more than an hour or two of dreadful fighting, with countless men and horses lying dead underfoot and the ground wet and slippery with blood and gore, the earl of Pembroke realised the battle was lost. He grabbed the reins of Edward’s horse and dragged the king, protesting, off the field. Five hundred knights surrounded Edward, their only thought to protect him at all costs. The
Lanercost
chronicler, a monk and armchair general, says unfairly, ‘To their perpetual shame they fled like miserable wretches,’ but given that the battle was lost, there was nothing else they could do but ensure the king’s safety.
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James Douglas pursued Edward and his large bodyguard a full 60 miles to Dunbar on the south-east coast. After a long, desperate gallop, with Douglas and his men picking off stragglers and so close behind it was said Edward and his knights had no time to stop and pass water, the king finally reached Dunbar Castle safely. His ally Patrick, earl of Dunbar, opened up the drawbridge for him.
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Edward later granted one William Franceis an income of fifty marks annually in gratitude for the unspecified ‘kind service he lately performed for the king in his presence at Dunbar’.
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Earl Patrick commandeered a fishing boat, and Edward sailed down the coast, with a handful of attendants, to Berwick.
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He was incredibly lucky to escape capture by Douglas, and vowed to found a Carmelite friary at Oxford to give thanks for his deliverance.
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Queen Isabella and several noblewomen, including Edward’s sister Elizabeth, waited at Berwick for the glorious army to return, proclaiming its glorious victory. Instead, the king arrived not at the head of a victorious army, but in flight, forced to travel by fishing boat. His shock and humiliation must have been profound. If Isabella felt any shame over her husband’s awful defeat, however, she kept it to herself, and lent him her own seal to replace his, so that government business could continue. She tended her husband’s wounds herself, and even cleaned his armour.
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Edward spent forty marks on new clothes for a small group of knights from Germany who had fought for him at Bannockburn and arrived at Berwick dressed, or disguised, as paupers.
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The terrible toll soon became clear. Over 500 knights and noblemen had been killed or captured, including the young Scotsman John Comyn, who had been so keen to avenge his father’s murder at Bruce’s hands, and thousands of common soldiers. Other men lying dead on the battlefield were Edward’s steward Edmund Mauley, his former steward Miles Stapleton, and Giles Argentein, said to be the third-greatest knight in Christendom after the Holy Roman Emperor and Robert Bruce himself.
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Argentein had been captured and held prisoner on Rhodes in 1311 on his way to the Holy Land, and in October 1313 Edward sent letters to eleven people, including the Byzantine emperor Andronikus Palaeologus and Edward’s cousin the Empress Eirene, asking them to procure Argentein’s release, a major diplomatic effort which had the desired result.
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Argentein, once he had made sure that Edward was safe, returned to the battlefield and was killed. His reckless courage earned him the approval of contemporaries: ‘Those who fall in battle for their country are known to live in everlasting glory,’ comments the
Vita
.
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Edward’s brother-in-law the earl of Hereford was captured after Bannockburn, as were the Scottish earl of Angus and Lord Berkeley. Roger Mortimer was also captured, though Bruce released him without ransom and sent him home with Edward’s captured shield and great seal, for which he courteously demanded no payment.
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Edward’s vast baggage train, said, probably with great exaggeration, to have been worth £200,000, fell into Scottish hands – a great and welcome windfall.
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As well as losing his dignity and his numerous valuable possessions, Edward was now deprived of the influence of his nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, loyal to him and also respected by the barons as the scion of an ancient noble family and grandson of the old king. Gloucester’s death meant that his vast lands and wealth would ultimately pass to ambitious and unscrupulous men. Robert Bruce treated Gloucester’s body with considerable honour and respect: he personally kept an overnight vigil over the body, and the following day sent it back to England with full military honours, at his own expense. The men were second cousins – Bruce’s grandmother was a de Clare – and were married to sisters, Elizabeth and Maud de Burgh. The body of Robert Clifford, the next highest-ranking Englishman to die in the battle, was also sent back to England with no payment demanded.
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Edward II has been condemned for military incompetence since 1314, and also for cowardice because he left the field. Yet remaining behind would not have won the battle and would only have resulted in his being captured, which would have been catastrophic. The ransom demanded by Bruce would have been massive, and Edward’s giving up all claims to English overlordship of Scotland a basic requirement of release. His death would have brought his nineteen-month-old son to the throne, which meant a regency of many years standing until the boy was old enough to rule in his own right – and as later events were to prove, the people who replaced Edward in power were not one whit more competent than he was. Nor is it fair to condemn Edward for physical cowardice, as some writers have; he was no general, but he fought bravely, even recklessly, with disregard for the danger to his life.
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As disastrous as Edward’s defeat at Bannockburn was, his capture or death would have been far worse. However, for the king of England, galloping away in ignominious flight from a battle he had fully expected to win, the realisation that he had at least spared his kingdom a crippling ransom or the perils of a long regency was no consolation whatsoever. And the humiliation was not yet over. In August 1314, Edward Bruce and James Douglas ‘devastated almost all Northumberland with fire’, plundering as far south as Swaledale in Yorkshire, burning Cumberland towns on their return, and carrying off livestock and crops.
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Edward announced in late September that he had received a letter from Robert Bruce, in which the king of Scots declared that ‘the one thing in the world he [Bruce] desires most is to have complete accord and friendship with us’, and on 6 October he commissioned five men to negotiate a truce with Bruce.
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He had little other choice.

Edward arrived in York on 17 July, and parliament opened there on 9 September. The king left the city on 7 September and rode the 17 miles to the village of Oulston, empowering three men to open parliament in his absence. He claimed that he was ‘unable to be present on account of some important and special business’ concerning himself, though what urgently required his attention in a small village is unclear, and this was perhaps an attempt on Edward’s part to avoid facing his enemies.
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If so, he evidently realised he could hardly avoid them for long, as he returned to York on 10 September. The earls of Lancaster and Warwick, who had refused to fight for Edward in Scotland, gloated over his failure, choosing to see the king’s defeat as a consequence of his failure to abide by the Ordinances. Lancaster had raised an army at his stronghold of Pontefract in case Edward returned triumphant from Scotland and used the chance to avenge Piers Gaveston’s death. Now, however, the army was used against Edward himself, as a threat to force the king to accept Lancaster as de facto ruler of England. For the next few years, Edward would be little more than a puppet-king. In no position to defend himself, he sat at parliament, forced to hear how his expenses would be reduced drastically to a mere ten pounds a day, and that his household would be purged and replaced by men sympathetic to Lancaster.
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Queen Isabella, faithfully supporting her husband, attended parliament at his side. She had helped her husband to the best of her ability since Gaveston’s death, and even her own uncle Lancaster came to regard her as an enemy. He ordered her income to be reduced, although Edward did his best to help her with grants from his own limited resources.
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Lancaster and Warwick were not the only ones to interpret the defeat at Bannockburn as evidence that God was showing his disfavour with Edward. A few weeks after the battle, a member of Edward’s own household was arrested for speaking ‘irreverent and indecent words’ against the king: a messenger called Robert de Newington commented that nobody could expect the king to win a battle when he spent all his time idling, digging and ditching when he should have been hearing Mass.
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(How listening to Mass would have helped Edward win the battle was not explained.) Edward’s reaction is unrecorded, and he was, in fact, sincerely and genuinely pious. Other men expressed their displeasure with Edward: in January 1315 a London goldsmith was accused of saying ‘certain evil and shameful things about the king’, and in December that year a clerk of Oxford said in public that Edward was not his father’s son – perhaps only meaning that he was very different from Edward I, which was true.
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