For several months after the siege of Stirling, Edward I did little except recover his strength and savour his victory. Having left Scotland in the last week of August, he spent two months travelling slowly through the north of England, and a further seven weeks resting at the royal manor of Burstwick in Yorkshire – a stop that Peter Langtoft described as a ‘sojourn awhile for his health’. At length the court crossed the Humber in December and arrived in Lincoln, where Christmas was kept in exceptionally lavish style. As one annalist explained, the buyers of the royal household had been ordered to prepare a feast worthy of a man who was now ‘the king and lord of the monarchy of two realms’. Edward was also unusually lavish in his distribution of rewards, handing out valuable gifts as well as compliments to the earls and knights who had helped him obtain what the same writer referred to as ‘his triumphant peace’.1
There was ample reason for feeling triumphant. With Scotland finally surrendered, Edward exercised a direct lordship in the British Isles far greater than that enjoyed by any of his ancestors. From the far north of Britain to the far west of Ireland, across the liberties of the March of Wales, the writ of the king of England now ran without challenge or contradiction. Nor was victory to be measured merely in insular terms. Gascony was also back in English hands as a result of the recently ratified peace with France. In June 1303, while Edward had been decisively harrying the Scots into submission, the duchy had been ceremoniously restored to his representatives in the church at St Emilion. At home and abroad, the king’s rights were at last respected and acknowledged.2
Obtaining that acknowledgement, however, had come at an exceedingly heavy price. In order to recover Gascony, and especially to subjugate Scotland, Edward had placed an enormous, almost intolerable strain on the rest of his empire. The peoples of England, Wales and Ireland had been asked repeatedly, year in year out, to provide the men to fight in these wars, the food to feed them and the money to pay them. In financial terms alone the costs were staggering. During the decade between the seizure of Gascony in 1294 and the surrender of Scotland in 1304, Edward had spent a sum well in excess of a million pounds. To raise it he had resorted to terrible expedients – visiting violence on the clergy, seizing the goods of his subjects without their consent, and even trying to impose taxation against the will of parliament. In consequence he had faced censure from the pope, provoked rebellion in Wales and very nearly sparked a new civil war in England.3
As this brief list of repercussions implies, the costs had been more than financial. The overall consequence of Edward’s wars was massive dislocation and disarray. In England, for example, the prolonged nonresidence of the king and his magnates had led directly to a dramatic rise in lawlessness, far worse than the temporary crime waves occasioned by their earlier absences in Wales and Gascony. The remarkable robbery of the Crown jewels from the treasury at Westminster Abbey in the spring of 1303 was but one manifestation of the increase; across the country as a whole its effects were far more serious and endemic. Crime, in a word, had become organised. Every town and county had witnessed the appearance of bands of armed men, popularly known as ‘trailbastons’ on account of the clubs they habitually dragged around with them. Through threat of violence these thugs held local society in their thrall. Langtoft explains how they would openly offer their services on market days, undertaking to beat people up in return for a fee. Other evidence shows how they indulged in racketeering, the intimidation of juries, robbery and murder. It was all highly embarrassing for a king who earlier in his reign had issued so much legislation with the aim of reducing crime, yet it was hardly unexpected, for Edward’s contribution to the problem amounted to more than just negligence. At the start of his war with France, such had been his desperate need, the king had handed out pardons to all who were willing to fight, emptying his prisons in the process. The problem he now faced was partly the result of these former jailbirds coming home to roost.4
Bad as things were in England, they were worse in Ireland, where the same combination of pressure and neglect had brought an already troubled lordship to a point of more or less perpetual crisis. Edward’s war effort had several times emptied Ireland of its English military tenants, leaving the colony’s less martial members at the mercy of their native Irish neighbours. At the same time, his willingness to pervert the course of justice in pursuit of his rights in Scotland had made it ridiculously easy to secure pardons for murder, which meant that homicides among the settler community had risen as a result. The extent of the problem had already been apparent in 1297, when a celebrated parliament had assembled in Ireland and drawn up a set of emergency measures ‘to establish the peace more firmly’. As these measures indicated, lawlessness was seen to be increasing in line with absenteeism of English landlords and the degeneracy of those who remained. Profits at the Dublin exchequer were diminishing, and the area of the country under English control was contracting.5
In Gascony, meanwhile, the disarray was equally great, albeit for different reasons. Although the rule of law was now slowly returning to the duchy, for the past decade its inhabitants had known little besides disorder and destruction. French occupation had led to many Gascons being dislocated and disinherited; English military efforts to reverse the situation had merely added to the devastation. According to the terms of the recent peace, Gascony was to be returned to its status quo ante bellum. But naturally this was proving impossible in practice, partly because of the chaos the conflict had created, and partly because the duchy’s legal relationship with France was now more hopelessly confused than ever.6
Nowhere, of course, was the confusion greater than in Scotland. It was not just that the country had been invaded and laid waste time and again by English armies, with the result that so many churches, castles, abbeys, towns and villages now lay in ruin. It was also that, for a whole generation, Scotland had been a nation divided against itself, with Robert Bruce and his adherents almost always ranged against the supporters of the absent John Balliol. Healing this rift was going to be a time-consuming and nigh-on impossible task; so too was the job of reconciling the rights of Englishmen who had been rewarded with lands north of the Border with the competing claims of Scotsmen who had latterly been guaranteed the restoration of their estates. For the moment Scotland had been left in the care of an ad hoc regime of military governors; for the future, some new form of civilian government would have to be found.7
Thus, while Edward rested and gave thanks, it fell to others to begin the business of restoring order on his behalf. Towards the end of November 1304, before he had left Burstwick, measures were put in place to deal with the trailbaston gangs. In three northern counties, commissioners were appointed with wide powers to identify, arrest and detain any individuals suspected of involvement, and the authority to raise posses for pursuit should the need arise. As the king moved into East Anglia in January to visit the holy sites of Norfolk and Suffolk the operation was extended into these areas too, and by the time he arrived in Westminster at the start of March it had evidently become nationwide. A few weeks later the first justices of trailbaston were appointed to hear cases up and down the country against the numerous individuals who were already in gaol awaiting trial. The crackdown had clearly been effective, though in some quarters it was regarded as disproportionate. A contemporary songsmith who purported to be a war veteran complained that, as a result of the new measures, good men like himself were being falsely accused and unjustly imprisoned, simply because they had knocked their servants about a bit.8
Parliament, naturally, was the forum in which such new remedies were discussed, and Edward’s return to Westminster after an absence of over two years coincided with the start of a new session. With both knights and burgesses in attendance it was as large an assembly as could be, perhaps for no other reason than to celebrate the victory over the Scots. Towards its end, on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), the king held a special service in Westminster Abbey to thank God and St Edward for his triumph.9
Scotland, however, was also the subject of much businesslike discussion. Several leading Scots were present for the purpose, and three of them were called upon to advise how their country might best be governed in the future. Their involvement indicates the extent to which Edward had learned from his earlier mistake of disregarding Scottish opinion, and their identities reveal the quite considerable lengths to which he was now ready to go in order to retain Scotland’s loyalty. Robert Bruce was admittedly an unsurprising choice, as arguably was John Mowbray, a close confidant of John Comyn. But it must have required a very dispassionate state of mind on the king’s part to accept advice from Robert Wishart, the bishop of Glasgow, who just a few months earlier had been accused of committing ‘great evils’. Nevertheless, on the recommendation of this trio, it was decided to give the Scottish political community time to hold a parliament of their own, and to choose a ten-man delegation to treat for a final settlement later in the year.10
Because of the length of time since the last parliament there was plenty of other business to deal with besides Scotland, and the many petitions that poured into Westminster from England, Ireland and Gascony provide a further reminder of the scope of Edward’s authority. Petitions came from Wales too, though in this case they were heard at nearby Kennington – a reminder that part of the king’s authority had lately been delegated, for Kennington was the London residence of his eldest son.11
Wales was arguably the territory that had suffered least as a result of the Scottish wars, for it had not been required to supply money or provisions on the same scale as England or Ireland. If anything, Wales had been a beneficiary of the conflict, for the wealth extracted from these other regions had provided the wages for the Welsh armies that had been so frequently called upon to fight.
Nevertheless, the reason Wales had been such a reliable source of manpower was because, in the wake of their own conquest, its people needed all the money they could get. As many of the petitions presented at Kennington attest, everyday life in Wales had become much more onerous under English rule. Tolls were heavier than they had been under the native princes, as were the labour services extracted in order to build the king’s new castles (construction at Caernarfon, abandoned during the Scottish wars, had recently been resumed). The Welsh looked to their new prince to put these and other matters right, ‘esteeming him their rightful lord, because he derived his origins in those parts’ (the words, admittedly, of an English chronicler). In practice, however, Edward of Caernarfon could do little to provide redress; he too was bound by the settlement that had been imposed on Wales in the weeks leading up to his birth.12
In any case, it is to be doubted whether the prince possessed the inclination to improve the lot of his Welsh subjects. His true attitude towards them is perhaps better indicated by a letter he sent to Philip IV’s half-brother, Louis of Evreux, just a few weeks after the hearings at Kennington. ‘If you want anything from our land of Wales,’ he joked, ‘we can send you plenty of wild men, who will know well how to teach breeding to the young heirs and heiresses of great lords.’ As this comment suggests, part of the prince’s problem was his frivolity. Other evidence – particularly the entry in his wardrobe book that shows he had gone swimming in February 1303 with Robert the Fool – points to the same conclusion. Of course, at that time he had still been a teenager, and in 1305 he was only just turned twenty-one; his father, at a similar age, had exhibited a similar irresponsible streak. But the older Edward was not a man to indulge his offspring as Henry III had been, as events soon showed.13
In June 1305, as the king was making his way to Chichester in Sussex, a row erupted between his son and his chief minister, Walter Langton. It arose, said one annalist, because the prince had earlier been trespassing in the minister’s woods. The rights and wrongs of their argument, however, were irrelevant; what caused uproar, according to an official record, was young Edward’s use of ‘certain gross and harsh words’ to Langton’s face. This was more than his father was willing to stand – to insult his chief servant was to disrespect the peace of his court – and he reacted by banishing the prince from his presence. During the month that followed he continued to tour the cathedrals and castles of south-eastern England, while Edward of Caernarfon followed at a distance, trying to effect a reconciliation. Eventually the king, still greatly annoyed, commanded his son to wait at Windsor until the start of the next parliament.14
That parliament, when it assembled in September, saw reconciliation on several fronts. Most importantly, the business of providing a government for Scotland was finally resolved. Despite the execution of William Wallace the previous month, the reception afforded the Scottish delegates in London was welcoming, and after a spate of tournaments they sat down with the English council to devise a settlement. Unsurprisingly, there was no talk this time round of reviving Scotland’s kingship. As the records of the meeting make clear, Scotland was no longer regarded as a kingdom (regnum), but had been demoted to the status of a land (terra). As such, it was to be governed in future by the king of England’s lieutenant, and that role was set to be filled by Edward’s nephew, John of Brittany. Beyond this, however, the scheme of government agreed that September testified to the ongoing desire in England to appease Scottish feelings. Of the nineteen sheriffs appointed in Scotland, for example, only two were English, while the rest were natives. Similarly, the council nominated to advise the new lieutenant was almost entirely Scottish in its composition, and the four Englishmen chosen to act as judges in Scotland were each paired with a Caledonian counterpart. All of this stood in marked contrast to the overwhelmingly English, ‘colonial’ administration that Edward had attempted to impose on Scotland nine years earlier.15
This willingness to draw a line under the past was equally apparent at the start of October, when the committee visited the king at Sheen in Surrey to present him with their conclusions. Once Edward had approved the new governmental scheme and the Scots, touching holy relics, had sworn to uphold it, more concessions were forthcoming. The conflict between English and Scottish claims to land was resolved by means of a process akin to that used to end the civil war in England almost four decades earlier. The Scots, it was allowed, could redeem their estates in return for cash, and the English would in turn be compensated for their losses. As these measures were announced, many of the sentences of exile imposed on the Scots the previous year were also declared lifted. The king, said one chronicler, rejoiced at the hope of firm and lasting peace in Scotland, and the Scots themselves were said to have returned home happy. The spirit of reconciliation, moreover, was also manifest on the domestic front. Edward subsequently moved from Sheen to Westminster and made peace with his eldest son. On 13 October – the feast of the Confessor – the prince of Wales celebrated his restoration to favour by holding a feast in his father’s palace.16
Edward I was coming close to achieving the peaceful disposition of his empire that he craved. Only one crucial matter arising from the struggle of recent years remained to rectified, and that was the damage that had been done to the rights of the Crown. At his coronation the king had sworn to preserve these rights unimpaired, yet in 1301 he had been forced to compromise on the issue of the Royal Forest, which had been reduced in size as a result. These injuries, therefore, would have to be mended. And, at the same time, the men who had inflicted them must be called to account.
One might imagine – as some contemporaries certainly did – that Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and long-time leader of the lay opposition, would be first in line for an interview. Bigod, however, had seen this day coming and had already taken steps to avoid it. More than three years earlier, in the spring of 1302, he had cut a face-saving deal, and – in return for a generous annuity – nominated Edward as his heir. From the earl’s point of view this had solved several pressing problems, not only restoring him to the king’s good graces but also plugging the gaping hole that a private army of followers had created in his finances. At the same time, it had cost him very little in personal terms, for he had no children to disinherit. By the same token, the deal had also been an excellent one as far as Edward was concerned, for it promised eventually to bring a vast amount of land to the Crown for a comparatively modest outlay, and such land would soon be needed. Unlike Bigod, the king had many children to provide for, not least the two new sons from his second marriage. Thus, by dint of a mutually beneficial agreement, the relationship between the two men had been repaired. In 1305 Edward had further eased the earl’s financial worries by cancelling his debts to the Crown – a gesture, as the king explained in his letters, inspired by the ‘great affection’ he now felt towards his former critic.17
This was not a phrase that he would readily have used about Bigod’s erstwhile ally, Robert Winchelsea. While the earl had quickly made his peace with Edward, the archbishop had continued to act as the king’s principal antagonist, and not just in parliament. In addition – and far more provocatively – Winchelsea had been backing the cause of a young man called John de Ferrers. Readers with very retentive memories may recall how, at the end of his struggle with Simon de Montfort, Edward and his friends had compelled Robert de Ferrers, earl of Derby, to surrender his estates to Edmund of Lancaster. John de Ferrers, as the son of the dispossessed and long-deceased victim, had lately begun a campaign to recover his lost inheritance, and Winchelsea had decided to act as his champion. In 1301, having secured permission from the pope, the archbishop had actually begun to judge the case in his own court, and had summoned the new earl of Lancaster to answer Ferrers’ accusation of unlawful disseisin. Needless to say, the king, already deeply embittered, must have been enraged by Winchelsea’s efforts to revisit this discreditable episode from his distant past. The archbishop had soon found himself being countersued in the king’s courts, charged with trying to disinherit the Crown and subvert the realm.18
In 1305 the gloves really came off. During the spring, as Bigod was being pardoned his debts, Winchelsea was hit with a demand for £4,000 of unpaid taxes. Then, in the summer, a new pope was elected and the archbishop’s fate was sealed. Boniface VIII, who would have defended Winchelsea, had died in 1303, shamefully hounded to death by the king of France’s thugs. Clement V, a Gascon by birth and a former archbishop of Bordeaux, was more inclined to oblige the English king. In October, apparently after a stormy interview with Winchelsea himself, Edward dispatched a high-ranking embassy to the Curia, charged with a two-fold task: to undo the concessions that had diminished his Crown, and to secure the archbishop of Canterbury’s deposition.19
Having spent a quiet Christmas in the West Country, Edward received his answer early in the New Year. On 11 February 1306, while he was hunting in Dorset, a papal bull arrived, reciting the royalist version of events since 1297, and absolving the king from his oath to all the concessions that his opponents had compelled him to grant. The following day – though Edward would not learn of it for several weeks – the pope suspended Winchelsea from office.20
With the arrival of this letter of absolution, the king’s work was effectively complete. His many territories were at peace, his authority was supreme and uncontested, and the rights of his Crown had been restored. Moreover, though Edward himself may not have known it, he had also smashed another record. By February 1306 he was sixty-six years and eight months old, which meant that he had lived longer than any previous king of England (his great-great-great-grandfather, Henry I, had lived to a similar age, but was no more than sixty-six years and seven months at his death). And yet, in spite of his advanced years, Edward remained fit and healthy. The conquest of Scotland, it is true, had left him feeling drained and in need of a lengthy convalescence, but since that time he had rallied and recovered his strength. The past twelve months had seen him hunting and going on pilgrimages, travelling at the same rate as of old. During the summer of 1305, perhaps during a stay at Leeds Castle in July, he had clearly been feeling particularly energetic. In February 1306 Queen Margaret was once again heavily pregnant.21
Was there a reason, beyond luck and the law of averages, for this extraordinary longevity and potency? Could it be that Edward had been spared to serve some higher purpose? With conflict at home now finally concluded, it was possible to consider again the idea of renewing the fight overseas. Almost two years earlier, in a letter to the Master of the Knights Templar, the king had noted that he had ‘long been hindered by diverse wars … from going to Jerusalem as he had vowed’. But, he had added hopefully, he still intended to go there ‘at all speed’ once those wars were over. ‘Upon this journey,’ he said, ‘we have fixed our whole heart.’ The recent embassy to the pope had raised the prospect of a new crusade in earnest, and Edward had been granted a crusading tax in return. Perhaps, at last, it was time for the king’s long-delayed vow to be fulfilled.22
But then, just a week or so after receiving the pope’s letter, other news arrived. Apparently, there had been a murder.
By any standards, the crime was appalling. It had been committed on 10 February, in the town of Dumfries, within the hallowed walls of the Franciscan church, right in front of the altar. Two men had come there in order to talk, but their conversation had quickly become a quarrel, and the quarrel had ended in bloodshed, with one man drawing his dagger and stabbing the other. It was, it seems, an impulsive, unpremeditated act, yet there was little room for mitigation. As the injured man had lain stricken on the altar steps, the friends of his assailant had weighed in and finished him off with their swords. What made this case especially appalling, however, were the identities of the two individuals involved. The victim was John Comyn, lord of Badenoch and erstwhile Guardian of Scotland. The killer was his long-time rival, Robert Bruce.
Precisely what passed between the two men that day in Dumfries must forever remain a mystery. It certainly mystified Edward I, who heard of the killing within a week or so and dispatched agents to investigate. Yet with hindsight there can be no doubt about the motive for the meeting, and ultimately for Comyn’s murder, for the seeds had been sown almost two years earlier. In the summer of 1304, while the king of England had been laying siege to Stirling Castle, Bruce had met with the bishop of St Andrews and entered into a secret alliance. Here too the details are vague, and deliberately so, for the purpose of the pact was clearly treasonable. A few months before it was sealed, Bruce’s father, the nondescript collaborator of the 1290s, had died, and his claim to the Scottish throne, dormant for over a decade, had passed to his son. Bruce was evidently preparing to reactivate it, and the bishop, although a long-time backer of Balliol, was evidently ready to assist him. What had happened in Dumfries, it seems certain, is that Comyn had been invited to join the conspiracy but had refused. Bruce had reacted angrily, but also decisively, knowing that if his rival opposed him, his bid for the throne must fail.23
With the plot now public, Bruce was forced to move fast. He and his supporters rapidly secured control of the castles of south-west Scotland, then rode to Glasgow, where they met with the city’s bishop, Robert Wishart. The stalwart upholder of the patriotic cause absolved the earl of his crime and urged him on, producing from his cathedral treasury certain regalia he had long ago secreted: a banner bearing the Scottish royal arms, and vestments suitable for the making of a king. As an anonymous letter from Berwick reveals, the English in Scotland were aware of the direction in which Bruce was moving, but his swiftness took them by surprise. By the last week of March the earl had arrived at Scone Abbey, where a sizeable number of other Scottish nobles and churchmen had also assembled to witness and approve a revolution. It was 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. Precisely one year earlier Bruce had been in Westminster, watching Edward I celebrate his final victory over the Scots before the shrine of the Confessor. Now, one year on, the earl was crowned as King Robert I. Scotland, recently relegated to the status of a land, was defiantly declared to be a kingdom once more.24
‘And when bold Edward was told how Bruce, who was so bold, had finished off the Comyn, and then made himself king, he went nearly out of his mind.’ Although written some seven decades later, these lines by the Scottish poet John Barbour may come very close to the truth. Edward’s wrath when he finally understood what was happening in Scotland was truly terrible, and probably contributed to a sharp and sudden decline in his health. In January and February 1306, as we have seen, the king was itinerating at much the same rate as usual. But by early March he was confined to Winchester, from where he did not stir for the next two months. When, at length, he left the city in the middle of May, he was being carried in a litter.25
As his strength finally began to fail him, Edward knew that he must look to others to take up the struggle. His contemporaries were almost all gone. John de Warenne, the ancient earl of Surrey, had died soon after returning from Scotland in 1304. Roger Bigod still lived but was himself too ill to campaign. Only Henry de Lacy, the fifty-six-year-old earl of Lincoln, was conceivably fit enough to fight. The conclusion was inescapable. Command must pass to a new generation. It was Aymer de Valence, the son and successor of his late uncle William, whom the king sent north in April to lead an immediate counter-attack.26
Above all, though, the burden of leadership must now fall to his own son and heir. The arguments of the previous year would have to be forgotten. Edward of Caernarfon, it was announced, would be commanding the main royal army that was ordered to assemble at Carlisle in July. Before then, it would be necessary to enhance his authority. On 7 April, the prince was granted Gascony by his father. Around the same time, word went out that there was to be a great ceremony in Westminster at Whitsun. The king would be knighting his eldest son, and all those who wished to receive the same accolade were invited to attend.27
Part of Edward’s motivation for promoting the prince was financial. Custom entitled a lord to levy a tax in such circumstances, and the king was quick to do so on this occasion. But the ceremony was also intended to serve a higher purpose. The young noblemen of England – ‘tyros’, as one chronicler termed them – were to be bound together in a new cause, much as their fathers and grandfathers had been united by their oaths to liberate the Holy Land. When the day itself arrived, Edward knighted his son in the palace chapel, and they then proceeded to the abbey, where the prince performed the repetitive task of knighting around 300 others. The choice of date was probably significant: it was at Whitsun that Arthur was supposed to have held his celebrated ‘plenary’ court at Caerleon. Certainly, once the dubbing ritual was over and the newly ennobled company had repaired to the palace, their feast assumed an unmistakably Arthurian air. The king himself vowed revenge against Bruce, and promised that once his enemy had been vanquished he would head straight for the Holy Land. The prince followed suit, swearing that he would not sleep two nights in the same place until the Scots had been defeated, a vow clearly modelled on Perceval’s declaration in the story of the Holy Grail. The feast was evidently magnificent, with a multitude of minstrels paid to perform, and each knight uttering his vow over two specially prepared golden swans. These, it seems, were an innovation, but one that set a fashion for swearing oaths on birds for the next two centuries.28
Assuming his vow was genuine, Edward of Caernarfon must have set out for Scotland more or less immediately. Two days after the feast, the king wrote to Aymer de Valence, saying that he was sending his son north with a strong force. He also added – perhaps surprisingly, given his condition – that he would follow in person as soon as possible.29
By the time these letters reached him, Valence was already well ahead with his advanced operations and scoring notable victories. In early June, having crossed the Forth, he captured both the bishop of St Andrews and the bishop of Glasgow – the latter was found holding the castle at Cupar in Fife ‘as a man of war’. A week or so later, the lieutenant came close to apprehending his principal target. On 18 June, after the English had reoccupied Perth, the new king of Scotland approached with his host, hoping to provoke battle. Valence declined to respond immediately, but the next day advanced his own army to nearby Methven and fell upon his enemy’s camp in the pre-dawn light. Many Scots were killed or captured, though Bruce himself escaped, fleeing west into the mountains with only a few hundred men.30
The king of England, meanwhile, had set out to join the fray but was heading nowhere fast. Ten days after leaving Westminster, Edward had travelled no further than Dunstable, a distance of only thirty miles. In the weeks that followed his progress continued at the same laborious rate, suggesting that he was in considerable pain. The agonies he suffered, both physical and mental, are also reflected in the remarkable preamble to an ordinance about the Royal Forest issued in the days before his departure. ‘While we behold the imperfection of human weakness,’ the king began, ‘and weigh with attentive consideration the widespread burdens that lie upon our shoulders, we are indeed inwardly tormented … tossed about by the waves of diverse thoughts, and are frequently troubled, passing sleepless nights, dwelling in our inmost soul about what ought to be done.’ His chief concern, he explained, was the ease of his subjects, ‘in whose quiet we have rest’, and he trusted that God, ‘in the clemency of his goodness, will mercifully look upon and supply our deficiency’.31
Edward’s own reserves of clemency and mercy were by this point entirely exhausted. It had taken six expeditions across eight years, countless expenditure and bitter compromises to subjugate the Scots, and it was only a matter of months since they had sworn to uphold his new scheme of government – a scheme that he considered to have been very generous and accommodating. Now his generosity had been thrown back in his face. The king was at the end of his tether, and his only thoughts were of vengeance. Valence had been told to take no prisoners, but seems to have interpreted his brief leniently: at least some of the knights taken at Methven had been subsequently dispatched into England to await sentence. In early August, however, on Edward’s express orders, the killings began, and the aristocratic status of the captives availed them nothing. ‘They bore arms against their liege lord the king and are prisoners of war,’ read the royal writ that condemned these men to be drawn through the streets of Newcastle and hanged.32
Nor did the status of the clerical captives count for much on this occasion. Edward, though pleased by the early arrest of the bishop of Glasgow, had instructed Valence ‘not to have any regard for his estate of prelate’, and Wishart can have anticipated little sympathy, for he presented the very model of rebellious ingratitude. A recent royal gift of timber, intended for the repair of his cathedral, had been used by the firebrand bishop to build siege-engines. On 10 August he was brought before the king, by this point in County Durham, along with the bishop of St Andrews and the abbot of Scone. Their tonsures were sufficient to save them from the scaffold, but at Edward’s command all three were sent south in chains, to be kept in castle dungeons.33
In Scotland the fortunes of King Robert had continued to deteriorate. Support for his rebellion, slight from the start, was waning visibly in the wake of his defeat at Methven. In July Bruce had been beaten for a second time at Dalrigh, near Tyndrum, and by a force of his own countrymen. Again he had escaped, but the net around him was drawing ever tighter. By mid-July the prince of Wales and his army of young tyros had left Carlisle and retaken south-western Scotland, closing off one set of escape routes, and by early August they had moved up to Perth to link arms with Valence. In desperation, therefore, Bruce decided to split his party in two. His wife, daughter and the other womenfolk were sent north-east, with the hope that they might make it to Orkney or even Norway. Meanwhile, Bruce himself fled in the opposite direction, and hid among the lochs and islands of Scotland’s western seaboard.34
During the second half of August King Edward was in Northumberland but evidently very ill. In the middle of the month, while he rested at Hexham Abbey, one of the monks was paid a pound for his medical efforts, and for the next fortnight the king remained motionless at nearby Newbrough. Most ominously, at the end of August Edward made assignments of land to his youngest children, including his new baby daughter, Eleanor. Thereafter, however, he appears to have rallied, and the court resumed its slow progress in the direction of Carlisle. ‘He is hearty and strong enough, considering his age,’ wrote an unnamed courtier on 21 September, and at the same time Edward himself sent letters to the king of Castile, indicating that he had now recovered from his recent infirmity. Yet one week later, with their destination just ten miles in the distance, it was once again decided that the king should move no further. The court had reached Lanercost Priory, which was close enough, and would make a comfortable headquarters for the time being.35
In any case, the war was all but over. Everywhere in Scotland was back under English control, or in the hands of non-rebellious Scots. In September military efforts were concentrated on just two castles: Dunaverty, on the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre, where Bruce was believed to be hiding, and Kildrummy in Aberdeenshire, where his female relatives had sought refuge. When the former fortress finally fell, the besiegers were disappointed. The king of Scots was already gone, escaped across the sea to Ireland. The women, however, were not so fortunate. Before Kildrummy was captured they made a last dash for freedom, escorted by the earl of Atholl and Bruce’s brother, Neil. Having reached the far north of Scotland, they were taken at Tain by adherents of the Balliol–Comyn cause, and sent south to face Edward I.36
Despite pleas for clemency from Queen Margaret and several English magnates, the killings continued. Neil Bruce was dispatched to die in Berwick, where he was drawn, hanged and beheaded. Atholl was condemned to a similar death in London, regardless of the fact that English royal blood flowed in his veins (he was a great-great-grandson of King John). This was a true watershed moment: no earl had been executed in England for 230 years, and Edward acknowledged it by having Atholl hanged on a gallows built thirty feet higher than that of his fellows, then beheaded and burned. Even the women prisoners, if reckoned to be complicit in the revolt, were subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. Isabella, countess of Buchan, who had participated in Bruce’s coronation, and Mary, the new king’s sister, were imprisoned in specially constructed cages, set high in the towers of the castles at Roxburgh and Berwick. As living spectacles, they sent out the same message as the mutilated remains of their menfolk. This was the new and terrible price of rebellion against the king of England.37
The execution of rebels was now officially proclaimed policy. After Edward’s arrival at Lanercost, it was announced that all those involved in Comyn’s murder would themselves be killed, as would anyone who had assisted Bruce or who was taken fighting in his name. Only those who surrendered would escape the noose, and even they faced an uncertain future of indefinite imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. The men carrying out these orders, of course, had a vested interest in seeing to the immediate dispatch of their enemies, for the rebellion had led to the territorial settlement of the previous year being torn up. Rich estates had once again been declared forfeit and were being regranted to the loyal. The result has been described as a ‘reign of terror’. ‘Alas, the noble blood that was thus spilt!’ lamented Peter Langtoft, a man not normally given to expressions of sympathy for the Scots.38
But besides the butchering of Scotsmen there seemed little left to do, and so, in a bout of self-congratulatory jubilation, some of the younger English nobles took themselves off to tourney, even going overseas. The king was enraged, and ordered the arrest of twenty-two named individuals, even demanding that they be imprisoned in the Tower. Many of them were associates of Edward of Caernarfon, though whether the prince had personally absconded is unclear. In December he was certainly staying by the Kentish coast, but this was probably in order to welcome Cardinal Peter ‘the Spaniard’, come to England to help finalise the French peace. When, in the new year, young Edward and his friends returned to Carlisle in time for the parliament that was being held there, all was forgiven. Thanks to the intercession of the queen, most of the errant knights were pardoned or had their presumptuous behaviour overlooked.39
In February 1307, however, a fresh and furious row erupted between the two Edwards over the treatment of one of these men. According to a London chronicler, the king ‘saw that his son, the prince of Wales, had an inordinate love for a certain Gascon knight’. The knight in question was Piers Gaveston, a young man of similar age to the prince and a member of his household for several years. Conventionally, and probably correctly, their relationship has been construed as homosexual; other chroniclers wrote of the ‘undue intimacy’ between the pair. Whatever the case, it was certainly regarded by contemporaries as wholly inappropriate, and the cause of the king’s wrath in 1307 was an inappropriate attempt on the part of his son to promote Gaveston far beyond his comparatively humble station. Walter of Guisborough describes the scene in dramatic terms, and explains how the prince first asked Walter Langton, the treasurer, to put a request to his father on his behalf. When Langton in due course did so, Edward was incredulous, and angrily ordered his son to be summoned.
‘On what business did you send this man?’ he demanded.
‘That I might, with your assent, give the county of Ponthieu to Sir Piers Gaveston,’ the prince replied.
At this the king exploded.
‘You bastard son of a bitch! Now you want to give lands away – you who never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!’
As these words were spoken, says Guisborough, the old man seized his son’s hair in both hands and tore out as much as he could until, at length exhausted, he threw him out.40
Edward’s readiness to lash out was not merely a result of his son’s provocation, nor simply a rage against the dying of the light. His fury was also fuelled by the knowledge that Robert Bruce had returned. At the start of February the fugitive king had re-crossed the Irish Sea and was understood to be at large ‘in the isles off the Scottish coast’. Thanks to the ongoing collaboration of certain clans in that region, his initial moves had met with disaster. A force led by his brothers, Thomas and Alexander Bruce, had been captured in Galloway, and both men were subsequently hanged and beheaded. Yet Bruce himself continued to evade capture, to the immeasurable frustration of his incapacitated opponent, still stranded at Lanercost after five months. In the second week of February Edward had sent withering letters to Aymer de Valence and his other young commanders, expressing utter amazement at their inability to apprehend Bruce, chastising them for their failure to furnish him with news, and suspecting from their silence that they were being excessively cautious.41
In fact, as Edward was beginning to realise, it was not the caution of his lieutenants that was causing difficulty, but the total lack of restraint to which he had urged them up to this point. The king’s savage policy of revenge had driven many Scots, whom in other circumstances might have submitted to English justice, into supporting the cause of his enemy. In mid-March, having finally managed to complete his journey to Carlisle, Edward sent out new orders. Apparently, he said, some people had interpreted his recent ordinance for the settlement of Scotland too rigorously; his commanders were now to have it proclaimed that all those who had been ‘compelled’ to rise to rebellion could come in without fear of reprisal. This sudden and wholesale volte-face suggests that the English in the field were experiencing grave difficulties, reaping the whirlwind they had sown by their earlier severity. Bruce had left Scotland the previous year as an unpopular rebel; in 1307 he returned as a potential redeemer.42
In April news came of the first English reversal. Valence, having learned that Bruce was lurking near Loch Trool in Galloway, and no doubt with the accusation of laxity still ringing in his ears, elected to mount an attack. On this occasion, however, his troops were repulsed by those of the Scottish king and, though their material losses were minor, their credibility was cracked. In the month that followed Bruce cemented his success with two further victories, first beating Valence himself at Loudon Hill on 10 May, and then roundly defeating one of his deputies in Ayrshire a few days later. In each case the English commanders escaped, but the myth of their invincibility had now been shattered. On 15 May a Scottish lord on the English side penned a vivid and alarming summary of the new situation. ‘I hear that Bruce never had the goodwill of his own followers or of the people in general so much as now. It appears that God is with him, for he has destroyed King Edward’s power both among the English and the Scots … May it please God to prolong King Edward’s life, for men say openly that when he is gone the victory will go to Bruce.’43
This plea to the Almighty to preserve the king, as well as indicating a belief in his almost superhuman ability, also betrays a total absence of faith in his successor. Edward of Caernarfon by this stage had long since left the north-west. In early May he was at Dover, bidding farewell to Piers Gaveston, who was preparing to sail into exile on the king’s orders. The prince had evidently accompanied his favourite with his father’s leave, for he was expected to lead an embassy to France in order to further the peace process. But when, in early June, the command came to abort this mission – no doubt in light of the worsening situation in Scotland – the king’s son showed himself in no hurry to return to the war zone, and remained in the south of England.44
King Edward had reacted to the defeats in Scotland, inevitably, with orders for more troops: a new army was to muster at Carlisle in the middle of July. In the meantime, however, his health again went into decline. According to Walter of Guisborough, the king was now suffering from dysentery, an affliction that all the electuaries, cordials and ointments prepared by his doctors in the past months can have done nothing to alleviate. There can thus have been little celebration in mid-June when Edward passed his sixty-eighth birthday. So grave was his condition that he had become all but invisible, and his seclusion gave rise to the rumour that he was in fact already dead.45
When, at length, these murmurs reached the king’s own ears, they stirred that part of his spirit that was indubitably great. Around 24 June the order was given to prepare for an immediate advance. With the muster date still three weeks into the future, whatever army had assembled in Carlisle can only have been half-formed at best. But leadership was required at once, and Edward had now abandoned the notion that it could be provided by others, least of all by his feckless and still-absent son. Instead, the ailing king rose from his bed to lead his men to war in person. The litter that had borne him on his agonising journey to the Border he rejected, and it was ceremoniously surrendered in Carlisle Cathedral. Edward now mounted his war-horse, as of old, and rode out from the city at the head of his host.46
It was all, of course, a magnificent act, undertaken in defiance – of the rumours, of the Scots, of pain and illness, and thus even of death itself. As such it was unsustainable. The king had headed west out of Carlisle, evidently with the intention of sailing to Scotland across the Solway Firth. But after ten days he had advanced only six miles, and on 6 July he was forced to stop at Burgh by Sands, an isolated settlement close to the Cumbrian coast. In this windswept wilderness Edward spent his last night on Earth. The following day – Friday, the feast of St Thomas – around mid-afternoon, his attendants appeared to help him to eat, but as they lifted the king from his bed, he died in their arms.47