The Great Cause

Within a month of the close of the autumn parliament of 1290 Queen Eleanor was dead. During her stay in Gascony she had contracted a malarial fever that, although it obviously did not prevent her from travelling, probably lingered and left her susceptible to the sickness that took hold at Clipstone in the last days of October. At that point a household sergeant was dispatched to Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the east, to procure better medicines. But a further fortnight brought no improvement, and it was evidently decided that the only hope was to get the queen to Lincoln in person, almost certainly so that she could be near the shrine of St Hugh in the city’s cathedral. The royal party proceeded by short journeys and managed to cross the River Trent, but by that stage it must have been clear that Eleanor could cope with no more. On 20 November the court was forced to stop in Harby, a small village six miles short of their destination, and for another week the queen rested in the modest home of Richard Weston, a local knight. These, though, were to be her last lodgings. During the evening of 28 November Eleanor died. She had recently passed her forty-ninth birthday.¹

Contemporary Englishmen who recorded the queen’s passing composed only the shortest of obituary notices, and what little they wrote was hardly positive. ‘A Spaniard by birth,’ said the annalist at Dunstable Priory, ‘she acquired many fine manors.’ As far as most people were concerned, there was not much more that could be said. Since her arrival in England thirty-five years earlier, Eleanor had made scant effort to cultivate popular affection. Medieval queens could endear themselves by the personal distribution of alms to the poor, and by interceding with their husbands on behalf of the needy, the oppressed or the condemned. But Eleanor had preferred to let others make donations on her behalf and – to judge from comments once made by Archbishop Pecham – was reckoned to have encouraged Edward to be more severe in his judgements, not less so. As the Dunstable annalist implies, foreignness was one part of her problem. Unlike the king, Eleanor had never learned to speak English. Acquisitiveness – the accumulation of ‘fine manors’ – was another. In the course of her career Eleanor had amassed lands worth a total of about £50,000 (or £2,500 a year). This was not simply a question of greed: at the time of her arrival in England the queen’s resources had been quite inadequate and required development. Yet the means employed by Eleanor and her officials to effect this expansion, especially the snapping up of estates encumbered by Jewish debts, had become notorious. So too had her methods of estate management, which inquests carried out after her death revealed to have been high-handed and ruthless. Not until her last moments did Eleanor seek to make amends. ‘After she had devotedly received the sacrament of the dying,’ wrote one chronicler, ‘she earnestly prayed her lord the king, who was listening to her requests, that everything unjustly taken from anyone by her or her ministers should be restored.’

Edward saw to this and much more besides. Indeed, his reaction to his wife’s death was such that it all but eclipsed the muted response of his subjects, and ultimately served to disguise the damage that the queen’s reputation had sustained during her own lifetime. It began with an elaborate funeral procession. From Harby Eleanor’s body was taken to Lincoln, where her viscera were removed and interred in the cathedral, while her heart, in accordance with her wishes, was reserved for later burial at the Blackfriars in London with that of her son Alfonso. Then, on 3 December, the king and his court set out to conduct the queen’s embalmed corpse south to Westminster – a slow, mournful progress that lasted the best part of a fortnight, and that ended on 17 December, when Eleanor was entombed near the high altar in Westminster Abbey.²

The king’s effort to honour his wife, however, was only just beginning. In the months and years that followed, a team of royal artists and artisans was commissioned to create what has been called ‘the most magnificent funerary display ever accorded an English monarch’. At Lincoln, Blackfriars and Westminster, three separate tombs were fashioned. Only the last survives, but it is a work of striking sophistication: the representation of Eleanor shows her with her hair unfastened and her eyes wide open. Cast in bronze and finished in gold, it took two years to produce and is rivalled only by the similar effigy created simultaneously for the tomb of Henry III.

In overall terms, though, Eleanor’s commemoration has no equal. In addition to the tombs, Edward ordered the creation of no fewer than twelve additional memorials – a dozen monuments of stone and marble, one to mark each place that the queen’s body had rested on its journey from Lincoln to London. These were the celebrated Eleanor Crosses, so called because each was originally surmounted with a devotional cross. Memorial crosses, the primary purpose of which was to encourage prayers for the departed, were not unknown in thirteenth-century England, but nothing on this scale had even been seen before, nor would it be attempted again. The only precedent, and the probable inspiration, were the series of monuments, known as montjoies, built in France to mark the last journey of Louis IX. None of these survives, however, whereas – miraculously – three of the twelve crosses erected for Eleanor are still standing (at Hardingstone and Geddington in Northamptonshire, and at Waltham in Hertfordshire). The building accounts indicate that these are lesser examples – their vanished counterparts that once stood in Cheapside and Charing (hence Charing Cross) cost up to seven times as much. Nevertheless, the three survivors, weathered and damaged as they are, stripped of their paint and their gilding, are generally acknowledged to constitute a watershed moment in English art – a novel fusion of sculptural and architectural forms that heralds the beginning of the English Decorated style.³

An appreciation of their aesthetic qualities, though, and of the contribution they made to the prestige of the Crown, had led some commentators to downplay what was surely the primary motivation for the crosses’ construction, namely, the profound grief of the king. Edward and Eleanor had been married for thirty-six years, and during that time they had hardly ever been apart. Their tastes and interests – hunting, chess, chivalry and romance – appear to have coincided almost exactly. Above all, they had shared a sense of adventure. On all the king’s travels, on crusade or on campaign, the queen had been his most constant companion. Her fifteen or sixteen pregnancies are another testament to their closeness, and there is no credible evidence to suggest that either was anything other than faithful. The English may never have taken Eleanor to their hearts, but Edward had always adored her. After her funeral in December 1290 he retreated to Ashridge, a religious house in Hertfordshire, to spend Christmas in what must have been the deepest sorrow. He was still there in January when he wrote a letter to the abbot of Cluny in France, in which he referred to the wife ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’.⁴

Deep as the king’s desolation assuredly was, there is no reason to suppose that it diminished in any way his enthusiasm for the planned crusade. If anything, Eleanor’s death may have intensified Edward’s desire to return to the Holy Land: a picture on the side of the queen’s tomb shows a knight, believed to be Otto de Grandson, offering prayers for her soul there.⁵ The king was distracted from his declared purpose in the autumn of 1290, but not by the loss of his wife. Rather his plans were disrupted by the death of a seven-year-old Norwegian girl in the distant islands of Orkney.

To explain this cryptic comment, it is necessary to travel back in time, and north in space, and consider the career of Edward’s brother-in-law, King Alexander III of Scotland. Like Edward, Alexander was a strong and successful king. In the 1250s, still in his teens, he had asserted his independence in the face of aristocratic efforts to control him. In the 1260s – much as Edward would do in Wales a decade later – he turned his attention westwards and imposed his authority on a debatable frontier. The islands on Scotland’s western seaboard, nominally under the control of the king of Norway, were effectively independent; but by 1266 the Norwegians had been forcibly persuaded to bow out, and the locals were obliged to acknowledge the superior lordship of the Scottish royal house. So successful, in fact, was Alexander’s rule, that the latter part of his reign suffers from documentary silence. Contrary to the belief of Walter Scott, who once opined that everybody in medieval Scotland was too busy fighting to write anything down, the hush that descends on Scottish affairs in the 1270s is testimony to the peace that their king had succeeded in establishing.⁶

But, forceful and fortunate in politics, Alexander was far less lucky in his family. First, in 1275, came the death of his queen (and Edward’s sister), Margaret. Then, in the decade that followed, came the successive loss of all their children: their younger son David died in 1281, their only daughter, also Margaret, in 1283, and lastly their elder son, Alexander, in 1284. It was an incredible run of dynastic bad luck, and inevitably raised the question of who would succeed to the Scottish throne when Alexander himself died, for the king had neither brothers nor uncles who might step in and replace him. Prudently, therefore, Alexander – still only in his early forties – elected to remarry. In 1285 he took as his second queen a young Frenchwoman by the name of Yolande of Dreux. Imprudently, however, just a few months into their marriage, the king set out to meet his new wife in a terrible storm. On the evening of 18 March 1286 he rode from Edinburgh to Queensferry, crossed the Firth of Forth by boat, and continued along the coast towards Kinghorn, where Yolande was waiting. But she waited in vain. At some point during the last stage of his ill-advised journey, her husband lost his escort, tumbled over a cliff and broke his neck. Not until the next day dawned was his lifeless body found lying on the shoreline.⁷

At this point the king of England was readying himself to leave for France, a trip on which the peace of Europe and the fate of the Holy Land were seen to hinge. Discomforting as was the news from Scotland, therefore, it could not be permitted to disrupt or even to delay the urgent business on the Continent. In May Edward set sail from Dover, having heard of Alexander’s sudden death, but not of its drawn-out sequel.

That news reached him sporadically during his stay in Gascony. In the summer of 1286 it was hopeful: Yolande of Dreux, the new and newly widowed Scottish queen, was pregnant. King Alexander, it seemed, had not failed after all. His subjects were now preparing themselves for a long minority, at the end of which the late king’s as-yet unborn child would succeed him. Until that time, Edward learned, Scotland was to be governed by a regency council. By common consent, power had passed to six ‘Guardians’ – two earls, two bishops and two barons – who had sworn to protect the kingdom for Alexander’s heir.⁸

The following year, however, the intelligence was altogether more desperate. The queen’s pregnancy had ended unsuccessfully with the delivery of a stillborn child. As a result, Scotland had been thrown into confusion. Rebellion had been raised in the south-west of the country, and although the Guardians had suppressed the rising, their authority was now weak and the peace they maintained fragile. What they needed, and what they sought above all, was Edward’s assistance. The Scots would remain on anxious alert until the English king could come there and help them solve their succession crisis.⁹

The terrible and tragic turn that events had taken in Scotland concerned Edward in more ways than one. Obviously, as king of England, he was bound to take an interest, if only from the point of view of security, in any disarray north of the Border. But far more disturbing were the general ramifications of the Scottish crisis, for it held up a mirror to Edward’s own domestic situation, and presented an alarming future vision of England overtaken by a similar dynastic disaster. Alexander’s untimely end emphasised that death was no respecter of high office and that even vigorous and active kings might be struck down in their prime. Edward’s luck was already legendary. He had emerged unscathed from two bloody battles, survived storms at sea, and had miraculously recovered from the seemingly deadly wound inflicted by an assassin’s blade. But such luck could not last forever. The broken collarbone that the king sustained in Gascony could easily have been a broken neck.

Had that been the case, the English crown would have passed to Edward of Caernarfon, a child barely two years old at the time of his parents’ departure for France. Needless to say, it would have been quite unwise, given the fate of all his other sons, for Edward to have pinned too much hope on the boy’s survival. By the same token, it must have been equally clear by 1287 that he and Eleanor could expect no more children. Little Edward, their only surviving son, would also be their last.

It was almost certainly with the example of Scotland uppermost in his mind that Edward set about formalising the arrangements for the English succession soon after his return from Gascony. In the spring of 1290 the king summoned a special meeting of counsellors, including the archbishop of Canterbury and five other bishops, to assemble at Amesbury in Wiltshire. The choice of location is revealing. In 1285, as we have seen, the priory at Amesbury had received Edward’s daughter, Mary, as a nun. But, more significantly, the priory had in the meantime also become home to the king’s mother. Eleanor of Provence was also making preparations for the end of her life, and had quietly followed her granddaughter in taking the veil during her son’s absence. Now in her late sixties, the dowager queen had lived a far less conspicuous and controversial life in the West Country since the death of Henry III some eighteen years earlier. Gone were the days of plotting revenge on her enemies and raising armies to rescue her husband’s realm. Mindful of the divisive and unpopular figure his mother had once been, Edward, while according her great personal respect, had allowed Eleanor no role in politics, just as he had marginalised the political position of his own queen.¹⁰

When it came to family matters, however, the king was wont to consult both women, and the question of the succession, although a political concern of the highest order, was ultimately a family affair. For this reason, Edward, his wife and his mother were joined at Amesbury not only by a crowd of senior churchmen, but also by Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s brother, and William de Valence, his half-uncle. Also in attendance was Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, who was about to enter this family circle by virtue of his impending marriage to Edward’s daughter, Joan. Indeed, Earl Gilbert’s presence, as the promissory documents he was induced to issue make plain, was most important, for the king’s daughters were revealed to be his back-up plan. All those gathered at Amesbury agreed that, in the event of Edward’s death, and the premature death of his only son, the kingdom would pass to the eldest of his five surviving daughters.

This was a remarkable provision. From a legal point of view, it was anomalous, in that primogeniture did not normally apply to female heirs. Ordinarily in such circumstances, estates were divided between daughters regardless of precedence of birth. By this decision, therefore, the kingdom of England was understood to be exceptional in its impartibility. But more remarkable still was the daring of the ordinance in the light of historical precedent. Only one earlier king of England, the imperious Henry I (d. 1135), had insisted that his daughter should succeed him, with the result that England had been torn apart by civil war for a generation. For Edward similarly to rule in favour of female succession, even in concert with the episcopate and his extended family, was thus a mark of his supreme self-confidence. At the same time, it exposed his shrinking range of options. The best that all of them could hope for was that Edward himself would continue to reign for many years to come, and that his only remaining son would beat the odds and survive to adulthood.¹¹

There was, however, a better hope still, and it lay with Scotland. Alexander III had died before he could father any more children of his own, but he was not without a direct heir. Between 1281 and 1283 his late daughter, Margaret, had been briefly married to the king of Norway, and at some point towards the end of that period she had given birth to a daughter of her own. This child, also called Margaret, had grown up in Norway, unaware that she would one day become the last hope for her grandfather’s dynasty. In 1284, when his last son died, Alexander had obtained general recognition of her right to succeed him in default of any new children he might have. And when, two years later, the king himself perished, the broad political consensus remained: Margaret, ‘the Maid of Norway’, had the best right to the Scottish throne.¹²

What if this little girl, aged only three at the time of Alexander’s death, were to be married to Edward’s only son, then approaching his second birthday? The boy would not only succeed his father as king of England, but also become king of Scotland in right of his wife. Their children would become rulers of a double kingdom – perhaps a united kingdom – which would stretch from the English Channel to the Western Isles. The idea appears to have been floated as early as 1284, by Alexander himself, following the death of his last son. In response to a letter of condolence from Edward I, the Scottish king had mused that, through his tiny granddaughter, ‘much good may yet come to pass’. It was an intriguing idea, though at that time only one of many possible futures; if Alexander had more children of his own, the vision would dissolve, and the future king of England would be committed to a disadvantageous match with a Norwegian princess, nothing more. But when Alexander died, the Maid’s succession seemed certain. Messengers began to travel between the English and Norwegian courts. In the spring of 1289, in anticipation of Edward’s imminent return to England, negoti ations began in earnest. Finally, on 6 November that year, an international summit was held at Salisbury. Edward and his advisers met with the Norwegian ambassadors and the Scottish Guardians, and it was agreed: within the next twelve months, Margaret of Norway would marry Edward of Caernarfon.¹³

The Scots were far from unhappy with this prospect. It promised an end to the years of uncertainty since 1286 and to the latent threat of further disorder. A marriage alliance with England would give the Maid a powerful protector, and would mean that her claim was most unlikely to be contested in the future. Accordingly, when the political community of Scotland assembled on the Border at Birgham in March 1290, the Salisbury agreement was unanimously ratified. More than a hundred Scotsmen of substance wrote to Edward I expressing their will to proceed with the wedding.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the Scots proceeded with caution. This was not just the union of two royal children but the union of two kingdoms. The fact that Edward was a force to be reckoned with also carried certain negative implications. Would he be too powerful, or too demanding? Realistically, the Guardians recognised that their options were limited, and accepted that England would be the dominant partner in the marriage. But, at the same time, they had sworn an oath to preserve Alexander III’s kingdom intact and undiminished for his eventual heirs. As such, their overriding concern was to safeguard Scotland’s future independence.¹⁵

What the Scots needed, in short, was a prenuptial agreement, and to this end negotiations with England dragged on into the summer of 1290. On many issues it was possible to reach consensus. Everyone, for example, accepted that, although the two children were not yet of marriageable age, they should nonetheless be regarded as if married from the moment of the Maid’s arrival, and that Edward of Caernarfon should therefore be regarded as king of Scotland from that point. There was agreement, too, on the question of the routine business of Scottish government. The Scots were concerned to ensure that they would not have to travel to England to do homage to their new king, or to answer or initiate lawsuits. What they demanded – and what Edward conceded – was that such matters should be dealt with in Scotland by a resident viceroy or lieutenant.

When they came to consider the matter of Scotland’s castles, however, the two sides could find no common ground. Edward was determined that all royal fortresses must come under his control, and insisted on his right to appoint their custodians in every case. His attitude was probably borne of bitter memories of 1258, at which point control of England’s royal castles had been handed to a council. Also, no doubt, the king recollected the unpleasant experiences of his sister Margaret after her marriage to Alexander III, whose minority had been blighted by one aristocratic coup after another.

But what seemed to Edward to be a commonsensical means of ensuring Scotland’s future security sounded to the Scots like an unconscionable demand for the surrender of sovereignty. Castles were the instruments of raw power, and for this reason neither side was prepared to compromise. When, in July 1290, the Scots reassembled at Birgham to meet the English king’s ambassadors, articles were drafted with a view to producing a final treaty, but, because of the disagreement on this crucial issue, no treaty was sealed.¹⁶

The deadlock was broken, it seems, by the news that the Maid had already set sail from Norway and was en route for Scotland. This intelligence, which apparently reached Edward’s ears in the last days of August, forced him to settle, for fear that the Scots’ bargaining position would be strengthened if they took possession of the girl. On 28 August, therefore, while the English court was at Northampton, the articles drafted earlier in the summer were approved. The contentious matter of castles was fudged: those Scottish envoys present accepted that keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the English king’. But the Scots did get a clear statement to safeguard their independence, of the kind they had been seeking since the start. In the most resonant phrase of their agreement, Edward promised that Scotland should remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.¹⁷

All thoughts now turned to the Maid’s impending arrival. Edward immediately sent his friend, the bishop of Durham, to see to her reception, and a few days later dispatched a welcoming gift of jewels for the little girl who was about to become his daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the magnates of Scotland, as was traditional, began to assemble at Scone Abbey near Perth in readiness for the enthronement of their new queen. In late September representatives of both nations rode into Scotland’s extreme north, to greet the Norwegian ship which, unexpectedly, had put into the islands of Orkney. Only in the course of their journey did they learn that, during her voyage, the Maid had fallen sick, perhaps from having eaten decayed food. And when, in early October, they returned south, it was with the news that the girl was dead.¹⁸

The death of the Maid of Norway finally extinguished the flickering flame that was the bloodline of King Alexander and threw the question of the Scottish succession wide open. It was necessary to forage far back into the royal family tree – over a hundred years – to find other branches that had flourished into the present. But these collateral descents were many, and consequently there was no consensus on who was next in line to the throne. The respective merits of the most important candidates will be considered later in this chapter; for now, it will suffice to note that, in the eyes of many Scots, the man with the best claim to succeed was John Balliol.

Twenty years earlier only a madman or a mystic would have put money on this candidate, and not just because the Scottish royal house had yet to be overtaken by disaster. Born around the middle of the thirteenth century, Balliol was the youngest of four brothers, and as such was apparently destined for a career in the Church. But in the course of the 1270s his family were also visited by an exceptional mortality: during that decade, all three of his elder brothers died without issue, leaving John as the heir to their father’s estates in England and France.¹⁹

As this paternal inheritance implies, Balliol was to all intents and purposes an Englishman. His father had been lord of Barnard Castle in County Durham, had fought for Henry III in the Battle of Lewes and, around the same time, had achieved lasting fame as the founder of Balliol College, Oxford. John, it is true, was Scottish on his mother’s side, and it was from his mother that he inherited his claim to Scotland’s empty throne. But Dervorguilla Balliol lived to be a very old lady, surviving until January 1290. Only at that point did her son, around the time of his fortieth birthday, enter into her extensive estates in Galloway and become a major Scottish landowner in his own right.²⁰

Nevertheless, Balliol had another connection with Scotland in the form of his brother-in-law, John Comyn. Having married Balliol’s sister, Eleanor, in the early 1270s, Comyn had gone on to become the lord of Badenoch, and as such wielded especially great power in the northern part of the kingdom. Together with his other relatives, moreover, he held lands and castles in almost every corner of Scotland. It was an indication of the Comyns’ importance that two of their number – John and his great-uncle Alexander – had been among the six Guardians elected in 1286. All of which is to say that John Balliol, although he was a newcomer to the ranks of the Scottish nobility, had major and influential backing for his claim to the throne from a family that was arguably the most formidable force in Scottish politics.²¹

That claim, however, did not go unchallenged. Balliol and the Comyns had a powerful opponent in the shape of Robert Bruce. Despite the fact that he too held lands in England, Bruce was the more obviously Scottish candidate: Annandale, a lordship in south-western Scotland, was his paternal inheritance (although, like Balliol, his claim was on his mother’s side). An elderly man – in 1290 he was about seventy years old – Bruce was nothing less than ferocious in prosecuting what he regarded as his superior right. Indeed, he evidently considered his right to be superior not only to that of Balliol, but also to that of the Maid of Norway. It was Bruce who had raised rebellion in the winter of 1286-87, on learning that Yolande of Dreux’s pregnancy had failed.²²

At that point the majority of Scots, represented by the Guardians, had given their backing to the Maid, and Bruce’s pretensions had been forcibly held in check. But in the autumn of 1290, once the Maid was revealed to be dead, the renewal of armed conflict seemed all but inevitable. Support was split between the two camps: neither Bruce nor Balliol could command sufficient backing among Scotland’s political community to impose a decisive settlement.

What the Scots needed was a powerful outside agency to help them choose between these two contenders: an honest broker to come and arbitrate. Once again, there was only one realistic option, and that was the king of England. He, after all, had been playing the role of international peacemaker in Europe for the past five years. On 7 October 1290 one of the Guardians, the bishop of St Andrews, wrote to Edward, stressing the turmoil in Scotland, and urging him to hasten north and prevent the outbreak of civil war.²³

The king’s response to this request has, unfortunately, not survived. The Scots would later allege that, after the death of the Maid of Norway, Edward sent them a letter of condolence, in which he promised that he would indeed come to Scotland in order to give his advice as ‘a friend and neighbour’.

The king’s intentions, however, were far from friendly or neighbourly. Death, in taking the Maid, had robbed him of a rich prize and within just a few weeks had also deprived him of his own beloved queen. Edward retreated to Ashridge, and there, in his mourning, he began to formulate a new plan. According to one English chronicler, this was revealed to his magnates when they assembled early in the new year. The king, we are told, ‘said that it was in his mind to reduce the king and kingdom of Scotland to his rule, as he had recently subjected Wales to his authority’.²⁴

If these words attributed to Edward are genuine, they show either supreme self-confidence or immense naivety – or perhaps both, the one born of the other. Scotland and Wales, of course, do share certain physical characteristics: most obviously, a large proportion of their landscape consists of hills and valleys. This meant, in the thirteenth century, that they also possessed some economic similarities. The predominance of upland meant that Welsh and Scottish societies were for the most part pastoral and hence poor in comparison with England. Viewed from Westminster, therefore, the two Celtic countries might have appeared to have much in common. In fact they were very different places.

In one respect, Wales was a more united country than Scotland. The Welsh, as we have seen, were a single ethnic group – the last survivors of an ancient civilisation that had once occupied all of Britain, but that had been gradually driven into the western margins of the island by the English. Hence, in terms of culture and language, Wales was homogenous. Scotland, on the other hand, was a complicated ethnic mix. Here too, in the south-western corner of the country, there were Brittonic elements that had been pushed out of England. Yet in south-eastern Scotland the population was mostly of English stock, a remnant of the once extensive Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. In the west, meanwhile, the natives were mainly of Gaelic origin, having immigrated from Ireland in ancient times, or of Norwegian (Viking) descent. Ethnically and culturally, medieval Scotland was a melting pot.²⁵

But politically – and this was its other major difference from Wales – Scotland was united. The kings of Scots, whose rule had once been restricted to the area around the River Tay, had over the centuries expanded their power first southwards, then westwards. By the thirteenth century their authority was acknowledged, albeit loosely in some quarters, by all of Scotland’s multi-ethnic, multi-cultural inhabitants. An important factor in promoting this political unity had been the Scottish monarchy’s adoption during the eleventh century of the practice of primogeniture. As a consequence, while the petty kings and princes of Wales continued to squabble for power with each successive generation, in Scotland the throne passed smoothly – or at least smoothly in relative terms – from one occupant to the next.²⁶

These fundamental differences between Wales and Scotland had huge ramifications after 1066 when England was brought under new, Norman management. It meant that when those Frenchmen who acquired lands along England’s northern and western borders went looking for further opportunities to expand their power, they were confronted with two very different prospects. In Wales they saw a fragmented society, with no existing political structures within which they could realise their objectives. They therefore simply took whatever they could and set themselves up in competition with the natives – which is to say, they created the March of Wales and became Marcher lords. Those Normans who harboured ambitions to expand into Scotland, however, saw a society that, in its barest essentials, conformed to their expectations. The kings of Scots were not only too strong to challenge for supremacy; they also possessed sufficient stature that it was possible to offer them military service in return for landed reward. In Scotland, therefore, the Norman newcomers were absorbed into the existing society, thereby adding yet another new ethnic layer to the country’s already complex combination.²⁷

Thus, as Wales was left drained and diminished by the advent of parasitical Norman neighbours, Scotland was strengthened by what was in effect a transfusion of new Norman blood. Thanks to the arrival of these Continental adventurers, Scottish kings and their subjects were soon drawn inexorably into the mainstream of European culture. A good indication that this process of assimilation was well under way by the end of the eleventh century is provided by the names of Scotland’s kings. Prior to this point they were exclusively traditional and Celtic – Donald, Malcolm and Duncan – but thereafter the names that predominated were classical, biblical or French – Alexander, David and William.²⁸

The key moment, indeed, in this transformation of Scottish society took place in the middle of the twelfth century during the reign of King David I. Although descended from the Celtic dynasty that had ruled in central Scotland since the late eighth century, David had grown up at the court of Henry I of England, where he received what contemporaries regarded as the benefits of a civilised education. Exposed in his youth to European cultural norms – modes and morals of warfare, methods of government and manners in general – David returned home to Scotland as king and began the business of acquainting his subjects with these new standards. In this he was helped by a number of friends he had made during his time in England, who accompanied him on his return, and whom he rewarded with lands and honours north of the Border. To take just one obvious example, David brought with him a certain Robert de Brus, a man who originally hailed from Brix in Normandy, and who was the forefather of the Robert Bruce who claimed the Scottish throne in 1290.²⁹

Nor were Anglo-Norman aristocrats like the Bruces the only newcomers. In the same period Scotland was engulfed by a veritable wave of more humble settlers – merchants and labourers in search of new markets. Some came from as far afield as France or Flanders, but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they were drawn from England. The Scottish kings endorsed and encouraged this immigration, founding new towns or ‘burghs’ in the more prosperous eastern parts of their realm. In fact, at almost every level, twelfth-century Scotland threw its doors wide open to outside influences. As well as the new burghs, and also in response to royal initiative, new abbeys and priories began to be founded on the Continental model; the king’s household, with its new officers, such as the constable and the steward, increasingly resembled those of other European rulers; royal government adopted the coins and charters common to the other civilised countries of western Europe. Above all, though, Scotland was approximating itself to England. Existing Scottish regions were recast as ‘shires’ – the characteristically English division of local government – and new shires were created along English lines. The English language, already the established vernacular in south-eastern Scotland, began to gain ground in other areas as the new burghs and burgesses spread. As one modern English historian has memorably (and rather provocatively) put it, ‘it is almost as if we are looking at two Englands, and one of them is called Scotland’.³⁰

The anglicisation of David I, and the subsequent anglicisation of Scotland, occurred at a critical moment. As we have already seen, it was in the middle decades of the twelfth century that attitudes in England towards the people beyond its borders underwent a fundamental shift. At first, the Scots were deemed to lack the essential hallmarks of civilisation, and, like the Irish and the Welsh, were stigmatised as barbarians. But, by the end of the twelfth century, the English were obliged to admit that their northern neighbours had effected a remarkable transformation. They waged warfare according to the proper rules; they held respectable attitudes towards sex and religion; and, as their new towns, castles and abbeys attested, they had achieved a commendable level of economic advancement. Whichever way one looked at it, the Scots were manifestly eligible for membership of the civilised club.³¹

That they had been admitted by the thirteenth century is confirmed by the rising number of important Anglo-Scottish marriages. In 1221 Henry III’s sister, Joan, was married to Alexander II of Scotland, and thirty years later Alexander III married Henry’s daughter, Margaret. In the meantime the earls of Norfolk, Kent and Pembroke were all partnered with Scottish princesses; John Balliol’s father, a northern English magnate, married Dervorguilla of Galloway, and Robert Bruce was married to a daughter of the earl of Gloucester. The multiplication of such matches, along with other social, cultural and economic links, suggests that the border between the two nations was beginning to blur.³²

Over and above this general bonhomie, however, an important question still loomed. What was the proper political relationship between the two kingdoms? Was Scotland, the weaker of the two by a very long chalk, in any way subservient to England? This was clearly the case with Wales, whose rulers had for centuries accepted that the king of England was their rightful overlord. In the 1250s and 1260s Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been desperate to do homage and swear fealty to Henry III, seeing this as the only way in which his territorial gains and title ‘prince of Wales’ could be legitimised. Even when the same prince fell out with Henry’s son, the argument was over exactly what dependency entailed. That such dependency existed was not denied – not until native Wales was in its death throes.

The Scots, however, squarely refused to accept any suggestion that a similar subservient relationship applied in their case. While relations with England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were for the most part amicable, the issue would surface during times of tension. The most consistent cause of stress in this period was the question of where the border between the two kingdoms should be. The kings of Scots would have liked to have redrawn it considerably further south than its present position, which is defined by the Cheviot Hills and the River Tweed. Their ambition was to gain control of Cumbria and Northumbria, and on occasion – when England was distracted by civil or Continental wars – they succeeded in doing so. It was for this reason that the castle keep at Carlisle, begun by Henry I, was finished by his former protégé, David I of Scots. When they regained their composure, however, the kings of England were always able to reverse such Scottish gains, and typically took the trouble to spell out, from a position of dominance, how they felt Anglo-Scottish relations ought to operate in the future. The most significant of these occasions came in 1174, when King William the Lion of Scotland, grandson of King David, was taken prisoner by Henry II of England and compelled to perform a humiliating act of homage. After his release the Scottish king renounced his oath, complaining that it had been exacted under duress, and in 1189 the English accepted the original state of affairs. King Richard I of England, desperate for funds to finance his crusade, agreed to drop the English claim to overlordship in exchange for a large cash payment.

For the next hundred years the question was never revisited with the same directness or intensity. It helped that in 1237 the line of the Border was fixed in its present position by mutual agreement, thereby removing the likeliest cause of future contention.³³Nevertheless, the issue of overlordship remained a live one. A good example of the kind of diplomatic tightrope that the kings of Scotland were sometimes forced to walk can be seen on the occasion of the marriage of Alexander III and Margaret, daughter of Henry III, which took place in York at Christmas 1251. The English king evidently assumed that, in the course of this sustained display of his superior power, he could easily extract from his new ten-year-old son-in-law an admission of political dependence. Young Alexander, however, had clearly been well coached by his advisers: he answered the request with a polite refusal, and Henry had sufficient wisdom to let the matter rest.³⁴

What might Edward I, then aged twelve and present as a witness, have made of this exchange? In the minds of thirteenth-century Englishmen the superiority of their country to Scotland was not merely based on the self-evident balance of power in the present; it was a matter of unimpeachable historical fact. Anybody who had read or heard Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain – and that must have included just about everybody, to judge from the number of surviving copies – would have understood that Scotland had always been subordinate to its southern neighbour. Geoffrey, for example, told the story of Belinus and Brennius, two brothers who, in the days before the Romans, had battled for control of Britain. When they finally agreed to divide the island between them, Belinus took all the lands south of the Humber (that is, England and Wales), while Brennius was to hold those to the north (including Scotland). Only Belinus, however, the elder brother, was crowned as a king. Brennius, it was agreed, ‘who was the younger, should be subject to his brother’. More famous still was Geoffrey’s account of the northern adventures of King Arthur. Having first waged war on the Scots for rebelling against him, Arthur went on to grant Scotland to a certain distant royal relative called Auguselus. This client ruler later honoured Arthur by attending his coronation, during which he carried one of the processional swords as a mark of his subservience.³⁵

This, then, was how Edward I understood the relationship between England and Scotland. In Scotland, however, little boys were told a very different story. When Alexander III was installed as king of Scots in 1249, a Highland historian appeared before him and read out, in Gaelic, a list of Scottish kings. Like the royal pedigrees recited in England, immeasurably elongated and enhanced by the fantasies of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Highlander’s list was a genuine genealogy of recent rulers, extended into the remotest past by invention. The eight-year-old Alexander was reminded that his dynasty began with Scota, a warrior princess, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, who had wrested northern Britain from the heirs of Brutus and renamed it in her own honour.³⁶

As well as highlighting the different histories that the English and Scots told themselves in the thirteenth century, Alexander’s inauguration also reveals another source of contention on the issue of overlordship. The king-making ceremony of 1249 took place, as it had always done, at Scone Abbey. A hefty stone of ancient provenance, used for such occasions since time immemorial, was carried out of the abbey church and into the churchyard, where it was probably placed in the base of an oaken chair. On this the young Alexander would have been seated for his transformation into a king. He was acclaimed, mantled and invested with the Scottish regalia, which included a sword, sceptre and a crown. Despite the use of this last item, however, and in spite of the best efforts of the Scots, this was not quite a coronation. Alexander was not anointed by anyone, nor was his crown blessed by any of those churchmen present. Since the start of the thirteenth century, Scottish kings had been applying to the pope for permission to sacralise their ceremony at Scone. Every time, though, they were rebuffed, thanks to English intervention. Their friends south of the Border might acknowledge that the rulers of Scotland were kings, but they firmly maintained that there was only one true Crown in Britain – the one worn by the king of England.³⁷

All of this makes it sound as if the English and the Scots, with their differing histories, asserting superiority on the one hand and independence on the other, were bound to fall out. In fact, Edward I remained on quite cordial terms with Alexander III for the rest of the latter’s life. Henry III may not have succeeded in exacting homage from the Scottish king in 1251, but that hardly mattered. Alexander had witnessed the awesome power and majesty of the English court at first hand, and realised from a young age that he was in no position to challenge it. The result of the royal wedding in 1251 was not hostility but increasingly warm and friendly relations. Five years later, following his own marriage to Eleanor and his return from Gascony, Edward took the trouble to visit Scotland to see his sister and brother-in-law; a little later still, at the end of that same summer, Alexander and Margaret journeyed south to be entertained at the English court. In 1260 they came south again, this time for the birth of Margaret’s first child. And when, in the summer of 1268, Edward paid another brief visit to Scotland, he was reportedly delighted with his sister’s children. The evident affection between the English and Scots now that they were part of one extended royal family meant greater political co-operation, not increased friction. Alexander sent a force of Scots to fight for Edward at Evesham (too late to be of any use, but surely appreciated as a gesture) and also permitted Scottish nobles – Robert Bruce, for example, and the older brothers of John Balliol – to join Edward’s crusade.³⁸

Such amicable relations meant that for a long time the issue of overlordship could be avoided. Those occasions that might in other circumstances be interpreted legalistically, as one king rendering service to another, could be cast simply in terms of friendship. When Edward returned from his crusade and was crowned at Westminster, nothing could have been more natural than for his sister and brother-in-law to take precedence among the distinguished guests. Edward himself may have attempted to exploit the situation: in a letter written a few weeks beforehand he alluded to ‘the service’ owed by the Scottish king, perhaps anticipating that Alexander would agree to carry a sword during the coronation procession, just as Auguselus had done for Arthur. Sadly, we have no way of knowing whether or not Alexander obliged, though it seems most unlikely: at this point the Scottish king also seems to have been able to avoid doing homage to Edward.³⁹

What undoubtedly refocused everyone’s attention on the overlordship question was the behaviour and subsequent punishment of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The Welsh prince, having pointedly failed to attend Edward’s coronation and then withheld his homage, was torn down to size in 1277 by an angry Edward at the head of devastating armies. When, the following year, a much diminished and chastened Llywelyn was permitted to marry his fiancée (in England, before the English king, on the feast-day of England’s premier royal saint), Alexander, now a widower, was again among the guests. Before crossing the Border he had insisted on an escort of English earls and bishops to emphasise his importance and his independence. But the knowledge of what had happened to the prince of Wales must have impinged heavily on the king of Scotland’s consciousness, for Alexander had come south at Edward’s bidding in order to perform his homage.⁴⁰

This was not necessarily the major concession it might sound. From the mid-twelfth century the kings of Scotland had held certain lands in England (Tynedale and Penrith). Since Alexander held these estates from Edward, it was entirely right and proper that he should formally acknowledge the fact. The homage he owed, in other words, was personal and private, and should not have affected his status as king of Scots. After all, Edward I, as duke of Gascony, had himself done homage on two occasions to consecutive kings of France, with no prejudice to his position as king of England.

Edward, however, was determined on this occasion to make more of it. When Alexander offered to do his homage soon after the wedding at Worcester, his brother-in-law demurred. It would be better, Edward explained, if the act took place before his full council in Westminster in a fortnight’s time. The English king was clearly angling for a major concession and wanted to be sure that everyone saw him land his catch. Anxious not to offend, Alexander and his advisers agreed, but once again stressed that they were only condescending as a favour. The ceremony finally took place on 28 October in the king’s chamber at Westminster, as Edward had planned, but accounts of what happened differ depending on whether they are Scottish or English. What is clear is that, as in a game of poker, everyone kept their cards concealed until the last possible moment. When Alexander came to speak his lines, he did the limited, personal homage that was appropriate for his English estates. Only then did the English show their hand, when the bishop of Norwich interjected that the Scottish king should also do homage to Edward for Scotland. According to the Scottish source, this provoked Alexander to respond with a robust rejoinder. ‘Nobody but God has the right to homage for my kingdom of Scotland,’ he declared, ‘and I hold it of nobody but God himself!’⁴¹

At the time of Alexander’s death, therefore, overlordship was an old controversy, but still a live one. It would remain so until the English agreed to drop their pretensions or until the Scots agreed to accept them. Consecutive kings of Scotland had proved staunch in defence of their independence. But now the Scots had no king, only a succession crisis that they needed English help to resolve. Edward I saw a great opportunity.

In the spring of 1291 the Scots were given to understand that the king of England was ready to offer them the friendly and neighbourly advice that he had allegedly promised the previous autumn. We do not know precisely what messages had been exchanged in the interim. But by May that year, probably at Edward’s suggestion, the Guardians and many other leading Scots had assembled in Berwick. This was an obvious location for the transaction of Anglo-Scottish business. Not only was it the largest and richest of Scotland’s royal burghs; it was also the closest to England, for it sits by the coast on the north shore of the River Tweed, fixed since 1237 as the eastern part of the Border. As for Edward himself, the Scots knew that he was headed for Norham, where an English parliament had evidently been summoned for 6 May. Situated some five miles upstream from Berwick on the Tweed’s opposite bank, Norham was a much smaller settlement, but had the outstanding attraction of a magnificent stone castle, established in the twelfth century by the bishops of Durham. It was the northernmost point at which the king and his court could be accommodated in any comfort prior to leaving England.⁴²

Leaving England, however, was not part of Edward’s plan. By 9 May the Scots gathered in Berwick had received the news that the king expected them to come to him. This was an unsettling invitation: they had assumed that the business of choosing between John Balliol and Robert Bruce, being a Scottish matter, would be transacted in Scotland. If it were done in England, there was the risk that, now or later, this might be interpreted as a sign of Scottish submission. Against such anxieties, though, the Scots did have Edward’s promise from the previous year that Scotland would remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’, and their confidence was further bolstered by the letters they secured from Edward on 10 May, promising that no prejudice should arise from their actions. Thus reassured, a delegation of Scotsmen crossed the Tweed to Norham later that same day.⁴³

It was, in fact, far worse than they had feared. Once inside the castle at Norham, the Scottish delegates were treated to an introductory speech by Roger Brabazon, an English royal justice. After a lot of flowery rhetoric about the beauty of peace and so on, they were told that Edward had come north to do right to anybody who had a claim to the Scottish throne. This implied that the king envisaged other candidates besides Bruce and Balliol, which would, in turn, alter the nature of his intervention. With more than two claimants, a straightforward arbitration of the kind anticipated by the Scots would become impossible. Edward was therefore proposing an alternative arrangement, namely that he should act, not as arbiter, but as judge. This was a role that he naturally felt entitled to assume, given the fact that he was Scotland’s rightful overlord.

The Scots were stupefied. It was surprising enough to discover that there were apparently other claimants besides Bruce and Balliol, but the corollary was outrageous. The king of England their overlord? They protested, with pardonable exaggeration, that they had never heard of such a novelty.⁴⁴

Edward had expected such a reaction – he had, after all, received a similar response from his late brother-in-law in 1278. Accordingly, he had taken the trouble on this occasion to prepare his ground thoroughly in advance. Two months earlier, a search of the archives had been ordered – and not just the royal ones. In abbeys and priories all over England, monks had been made to ferret through their chronicles and muniments in an effort to build the king’s case. Given that the trawl was so extensive, the haul was disappointing (inevitably, of course, given that the superiority that Edward took for granted was built on exceedingly weak, and for the most part fantastical, foundations). Nevertheless, in the days before the Scots had crossed to Norham, a crowd of clerics had told the king what he wanted to hear: his was indeed the superior right. This enabled Edward to present the Scots with a two-fold challenge. If they would not concede his overlordship as a matter of course, he said, they should disprove the facts set out in his new dossier. Or, as an alternative to both these options, they could decide the matter by force.

It was Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow and Guardian, who recovered himself sufficiently to respond on behalf of the startled Scots. In the first place, he said, it did not matter what they, as temporary custodians, might or might not concede: only a king of Scotland could answer such a momentous demand. Secondly, the bishop took Edward to task over his reasoning: they were not obliged to prove him wrong; rather he should prove himself right. Thirdly, and more caustically, Wishart reminded the English king that he was supposed to be a crusader, and observed that a threat to unleash war against a defenceless people did him no credit. At this last Edward was predictably enraged, and prompted to issue a new threat. He would indeed lead a crusading army, he declared – against the Scots!⁴⁵

Amid these acrimonious scenes, the meeting at Norham broke up, with nothing agreed between the two sides beyond the need for a three-week adjournment. For the Scots, obviously, it had been a total disaster: they had come to the Border expecting the happy resolution of their problems by a friend, only to be confronted with ultimatums and undisguised belligerence.

Yet for Edward, too, the encounter had been highly unsatisfactory, and had turned out quite contrary to expectation. The king, to be sure, had anticipated some opposition to his demands – hence the massive effort to prove himself right by documentary means. But the scale and fervour of Scottish resistance had left him reeling, with no response other than angry threats of force. And force, as the bishop of Glasgow had discerned, was an inappropriate answer in present circumstances.

The fact of the matter was that Edward, like the Scots, had been misled. In February the king had received a letter from Robert Bruce, in which the latter had made it abundantly clear that he and his supporters were willing to endorse the English interpretation of Anglo-Scottish relations. At one point in this letter, for example, Bruce had referred explicitly to the submission made by William the Lion in 1174 and the subsequent decision by Richard I in 1189 to nullify it. This reversal, Bruce suggested, could hardly have been right, for Scotland was a limb of the English Crown, and surely ‘one must keep the Crown whole’. Edward, of course, did not need to be convinced that this was the case, but to hear it coming from a Scotsman must have been music to his ears. Bruce had gone on to say that, whenever the English king was ready to come north and demand his right, the Bruce family and their friends would be ready to obey him.

Edward, therefore, had come north expecting a far easier ride than the one he had in the event experienced. Bruce, it was now clear, had not spoken for the majority of his countrymen, with the result that they and the English king now found themselves in a bitter impasse. The three-week adjournment ended, predictably, with a flat refusal from the Scots to return to Norham.⁴⁶

By this stage, however, Edward had come up with a new way to exploit the situation. The Scots maintained that only a king of Scotland could answer the demand for an admission of English overlordship. Edward’s rejoinder was to seek individual admissions of his superior right from all those contending for the royal title. If all the men who might one day be king were willing to acknowledge England’s superiority, so this logic ran, then Scotland’s current custodians – the Guardians – could have no grounds for further objection. The English king could take possession of the vacant kingdom, and award it to whichever candidate he adjudged to have the strongest claim.

In deciding on this strategy, it is likely that Edward acted in collusion with Robert Bruce. Certainly, when the suggestion of individual submissions was made public around 5 June, Bruce was among the first to throw his hat into the ring and recognise the English king’s right. John Balliol, who was probably still in Berwick at this point, evidently held out a little longer, and may have made a last-ditch appeal for arbitration rather than judgement. But the following day, no doubt fearing that he would be ruled out of the race, Balliol too returned to Norham and agreed to Edward’s terms.

The swift submission of the two principal competitors (now joined by a host of other less likely candidates) had the inevitable effect of weakening Scottish resistance. Balliol’s capitulation was all the more significant in that he was accompanied across the Tweed by John Comyn, not only his brother-in-law but also one of the Guardians. The six men entrusted in 1286 with safeguarding Scotland’s future had since been reduced to four, but only by death’s intervention; Comyn’s surrender on 6 June represented the first desertion from their company for political reasons.⁴⁷

The three remaining Guardians, however, and those Scots still with them at Berwick, continued to hold out. (No doubt the presence among their ranks of the indomitable bishop of Glasgow served to stiffen their resolve.) Unlike the claimants, they had nothing to gain by falling in with the king of England’s wishes. On the contrary, they could easily end up violating the solemn oath they had sworn to preserve Scotland for Alexander III’s heirs. The same was true for the twenty or so constables who had been entrusted with the keeping of the kingdom’s royal castles. These men were not going to give up their custodies to Edward I until they were satisfied that he would abide by his promise of the previous year to leave Scotland free and independent, and they were certainly not about to surrender anything to the king while he was claiming to be their overlord. When Edward tried to claim the castles in that capacity after the submission of Bruce and Balliol, he met with a firm refusal.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, the stalwart Scots at Berwick could not hold out for ever. Nor could the threat of force, no matter how improbable or unconscionable it might appear in retrospect, have been entirely absent from their minds. It was not just an impatient English king waiting on their doorstep, but the English royal household, swelled by the presence of half a dozen English earls. Moreover, from the start of June this implied might had been reinforced with 650 crossbowmen, and all the while the Scots negotiated they were conscious of an English fleet lurking off the coast near Lindisfarne. This might not have been gunboat diplomacy, but it came pretty close.⁴⁹

Eventually, after six more days of argument, a compromise solution was found. Despite the intense English pressure, the Scots remained staunch in their refusal to admit Edward’s overlordship, so the way forward became a complicated legal fiction. The king himself now put in a claim to the Scottish throne, and proposed that he should take custody of the kingdom and its castles, not as an overlord, but simply as one claimant acting on behalf of all the others.

This was a formula that the Guardians felt able to accept: it meant that Edward would gain control of Scotland, not by dint of any existing superiority, but because the Scots themselves had agreed to grant him its keeping for a limited period. Put more concisely still, he was not taking the kingdom from them: they were giving it to him. The significance of this crucial distinction was reinforced by the fact that the transfer took place not in England but in Scotland. To the last, the Guardians had refused to cross the Tweed, and in the end it was Edward who was obliged to make the short boat trip from Norham Castle. It was in the meadow of Upsettlington, on the river’s north shore, that the deal was finally struck. On 12 June the Guardians surrendered their seal, along with the custody of the royal castles, and the English king promised to maintain the laws and customs of Scotland. The following day all those Scots present swore fealty to Edward in his capacity as Scotland’s temporary caretaker – ‘chief lord and guardian of the kingdom, until a king is provided’.⁵⁰

*   *   *

Now that Edward had obtained seisin of Scotland, the momentous business of providing a king could begin. The preliminaries for hearing this great case – ‘the Great Cause’, as it was dubbed in the eighteenth century – began at Norham immediately after the agreement of 12 June. But the proceedings proper were adjourned to the start of August, at which point the case was set to resume on the Scottish side of the Border. The delay gave the various claimants – now thirteen in number, excluding Edward himself – a few weeks to consult their legal teams and prepare their arguments. At the same time, it also offered Scotland’s new custodian the opportunity to obtain a wider recognition of his role. In July Edward embarked on a tour of the heartlands of the Scottish kingdom – the prosperous royal burghs clustered around the Firth of Forth. At Haddington, Edinburgh, and Linlithgow, Stirling, Dunfermline and St Andrews he stopped to receive oaths of fealty of the inhabitants. Given that his lordship was expected to last only a little while longer, the English king was going to considerable lengths to have it acknowledged by as many Scots as possible.⁵¹

By 2 August Edward was back at the Border, only this time in Berwick, and the following day the proceedings to decide the Scottish succession began. The case, it had been agreed in June, would be determined by a special tribunal of 105 men – the number apparently suggested by the courts of similar size that had sat to consider inheritance disputes in Ancient Rome. Twenty-four of these auditors had been chosen by Edward (whose own inclusion brought the royal contingent to twenty-five); the remaining eighty men had been selected by Bruce and Balliol, who were thereby evenly represented with forty auditors apiece. The shape of the tribunal, in other words, reflected the reality of the contest, and was probably a concession to the Scots. In spite of the multiplicity of candidates that Edward had encouraged in his attempt to wrangle an admission of overlordship, this was now implicitly acknowledged to be a two-horse race.⁵²

Nonetheless, the other candidates had to be heard, even if only to have their claims dismissed. Accordingly, much of the opening business at Berwick was devoted to a consideration of the case of Florence, count of Holland. By any reasonable reckoning, Count Florence was a no-hoper, but his arguments do take us to the heart of the debate about who should be Scotland’s next king.⁵³

In the decade 1280–90, as we have seen, three generations of the Scottish royal family – Alexander III, his children, and his only grandchild – had died out entirely. The same was also true of the previous generation, at least in the legitimate lines. The search for a new king of Scots therefore had to begin one generation further back, in the time of Alexander’s grandfather, William the Lion (who reigned from 1165 to 1214). Now that William’s own bloodline had failed, the succession was generally reckoned to have passed to his younger brother, David, whose descendants were several, and included both Balliol and Bruce.⁵⁴

Count Florence, however, claimed to have an additional piece of information that crucially altered the story. It was his contention that David, in return for a grant of land from his older brother, had resigned his right to the Scottish throne. That right had consequently been fixed on their sister, Ada, who – it just so happened – was the great-great-grandmother of Florence. The count contended that he could prove all of this from documents, given time to find them. It was, to say the least, an optimistic claim, and unlikely to have commanded much credence with the majority of the 105 auditors, not least because both the Bruce and Balliol camps had a vested interest in throwing it out. It must, therefore, have come as a considerable surprise to most of the court when, just nine days into their deliberations, Edward announced that there would be a second adjournment to allow Florence to unearth his alleged evidence. Surprise, moreover, must have quickly turned to anger when the king went to declare that this new adjournment would last ten months.

What was Edward up to? One possibility, which cannot be entirely discounted, is that both he and Florence were sincere in their belief that the necessary proof existed, and that Edward was actually entertaining the thought of passing judgement in the count’s favour. Florence’s son John was engaged to be married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth (b. 1282), so the count’s candidacy represented a second chance to construct a marriage alliance between England and Scotland. Florence was also financially beholden to Edward, and would doubtless have made a pliable client king.

It is more likely, however, that the lengthy delay was a deliberate ploy on Edward’s part to extend his temporary tenure of Scotland. In ten months’ time the king would have had custody for more than a year and a day – a period that, from a legal point of view, might be deemed at a later date to strengthen the English claim to overlordship. As such, the long adjournment was another piece of chicanery by Edward in keeping with his earlier efforts to exploit Scotland’s difficulties to England’s advantage, and no doubt explains the care he had taken to extract oaths of fealty from the Scots during the previous month. The Scots themselves must have been infuriated, especially in view of the fact that the king had promised at the outset to provide a speedy resolution to the succession crisis. But the transfer of lordship and of castles that had taken place in June meant that this was now Edward’s show. It would stop and start at his discretion, and it would run for as long as he deemed necessary.⁵⁵

The court at Berwick therefore broke up. Florence hurried off, ostensibly to hunt for his documents, the other competitors went to their own parts, and Edward returned to England. The king’s affairs in the south had remained for the most part quiet and orderly during his absence, but there were nonetheless one or two items that required his immediate attention.

The first was the funeral of his mother. Eleanor of Provence had died, aged sixty-eight or very nearly so, on Midsummer’s Day, but her burial had been purposely delayed until her eldest son could be present. To the evident surprise of some people – including, it seems, Eleanor’s younger son, Edmund – the queen was not laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, but in the more remote surroundings of her latter-day home at Amesbury. Possibly this was Eleanor’s own, quietly kept intention; it is hard to imagine that Edward would have deliberately disregarded his mother’s last wishes had she wanted to be buried at Westminster. At the same time, it is also fair to remark that, following the recent decision to create new golden effigies of Henry III and Eleanor of Castile, the abbey already had its idealised images of kingship and queenship. Edward was therefore quite content to see his mother – beloved by the king himself but still remembered throughout the kingdom as a virago – interred in the quiet Wiltshire countryside. On 9 September a great crowd of magnates and prelates attended Eleanor’s funeral at Amesbury; but thereafter, except in Amesbury itself, her memory was allowed to fade away.⁵⁶

The other major item on Edward’s agenda in the autumn of 1291 was the March of Wales, which for the past two years had been disturbed by a violent dispute. The earls of Hereford and Gloucester, respectively the lords of Brecon and Glamorgan, had locked horns over a debatable strip of land that lay between their two territories. In 1289 Gloucester had begun to build a castle, Morlais, to assert his claim, Hereford had in due course retaliated, and the result had been a private war. This in itself was uncontroversial: one of the benefits (or burdens, depending on one’s viewpoint) of being a Marcher lord was the right to settle disagreements at sword-point, and without reference to the Crown. The issue had become contentious on this occasion because, at an early stage, the king had called on both earls to desist, yet Gloucester had continued to make raids into Hereford’s territory. A subsequent royal commission sent to the March in 1291 had been similarly disregarded. Gloucester had not even bothered to attend its hearings, and those other Marchers called to bear witness against him had closed ranks in refusing to do so. The old maxim that ‘in the March of Wales, the king’s writ does not run’ was clearly felt to be under threat.⁵⁷

The scale of the threat was made manifest in October when Edward arrived in the March to assert his authority in person. In a specially convened session of the council at Abergavenny the king imperiously insisted that the rights and dignity of his Crown were superior to any Marcher liberties. Gloucester was called before the court and found guilty, not of having waged war, but of having done so in spite of Edward’s express prohibition. Hereford too, much to his surprise and chagrin, was found guilty on similar charges of contempt (for having retained some cattle his men had seized during the course of the dispute). Both earls were bailed to appear before a parliament at Westminster in January, at which point they were sentenced to imprisonment and the loss of their Welsh estates.⁵⁸

Naturally, neither of these great men was deprived of his lands or liberty for very long (Gloucester, after all, had lately become the king’s son-in-law). Within a few days both had been released from captivity, and a few months later their lordships were ordered restored. What Edward had wanted from each of them, and from the Marchers in general, was an acknowledgement of the Crown’s supremacy. That point had now been clearly conceded. The Marchers, it was allowed, could keep their liberties, but on the understanding that in the final analysis there were no areas into which the king of England’s authority did not reach. This fact was nicely reinforced in the spring of 1292 when fate finally caught up with Rhys ap Maredudd, the fugitive leader of the last Welsh rising. Taken in the Tywi Valley, Rhys was sent in chains to Edward and sentenced to be drawn and hanged. Whether in the March, or in the valleys of the interior, the English king’s mastery in Wales was now seen to be complete.⁵⁹

It remained to demonstrate that the same was true in Scotland. By 1 June 1292 Edward was back in Berwick, and on the following day – even as Rhys ap Maredudd was being dragged to his death through the streets of York – the proceedings to select the new king of Scots were resumed.⁶⁰

Unfortunately, the first two weeks of this second session are shrouded in mystery. One would assume, since he was officially the cause of their long adjournment, that the auditors began their deliberations by considering the business of Florence of Holland. If this was the case, however, then no verdict was reached: during this fortnight the count’s claim was neither upheld nor thrown out. The tribunal, it seems, was experiencing procedural problems – hardly surprising, given its unwieldy size and experimental nature. By the middle of June the auditors had admitted as much to Edward, who responded on 16 June by announcing that he wished to ‘hasten’ the proceedings. Accordingly, Florence was persuaded, not to abandon his claim, but to stand aside while others advanced theirs (possibly in return for a payment of £1,250, which he received from the king around this time). As far as Edward was concerned, the count had already served his purpose by prolonging English overlordship of Scotland. It was now imperative that they got to the heart of the matter and heard the arguments between John Balliol and Robert Bruce.⁶¹

These arguments hinged, as we have already noted, on the descent of both men from David, the younger brother of William the Lion, sometime king of Scots. David had continued his family’s line by fathering three daughters. Bruce was the son of the middle daughter; Balliol was the grandson of the eldest. In the view of Balliol and his supporters, the argument was therefore simple. Their candidate was descended from the senior line, and thus his was clearly the superior right.⁶²

Not so, said Bruce, whose argument was much more complex, and yet had a certain compelling logic. In the first place, Bruce observed, primogeniture did not apply to women. If matters really were as simple as Balliol made out, and Scotland were an estate like any other, then by rights it should be split up and shared equally between all the descendants of David’s three daughters. From the outset, however, all the parties involved in the Great Cause had agreed that the kingdom should remain intact. In other words, said Bruce, kingdoms were clearly exceptional. Their descent was not governed by the customary law that applied to other estates, but by a higher law, which was written, ancient and imperial (and, he might well have added, were they not sitting in a court configured along ancient, Roman lines?). According to this law, Bruce asserted, primogeniture was irrelevant; what mattered most was nearness of degree in blood. He was the son of one of David’s daughters; Balliol was merely the grandson of another. Therefore he, Bruce, had the stronger claim.⁶³

Thus, for the auditors, it was not simply a matter of deciding between two rival candidates; it was also a matter of deciding which species of law ought to apply, and this proved altogether too taxing. After ten days of debate the court was still deadlocked, and Edward called proceedings to halt. It was clear that, unless they took wider consultation, their deliberations could go on for ever. The question of which law ought to be used, the king determined, should be put to the lawyers at the university of Paris, whose authority on such matters was second to none. This meant, frustratingly, that there had to be a third adjournment, albeit not as long as the second, spurious interruption. On 25 June the court was disbanded and told to reconvene in three months’ time.⁶⁴

It was not, therefore, until mid-October that the English and Scots reassembled in Berwick for what all hoped would be their final session. Edward (who had occupied himself in the interim by touring northern England) was by this time as anxious as anyone to wrap things up. Although his decision to suspend proceedings in the summer had apparently been conscientious, his actions in the autumn were rather more impatient and less even-handed. In terms of personalities, the king probably had no strong preference for Bruce or Balliol (even though he might have been expected to favour Bruce, as the more obviously obsequious candidate). When it came to the law, however, Edward leaned instinctively towards Balliol’s customary case. In this he was almost certainly in step with the majority on both sides of the Border. Bruce’s arguments were certainly cogent, and they did flag up the inherent contradictions in the customary claim. But were the traditions common to England and Scotland really to be set aside in favour of the ancient but alien concepts advanced by Bruce? And was the contradiction of accepting female primogeniture but rejecting partition really so insuperable? After all, just two years earlier, the English succession had been fixed, in default of male heirs, on whichever of Edward’s five daughters was eldest. There had been no question of dividing England among them.⁶⁵

The English precedent was probably a crucial factor in finding a verdict for Scotland. It was awkward that, when the time came to consider the opinions of the learned clerks of Paris, they weighed in favour of Bruce’s imperial law. But only slightly awkward because, while the court had been in recess, Edward had decided to adjust its workings. In October it was not the eighty Scottish auditors who were asked to rule on which law should be used, but the English king’s council. By 5 November the latter had reached their decision, and the following day the auditors concurred: customary law should apply. Bruce’s appeal for imperial law was thrown out.⁶⁶

This did not make Balliol the winner by default, for there was still the matter of hearing the claims of the other, lesser candidates. But it did make Bruce the loser, and prompted the old man to try a series of drastic last-minute expedients. On 10 November, for example, Count Florence of Holland put forward his claim for a second time, only now with Bruce as his backer. During the summer, at the moment when Florence had been induced to stand aside, the two men had struck an extraordinary agreement, whereby whichever of them became king would compensate the other with a third of the kingdom. The count’s candidacy therefore held for Bruce the prospect of a considerable compensation prize (or perhaps even the throne, if he could buy his partner out). When Florence went on to present his case, however, it was an embarrassing mess. Despite his ten-month adjournment, the count was still unable to produce the alleged documents on which his claim depended. They had, he now claimed, been stolen. But if the court would permit him an inquest …⁶⁷

Seeing Florence flounder, Bruce tried one last, desperate roll of the dice. From the outset he had reasoned that, if the kingdom was indivisible, customary law should not apply. Now, since that reasoning had got him nowhere, he stood the argument on its head. If customary law did apply, it surely followed that the kingdom should be divided. On 14 November both Bruce and John de Hastings (a claimant descended from the youngest of David’s three daughters) applied in this way for a third share of the kingdom. The following day they received their final answer. The kingdom was not partible. There would be no three-way split. And there would be no further argument.⁶⁸

Edward desired to draw matters to a close. He had expected that the business of selecting Scotland’s new king would be concluded during the summer, yet here he was, still north of the Border, watching as the winter set in. In the final days of the proceedings, his council not only summarily rejected the plea for divisibility; they also dealt swiftly with the lesser claimants, including Florence of Holland. Edward had no further use for the count’s far-fetched story that had earlier enabled him to prolong his overlordship. Now the king wanted resolution, not a pantomime that would run and run. Bruce had had his day in court and lost. Balliol was the popular favourite, whose claim was supported by the law that Edward, the English and the great majority of Scots felt was the most natural. On 17 November judgement was pronounced in Balliol’s favour. Two days later, Edward gave orders that the kingdom and its castles should be handed over.⁶⁹

For the Scots, the most important matter now became the enthronement of their new king. As luck would have it, the Great Cause had concluded with just enough time for everyone to get to Scone Abbey before the end of the month. There, in the abbey churchyard, Balliol was seated on the sacred stone and crowned as King John I. The ceremony took place on 30 November, the feast of St Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint and protector.

Edward was not present to witness it. To his mind, kings of Scotland should attend the creation of kings of England, but not vice versa. It was sufficient for English interests that two royal henchmen oversaw Balliol’s inauguration. For Edward, the installation of a new king of Scots was only a secondary concern, just as the selection process had been. His declared priority over the past two years had been ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scotland to his authority’: an attributed declaration, admittedly, but one entirely borne out by his bullying behaviour at Norham and the preposterously long adjournment he had ordered at Berwick. English domination was the major project, and it had yet to be completed. As far as Edward was concerned, the crucial ceremony was still to come.

Before leaving for Scone, Balliol had sworn fealty to the English king, and done so in the most explicit terms. Not only were his words spoken in England (Edward had returned to Norham especially in order to hear them); they also applied unambiguously to the kingdom of Scotland. To complete the process, therefore, it remained to receive Balliol’s homage, and this was duly obtained at Christmas. It was at Newcastle, on 26 December, that the newly made king of Scots knelt before Edward and became his man.

For those Scots who had taken a stand against English assertions of overlordship, this was a grave disappointment, but not unexpected. Balliol, like all the other candidates, had entered the race admitting that the king of England was his overlord. Now he had emerged as the winner, the new Scottish king was simply being made to reiterate his previously stated position.

Far more startling to the Scots, though, was the subsequent behaviour of Edward. In the short interval between Balliol’s fealty at Norham and his homage at Newcastle there had been a small but alarming development. On 7 December a burgess of Berwick, dissatisfied with several judgements given against him during the time of the Guardians, had appealed to the English king as his superior lord; Edward, in response, had proceeded to review the case at Newcastle and, on 22 December, had overturned one of the original verdicts.

To the Scots at Newcastle this constituted a clear breach by the English king of his earlier promises. Had he not assured them, in June the previous year, that their laws and customs would be maintained? And had he not, more to the point, accepted in 1290 that Scotland should remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’?

Edward’s answer was given in two parts, first by proxy, then in person. On 30 December an English royal justice informed the Scots that any promises that had been made before Balliol’s enthronement had been only ‘for the time being’: they were no longer applicable in the present. This was affirmed the following day, when Edward addressed his critics directly. In no uncertain terms, the king declared that he would not be bound by his earlier words. As superior lord of Scotland, he would hear appeals wherever and whenever he wanted; if necessary, he would summon even the king of Scotland himself to appear before him in England. Lest there should be any doubt on these matters, Balliol was obliged in the days that followed to seal a series of written instruments, acquitting his overlord of any earlier promises he might have made, and specifically those resonant assurances of independence made in 1290.⁷⁰

Edward’s mastery had been acknowledged and demonstrated beyond doubt; his two-year scheme to establish Scotland’s subservience was finally complete. The time had now come to consider his last and greatest project, especially in light of Christendom’s recent and appalling loss.