At the start of the year 1290, Edward I was fifty years old and at the height of his power. King of England for over seventeen years, he had been a legend for even longer. Half a lifetime earlier he had defeated and killed his notorious uncle, Simon de Montfort, at the Battle of Evesham; a little later, in his early thirties, he had travelled to the Holy Land on crusade – an adventure in which he had miraculously dodged death by surviving an attack from a knife-wielding Assassin. Above all there had been his conquest of Wales. During the first decade of his rule, Edward had decisively terminated Welsh independence with an awesome display of military power, still manifest today at Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon, to name just the three most celebrated of his many Welsh castles.
Now, at the start of 1290, Edward was close to realizing an even greater goal. Since the conquest of Wales, his overriding ambition had been to lead a new crusade and recover Jerusalem. It was a project that had kept him busy for years, partly because of protracted negotiation with the papacy on the question of funding, but mainly because the other kings of Europe had been engaged in a fratricidal war. From 1286, Edward had spent over three years outside of England, trekking back and forth across the Pyrenees, trying to broker peace between France and Aragon, and to effect the liberation of his cousin, the captive king of Sicily. By the time he returned home in the summer of 1289, his plan was approaching fruition. The Sicilian king was free, peace seemed to be in prospect, and, at the end of the year, the pope proposed a financial package for the crusade that would require only minuscule fine-tuning. When, in January 1290, a parliament assembled in Westminster – the first in almost four years – Edward was pleased to receive an embassy from the Mongol il-khan of Persia, who professed to be ready to ally with the English king, and who promised to meet him outside the walls of Damascus in one year’s time.
The year 1290, moreover, looked set to be an annus mirabilis in more ways than one. Another subject for discussion in that parliament would have been the situation in Scotland. Almost four years earlier, on the eve of Edward’s departure for the Continent, the northern kingdom had suffered a terrible tragedy. King Alexander III, forty-five years old, vigorous and successful, had set out riding in a storm and tumbled over a cliff. The scale of the disaster was magnified by the fact that all three of his children by his first marriage had predeceased him, and the pregnancy of his second queen had ended after his death with the delivery of a stillborn child.
Yet out of this tragedy a golden opportunity had arisen, for Alexander had not died entirely without heirs. Five years earlier, his late daughter had been married to the king of Norway, and in their brief time together the young couple had produced a daughter of their own. This girl, only three years old at the time of her grandfather’s untimely end, was named Margaret, like her mother. But to posterity she is better known as ‘the Maid of Norway’. She was the last chance of survival for Scotland’s established line of kings, but also the hope of something far greater still.
What if this young girl, heiress to the throne of Scotland, were to marry a son of the king of England? Edward I had been hardly more lucky than Alexander III in his family: he and his wife Eleanor of Castile had produced at least fifteen, possibly sixteen children, but only six of them were still living in 1290, and only one of the survivors was a boy. Nevertheless, one boy was all that was required. If the six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon were married to the Maid, he would become king of Scotland in right of his wife. Any children they went on to have would one day stand to inherit two kingdoms. Perhaps, in time, they would seek to rule them as a united kingdom. What was on the cards in 1290, in short, was nothing less than a union of the crowns, over three centuries in advance of the eventual union of 1603.
To many modern ears, this may sound like a ridiculous suggestion. The textbooks tell us that England and Scotland were enemies for much of their history, and we are inclined to believe that it was ever thus. ‘March straight back to England,’ says Mel Gibson’s William Wallace to his English opponents in Braveheart, ‘stopping at every home you pass by to beg forgiveness for a hundred years of theft, rape and murder’. But this is the biggest of the film’s many nonsenses. Not only had there been no armed conflict between the two kingdoms for eighty years before 1296; during those eighty years, and for many decades beforehand, the English and Scots had been getting on like a house on fire.
This was largely because, since the twelfth century, Scotland been busy approximating itself to England. The Scots, led by the example of their kings, had embraced social, economic and moral standards that were normal south of the Border. At the same time, Englishmen – merchants, labourers and monks – began emigrating to Scotland in their thousands, helping to found new towns, or to establish new religious communities which retained their links with England. Meanwhile Scottish aristocrats built castles (such asCaerlaverock, near Dumfries) after the English example, and intermarried with their English counterparts. And this was also true of their respective royal families. Edward I’s aunt, Joanna (d. 1238) had been married to Alexander II (d. 1249), and his sister, Margaret (d. 1275) had been the first wife of Alexander III. Nothing could have been more natural, therefore, than another Anglo-Scottish royal wedding in 1290. In March that year, the magnates of Scotland assembled on the Border at Birgham, and unanimously agreed that the match should go ahead.
The only difficulty lay in deciding how the new relationship would work in practice. The Scots wanted a powerful protector for their infant queen, and Edward I was certainly that. But they were concerned that he might prove too powerful, and might make demands that would compromise Scotland’s independence. Thus, during the spring of 1290, there was much discussion between the representatives of the two nations. On many points they were able to reach agreement, but when it came to control of Scotland’s royal castles, there was deadlock. Edward was determined that the right to appoint their keepers should belong to him alone, and the Scots were equally adamant in their refusal to accept his demand.
For a while, therefore, the projected marriage hung fire, and Edward proceeded with other momentous business. In April he took the remarkable step of safeguarding England’s future stability by fixing the English succession on his daughters, should he and his namesake son die without other heirs. At the end of the month, one of these daughters – Joan – became the first of the king’s children to marry, taking as her husband the earl of Gloucester. A few weeks later Edward caused the body of his father, Henry III, to be moved to a new tomb in Westminster Abbey, subsequently decorated with the magnificent gilded-bronze effigy that can still be seen today. Later, on 9 July, there was more ceremony in the abbey when another of the king’s daughters, Margaret, was married with great pomp to the duke of Brabant. Lastly, on 18 July, Edward committed one of the most notorious acts of his entire career when, in return for a generous grant of taxation, and to the universal delight of his other subjects, he ordered the expulsion of all the Jews from England. It would be more than three centuries before they were allowed to return.
At length, as the summer drew to a close, there was a breakthrough in negotiations with the Scots, though not because either side had abandoned their earlier contrary positions. What seems to have happened is that, around the end of August, Edward learned that the Maid had set sail from Norway and was en route to Scotland, and that this intelligence obliged him to settle. The crucial question of castles was fudged; the Scottish envoys contented themselves with the statement that their keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the English king’. In return they received a clear statement safeguarding their country’s independence. In the most resonant phrase of the agreement, Edward promised that Scotland would remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.
With the third royal wedding that year seemingly just weeks away, Edward sent his own envoys into Scotland, bearing jewels with which to welcome the Maid on her arrival. At the same time, he prepared to finalize his crusading plans. By this stage he had received a final offer from the pope to which he was ready to commit, and a small parliament of magnates was summoned to meet in Sherwood Forest in October in order to witness its approval. In the meantime, Edward took himself into Derbyshire and the Peak District for a spot of hunting.
Then the wheel of fortune turned and the king’s plans collapsed. When he arrived in Sherwood in mid-October, it was to the news that the Maid of Norway was dead. Probably she had been inadvertently poisoned by eating decayed food during her voyage. A fortnight later and the next blow fell. Eleanor of Castile, who had contracted a lingering malarial fever on the Continent the previous year, suddenly became seriously ill. Despite desperate efforts to save her, the queen died at the end of November. Edward had her body carried from Lincoln to London in a slow, mournful procession – every stop would later be marked with an ornate monumental cross – and buried in Westminster Abbey on 17 December. The king then retreated into a religious house at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, to spend Christmas and New Year in the deepest sorrow.
Eleanor’s death was more devastating in personal terms, but it was the death of the Maid that altered the course of history. Had the girl lived, the union of the crowns would have taken place in the autumn of 1290, and England and Scotland could have been peaceably united for generations to come. Edward might well have gone on crusade for a second time (in spite of the bad news from the north, he did ratify the pope’s offer), with Scotsmen fighting by his side, as had been the case during his first expedition. Closer to home, too, there would have been ample scope for Anglo-Scottish co-operation. Together, the English and the Scots, led by a single monarchy and their intermarried aristocracies, might have directed their energies into subjugating the peoples who dwelt in the northern and western extremities of the British Isles – the ‘wild Scots’ of the Highlands and Islands, and the ‘wild Irish’ – resulting in a single kingdom that was precociously united.
But none of this was to be. The Maid’s death left the Scots unable to agree on who should wear their country’s crown, and the king of England was invited to come and arbitrate between the two most obvious candidates. But when Edward emerged from his mourning at Ashridge, it was to announce a disastrous Plan B, ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scots to his rule’. To the Scots’ dismay, he came north insisting that he was Scotland’s rightful overlord. By coercion and intimidation he persuaded the two principal claimants, plus a host of other less credible contenders, to admit his superiority. At length he found in favour of John Balliol, who was forced to perform an unambiguous act of homage, to annul the guarantees of independence that had been given in 1290, and to travel to Westminster whenever the king of England demanded.
In this way, Edward I turned the Scots, who had long been friends and allies of the English, into their most embittered enemies. When, in 1294, war unexpectedly broke out between England and France, Scotland for the first time allied itself to the latter. The trend towards convergence in the British Isles was thereby arrested and thrown into reverse. Edward spent the last ten years of his life hammering away at the Scots, devastating their country with fire and sword in an effort to persuade them to accept his authority. In so doing, he established the hostile relationship between the two countries that persisted for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, and which in some respects persists even in our own day. Scotsmen had once striven to make themselves more like their cousins south of the Border; in the years before 1290, many of them had been pleased to christen their sons ‘Edward’. They would not do so in the future. ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive’, they famously wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English’. It was a change of heart that had been caused by the death of a seven-year-old girl from Norway, and the terrible miscalculation of Edward I.