As the Jews departed England in the autumn of 1290, all signs pointed to Edward I leaving the country with them, on a crusade of reconquest in Outremer. As tax collectors worked the land, milking its secular and clerical wealth, it seemed as though ‘the new Richard’ was about to usher in another great period of death and glory in the name of Jerusalem. Yet within months, fortune had decreed that there would be no journey east, and no new chapter in the story of the Plantagenet crusades. The rest of Edward’s reign would be concerned with events far closer to home: revived insurgency in Wales, a newly aggressive French monarchy with designs on throwing the Plantagenets out of Gascony, and bloodiest of all, the war with Scotland.
‘When all the Welsh tyrants were suppressed, the Scots raised their spears, armed with rags.’ This jaunty lyric to a popular song written in 1298 succinctly depicted the switch that occurred halfway through Edward’s reign from making war on the Welsh to making war upon the Scots. The truth was not nearly so neat.
In early September 1290 a fleet of boats set out from Bergen on the south-western coast of Norway. The destination was Scotland. The cargo was precious: a girl no more than six years old, named Margaret. She was known as the Maid of Norway, but circumstance now dictated that she was to become the Lady of Scotland. On her slim shoulders rested the hope and security of a troubled nation.
The little girl was the granddaughter of Alexander III, the Scottish king who had died in 1286. Alexander’s death had plunged his realm into a state of confusion about the royal inheritance. Dynastic circumstance meant there was no obvious heir to the throne. Although Alexander’s wife, Queen Yolanda, had been pregnant at the time of the king’s death, the child had been still-born late in 1286. The failure of the line spelled disaster for the kingdom. ‘Christ born in virginity, succour Scotland and remedy, that state is in perplexity,’ wrote the fourteenth-century chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun, reflecting decades afterwards on the turmoil provoked in the kingless state.
Between 1286 and 1290, Scotland had been in a state of suspended animation, ruled by a council of guardians who attempted to maintain the country until an heir could be found. The heir who had been settled upon was Margaret, and her transfer to Scotland had been agreed in the summer of 1290 after lengthy negotiations between the English and Norwegian courts and the magnates of Scotland. Since the rule of a little girl on her own was no remedy for a constitutional crisis, the Scots had persuaded Edward that the child was to be brought to the British Isles and married to the English king’s son, Edward of Caernarfon, who was also six years old. The marriage would function as a dynastic union, knitting together the English, Scottish and Norwegian royal lines. The Treaty of Birgham, sealed on 18 July 1290, confirmed the marriage alliance, guaranteeing ‘that the kingdom of Scotland shall remain separate and divided from the kingdom of England … and that it shall be free from subjection’.
Margaret’s journey from Norway was not an unusual or dangerous one. Links between Norway and Scotland were close, the kingdoms separated by a short stretch of the North Sea with regular trade routes. The stopping point between them was Orkney, the archipelago off the Highland coast whose earls owed joint allegiance both to the Scottish and the Norwegian kings. By the first week of September 1290 Margaret was at sea, and by the third week of the month she had landed at Orkney. Scottish and English diplomatic channels fizzed with news of her arrival, and English diplomats under Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham, were sent into Scotland bearing precious jewels as gifts to mark the Maid’s arrival.
But the English diplomats were never able to present the child with the rich gifts that Edward intended for her. In the last days of September grim news filtered into Scotland from Orkney: Margaret had died on the island, after a week’s illness at Kirkwall. The cause of her death is a mystery, but it probably derived from acute food poisoning caused by eating rotten food at sea.
With Margaret’s death, the line of Dunkeld, which stretched back nearly 300 years to the reign of Duncan I at the turn of the first millennium, was extinguished. Scotland was truly kingless. The effort to find a new ruler very nearly tore the kingdom apart.
From the first rumours that the Maid of Norway was dead, letters and entreaties flowed between Edward’s court and the great men of Scotland. A newsletter written from the bishop of St Andrews in the immediate aftermath of Margaret’s death revealed that there were widespread fears of civil war. The magnates were arming themselves and preparing to fill the vacuum of power with blood. Only a king with such resources and reputation as Edward could assist in preventing a descent into anarchy. ‘Let your excellency deign, please, to approach the Border to the consolation of the Scottish people and to staunch effusion of blood, so that the true men of the kingdom can … set up as king him who by law should inherit …’ wrote the bishop. Without the sort of overarching authority held by Edward, he implied, there could be no legal process to decide upon the new king.
Edward was personally overcome by grief at the end of 1290. As news was reaching him of the Maid’s death, he was also hearing that Queen Eleanor was suffering from a recurrence of a feverish illness she had first contracted in Gascony during a visit in 1287. She was travelling to meet him at Lincoln when she took to her bed for the final time, on 28 November 1290, in the village of Harby in Nottinghamshire. Edward rushed to meet her and was by her side when she died. Eleanor was forty-nine years old; the couple had been married for thirty-six years.
Edward grieved very publicly for a wife whom he wrote the following year that ‘we cannot cease to love’. As Eleanor’s body was brought back to Westminster in twelve stages, embalmed and stuffed with barley, Edward ordered that large tiered stone crosses surmounted with spires should be erected where her body lay. These ‘Eleanor Crosses’ were very public monuments of mourning inspired by the Montjoie crosses that had been erected for Louis IX of France. In addition, Edward lavishly sponsored masses to assist Queen Eleanor’s soul on its journey through purgatory: six months after Eleanor’s death the archbishop of York boasted to the king, somewhat improbably, that 47,000 masses had already been sung for his late wife’s soul.
Edward would take the utmost interest in supervising the Great Cause, which was the name given to the huge and complex legal case that erupted between thirteen different claimants to the Scottish throne. The case lasted for two years and boiled down to a choice between John Balliol and Robert Bruce. Edward, in a condolence letter on the Maid’s death, described himself as a ‘friend and neighbour’ to Scotland, but he saw the Great Cause as a clear opportunity to reinforce his influence in Scottish affairs. He determined to judge the case not out of the goodness of his heart, but out of his relentless urge to establish and exercise the rights of kingship. He believed firmly in the feudal rights of his Crown over the Scottish Crown, which had been asserted only sporadically during his dynasty’s history. Throughout the process to decide the king and thereafter, Edward made every effort to demonstrate that he was the lord and master of all the British Isles.
The legal case that eventually found in favour of John Balliol was massive and complex. Who was fit to judge the appointment of a king? The reluctant decision reached at last by the claimants to the throne was that submission to Edward was the only means by which they could answer the question. But the decision was not taken lightly or easily. It took a year between the Maid’s death and a conference held at Norham castle, on the border, for Edward to have his overlordship recognized by the Scots. By November 1292 the case was settled, and on 30 November John Balliol was inaugurated King John of Scotland in the ancient capital of Scottish kingship, at Scone.
But if Balliol thought that kingship would put him on a par with his ‘friend and neighbour’ in the south, he was mistaken. Edward had overseen the election of a vassal, not an equal. Henry II and John had been happy simply to have the homage of the Scottish kings, satisfying themselves with theoretical rather than practical power; and for many generations Scottish kings had enjoyed good relations with the English court, holding English earldoms (most notably of Huntingdon) and serving in English feudal armies. For Edward I, however, this was not enough. He expected full and public submission, not only in ceremonial form but in political reality, too.
Ten days before his inauguration, Balliol had given his fealty to Edward, swearing in French that he held Scotland from the English Crown, and that he would ‘bear faith and loyalty to you of life and limb and of earthly honour, against all folk who can live and die …’ On 26 December he had done homage to Edward in front of twenty-three Scottish magnates.
This was nothing unusual, but in addition to the simple pageantry of kingship, Edward claimed as part of his overlordship a right to hear appeals against the Scottish king’s legal decisions. This directly contradicted the state of affairs that had been envisaged in 1290 under the Treaty of Birgham, which despite projecting a dual monarchy under Edward of Caernarfon and the Maid of Norway had promised that ‘the rights, laws, liberties and customs of the kingdom of Scotland in all things and in all ways shall be wholly and inviolably preserved for all time throughout the whole of that kingdom and its marches’, and that ‘no one of the kingdom of Scotland shall be held to answer outwith that kingdom for any agreement entered into, or for any crime committed, in that kingdom, or in any other cause’. Times having changed, Edward saw fit to exercise his lordship much more vigorously. In a case involving the Scottish magnate Macduff of Fife, who claimed to have been denied his succession to lands in northern Fife, Edward summoned John Balliol himself to appear before the English parliament of Michaelmas 1293. Balliol disclaimed the English parliament’s right to hear appeals from Scotland, but under threats from Edward he backed down, withdrew his protests and renewed his homage. It was a humiliation from which Balliol’s kingship never recovered. The vassal king, and all who observed his kingship would soon realize that with such a forceful neighbour as Edward, the Scottish monarchy was hollow indeed.
Edward, however, was overreaching. It was all very well to stamp England’s might on the kingdom of Scotland, but his uncompromising stance crushed Balliol between two irreconcilable positions. The Scottish king was expected to be a sop to Edward’s Arthurian ambitions, while simultaneously standing up for the independence of the Scottish Crown. The effect would ultimately be to destroy Balliol’s kingship and drive the whole of Scotland into fierce opposition to the English. Far from embedding his authority deep into Scottish affairs, Edward was driving the Scots into the arms of the French.