Scotland: The Story of a Nation

Richard of Hexham described David’s ‘wicked army’ as being ‘composed of Normans, Germans, English, of Northumbrians and Cumbrians, of men of Teviotdale and Lothian, of Picts (who are commonly called Galwegians) and of Scots’. For Ted Cowan, this list of participants from Scotland tells us a lot about David’s kingship:

Whether that list is strictly accurate or not, it was a code for saying ‘David controlled the whole of his kingdom’. He was the ruler – the first person who ruled all of Scotland; and all its representatives showed up to fight for him against the English in 1138. That is a remarkable testimony to the ability, and probably the ingenuity, of this man.

David escaped from the potential disaster of the Battle of the Standard with his territorial ambitions unscathed, even enhanced. But what sort of ‘Scotland’ did he create? To what extent could Scotland be called ‘a nation’, in the modern sense, in King David’s reign? Steve Boardman says:

‘Nation’ is not the right word to use when we look back on the medieval kingdom. Scotland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was a collection of regional lordships, presided over by a man who called himself King of Scots. David issued charters during his reign to his subjects – Scots, French, English – reflecting the different racial, ethnic and linguistic groups which made up the kingdom. The idea of nationhood would have been alien to people in twelfth-century Scotland, because they still belonged to different lordships, they still belonged to different ethnic and linguistic groups. What held Scotland, and indeed all medieval kingdoms, together was allegiance to the king and submission to the king’s laws, the king’s political authority; so to be a ‘Scot’ would not have meant what we mean by it today; it would have meant being someone who acknowledged the authority of the King of Scots – and that is not the same thing as identifying yourself ethnically and linguistically as part of a bigger group who are called Scots.

Later Scottish sources were fulsome in praise of David. John of Fordun wrote of him in the Chronica Gentis Scotorum in floridly metaphorical terms:

He enriched the parts of his kingdom with foreign merchandise, and to the wealth of his own land added the riches and luxuries of foreign nations, changing its coarse stuffs for precious vestments, and covering its ancient nakedness with purple and fine linen.

King David I reigned for twenty-nine years. He was nearly seventy years old, but had lost none of his vigour, when he died – significantly, in ‘his’ Carlisle Castle – in May 1153. His only son, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, had died the previous year, leaving three sons and three daughters from his marriage to Ada, the Anglo-Norman daughter of the Norman Earl of Warenne. These three granddaughters of David I were to play an important role in the dynastic crisis which followed the death of Alexander III in 1286 (see Chapter 9 (#uba4d0175-ef7d-5312-b738-2df3be9932b3)).

In the last year of his life, after his son Henry’s death, David designated the eldest of his grandsons, Malcolm, as his successor. In 1153, at the age of twelve, Malcolm was inaugurated on the Stone of Scone as Malcolm IV (r.1153–65). He never married, and was known as Malcolm ‘the Maiden’. Sure enough, as David had feared, having a minor on the throne triggered unrest, and there were uprisings against Malcolm in the ‘unreconstructed’ Celtic west and north. In 1157 Malcolm was summoned to meet the new King of Engand, Henry II, at Chester. Henry forswore the undertaking he had given David in 1149 about Scotland’s future frontier; by the Treaty of Chester the young King of Scots gave up Carlisle, together with the rest of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. He was compensated, however, with the gift of the earldom of Huntingdon. This made him a vassal of the King of England, for that possession at least. Henry II was not slow to press home his advantage; in 1158 he took Malcolm to France as his liegeman to campaign under his standard.

Malcolm was a frail, intensely pious young man who never enjoyed good health. Nonetheless, he showed unfailing courage and determination in dealing with the various uprisings and rebellions which broke out during his reign. He died at Jedburgh in December 1165 at the age of twenty-four, and was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old brother William, a much more aggressive character: William I (r.1165–1214), later to be known as William ‘the Lion’.

Chapter 7 WILLIAM THE LION (r.1165–1214) (#ulink_0f3f6964-b523-5378-b7e5-3b08e6a43790)

William King of Scotland, having chosen for his armorial bearing a Red Lion, rampant … he acquired the name of William the Lion … William, though a brave man, and though he had a lion for his emblem, was unfortunate in war.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

The majestic ruins of Arbroath Abbey, on the Angus coast about thirty kilometres east of Dundee, retain memories of many significant events in the story of Scotland’s nationhood struggle: it was here that the Declaration of Arbroath was prepared and signed in 1320 (see Chapter 11 (#u3b22e910-5049-5b37-8c82-3ff6e286ecd6)), and it was on the foundations of the High Altar that the Stone of Destiny was laid in 1950 after it had been spirited away from Westminster Abbey by four young Scottish Nationalists (see here (#litres_trial_promo)).

On the turf a few metres in front of the High Altar, sheltered now only by the gaunt remains of the east gable wall, an incised slab of red sandstone commemorates the burial, somewhere in that area, of the royal founder of the abbey in 1178: King William I, ‘the Lion’.

William the Lion is one of the least known and most disregarded of Scotland’s kings. Despite the fact that his was the longest reign by a medieval Scottish monarch (forty-nine years, from 1165 to 1214), he is strangely unknown to the general public compared with his grandfather David I or his successors (his son Alexander II and grandson Alexander III). Indeed, some historians have been scornfully dismissive of him:

Of this king little can be told that is creditable to himself, of advantage to Scotland or, indeed, of interest to the reader. He reigned for almost half a century but achieved practically nothing.

P. AND F.S. FRY, THE HISTORY OF SCOTLAND (1980)

But was William really as toothless a lion as that? Geoffrey Barrow, Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University and an eminent scholar of late medieval Scotland, has stressed that William successfully extended royal authority over the remoter Celtic and Scandinavian areas of the kingdom (the far north and west), and greatly improved the feudal administration of Scotland. His major failure, however – a failure which cost Scotland very dear – was his attempt to recover, as his personal fiefdom, the northern provinces of England: David I had assigned to William’s father, Prince Henry, the earldom of Northumberland, but William’s predecessor on the throne, his elder brother Malcolm IV, had surrendered it to the King of England.

And therein lies the paradox at the heart of William’s reign. Totally committed as he was to consolidating Scotland’s independence, he was nonetheless forced to pledge the nation’s vassalage to England as a result of his disastrous obsession with the lost province of Northumbria.

Yet when he ascended the throne in 1165 at the age of twenty-two, William must have looked every inch the part of a native Scottish king. He was red-haired and powerfully built, a man of lusty energies and appetites (he fathered six illegitimate children before his marriage in 1186 at the age of forty-three), a reckless young knight who lacked both the political guile of his grandfather David I and the artistic sensibilities of his brother Malcolm IV, a blustering, headstrong fellow, the sort of captain of men who could today win a rugby international at Murrayfield single-handed and just as easily throw away the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham.

The most useful way of assessing his long reign is to divide it into four distinct periods.

The first nine years, from 1165 to 1174, was a time when the new king enjoyed comparative peace. But he quickly signalled his obsession with the earldom of Northumberland by badgering Henry II of England about it at every opportunity – so much so, as reported in a private letter reproduced in Sir Archibald Lawrie’s Annals of the Reigns of Malcolm and William, Kings of Scotland (1910), that

the mere mention of William’s name caused Henry to fly into a violent rage, tearing at his clothes, ripping the covers on his couch and even gnawing at handfuls of straw snatched up from the floor.

The second period, the fifteen years from 1174 to Henry II’s death in 1189, marked the most humiliating period of William’s reign – the long and bitter subjection to English overlordship. Disregarding the counsel of his senior advisers, William thought he could take advantage of a rebellion fomented by Henry’s sons against their father and recover the northern counties while Henry’s attention was distracted. He sent his younger brother, David, the Earl of Huntingdon, south to the English barons as an earnest of his good faith, while he himself mounted an invasion of Northumbria which became (in English minds, at least) a byword for merciless ferocity. But his attempt to bludgeon Henry into agreement failed disastrously. David was quickly made a prisoner; worse still, William himself was captured at Alnwick in July 1174.

There is an air of tragi-comedy about that capture. William’s army had failed to capture Newcastle and was now besieging Alnwick. One day William was out riding with a small group of men-at-arms when he detected, through the early-morning mist, a band of cavalry approaching. William thought they were a detachment of his own army; when he realised they were English knights, he charged at them, lance at the ready, shouting, ‘Now we shall see which of us are good knights!’ Hopelessly outnumbered, he was unhorsed and taken prisoner. His captors retreated swiftly with their royal prisoner and he was taken to King Henry at Northampton with his legs tied under his horse’s belly like a common felon. Henry incarcerated him in a dungeon in the castle of Falaise, in Normandy, and kept him prisoner there for five months. Eventually, through the Treaty of Falaise (December 1174), William was forced to pay Henry explicit homage not just for himself but also ‘for the kingdom of Scotland and his other lands in England’, directly subject to the overlordship of the king of England and his heirs. The implication was clear: Scotland was only held by the King of Scots as a fief from the King of England as his overlord. English garrisons were installed in the castles at Berwick-upon-Tweed, Edinburgh, Jedburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling (all at Scotland’s expense), the Scottish bishops were required to make submission to Canterbury (which they resisted successfully), and the sons of important Scottish nobles were taken as hostages.

For fifteen years the Treaty of Falaise remained in full force, and until the day he died Henry II extracted every drop of homage and humiliation he could from William, demanding the scrupulous fulfilment of every letter of the treaty. Perhaps the most humiliating sign of William’s subjection to Henry was his marriage in 1186. Not only did Henry choose William’s wife for him (Ermengarde, the daughter of a minor Norman vassal, Richard de Beaumont), he gave the new Scottish queen a cheap (for him) and cynical wedding-gift – Edinburgh Castle.

The English stranglehold on Scotland was loosened only when Henry II, brought to bay in France by another rebellion stirred up by his sons, died in the summer of 1189. His death ushered in the third major period of the reign of William of Scotland, from 1189 to 1209 – a twenty-year period of independence and peace with England and comparative prosperity. The new King of England, Henry’s eldest surviving son Richard I (Richard Lion-Heart), had already taken a vow to go on the Third Crusade to drive the Saracens out of Palestine, and was desperate for money to finance the expedition. The castles north of the border still in English hands were returned to Scottish ownership, and William and the Scottish nation willingly paid ten thousand Scottish merks for the abrogation of all the terms of the Treaty of Falaise, in what is known as the ‘Quitclaim of Canterbury’ (1189): ‘Thus, God willing, he worthily and honourably removed the heavy yoke of domination and servitude from the kingdom of the Scots’ (Chronicle of Melrose).

No sooner did William get back the unfettered feu of his kingdom, however, than he was riding his relentless hobby-horse to Northumbria again. In 1194, after personally subscribing two thousand merks towards Richard’s own ransom after his capture by the German Emperor in 1192, William offered fifteen thousand merks for Northumberland, more than he had paid for Scotland itself – but Richard would have none of it, if it meant acknowledging Northumberland to be part of Scotland.

But where it mattered – in Scotland – the decade of Richard’s tenure of the English throne saw William reach the peak of his predominance at home, building up his military power to deal with domestic insurrection and knitting his kingdom together. From the accession to the English throne of Richard’s treacherous younger brother, John ‘Lackland’, in 1199, it all began to go downhill. As usual, William lodged another claim for Northumbria and, as usual, it was turned down. John was much more skilfully ruthless than William, much better versed in the subtleties of power-politics. Relations between them, which had been strained from the outset, reached breaking-point in 1209 over the building of a new English castle at Tweedmouth, facing the vital sea-port of Berwick, which was then part of Scotland.

This trouble ushered in the fourth and final period of William’s reign, from 1209 to 1214. William was a relatively old man by now, in his mid-sixties, and his health was beginning to fail. He had lost the initiative in the power-play with England. In 1204, in an act of blatant provocation, King John had given orders for the Tweedmouth fort to be built where it could menace Berwick. The Scots had responded by levelling the half-built castle to the ground – twice. The two kings held peace talks in Norham Castle, but nothing came of them. In 1209 John returned to Norham with a huge army. William, in response, assembled a force at Roxburgh, and full-scale war threatened. This time, however, William drew back from the brink. By the Treaty of Norham John agreed that the castle would not be completed, but in return for this ‘concession’, and as compensation for damage inflicted, William had to pay fifteen thousand merks ‘for having the goodwill of King John’. William also had to relinquish all claim to the northern counties, and to hand over his two elder daughters, Margaret and Isabel, to be married off by John, on the vague suggestion that they would eventually marry John’s sons. Nothing came of that, and William would never see them again; in the event they were married off to high-ranking English noblemen many years after his death.

The Treaty of Norham was another grave setback for the Scottish monarchy. The last six years of William’s reign became a sort of interregnum: the ageing king was steadily losing his vigour and drive, and the young heir to the throne, the future Alexander II, was barely out of childhood (he was born in 1198, twelve years after his parents’ marriage), too young and inexperienced to take over the reins of leadership with any confidence. Little wonder, then, that King John was able to impose himself so aggressively on the Scottish kingdom and its subjects.

William had a year of illness and convalescence in 1213, but was sufficiently recovered by the following year to march north to Caithness to impose the king’s peace there. In September he was back in Stirling, where he succumbed to his final illness. He died on 4 December 1214, at the age of seventy-one.

The legacy of the Lion

To be saddled with the sobriquet of ‘Lion’ (or ‘Lion-heart’, for that matter) can be a handicap if one’s actions are not perceived as being sufficiently leonine. William was never known as ‘the Lion’ in his lifetime – it was a nickname invented by later historians – and there is little agreement about how or why he acquired the name. In Tales of a Grandfather, Sir Walter Scott assumed that it was because of the emblematic lion rampant on his coat of arms. Others have thought it was because of his ‘rough and stern countenance’. The most likely explanation, to my mind, lies with the earliest Scottish chronicler to imply the name, John of Fordun in the fourteenth century, who referred flatteringly to William as leo justitiae, a ‘lion of justice’. Nonetheless, if he really was the first Scottish king to emblazon his standard with the lion rampant, William bequeathed to his nation a symbol of defiance with which generations of Scots have been happy to identify ever since.

Arbroath Abbey was the other major legacy of his reign, and thereby hangs an intriguing tale. William was not greatly renowned for piety or devotion to the Church, as his brother Malcolm IV had been (although towards the end of his life he seems to have achieved a reputation for personal sanctity). But in 1178, three years after his release from Henry’s captivity after the disaster at Alnwick, he not only founded Arbroath Abbey but also endowed it so lavishly that it became one of the richest religious houses in all Scotland.

According to the original charter, William founded a monastery and church ‘at the place near the mouth of the Brothock Burn in honour of God and of St Thomas à Becket, Archbishop and Martyr’. That should give us pause, for there is more to this than meets the eye. Why should this violently anti-English king choose to dedicate this magnificent Scottish foundation to Thomas à Becket, an Anglo-Norman prelate?

Thomas, in his time, was the most brilliant figure in the court of Henry II, a man of great personal charisma, apparently, an assiduous party-giver, a skilled diplomat and, moreover, well-versed in all the martial arts of chivalry. He became Henry’s chancellor in 1155 (the year after Henry’s accession), and in 1162 Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost overnight the sybarite became an ascetic; his former loyalty to Henry was replaced by an unswerving zeal for the Church and its rights against the state. This led to exile, followed by an uneasy reconciliation; but as soon as Thomas returned to Canterbury the old antagonism flared up again, and Henry uttered his celebrated, impetuous wish to be rid of ‘this turbulent priest’. It was as a direct result of these intemperate words that Thomas à Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 by four of Henry’s hard-tempered Norman knights. The murder and its circumstances sent a thrill of horror throughout Europe, and stories soon spread of miracles worked at Thomas’s tomb. In 1173 he was canonised and quickly became the most widely venerated of all English saints.

King Henry was nothing if not a pragmatist. Becket’s martyrdom had swung the struggle between Church and crown in the Church’s favour, and Henry had to swing it back again. After settling some differences in Normandy in the summer of 1174, Henry came back to England to do public penance for the death of Thomas à Becket. On 12 July he submitted himself to be scourged by each one of the eighty assembled clergymen in turn.

A week later, when Henry was back in London, he was brought the news that King William of Scotland had been captured at Alnwick on the previous Saturday – 13 July. Praise be to God! And, in particular, praise be to Thomas à Becket, who had in this way clearly rewarded Henry for his (albeit belated) repentance.

But why, four years later, should William wish to thank God and Thomas à Becket for his capture? One can understand his motives, in the middle of the most abjectly humiliating period of his reign, for building Arbroath Abbey in the first place, as a deliberate and defiant statement of his continuing importance and prestige. And perhaps – just perhaps – the dedication to St Thomas was intended as a monumental insult to the English royal house, by extolling the man who, both in life and in death, had humbled the crown of England, yet couched in such unassailable piety that none could publicly take offence, not even Henry of England himself. I tend to believe that it was the one truly subtle thing which this blunt and headstrong king ever did.

After his death at Stirling in 1214 the body of King William the Lion was taken to the abbey he had founded and was buried there ‘in front of the high altar’, according to John of Fordun. But where ‘in front of the high altar’? For many years there was no monument nor plaque to commemorate his interment, because no one knew the precise spot where his body had been laid. And then, in 1816, a local antiquarian named Dr Stevenson who was poking around with spade and trowel in the ruins, four metres in front of the High Altar, chanced upon an old stone coffin containing some mouldering bones, its lid surmounted by a headless recumbent effigy with its feet resting upon a crouching lion.

We should remember that this period was the heyday of earnest amateur antiquarianism. 1816 was also, by an agreeable coincidence, the year in which Sir Walter Scott published one of his most charming works, his own ‘chief favourite among all his novels’, as he himself put it: The Antiquary. The antiquary of the title, Jonathan Oldbuck, the learned and garrulous Laird of Monkbarns, is an affectionately mocking caricature of all those earnest snappers-up of unconsidered historical trifles – including Walter Scott himself:

He had his own pursuits, being in correspondence with most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like him, measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in proportion of twelve pages to each letter of the legend.

Dr Stevenson, the real-life Jonathan Oldbuck, leaped to the instant and uncritical conclusion that he had found a royal tomb – the royal tomb, indeed: the tomb of William the Lion. The find created a local sensation; it also created a small fortune for unscrupulous local entrepreneurs who were soon exhibiting and selling bits of bones from the coffin (assiduously replenished whenever stocks ran out). Dr Stevenson himself sent various items of ossified royalty to his fellow-virtuosi and antiquarians, including a tooth (‘a royal grinder’, as he called it) to a gentleman in Montrose: ‘Very few relics are so well authenticated,’ he wrote, ‘even the most venerated of the Church of Rome.’

But it was all wishful thinking. After more than a century and a half of fierce argument the effigy on the sarcophagus lid was dated, on stylistic grounds, to be that of a wealthy commoner from no earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century – 150 years after King William’s death. It was placed for safe keeping in the Abbot’s House outside the skeleton walls of the abbey and put on proper display as part of an imaginative Visitor Information system in 1982 (the first to be put in place at a historic monument in the care of the state). Finally, in 1986, to give the vexed issue of William’s place of interment a dignified conclusion, the Historic Buildings and Monuments Directorate of Scotland (now Historic Scotland) planted that sandstone memorial slab in the area in front of the High Altar. It marks not the alleged site of the burial, but only the event itself:

King William the Lion

King of Scots 1165–1214

Founded this monastery in 1178

In honour of St Thomas of Canterbury,

Archbishop and Martyr,