Scotland: The Story of a Nation

The decision of Edward I to choose Balliol as king has gone down in Scottish history as being a travesty of justice – the justice of the Bruce claim to the throne. But historians are no longer prepared to accept that. In terms of the claims of the two men, Balliol had the most obviously straightforward claim because of the way in which the laws of primogeniture had evolved by the thirteenth century. Bruce’s big claim was that he was a generation nearer to the previous king, but that was irrelevant; so it would not have come as any surprise to anyone that Balliol was chosen as king.

The argument has been advanced that Balliol was chosen because he was the weaker man, the man who would bend the more easily to Edward’s will. In fact it was Robert Bruce the Competitor, not John Balliol, who was the first to accept Edward’s claim to overlordship of Scotland, and who did so at every opportunity thereafter.

Two days after the court’s verdict was announced, Bruce formally resigned his claim to his son and heirs, so that it would not be lost after his death; he retired to his castle at Lochmaben and took no further part in politics (he died in 1295). His son Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, in turn surrendered his earldom to his own son, Robert Bruce (the future king), who was now eighteen years old. The Bruce claim to the throne was anything but dead.

Now, if not before, Edward I must have realised that he had a golden opportunity to interfere decisively in the future of the northern kingdom, perhaps even to fulfil what may well have been a deep-seated imperial ambition – to be king of all the territories of Britain. Ted Cowan says:

This was Edward’s chance. During or just before the Great Cause, when he sat in the court at Berwick and decided who had the best claim, it must have occurred to Edward that he could manipulate this situation to his own advantage. After all, he had just conquered Wales, and he saw an opportunity of making himself ruler here in Scotland as well, the first ruler of the whole of the British Isles. One can hardly blame him – he was a politician, after all, and a very acute man. Why not exploit the situation to suit himself?

The die was now cast. On 17 November 1292, in the Great Hall of Berwick Castle, Edward formally accepted the decision of the auditors and chose John Balliol as the next King of Scots. Next day, in the chancel of St Cuthbert’s Church in Norham, he accepted the homage of Balliol for the kingdom of Scotland.

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Three days later, after paying homage to Edward, Balliol left for Scone, where he was inaugurated as King of Scots on the Stone of Scone inside the abbey church on 30 November 1292 – St Andrew’s Day. It was to be the last time a King of Scots would sit on the royal Stone at Scone. Within a month Balliol and many Scottish nobles had to travel to Newcastle to swear fealty yet again for his kingdom to King Edward. It was the start of an unhappy four-year reign which ended in humiliation for King John Balliol and disaster for Scotland, and left Balliol with the jeering sobriquet of ‘Toom Tabard’ (Empty Tunic) with which he has come down in history.

There are few details available of Balliol’s reign. It is clear that much of the authority which had been exercised by the Guardians during the Maid of Norway’s minority was passed to the Community of the Realm, in the shape of a parliament; and there is evidence that King John tried to carry out the functions expected of a king, despite the implacable enmity of the Bruces. But Edward I was clearly intent on humiliating him at every turn. He usurped the right to hear appeals from Scottish judgements, and King John was even ordered by the Sheriff of Northumberland to appear before a court in London to account for a wine-bill left unpaid by Alexander III. John never had a chance, according to Fiona Watson:

Balliol was not well known in Scotland before he became king, but he did a reasonable job, considering that he was up against a king who had the best legal mind in Europe – a man, moreover, who was prepared to use military force to back up his claims. From south of the border, Edward was constantly telling him what to do. I do not think anyone could have stood up to Edward; and anyone who tried would have had to fight a war over it. That was a decision which Balliol took a long time to make – quite rightly, because it would plunge Scotland into a war with a very formidable adversary.

I think John Balliol’s reputation is due for serious revision – he certainly deserves much more attention and much more understanding; but that devastating nickname, ‘Toom Tabard’, is difficult to get round, and it is even more difficult to reach the real John Balliol through the propaganda and vilification engendered by the man who usurped his throne – Robert the Bruce.

In 1294, less than two years after his accession, King John was instructed to raise troops to assist Edward in his war with Philippe IV (‘Philippe the Fair’) of France over Gascony. That was one demand too many. In July 1295 a meeting of parliament at Scone decided to put the direction of affairs into the hands of a Council of Twelve, made up of four bishops, four earls and four barons – a new form of Guardianship, in effect. John Balliol remained king, but was effectively sidelined: the real power behind the governance of Scotland was in the hands of Balliol’s main supporters, the Comyn family.

In October the hard-line Council of Twelve decided to look for help abroad. In Paris that month they concluded a mutual defence treaty with Edward’s arch-enemy Philippe IV of France, who was giving Edward as hard a time as Edward was giving Scotland. It was the start of what has become fondly known, in Scotland at least, as the ‘Auld Alliance’. In practical terms, the Auld Alliance was little more than a sentimental association between two countries which for a long time shared a certain antipathy towards England. Historians tend to look askance at it. During the Wars of Independence it proved of some value in terms of French political and diplomatic intercession with the papacy or as a potential threat against England; but there was very little in terms of military co-operation. It helped Scotland to maintain a role as a player in European politics, and was an alliance of mutual self-interest, but there is no indication that either of the allies was ever prepared to go to any lengths to support the other at the expense of its own interests.

The 1295 Treaty of Paris guaranteed that Scotland would maintain hostile pressure on England in return for military aid from France should Scotland be invaded. It was to be cemented by a future marriage between John Balliol’s son and heir, Edward Balliol, and Jeanne de Valois, niece of Philippe IV (in the event, the marriage never took place). The treaty was ratified by the full Community of the Realm at Dunfermline in February 1296. It was an implicit declaration of war on England; Edward I certainly read it as an open act of rebellion by the country over which he claimed overlordship, and in the autumn of 1295 he had put the north of England on a war footing.

Effectively, the Treaty of Paris was the start of what have become known as the ‘Wars of Independence’; to the English they were simply the ‘Scottish Wars’, but perhaps they could more accurately be described as ‘Wars of Preservation’. Buoyed up with the hope of French military assistance, Scotland raised a national army which was ordered to assemble at Caddonlea, the traditional site of a Scottish wapinschaw (‘inspection of weapons’), four miles north of Selkirk, on 11 March 1296. Significantly, but not surprisingly, the Bruces refused to attend the muster; as a result their Annandale lands were declared forfeit by King John, and granted to his father-in-law John Comyn, Earl of Buchan.

King Edward I was also on the move. He had summoned his feudal host to assemble at Newcastle upon Tyne on 1 March; it was a formidable force, comprising an estimated four thousand cavalry and twenty-five thousand infantry – larger by far than the Scottish army which would assemble at Selkirk on 18 March. By the middle of March, Edward had joined the English army in person as it moved to a new encampment near the village of Brunton, north of Alnwick. He celebrated Easter Day (25 March) at Wark Castle, just south of the Tweed, and here he received renewed pledges of fealty from the Bruces (father and son) and other Scottish barons for their lands in Scotland:

I shall be faithful and loyal, and shall maintain faith and loyalty to King Edward, King of England, and to his heirs, in matters of life and limb and of earthly honour against all mortal men; and never shall I bear arms for anyone against him or his heirs …

In his response, King Edward tellingly referred to John Balliol as ‘the former King of Scotland’ (qui fust Roy d’Escoce). The King of Scots was king no more; to the Bruces it could only have meant that the throne was up for grabs again.

It was the Scots who struck the first blow. On 26 March, the day after the ceremony at Wark, a strong Scottish force from the former Bruce fiefdom of Annandale, led by John Comyn the Younger of Buchan, attacked Carlisle Castle, which was held by the dispossessed Lord of Annandale and his son, young Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick; but Carlisle, with its formidable fortifications, was too strong to be stormed, and the attack was repulsed with little difficulty.

King Edward now unleashed the counter-invasion he had been planning all winter. He moved across the border at Coldstream and on 30 March launched a ferocious assault on the royal burgh of Berwick, which was then the wealthiest commercial town in Scotland. The timber palisade walls of the town offered no defence, and Berwick was sacked with terrible brutality. The inhabitants were massacred without mercy – women and children as well as men. Of the town’s 12,500 inhabitants, only five thousand survived the slaughter. The wholesale destruction of Berwick quickly became a byword for savagery, the ultimate war atrocity. The castle held out, however, until the garrison, commanded by Sir William Douglas (who offered himself as hostage), were promised truce and safe conduct from the burning town.

The Scots retaliated with an equally savage raid deep into Northumberland on 8 April, burning villages and abbeys all the way to Hexham. This raid, with English claims of gratuitous cruelty (including the burning alive of schoolchildren in Hexham), became as much of a byword for merciless brutality as the sack of Berwick. Edward I ignored it. He stayed on in Berwick for the next month, supervising the rebuilding of the town and its flimsy defences, and repopulating it with English burgesses; it was now that he ordered the construction of the curtain wall (the ‘White Wall’) from the castle down to the shore.

The Scots raiding force moved back across the border and up to English-held Dunbar, where the castle was opened to them by the Governor’s wife, the Countess of March. Part of the English army, under the command of John de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey (ironically, John Balliol’s brother-in-law), was sent north to retake the castle at Dunbar. Surrey laid siege to the fortress on 25 April. Two days later the main body of King John’s army, under the command of John Comyn (the ‘Red Comyn’), made an attempt to raise the siege, but it was no match for the heavy English cavalry and the disciplined men-at-arms. The Scottish cavalry fled the field, and the foot-soldiers were cut down relentlessly as they scattered. English sources claimed that ten thousand Scots were killed, which seems an impossibly exaggerated figure. Nevertheless the casualties among the Scottish foot-soldiery were heavy. The castle promptly surrendered, and many of the leading barons of Scotland – including Atholl, Ross, Menteith and John Comyn the Younger – were taken captive and sent to the Tower of London.

‘Toom Tabard’

Edward defeated the Scottish army in a great battle near Dunbar, and Baliol, who seems to have been a mean-spirited man, gave up the contest.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI

It was the end of the ‘rebellion’. Scottish resistance simply collapsed after Dunbar Castle surrendered. The castles of Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth followed suit. Scotland lay paralysed and helpless. John Balliol sent a letter to Edward in Perth, suing for peace, but Edward would be satisfied with nothing less than unconditional surrender. On 2 July 1296 Balliol met Bishop Bek of Durham at Kincardine Castle, where he issued his document of surrender:

…seeing that we have by evil and false council, and our own folly, grievously offended and angered our lord Edward, by the Grace of God, King of England … Therefore we, acting under no constraint, and of our own free will, have surrendered to him the land of Scotland and all its people …

A week later, on 8 July, at a humiliating ceremony in Montrose, Balliol formally resigned his kingdom to Edward and was subjected to the ultimate ignominy: he was stripped of his crown, sceptre, ring and girdle, and the red and gold royal insignia were ripped from his surcoat, giving rise to that nickname of ‘Toom Tabard’. He and his son were sent into captivity in the Tower of London, along with the last of his supporters still at large, including John Comyn the Elder of Badenoch and the Earl of Buchan. Balliol was soon moved to more comfortable house arrest in Hertford, and after three years he would be released into papal custody and permitted to retire to his family’s estates in Picardy in France, where he died in 1313.

Steve Boardman is more sympathetic to John Balliol than Sir Walter Scott was:

I think of Balliol as one of those unfortunate figures who simply gets run over by history. At one stage he tried to assert his own power as Scottish king and to govern effectively, but he was faced with one of the most powerful kings in Western Europe, a massively prestigious figure. Edward I had destroyed the power of the Welsh princes in the 1280s, and in the 1290s he wanted to make his rights in Scotland stick: he wanted to make something concrete of the vague claim to overlordship which previous English kings had occasionally asserted. Edward was in the position and was of the mind to make these vague claims to overlordship a reality in the years after 1292.

In that sense, Balliol was caught in a unique situation: because of the nature of the competition for the throne, he had already acknowledged Edward specifically as the overlord of Scotland. He was dealing with a very powerful adversary, and his own support within Scotland was limited by the disaffection of the Bruces and their supporters. He was simply unable to cope with that combination of circumstances. But that does not mean that when he came to the throne he intended to be any less of a king than any of his predecessors had been; he was, quite simply, hopelessly outgunned.

From Montrose, Edward I made a triumphal progress north as far as the Moray Firth. Then he ransacked the country, systematically and purposefully. The Great Seal of Scotland was ceremoniously broken in two. The Stone of Scone was removed and sent south to Westminster Abbey, where it was placed in the chapel dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The state archives were packed into fifty-three containers and shipped out of the country. Edward also ordered the removal of the Scottish regalia (the crown, sceptre, sword, ring and royal robe) and the precious relic of Scotland’s only royal saint, the Black Rood of St Margaret, which had comforted her on her deathbed; it was never seen in Scotland again.

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Dauvit Brown has studied Edward’s motives for the looting of the symbols and the raiding of the government archives:

The English kings and their government had by this stage become one of the most bureaucratic in Europe. The reason why they took all the Scottish government records was not to suggest that Scotland had never existed as a kingdom, but because Edward I, as the sovereign lord, had taken control of it and because, in order to govern Scotland properly, he needed to have on file all the previous records of the kings.

It was typical of their approach to their task that they did not just throw things into sacks and take them south; they compiled an inventory of what they were taking. There is a lengthy and impressive list of the titles, at least, and brief descriptions of what the documents were. Sadly, the documents were lost en route: they sank with their ship on the way south, which was a great loss. If those records still existed we would have a much more complete set of evidence relating to government in Scotland and many more royal charters and official documents of that kind.

It has been claimed that Edward also ransacked the country for any histories and chronicles which existed and took them away, too – which was why chroniclers like John of Fordun had to start writing Scotland’s history from scratch. But, in fact, narrative histories were not listed in the inventory of documents removed; they would not have been part of the government archives.

Edward also clearly believed that taking the Stone of Scone, the inaugural stone of the kings of Scots, was the absolute and final symbol that Scotland had ceased to be a kingdom. But what seems to have happened is that the Stone and its legend became even more famous; references to it as the ‘Stone of Destiny’ start now, along with the story that wherever the Stone is, the Scots will rule. Edward may have thought that it represented a full-stop and a final statement of Scottish existence; but as far as the Scottish people were concerned, it was the beginning of a new chapter.

That new chapter was still a long way off, however. Before Edward left Scotland, a parliament was held in Berwick on 28 August, at which a compilation was made of more than 1,500 earls, lords, bishops and leading burgesses who had sworn fealty to him and formally recorded their homage to him as King of Scotland. This document has come to be known as the ‘Ragman Roll’ from the tangle of ribbons which hung from the seals of the signatories.

John Balliol’s name is there. So is that of Robert Bruce, son of Bruce the Competitor (who had died in 1295), and of his twenty-two-year-old son Robert, Earl of Carrick. Every notable family, every major landowner, every significant member of the gentry – all were required to make legal acknowledgement of Edward’s overlordship. But one name among the lesser gentry is missing: the name of William Wallace.

Only hindsight can claim to know how significant an omission this was. The Comyn-led government of Scotland was discredited, with most of its leaders incarcerated in castles throughout England. Of the aristocratic families of Scotland, only the Bruces were still in favour with the autocratic King of England – but even the Bruces had been contemptuously dismissed. When the older Robert Bruce, father of the future king, importuned Edward about the cherished Bruce claim to the throne, Edward is said (by Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon) to have given the withering reply, ‘Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?’

What was the driving force behind Edward’s single-minded, ruthless treatment of Scotland? Fiona Watson finds it an enigma:

Edward was already embroiled in a bitter dispute with France over Gascony, of which he was Duke. But that made no difference – he simply ditched Gascony (temporarily, in his mind) to go for Scotland. And that makes no sense: Gascony was one of the richest parts of the English empire, and to lose it for a cold, fairly barren northern kingdom is bizarre. But Edward was the sort of man who never gave up: if he wanted something, he went for it, again and again and again.

Edward was absolutely determined to subdue Scotland, but one cannot be sure why, other than sheer pride and stubbornness. He did it in the face of mounting protest at home over the expense of his seemingly endless wars and the ever-increasing burden of taxation. So there are some large unanswered questions about Edward’s character and motives; but ultimately, to my mind, he was simply an obsessive who refused to be balked from his purpose. That made him very dangerous indeed as far as Scotland was concerned.

Edward I left his newly acquired kingdom in the hands of the Earl of Surrey as Governor and Hugh de Cressingham as Treasurer. An exchequer was established at Berwick on the Westminster model. English sheriffs and justiciars were appointed the length and breadth of the country. English soldiers garrisoned the major castles. The subjugation was complete; it had taken Edward I only five months to achieve.

Perhaps Edward thought to himself, that, by uniting the whole island of Britain under one king and one government, he would do so much good by preventing future wars, as might be an excuse for the force and fraud he made use of to bring about his purpose. But … the happy prospect that England and Scotland would be united under one government, was so far from being brought nearer by Edward’s unprincipled usurpation, that the hatred and violence of national antipathy which arose betwixt the sister countries, removed to a distance, almost incalculable, the prospect of their becoming one people, for which nature seemed to design them.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI

King Edward thought he had settled the ‘Scottish question’ once and for all. There is a story, recorded by Sir Thomas Grey of Heaton (near Newcastle) in his Scalacronica (written while he was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle in 1355–57), that as Edward left Berwick in September 1296 he said to his companions (in French), ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’ (Bon besoigne fait qy du merde se delivrer). But if Edward thought he was rid of the business, he was very wrong.

1 (#ulink_31ed2e18-4cfe-5022-9402-4dbece752026) The Great Hall of Berwick Castle, which had fallen into a ruinous state by the seventeenth century, fell victim to the building frenzy of the Railway Age in the nineteenth century. In 1844 an Act of Parliament was passed to permit the linking of the North British Railway line from Edinburgh to Berwick and the Great North British Railway line from London to Berwick. The ruined castle, hard by the north end of Stephenson’s magnificent Royal Border Bridge over the river, was considered the most suitable site for the station, which was formally opened in June 1846.

1 (#ulink_399ba59f-0baf-5d6b-bcd7-04aec4dfda18) An ‘Eleanor Cross’, erected by Middleton Barry in 1865, stands in the forecourt of Charing Cross Station in London; it is a replica of the original which King Edward put up in the ancient village of Charing.