Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, page 9
In the event it was a military parade. Leaving Roxburgh in May 1303, King Edward marched up the eastern route, as in 1296, to reach Kinloss Abbey near Elgin in September without meeting any serious resistance. Only at Brechin Castle was his progress halted. There, with superb defiance, Sir Thomas Maule held them at bay until on 9 August he was killed on the battlements and the garrison capitulated.37
The King remained at Kinloss Abbey for long enough to strengthen his hold on turbulent Moray and receive submissions, and then retraced his steps to Dunfermline Abbey for winter quarters from October to February 1304. There the history of 1296 repeated itself. Men and communities flocked to submit. John Comyn ‘the Red’, who had taken over the guardianship when John Soulis sailed to France, was still at large with a fighting force in Selkirk Forest, but on 9 February at Strathord near Perth he came to terms with the King.38 The settlement he negotiated ‘on behalf of the community of the realm’ was very different from the abject surrender of John Balliol and reflected a new approach by King Edward. In the conditions it was laid down that the Scottish people
should be protected in all their laws, usages, customs and liberties in every particular as they existed in the time of Alexander III unless there are laws to be amended in which case it should be done with the advice of King Edward and the advice and consent of the responsible men of the land.39
There should be no disinheritance of the Scottish leaders and forfeited estates could be redeemed by their owners on the payment of varying fines.40 For some there should be short periods of exile but all in all it was a generous settlement and it is not unreasonable to believe that it was the advice of Robert Bruce which in part persuaded the King that only by a magnanimous gesture could he hope to confirm a peace.
The magnanimity of the monarch was diminished by two vindictive actions. Sir William Oliphant, who held Stirling Castle in the name of King John by order of Sir John Soulis, asked permission to send a messenger to his master to find out whether he might surrender it or whether he should defend it to the last. King Edward refused this reasonable request for no other cause than his determination to test in action the great siege engines he had transported from England.41 So for three months from May to July 1304, Oliphant and his men, loyal to their commission, were subjected to the battering of every ingenious invention of King Edward’s engineers. The Vicar, the Parson, the Gloucester, the Belfry, a baker’s dozen of engines in all, pounded the castle walls while the English Queen and her ladies amused their idle hours by watching the proceedings from a balcony in Stirling town. Even when the garrison finally offered to surrender unconditionally, King Edward delayed his reply until his latest and greatest machine, the Warwolf, had had time to reach him and be tried out in a massive bombardment against the now suppliant defenders.42
But even more malignant was his treatment of William Wallace. He had never forgotten nor forgiven that it was this man alone who, in all the successive campaigns against Scotland, had inflicted the one decisive defeat upon the English. In his negotiations with John Comyn the terms for the Scottish surrender contained these baleful words:
No words of peace are to be held out to William Wallace in any circumstances in our will … The Stewart, Sir John de Soulis and Sir Ingram de Umfraville are not to have safe conduct nor come within the King’s power until Sir William Wallace is given up … Sir John Comyn, Sir Alexander Lindsay, Sir David Graham and Sir Simon Fraser shall exert themselves until twenty days after Christmas to capture Sir William Wallace and hand him over to the King who will watch to see how each of them conducts himself so that he can do most favour to whoever shall capture Wallace with regard to exile or legal claims or expiation of past misdeeds.43
For seven years little had been heard of Wallace except a fleeting reference to his presence in Paris and in Rome. Now at the very time when the Scottish nobles were bending their knee to the conqueror, he emerged from the shadow, still defiant, to clash with the English near Peebles in February 1304 and again at the Bridge of Earn in September 1304; then there is silence again until the fateful day of 3 August 1305 when he is betrayed and captured in Glasgow in the house of Robert Rae, a servant of Sir John Menteith.44
For four hundred miles along the dusty summer roads, he was led on horseback to London with his legs tied beneath the belly of his beast. On his arrival in the evening of 22 August he was lodged for the night in the house of Alderman William de Leyre in the parish of Allhallows Fenchurch, and from there next morning he was taken in procession by the Mayor of London, the aldermen and the sheriffs, through the thronged streets and jeering crowds to Westminster Hall. There, with his huge frame bound and shackled, he was seated at the south end of the hall to face his judges. A coronet of laurel leaves was mockingly placed upon his brow because of his alleged boast that one day he would be crowned at Westminster. He was not allowed to plead or make defence, but in silence listened to a long indictment of all his crimes against the English, culminating in the charge of treason in that he had been unmindful of his troth and allegiance.
Only then he spoke. He admitted all his acts against the English which he had done in defence of his country against her enemy, but he denied that he had ever been a traitor to the King of England for never had he pledged to him his allegiance. Nevertheless, it was of treason that the court found him guilty and it was for that offence that the King had devised an appalling penalty.
It was inflicted on Wallace the same day. He was chained flat to a hurdle and for the greater entertainment of the populace was dragged by horses along a circuitous route over four miles of cobblestones from Westminster to Smithfield. There he was hanged but cut down half-strangled and still alive. Then he was castrated and disembowelled. His genitals and entrails were burned before his eyes and, after his unspeakable agony had been ended by the headman’s axe, his heart was ripped out and added to the flames. His body was then hacked into four pieces. His head was mounted on a pike on London Bridge and the four quarters were distributed to Newcastle-on-Tyne, Berwick, Stirling and Perth to be displayed to the public eye as menacing symbols of King Edward’s might.45
But the flesh had hardly shredded from his dismembered bones than he had become a legend among the common folk of Scotland. A sense of injustice rankled in their minds. The great nobles had vowed and disavowed their allegiance to an alien monarch and yet had retained their territories and their lives, but a landless man of lesser rank, who had never broken his oath because he had never done homage, was condemned to degradation and a vile death simply for doing his duty in defence of his country. King Edward thought to make an example. He made a martyr instead. The name of William Wallace has echoed down the centuries as a trumpet call to Scotsmen in whatever corner of the globe they dwell.
NOTES - CHAPTER 6
1 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1184
2 Barrow 147
3 ibid., 150
4 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1071
5 ibid., ii, 1978
6 ibid., ii, 1092, 1111
7 Rishanger, 402
8 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1109
9 Barrow, 158
10 Rishanger, 395
11 ibid., 440
12 Langtoft, 247
13 Rishanger, 440
14 ibid., 442; Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1147
15 ibid., 445
16 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1069
17 Stones, 163–75
18 Rishanger, 447
19 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1163
20 ibid., ii, 1193
21 Barrow, 161
22 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1191
23 ibid., ii, 1236, 1239
24 ibid., ii, 1235
25 ibid., ii, 1250
26 ibid., ii, 1269, 1282
27 S.H.R., xxxiv, 130–31
28 Barrow, 169
29 Stones, 237–9
30 Dunbar, 128
31 Pluscarden, ii, 169
32 Rishanger, 211
33 ibid., 211
34 ibid., 211
35 ibid., 213
36 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1375
37 Flores Historiarum, ii, 564
38 Palgrave, 279
39 ibid., 286–7
40 ibid., 287
41 Flores Historiarum, ii, 570
42 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 1599
43 Palgrave, 276
44 Barrow, 193
45 ibid., 193
* note IV
7
By this one act King Edward unravelled for ever the web of cooperation he had sought to create by the conciliatory settlement of 1304 and his subsequent measures.
In the spring of 1305 he had appointed Robert Bruce, the Bishop of Glasgow and Sir John Mowbray to draw up a report on the future settlement of Scotland. Their recommendation was that the community of the realm should be summoned to elect ten persons to attend the next English parliament to help draw up a new constitution for their kingdom. On receiving the King’s acceptance, they convened a Scottish parliament at Perth in May, at which the ten were duly chosen. Representing the earls, the bishops, the barons, the abbots and the lay community, the elected members attended the Westminster parliament in September 1305 and in company with twenty English colleagues drew up an ordinance for the government of the land – no longer the realm – of Scotland.
On the surface this appeared to give a form of self-government to the Scots. The viceroy, it is true, was to be the King’s nephew, the Earl of Richmond, and the chancellor and the chamberlain were to be English, but they were to be advised and assisted by a Scottish council of twenty-two members, consisting of four bishops, four abbots, five earls and nine barons, among whom were three former guardians, Robert Bruce, Bishop Lamberton and John Comyn the Red. In spite of the number and eminence of these advisory councillors and the fact that, apart from the southeast counties, most of the sheriffdoms in the country were to be held by Scotsmen, the ultimate power was nevertheless concentrated in the hands of the viceroy, who had the authority vested in him to dismiss and replace officials on his own initiative and to maintain in such strategic castles as he thought fit English garrisons and English governors.1
However, King Edward believed that the iron fist was sufficiently covered by the velvet glove for the Scots, tamed by their many defeats, to acquiesce in the new arrangements and combine peacefully to put them into operation.
So confident was he that, pending the arrival of the new viceroy, he appointed a committee of four to administer the country in his stead, headed by no other than William Lamberton, Bishop of St Andrews. It was an ironic choice for the bishop was already organizing in secret a combination for the recovery of Scottish independence.2
For eight years the Scottish Church had been the coordinating factor behind the Scottish resistance and Bishop Lamberton had been the architect of that coordination. He had supported the Comyns, he had used his powerful influence to reconcile the factions of Bruce and Comyn but his instruments had broken in his hand. When he returned from France after the settlement of 1304 and paid his homage to King Edward, he thought deeply on what potentialities for freedom remained.
During his sojourn in Paris he had realized that, while the French were lavish in their promises, they were too exercised by their own problems to give any active help to Scotland and that their protégé, the abdicated King, John Balliol, had neither the ambition nor the wish to forsake his sequestered rural existence for the hurly-burly of dynastic struggle. Yet in that hierarchical age only a king could inspire and synthesize the deep felt desires of prelate, knight and common man. Wallace had not had the qualifications, the Comyn figurehead was discredited. Only one man remained who had a justifiable claim to the throne and the personality, ambition, skill, prowess and magnetism to achieve that end: Robert Bruce.
Between his surrender to King Edward in 1302 and the fall of Stirling Castle, Robert Bruce had maintained a cautious and diplomatic stance giving lip service to the English monarch but quietly rendering nugatory any demands for his military support. As early as 11 March 1302 he had written to the monks of Melrose Abbey:
Whereas I have often vexed the abbey’s tenants on their grange of Maybole by leading them all over the country in my army of Carrick although there was no summons of the common army of the realm, troubled in conscience I shall never again demand such an army service neither of many nor of few, unless the common army of the whole realm is raised for its defence when all inhabitants are bound to serve.
As a Scottish historian pertinently remarks, ‘Bruce’s conscience did not trouble him until the beginning of Lent 1302, just in time to ensure that his army would be of less use to Edward than it had been to the Scots.’3Again, when asked by King Edward in the spring of 1304 to forward the English siege engines for the attack on Stirling Castle, he duly complied but omitted to include the vital part of the machinery necessary for their function,4 and yet again when called upon to supply troops for the same purpose, he wrote personally to the King on 4 April 1304 that ‘he has been in London and Essex where his lands lie and is still there endeavouring in every possible way to procure horses and armour for himself and his people but … has had no success whatever in his attempts to borrow for the purpose or get a penny of his rents’.5
During King Edward’s invasion of Scotland in 1303 he had been with the Prince of Wales and his father-in-law, the Earl of Ulster, on the western route which was no more than an unopposed military parade and was left in charge of Ayr Castle. From there he was ordered to join Sir John Segrave in February 1304 to make a mounted raid on Wallace and Simon Fraser in Selkirk forest, but it is significant that while some of their followers were captured both these leaders had prior warning and escaped, for which Bruce was gently chided by King Edward with the words ‘as the cloak is well made, also make the hood’.6
It was a difficult and uneasy role to play, but until the autumn of 1305 it succeeded. Not only he, but members of his family, obtained the favours and dangerous friendship of the monarch. Edward Bruce, his brother next in age, was placed in the Prince of Wales’s household and a younger brother, Alexander, after a brilliant career at Cambridge University – ‘no one,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘who read arts at Cambridge before or since his time ever made such progress’ – was granted by royal favour the living of Kirkinnen near Wigtown and made Dean of Glasgow.7 Bruce himself had already been given the guardianship of his young nephew, Earl Donald of Mar, with all the benefits of the great Mar estates in the northeast and the control of the formidable stone-built fortress of Kildrummy, as well as the wardenship of three royal forests.8 In March 1305 he asked for and obtained the de Umfraville lands in Carrick9 and in the same month was entrusted in company with Bishop Wishart and Sir John Mowbray to ordain in what manner the guardians of Scotland should organize its defence.10
He was indeed ‘a favourite son’ and it is understandable that he should be so. Long ago, when Prince of Wales, Edward had assessed the fine temper of the family when Bruce’s grandfather and father had been his companions in arms in the heat and dust of the Holy Land. Now in their descendant he saw all those qualities that he most admired, sagacity, endurance, courage and skill in arms. So, in his relationship with Bruce there was something deeper than a politic wooing of a powerful Scottish magnate. And on Bruce’s side too there must have been a respect for the determination and abilities of the older man, for in his future kingship he was to model much upon the royal pattern he had observed.
So, when his father died in March 130411 and, at the age of thirty, Bruce succeeded to the vast family estates in the counties of Essex and Huntingdon, Dumfries and Aberdeen, there was every worldly reason why he should pursue the path of conformity and enjoy the pleasure of married life in the courtly circles of the Crown.
But the Celtic blood of his mother pulled him towards Scotland. The ‘Community of the Realm’, that conception to which every Scottish document had referred during the years of struggle, had become to him over the past decade a living entity and overriding all affinity to the English King was the profound conviction that he and he alone was the rightful monarch of the northern realm whose mission it must be, when the time was ripe to recover its ancient independence.
After obtaining probate of his English estates in May 130412, he travelled north to King Edward’s camp outside Stirling Castle at the same time as Bishop Lamberton reached it from France. There King Edward was indulging an old man’s vanity by showing off his virile prowess before his young Queen. Mounted on horseback, he rode so close beneath the walls of the besieged castle in order to direct operations that on one occasion a javelin hurled from the ramparts lodged in the steel plates of his armour and on another a huge stone fell so near that his horse reared and overturned with its master, who was lifted up, dazed and shaken, and carried by soldiers to his tent.13
When the old friends, prelate and earl, observed or heard of these proceedings, the same thought must have come to them both: the King was an old man who by the hazard of war or by sickness must soon die and when he was succeeded by the Prince of Wales, of whose vacillating character they were both aware, a new opportunity for Scotland’s freedom could arise. On 11 June 1304 at the Abbey of Cambus Kenneth they signed a bond:
that they should mutually help each other in all their several businesses and affairs at all times and against all other persons whatever without any deceit and that neither of them should undertake any important business without the other of them. They will mutually warn each other against any impending danger and do the best to avert the same from each other and for the full performance of the agreement they bound themselves by oath and under the penalty of the sum of £10,000 to be applied for the recovery of the Holy Land.14
