A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (47 page)

This was a remarkable provision. From a legal point of view, it was anomalous, in that primogeniture did not normally apply to female heirs. Ordinarily in such circumstances, estates were divided between daughters regardless of precedence of birth. By this decision, therefore, the kingdom of England was understood to be exceptional in its impartibility. But more remarkable still was the daring of the ordinance in the light of historical precedent. Only one earlier king of England, the imperious Henry I (d. 1135), had insisted that his daughter should succeed him, with the result that England had been torn apart by civil war for a generation. For Edward similarly to rule in favour of female succession, even in concert with the episcopate and his extended family, was thus a mark of his supreme self-confidence. At the same time, it exposed his shrinking range of options. The best that all of them could hope for was that Edward himself would continue to reign for many years to come, and that his only remaining son would beat the odds and survive to adulthood.
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There was, however, a better hope still, and it lay with Scotland. Alexander III had died before he could father any more children of his own, but he was not without a direct heir. Between 1281 and 1283 his late daughter, Margaret, had been briefly married to the king of Norway, and at some point towards the end of that period she had given birth to a daughter of her own. This child, also called Margaret, had grown up in Norway, unaware that she would one day become the last hope for her grandfather’s dynasty. In 1284, when his last son died, Alexander had obtained general recognition of her right to succeed him in default of any new children he might have. And when, two years later, the king himself perished, the broad political consensus remained: Margaret, ‘the Maid of Norway’, had the best right to the Scottish throne.
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What if this little girl, aged only three at the time of Alexander’s death, were to be married to Edward’s only son, then approaching his second birthday? The boy would not only succeed his father as king of England, but also become king of Scotland in right of his wife. Their children would become rulers of a double kingdom – perhaps a united kingdom – which would stretch from the English Channel to the Western Isles. The idea appears to have been floated as early as 1284, by Alexander himself, following the death of his last son. In response to a letter of condolence from Edward I, the Scottish king had mused that, through his tiny granddaughter, ‘much good may yet come to pass’. It was an intriguing idea, though at that time only one of many possible futures; if Alexander had more children of his own, the vision would dissolve, and the future king of England would be committed to a disadvantageous match with a Norwegian princess, nothing more. But when Alexander died, the Maid’s succession seemed certain. Messengers began to travel between the English and Norwegian courts. In the spring of 1289, in anticipation of Edward’s imminent return to England, negoti ations began in earnest. Finally, on 6 November that year, an international summit was held at Salisbury. Edward and his advisers met with the Norwegian ambassadors and the Scottish Guardians, and it was agreed: within the next twelve months, Margaret of Norway would marry Edward of Caernarfon.
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The Scots were far from unhappy with this prospect. It promised an end to the years of uncertainty since 1286 and to the latent threat of further disorder. A marriage alliance with England would give the Maid a powerful protector, and would mean that her claim was most unlikely to be contested in the future. Accordingly, when the political community of Scotland assembled on the Border at Birgham in March 1290, the Salisbury agreement was unanimously ratified. More than a hundred Scotsmen of substance wrote to Edward I expressing their will to proceed with the wedding.
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Nevertheless, the Scots proceeded with caution. This was not just the union of two royal children but the union of two kingdoms. The fact that Edward was a force to be reckoned with also carried certain negative implications. Would he be too powerful, or too demanding? Realistically, the Guardians recognised that their options were limited, and accepted that England would be the dominant partner in the marriage. But, at the same time, they had sworn an oath to preserve Alexander III’s kingdom intact and undiminished for his eventual heirs. As such, their overriding concern was to safeguard Scotland’s future independence.
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What the Scots needed, in short, was a prenuptial agreement, and to this end negotiations with England dragged on into the summer of 1290. On many issues it was possible to reach consensus. Everyone, for example, accepted that, although the two children were not yet of marriageable age, they should nonetheless be regarded as if married from the moment of the Maid’s arrival, and that Edward of Caernarfon should therefore be regarded as king of Scotland from that point. There was agreement, too, on the question of the routine business of Scottish government. The Scots were concerned to ensure that they would not have to travel to England to do homage to their new king, or to answer or initiate lawsuits. What they demanded – and what Edward conceded – was that such matters should be dealt with in Scotland by a resident viceroy or lieutenant.

When they came to consider the matter of Scotland’s castles, however, the two sides could find no common ground. Edward was determined that all royal fortresses must come under his control, and insisted on his right to appoint their custodians in every case. His attitude was probably borne of bitter memories of 1258, at which point control of England’s royal castles had been handed to a council. Also, no doubt, the king recollected the unpleasant experiences of his sister Margaret after her marriage to Alexander III, whose minority had been blighted by one aristocratic coup after another.

But what seemed to Edward to be a commonsensical means of ensuring Scotland’s future security sounded to the Scots like an unconscionable demand for the surrender of sovereignty. Castles were the instruments of raw power, and for this reason neither side was prepared to compromise. When, in July 1290, the Scots reassembled at Birgham to meet the English king’s ambassadors, articles were drafted with a view to producing a final treaty, but, because of the disagreement on this crucial issue, no treaty was sealed.
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The deadlock was broken, it seems, by the news that the Maid had already set sail from Norway and was en route for Scotland. This intelligence, which apparently reached Edward’s ears in the last days of August, forced him to settle, for fear that the Scots’ bargaining position would be strengthened if they took possession of the girl. On 28 August, therefore, while the English court was at Northampton, the articles drafted earlier in the summer were approved. The contentious matter of castles was fudged: those Scottish envoys present accepted that keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the English king’. But the Scots did get a clear statement to safeguard their independence, of the kind they had been seeking since the start. In the most resonant phrase of their agreement, Edward promised that Scotland should remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.
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All thoughts now turned to the Maid’s impending arrival. Edward immediately sent his friend, the bishop of Durham, to see to her reception, and a few days later dispatched a welcoming gift of jewels for the little girl who was about to become his daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the magnates of Scotland, as was traditional, began to assemble at Scone Abbey near Perth in readiness for the enthronement of their new queen. In late September representatives of both nations rode into Scotland’s extreme north, to greet the Norwegian ship which, unexpectedly, had put into the islands of Orkney. Only in the course of their journey did they learn that, during her voyage, the Maid had fallen sick, perhaps from having eaten decayed food. And when, in early October, they returned south, it was with the news that the girl was dead.
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The death of the Maid of Norway finally extinguished the flickering flame that was the bloodline of King Alexander and threw the question of the Scottish succession wide open. It was necessary to forage far back into the royal family tree – over a hundred years – to find other branches that had flourished into the present. But these collateral descents were many, and consequently there was no consensus on who was next in line to the throne. The respective merits of the most important candidates will be considered later in this chapter; for now, it will suffice to note that, in the eyes of many Scots, the man with the best claim to succeed was John Balliol.

Twenty years earlier only a madman or a mystic would have put money on this candidate, and not just because the Scottish royal house had yet to be overtaken by disaster. Born around the middle of the thirteenth century, Balliol was the youngest of four brothers, and as such was apparently destined for a career in the Church. But in the course of the 1270s his family were also visited by an exceptional mortality: during that decade, all three of his elder brothers died without issue, leaving John as the heir to their father’s estates in England and France.
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As this paternal inheritance implies, Balliol was to all intents and purposes an Englishman. His father had been lord of Barnard Castle in County Durham, had fought for Henry III in the Battle of Lewes and, around the same time, had achieved lasting fame as the founder of Balliol College, Oxford. John, it is true, was Scottish on his mother’s side, and it was from his mother that he inherited his claim to Scotland’s empty throne. But Dervorguilla Balliol lived to be a very old lady, surviving until January 1290. Only at that point did her son, around the time of his fortieth birthday, enter into her extensive estates in Galloway and become a major Scottish landowner in his own right.
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Nevertheless, Balliol had another connection with Scotland in the form of his brother-in-law, John Comyn. Having married Balliol’s sister, Eleanor, in the early 1270s, Comyn had gone on to become the lord of Badenoch, and as such wielded especially great power in the northern part of the kingdom. Together with his other relatives, moreover, he held lands and castles in almost every corner of Scotland. It was an indication of the Comyns’ importance that two of their number – John and his great-uncle Alexander – had been among the six Guardians elected in 1286. All of which is to say that John Balliol, although he was a newcomer to the ranks of the Scottish nobility, had major and influential backing for his claim to the throne from a family that was arguably the most formidable force in Scottish politics.
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That claim, however, did not go unchallenged. Balliol and the Comyns had a powerful opponent in the shape of Robert Bruce. Despite the fact that he too held lands in England, Bruce was the more obviously Scottish candidate: Annandale, a lordship in south-western Scotland, was his paternal inheritance (although, like Balliol, his claim was on his mother’s side). An elderly man – in 1290 he was about seventy years old – Bruce was nothing less than ferocious in prosecuting what he regarded as his superior right. Indeed, he evidently considered his right to be superior not only to that of Balliol, but also to that of the Maid of Norway. It was Bruce who had raised rebellion in the winter of 1286-87, on learning that Yolande of Dreux’s pregnancy had failed.
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At that point the majority of Scots, represented by the Guardians, had given their backing to the Maid, and Bruce’s pretensions had been forcibly held in check. But in the autumn of 1290, once the Maid was revealed to be dead, the renewal of armed conflict seemed all but inevitable. Support was split between the two camps: neither Bruce nor Balliol could command sufficient backing among Scotland’s political community to impose a decisive settlement.

What the Scots needed was a powerful outside agency to help them choose between these two contenders: an honest broker to come and arbitrate. Once again, there was only one realistic option, and that was the king of England. He, after all, had been playing the role of international peacemaker in Europe for the past five years. On 7 October 1290 one of the Guardians, the bishop of St Andrews, wrote to Edward, stressing the turmoil in Scotland, and urging him to hasten north and prevent the outbreak of civil war.
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