A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (67 page)

The extreme fragility of the English hold was exposed early in the new year 1303, when the Scots began attacking and re-occupying castles and towns. Linlithgow, the most strategically important of the two new timber fortresses, held out, but Selkirk, the more expensive, fell in January. There was more bad news for the English the following month, when a force of their cavalry was ambushed at Roslin, near Edinburgh, by a Scottish army commanded by John Comyn. Ralph Manton, the king’s chief financial official in Scotland, was among those killed, and other high-ranking Englishmen were taken prisoner. The Scots were demonstrating to their enemies that denying them a truce had a definite downside.
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Edward therefore left no stone unturned in preparing for his spring offensive. Debtors to the Crown were hit with demands for repayment; foreign merchants were granted new privileges in exchange for a hike in customs. The king even called in the aid for the marriage of his daughter, approved but not collected thirteen years before.
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Every available fiscal resource was squeezed, and every ounce of manpower summoned. Ten thousand infantry were demanded from northern England; unknown quantities were required from Wales. On Ireland, in particular, great hopes were pinned, and in the end some 3,500 men were assembled to embark in 173 ships, the largest naval force the island had ever seen. Many of them were provided by the earl of Ulster, whose debts to the Dublin exchequer, totalling more than £11,000, were written off in return.
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And above and beyond this, of course, Edward now expected service from his newly obedient Scottish subjects: Robert Bruce was instructed to turn out with 2,000 foot and as many cavalry as he could muster. Bring all you owe and more besides: such was the common refrain in every royal writ. The king’s lieges were exhorted ‘to attend so powerfully accompanied that the contumacious resistance of the enemy may be overcome’.
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No single aspect of this furious preparation concerned Edward more than the work of fifty carpenters at King’s Lynn, upon whose skill and diligence his whole strategy hinged. The king’s plan in 1303 was simple. He intended to penetrate northern Scotland – that part of the country in which he had not set foot since 1296, and where Comyn power was strongest. This, of course, entailed crossing the Forth, which in turn explains the sudden burst of industry in Norfolk. Rather than waste time winning control of Stirling, Edward proposed to create a new crossing further down the river – a pontoon bridge, of the kind that had been used to conquer Wales two decades earlier. Great efforts were taken to ensure that the finished product would be both viable and defensible – the Welsh prototype, after all, had worked only on the second attempt, and memories were still fresh of the disastrous attempt to cross the Forth in 1297. Three separate bridges of differing size were built, each of them equipped with drawbridges and giant crossbows.

The scale of the enterprise, needless to say, was enormous. Preparing the bridges took almost four months, and cost almost £1,000. It took a fleet of thirty ships to ferry the completed parts into theatre.
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It is consequently disappointing to discover that this massive feat of medieval engineering was apparently never used. ‘By chance there was no need of it,’ said Peter Langtoft, and it looks as if he was right. Edward and his army mustered on the Border in late May and by 6 June had reached Linlithgow. As the king’s writs show, however, he subsequently moved to Stirling, which suggests that in the event he crossed the Forth by the conventional route. Stirling Castle was still in Scottish hands, but its garrison was too small to trouble the English host as it swept past their walls and marched unopposed into the north.
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The reason for Edward’s unimpeded progress soon became apparent. Within days his officials at Carlisle were writing panicked letters, reporting the arrival in south-west Scotland of ‘a great multitude of armed men’. The Scots, knowing that ‘almost all of the cavalry and infantry were with the king’, were attacking the depleted garrisons of Dumfries and Galloway. Worse still, on 18 June they crossed the Border and began laying waste to northern England.
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Thus the nature of the conflict was established. It would not be decided in open confrontation, as at Stirling Bridge or Falkirk, but by attrition. Victory would go to whichever side could mete out the most pain and suffering in the territory of the other, while simultaneously enduring the misery inflicted in their own. Edward in due course heard the news from Carlisle and dispatched a relief force under Aymer de Valence and Robert Bruce. But the king himself pressed on northwards with the bulk of his host, razing everything in his path. ‘Hamlets and towns, granges and barns/Both full and empty, he everywhere burns,’ wrote Peter Langtoft. ‘He advanced taking much plunder,’ added Walter of Guisborough, ‘burning and destroying almost everything.’
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If Edward hit hard, it was because his chances in a war of endurance were weak. From Stirling he advanced quickly to Perth, but there he was forced to wait for over a month while his supplies were replenished. As in previous campaigns, provisioning was perilously hand to mouth. Even in June, ships and crews were having to be arrested in southern England in order to ferry the requisite grain to the Firth of Tay. When the king finally struck out along Scotland’s north-eastern coast in late July, he continued to be dependent on this naval lifeline. A successful rendezvous with more ships at Montrose delivered him the necessary artillery to reduce the castle at nearby Brechin in early August. But when he reached Aberdeen on 23 August, the ships full of coin he had expected to find were not there. By this point Edward had already lost half his infantry; he could not afford to lose more. After waiting five days with no sight of a sail, he wrote an exasperated letter to the exchequer. ‘If we cannot make these payments,’ he said, referring to the wages of his men, ‘they will go back to their own parts, as they are already doing from day to day.’
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Meanwhile, in south-western Scotland the situation had been transformed by the arrival of the Irish, who landed in the middle of August and began capturing castles along the west coast. The creation of this new front, combined with the simultaneous appearance in the region of forces under Valence and Bruce, seems to have succeeded in drawing the Scots’ fire. Certainly the English garrisons in Dumfries and Galloway, which a few weeks earlier had been on the verge of disintegration, were given succour enough that they managed to hold out.
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The king, too, scraped through by the skin of his teeth. On 28 August, the very day his desperate letter was sent, ships arrived in Aberdeen with the much-needed money, and the reimbursed royal host was able to push on into the heart of enemy territory. By the middle of September Edward had reached the shores of the Moray Firth, and the abbey of Kinloss, which marked the furthest point of his devastating progress. A week later he was laying siege to John Comyn’s castle at nearby Lochindorb. By early October the fortress had fallen.
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Comyn himself, however, showed no signs of flagging. At this time the Scots’ sole Guardian was still active in central Scotland, reportedly raiding English positions with a force of a hundred horse and 1,000 foot. To him and his allies it seemed impossible that their opponent could last much longer. In late September Aymer de Valence had written of his hope that some Scottish leaders might be about to come in, but within a few days he was obliged to eat his words. The Scots in question had approached the English camp at Linlithgow, taken one look at the sorry state of its starving Irish garrison, and concluded that their enemies were on the point of collapse.
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And yet, in spite of its apparent exhaustion, English power prevailed. When Edward returned from harrying Comyn’s north-eastern heartlands, his forces were too weak to carry through his intention of reducing Stirling Castle, but the king nevertheless made it clear that he was not about to retire any further south. In November he ensconced his army on the north bank of the Forth at Dunfermline Abbey, while his son, the prince of Wales, established a separate camp on the Tay at Perth. It became evident that, once again, Edward was preparing to winter in the midst of his enemies.
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If the continued presence of their oppressor in a part of Scotland that had previously offered them safe refuge was an ominous development for the Scots, the location of his new winter quarters must have been more dispiriting still. Dunfermline was the burial place of Scotland’s kings and queens – Edward’s own sister, Margaret, was buried there, alongside her husband, Alexander III. Perth, meanwhile, stood adjacent to the abbey of Scone, long since robbed of its ancient Stone. The English occupation of these two symbolic sites, once the sacred centres of Scottish royal power, served to emphasise the same fundamental point. For more than seven years, Scotland had been a kingdom without a king. For all that time the Scots, and the Comyn faction in particu lar, had fought doggedly and hopefully in the name of John Balliol. It was now certain, however, that Balliol would not be coming back. On 20 May England and France had at last sealed their long-postponed peace, and the Scots had not been included. ‘For God’s sake, do not despair,’ the Scottish negotiators in Paris had written to their com patriots back home. ‘If ever you have done brave deeds, do braver ones now.’ That summer the Scots had done their utmost to heed this exhortation, but, as the winter began to set in, so too did despair, and with it the painful realisation that the cause for which they had been fighting was now irredeemably lost.
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Comyn and his allies surrendered early in the new year, having spent several weeks negotiating the best possible deal for themselves and the Scottish people. The terms they eventually secured, if not quite the total amnesty that they had hoped for, were nevertheless remarkably generous. In return for their submission, Edward guaranteed that there would be no loss of life or limb, lands or liberty. Some of those who came in were obliged to accept a period of temporary exile, the duration determined by the perceived scale of their offence.
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In truth, Edward could hardly have acted otherwise. What was presented to the Scots as magnanimity was in reality a tacit acknowledgement of their persisting power. Once upon a time, he had regarded the Scots as little more than a joke; a people he might conquer in a single summer, and whose affairs he might reorder at his whim. But since then it had taken him seven long years and every last ounce of strength to persuade them to accept surrender for a second time. The king may not have cared to admit it, but these were men who had earned the right to his respect.

Comyn knelt before Edward in February; some 130 other landowners similarly swore allegiance to the king in a specially convened parliament at St Andrews in March. Thereafter, all that remained was to deal with those few Scots who had refused to attend the meeting and who continued to bear arms against their rightful overlord.
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The first target – in the most literal sense – was Stirling Castle. The small Scottish garrison there had long been a thorn in Edward’s side; now their continued obstinacy gave the king the opportunity to conclude his conquest with an appropriately majestic display of royal might. From every quarter of Scotland, English artillery was shipped, trundled and reassembled in order to batter the fortress into submission.
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As far away as Perth and St Andrews, lead was stripped from the roofs of churches to make the counterweights that would give the trebuchets their tremendous hurling power. Inevitably, given Stirling’s virtually impregnable situation, the task of reducing it took weeks, but the spectacle was awesome. This was one of the earliest recorded occasions that gunpowder – ‘Greek Fire’, as contemporaries called it – was used in Britain. To distinguish them, possibly even to jollify them, the throwing machines were given names, and proceedings outside the castle soon assumed the air of a chivalric entertainment. Edward thoughtfully had a large new window inserted into the queen’s chambers, so that she and her ladies could observe their gallant menfolk in action.

Eventually, after twelve weeks of bombardment and pyrotechnics, the garrison indicated their willingness to surrender – a decision probably encouraged by the sight of a truly giant trebuchet, the work of more than fifty men for two whole months, approaching the point of completion. Unfortunately, Edward had by this time developed a personal interest in the Warwolf, as the beast had become known, and insisted that no surrender would be accepted until his new toy had been tested. Some modern historians have condemned him for this, though at the time nobody seemed to think his behaviour so very unreasonable: the defenders, after all, had been targeting the king throughout the siege and, indeed, had on two occasions come within a whisker of killing him. At length, on 24 July – presumably after the Warwolf had scored a few hits – a surrender was accepted. The garrison presented themselves, as ritual recommended, barefoot and with ashes on their heads, in the hope that Edward would show them mercy; the king, with equal respect for convention, allowed that their lives would be spared. Thus the siege, and the war, ended in such a way that chivalric expectations were satisfied. There was even a tournament to mark the conflict’s final conclusion.
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