The Lion Rampant (51 page)

‘As long as you deal the stones through me, you are safe,’ he said. ‘After that, let them sink into legend and oblivion. The King does not know anything of the Apostle stones now and need not ever be remembered of them, to his undoubted troubling. Besides, he has enough to concern him in the getting of an heir and mending at least part of the life between himself and his queen.’

He turned and smiled at them both.

‘He would give crown, Kingdom and all for a lick of what you pair possess,’ he added and that stunned them both to silence until he had reached the yett, the miserable Rauf trailing coldly in his wake.

‘Stay well,’ Kirkpatrick said at the door, pulling on his gauntlets as Horse Pyntle led their mounts to the foot of the stairs. ‘I will dance at your wedding.’

Hal watched him go, even gave the lie of a cheerful wave. There never was an end to it, he thought, never a happy after. For all their loving life together, he and Isabel had lived in the shadow of a vengeful Earl of Buchan and Badenoch and red war.

Now, just as it seemed they could walk to a wedding in a sunlit meadow with no shadows at all, there was the old thundercloud, black and fresh with menace, rimmed with uneasy crowns and bloated with a war that did not seem sated with slaughter and dubious victory at Stirling.

Under it was a king, whose every act to preserve the Kingdom could be no sin, and the faithful dark-hearted hound he sent to commit it was the dog Hal now had to trust to keep them safe in a world where only the sword and the tower could be truly relied on.

‘O Lord, Heavenly Father,’ Isabel murmured into the seeping cold from the open door, ‘let Your angels watch over Your servants that they may reach their destination in safety, that no enemy may attack them on the road, nor evil overcome them. Protect them from fast rivers, thieves, wild beasts – and troubled kings.’

‘Amen,’ Hal answered vehemently, sure that her prayer was not simply one for Kirkpatrick and Rauf’s safe journey.

The cold swept in the yett; Hal put his arm round Isabel like a fortress and led her into the thickness of Herdmanston’s walls.

‘Parcy,’ he called out over his shoulder. ‘Double bar the door.’

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The problems of Scotland in 1297 are not strangers to most of the Scots of the twenty-first century, not to the ones who voted in the SNP for five more years in 2011, nor those who may well vote us out of the Union some time within that span.

Certainly not to all those with an enormous chip on their shoulder, born out of a strong sense of grievance and a casual, institutionalized racism on both sides.

But that has always been the problem with Scots – dominated by England, Scotland has resented, struggled, died, bristled impotently at being so treated and retained a legacy of striving for freedom, however nebulous the chance or the reality.

The memories run deep. On one glorious day in the year this book is set, the Scots won a great victory against all the odds, cocked two fingers at English ambitions – and, of course, only managed to annoy its more powerful neighbour, who recovered sufficiently to make the Kingdom suffer for it for the next several hundred years.

For all that Scots love to believe it, Bannockburn was not the end of matters. It achieved everything – and nothing. It consolidated Bruce on the throne, sent Edward II’s relationship with his rebellious barons into a downward spiral from which, ultimately, it never recovered, but it did not end the cycle of invasion, slaughter and harrying.

It did not even keep a Balliol from the throne; supported by Edward III in 1332, Toom Tabard’s son, Edward Balliol – and there is wealth of revelation in that first name – took the throne from Bruce’s young son, David. Ousted almost at once, he was promptly reinstated by English might, only to be ousted once more. Returned to power a third time by the English, he was finally thrown out in 1336 and this time he took the hint.

From this, you can see that war between Scotland and England rasped along, right through the Rough Wooing of Henry VIII (another abortive attempt to force the Scots to bow the knee), and only ended most of the brutal bloodshed with the Union of the Crowns in 1603. It finally grumbled to a grudging halt with the Acts of Union in 1707, flared briefly in 1715 and ’45 and then died forever at Culloden.

Bannockburn, resplendent in the panoply of great battles, was simply one more in the bloody tapestry of Scotland’s history. Together with Culloden, they mark both the highest and lowest point of the Scottish martial bid for freedom.

For all that, Edward II was not his father, against whom Bruce never took a yard of ground. Edward I, in his turn, was never so bloody or brutal as his grandson, ‘the perfect king’ Edward III. From an English perspective, Edward I and his grandson are golden monuments to chivalry; the Scots, of course, have a different view.

Bannockburn, for all its impact on history, is one more battle of which we actually know very little. Numbers, actual site and progression are all best guesses and I have used numerous sources, taking the bits I think fit best as a historical novelist creating one more fiction around the event. In an age of military shock and awe, it is worth remembering that the entire of Edward II’s army, a monstrous host for the time, could have fitted into Edinburgh’s Meadowbank Stadium, capacity 16,000. Bruce’s spearmen could have crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, on a football pitch.

Bannockburn itself, on the day, is also best guess, though the idea has perpetuated that the boggy ground hampered the English heavy horse, an idea no doubt culled from all the later historians who bothered even to walk that ground in a typical wet summer.

But the summer of 1314 was not typical, just as the battle was not typical. There are hints, in other extant accounts, that May and June of 1314 had been rainlessly hot – and Bannockburn’s carse, given weeks of beating sunshine, is firm and perfect for cavalry, even if the steep-sided streams, tidal washed twice a day at one end, retain a measure of damp.

That year, 1314, marked the start of a climate change which saw long, harsh winters, arid summers and wet autumns, all of which conspired, for the next few years, to ruin harvests. The year after Bannockburn saw famine in Britain, worst of all for the people of northern England, whose wheat crops were ruined by weather and the ravages of victorious, raiding Scots. Scotland also suffered, though the despised oat, staple of the Scots diet, was a hardier plant for wet weather and the Scots were not being burned out of what little they had.

Another persistent idea concerns the Templars and the debate about their presence continues to rage on. Did Bruce give them shelter? Did he, as is claimed, become head of the Order, or form a new Order out of their ruins? Are the Masons of today the direct inheritors? Is the Scottish Rite handed down from the Templars? Did they lead an army of ‘sma’ folk’ down Coxet Hill at the crucial turning point of the battle and so bring Bruce victory?

If you want proof that a writer has gone mad, see if he has become involved with the history of Templars in Scotland. For my own part, I dismiss all of it. Bruce was not foolish enough to shackle himself to a discredited, disbanded Order simply because he had been excommunicated. The whole thrust of his life in the aftermath of Bannockburn was to undo that and gain papal approval of his kingship, so he was hardly likely to be flaunting heretic Templars in the Vatican’s face.

The Templars ended in Scotland, just as they did everywhere else, but there is no doubt that disinherited Templars were treated with more leniency in Scotland, as they were in Ireland. There is some evidence that both those countries were backwaters for Templar commanderies, a sort of retirement home for aged servitors of the Order. No one was too concerned to punish old men in a care home.

Was there a Templar treasure, taken from France to the north of Scotland? Possibly – define treasure. If the Templars thought they possessed the Grail, the Shroud of Christ and other such holy artefacts, which was their speciality after all, it may be that kings and popes spent a long time looking for the wrong fortune.

There may not, however, have been a fabled Treasury at all; most accounts of commanderies taken over reveal very little in the way of loot. If there was a Templar treasure for Bruce it would be in the weapons and harness he needed – constant war, raids and English domination is not conducive to garnering the money needed to trade or create the amount of weapons and armour, simple though it was, with which the Scots army was equipped.

So where did he get them? Probably not as I have stated, using Templar money to buy Templar weapons from the beneficiaries of the fallen Order in northern Spain, the new Order of Alcántara. But it gave an adventure for Hal and Kirkpatrick while the events leading up to Bannockburn warped and wove themselves into a bloody tapestry of Midsummer’s Day, 1314.

Incidentally, the Glaissery Castle I have Bruce handing to the ‘simple Benedictine monks’ in exchange for their help is now known as Fincharn Castle, a former MacDougall stronghold on Loch Awe and not more than a prayer away from Kilneuair Church, a sadly neglected ruin with Templar symbols on gravestones. Loch Awe is the place where the Templars from France brought their fabled treasure, if you believe the many theories.

All of it is too good for a novelist to pass up. Historians would be wiser to treat tales of the secret continuation of the Templars in Scotland with a huge saline pinch.

The salient points of the battle at Bannockburn are fairly well confirmed, source to source: the arrival of the English, weary and exhausted; their hasty and ill-conceived assault; the death of Sir Henry de Bohun at the hands of Bruce personally; the belief that the Scots would not stand for a second day and the shock of them not only still being
in situ
but actually attacking.

The victory was the culmination of Bruce’s struggle to ensure that Scotland recognized him as king. It would take fifteen more years before the rest of the world recognized it as well.

The start of this book is purportedly written by an unknown monk in February of 1329, three months before Robert the Bruce is finally acknowledged as King of Scots by the Pope – and four months before his death, ravaged and ruined by ‘an unspecified illness’.

Think of this as stumbling across a cache of hidden monkish scribblings which, when read by a flickering tallow candle, reveal fragments of lives lost both in time and legend.

If any interpretations or omissions jar, blow out the light and accept my apologies.

LIST OF CHARACTERS

ADDAF the Welshman

Typical soldier of the period, raised from the lands only recently conquered by Edward I. By this time, however, Addaf is a contract captain – leader of a band of mercenary Welsh archers, well armed, mounted and time served in the wars in France. The Welsh prowess with the bow and spear was already noted, but the true power of the former, the Crécy and Agincourt massed ranks, was a strategy still forming during the early Scottish Wars. Like all of the Welsh, Addaf’s loyalty to the English is tenuous and, as a captain of mercenaries, he is aware that some of his own men have a loyalty to him which is just as threadbare.

ARGENTAN, Sir Giles d’

Shadowy character save for his appearances, like a bright flame, beside the pale light of Edward II. He was one of the many knights present at the famous Feast of the Swans, when Edward I knighted his son and many other gilded youth in an attempt to bind them to the young prince. D’Argentan chased Bruce at the Battle of Methven and, if his horse had not foundered, history might well have seen an epic struggle: he was considered the third-best knight in Christendom, the second being Robert the Bruce and the first being Heinrich, Holy Roman Emperor. Not long after, d’Argentan is mentioned as one of the knights a furious Edward I ordered arrested for leaving his son’s army during campaign in Scotland to attend a tourney in France. In 1314 Edward II, in the middle of his acute financial constraints, found time and money to ransom d’Argentan from prison in Salonika – he had gone to Rhodes to join the Knights Hospitaller and fight the Saracens. Knights of his calibre and chivalric fame were clearly needed by Edward II, if only for the morale value – certainly d’Argentan’s heroic, if typically rash, death at Bannockburn brought him considerable renown.

BADENOCH, Lord of

Here, it is the son of the Red Comyn murdered in Greyfriars. John IV, lord of Badenoch, was a youth when his father met his death and thereafter was firmly in the English camp – his mother was Joan de Valence, sister of Aymer de Valence (see below). He was killed at Bannockburn, though the actual circumstances of it are unknown.

BALGOWNIE, Pegy

Fictional character, commander of the cog which takes Hal and Kirkpatrick to Spain on behalf of the King. Pegy is a nickname; it is the small, topmost portion of the mast used to fly a pennant from. I have made him an ex-privateer, one of the captains of the very real Red Rover, a French pirate called de Longueville who assisted Wallace back and forth to France. Also real is Jack Crabbe and when de Longueville gave up piracy in favour of a privileged life ashore, his captains made their own way. Pegy Balgownie, the fictional one, joined Bruce. Jack Crabbe continued on his own and, captured by the English in later life, became a firm adherent of Edward III for whom he used his expertise with the new-fangled ‘gonne’ to direct the ordnance in the 1333 siege of Berwick – which eventually fell.

BEAUMONT, Henry de

One of the most experienced warriors in Edward II’s retinue, he was also Earl of Buchan by his marriage to Alice Comyn, niece of the Earl married to Isabel MacDuff. The title of Countess of Buchan, clearly removed from Isabel, passed to Alice – though de Beaumont had the title ‘in parchment only’. He campaigned in Flanders, and then fought against Wallace at Falkirk, where he had a horse killed under him and was lucky to escape with his life. He returned to Scotland in 1302 and 1304, where he was at the English siege of the Scots-held Stirling Castle. His near-death experience and rescue by Sir Thomas Gray (see below) happened as described here, as did his quarrel with Gray at Bannockburn. De Beaumont accompanied Edward from the field and thereafter became an implacable supporter of the Disinherited, those English-supporting lords whose lands and titles in Scotland were confiscated by Robert the Bruce. From 1314 until his death in 1340, de Beaumont led assault after assault, both military and political, on Scotland – to no avail. He died never having achieved the Buchan lands and, when his wife, Alice Comyn, died in 1349, the title finally reverted to the Crown until bestowed on Alexander Stewart in 1382. He was known as the Wolf of Badenoch for his rapacity and cruelty.