The Scots

By the mid-1290s, other shadows had begun to fall across Edward’s imperial horizons. If his ultimate goal was the consolidation of the British Isles under English imperial authority, then he needed to look not just westwards to Ireland and Wales but northwards to the kingdom of the Scots. Here, since the late eleventh century, a dynasty of kings, as much Anglo-Norman as Scoto-Gaelic, had been established in the lowland regions with their own network of earls and barons, in many cases themselves of Anglo-Norman descent, stretching out into the still essentially native-ruled highlands and islands. The last of this Scots royal line, King Alexander III, died after a fall from his horse in March 1286 while attempting a late-night crossing of the Firth of Forth, having ignored the advice of those with whom he had feasted in Edinburgh Castle, in order to visit his young new queen. As with many a highland motoring accident, neither lust nor strong drink was ever publicly alleged as a factor contributing to this tragedy. Alexander’s son, born to a first marriage to a daughter of King Henry III of England, had died only two years before, in his early twenties. No doubt, Alexander’s anxiety to visit his new wife had something to do with his desire to replenish the royal quiver.

His untimely death ensured that his only surviving heir was a granddaughter, Margaret, known as the ‘Maid of Norway’, herself born in 1283 to a marriage between Alexander’s daughter and King Eric II of Norway. After 1286, Margaret was in theory Queen of Scotland. In practice, the Scots themselves chose a committee of guardians, who eventually, after negotiations between Scots, English and Norwegian ambassadors, agreed that Margaret should be dispatched from Norway to Scotland, leaving open the possibility that she might in due course marry Edward, the eldest son of King Edward I of England and thereby bring about a union in which the future Edward II would become de facto ruler of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In the event, Margaret died in October 1290, in the Orkney Islands (not sold by Norway to the Scots crown until the 1470s), without ever having set foot on the Scottish mainland. Edward I’s plans for an easy imperial succession were brought to nothing. The Scots themselves were left with neither king nor queen. The union of the Scots and English thrones was postponed by three hundred years.

It was into this situation that Edward I now stepped, claiming to act as arbiter in the ‘Great Cause’, to nominate a successor to the Scots crown. Two candidates emerged, both of them members of Normanno-Scots families with landed interests both in Scotland and in England: Robert de Bruce, lord of Annandale in the central lowlands, and John de Balliol, lord of Galloway. The Bruces were of Norman descent, from Brix near Cherbourg. Robert himself held extensive lands in Essex and had fought in Edward’s army during the English conquest of Wales. The Balliols were ultimately from Picardy, from Bailleul, near Abbeville. Established in northern England under the early Norman kings, like other northern French families, they had risen to greater prominence during the rule of King Stephen, himself Count of Boulogne. One of John de Balliol’s ancestors had been captured alongside King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141. Another had fought for Henry II, playing a leading role in the campaign which culminated, in 1174, with the capture of the Scots King, William I, near Alnwick.

Neither the Balliols nor the Bruces, therefore, were exactly unfamiliar to the English court. From the Great Cause, in 1292, Edward chose the claims of John de Balliol over those of Robert de Bruce of Annandale. It was a fateful choice. Balliol, favoured precisely because of his pliancy (he had already named his eldest son and heir Edward, which supplies a rather heavy-handed clue as to his loyalties), proved incapable of bringing order to Scotland. Bruce’s son, the rather more famous Robert Bruce, rebelled, almost certainly with his father’s sanction. A council of a dozen Scots barons now claimed to have wrested authority from Balliol. Early in 1296, this council negotiated a treaty with the King of France, the origins of the so-called ‘Auld Alliance’, by which the Scots and the French sought mutual support against their common enemy, the King of England.

Techniques which Edward had employed against the Welsh, by using English law and his status as overlord to undermine Welsh independence, had been applied with equal success by the French to Edward’s own subjects in Gascony who were encouraged by the French King, Philip IV, to present their cases for arbitration not before Parliament in England but before the French Parlement in Paris. War with France broke out in 1294. Edward’s response was rapid and apparently overwhelming. In a campaign lasting barely twenty-one weeks, he brought the Scots to heel, seizing the border fortress of Berwick and defeating the Scots army at Dunbar. Having suppressed the Welsh rebellion of 1294, he negotiated a series of alliances in Germany and the Low Countries to launch a two-pronged attack on the French timed for 1297. Here, however, his luck ran out.

The costs of war in Wales, Scotland and France were too high for royal finance to bear. Additional charges of 40s per sack of wool exported from England merely brought outcry against this ‘maltote’ or ‘bad tax’, not least from English landowners and wool growers who feared that the price that they received for their produce would be lowered so that wool merchants could recoup the tax. Edward’s allies in the Rhineland, like the earlier allies recruited by King John of England for his campaign of 1214, demanded extortionate subsidies, in excess of £250,000. Meanwhile, the clergy of England, spurred on by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and backed by papal letters intended to starve both the English and the French war machines of finance, resisted attempts to impose subsidies on the Church. The Riccardi bankers upon whom Edward had relied for credit were bankrupted, probably already overstretched by the costs of the Welsh campaign and owed nearly £400,000 by the crown, in theory repayable from future proceeds of the customs, in practice just as useless a security as the junk bonds of modern Wall Street.

This was in effect the first and in some ways still the most serious sovereign debt crisis in the history of England. Into this perfect storm of financial catastrophe, strode two further heralds of apocalypse. The earls of Gloucester and Hereford, long resentful of the King’s extension of authority over the Welsh Marches, refused to serve in France unless with the King in person. In other words, they would sail with the King to Flanders but they would not take up independent command of the King’s army in Gascony. By the time that this crisis was resolved and Edward was ready to sail for Flanders, his allies had already been defeated by the French. The only real hostilities left for Edward to witness took place amongst his own sailors, between the men of the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex and the fishermen of Yarmouth. Worse still, the King left England at the precise moment that events in Scotland reached climax.