Bruce and the king

On the anniversary of the death of Robert de Bruce, King of Scots, in 1329, I thought it would be interesting to look at his relationship with Edward I of England.

What was Bruce’s attitude towards the would-be conqueror of Scotland? Bruce’s private opinion is a mystery, of course, but circumstances dictated his behaviour. There were many other factors at work. Bruce was not too proud - or too patriotic either - to make use of the English king when it suited him. Edward in turn appreciated Bruce’s value as an ally, and the shock of the latter’s final revolt may well have hastened the old king’s death.

To begin with, the Bruce faction were thoroughly on board with Edward’s Scottish project. They rode with the king when he invaded Scotland in 1296, which led to accusations of treachery from Scottish writers. As Walter Bower later put it:

"All the supporters of Bruce’s party were generally considered traitors to the king and kingdom…”

Just like anyone else, the Bruces were out for themselves. They supported Edward in the hope that he would depose John Balliol and put a Bruce on the Scottish throne: Bruce’s father, the sixth earl of Carrick. Balliol was duly dethroned and sent off to captivity in England, but Bruce senior’s tentative reminder met with a stern brush-off from the king:

“Have we nothing else to do than win kingdoms for you?”

Edward had no reason to fear the earl: he had always obeyed the king, and served him faithfully in Wales and Ireland. Bruce junior was made of sterner stuff, even if he took a while to show it. When Andrew Moray and William Wallace raised their standard in 1297, Bruce and other nobles threw in their lot with the ‘rebels’. In July they promptly threw in the towel before Edward’s captains, only to be shown up by Moray and Wallace’s stunning victory at Stirling Bridge in September.

The news of Stirling Bridge inspired Bruce to go back into revolt. When Edward came north again in 1298 - ‘a great black storm of rage’- as one writer put it - Bruce remained a Scottish loyalist. After his victory at Falkirk, Edward turned west and rushed over to Ayr to try and catch Bruce in his stronghold. He found his quarry long gone, vanished into the hills, and the town and castle in flames.

Bruce’s eyes were firmly fixed on the empty throne. He knew that Wallace would not survive as Guardian much longer, and that the rival Comyn faction was planning to take over. Bruce could not allow that to happen, but ended up sharing power with his chief rival, John ‘the red’ Comyn of Badenoch. This uneasy alliance ended in a fight, in which Comyn is said to have seized Bruce warmly by the throat. More bad news arrived from France, where John Balliol was now in papal custody. For a few awful months it looked as though Balliol might return to Scotland at the head of a French army.

This was an equally horrifying prospect for Edward, which meant he and Bruce now had shared interests. In early 1302 Bruce turned himself in at Lochmaben and surrendered to the king’s keeper of Galloway, John de St John. For the next four years he was Edward’s man, at least on the surface. We can only speculate, but it would seem that Bruce meant to use Edward to crush the opposition in Scotland, before breaking loose to claim the throne. Therefore his aim was to achieve a free and independent Scotland, but only with himself as king.

This, at any rate, is what happened. In 1304, when Edward launched his final all-out effort at conquest, Bruce played a key role. He was with the Irish when they landed on the western seaboard, and supplied the king with artillery for the siege of Stirling. Edward seems to have regarded Bruce as his best boy at this point, and sent him a letter applauding his efforts:

“For if you complete that there which you have begun, we shall hold the war ended by your deed, and all the land of Scotland gained. So we pray you again, as much as we can, that whereas the robe is well made, you will be pleased to make the hood.”

Contemporary MS illustration of Edward I

Bruce’s long-term goal was in sight. Edward was an old man in poor health, albeit with an irritating tendency to rally. Even as English war-machines pounded the walls of Stirling, Bruce was arranging his future. On 11 June he met secretly with the Bishop of St Andrews at the abbey of Cambuskenneth, where they finalised a treaty of mutual aid. The treaty did not state as much, but the implication is that Scotland’s most senior churchman had agreed to support Bruce’s bid for the throne.

Yet the time was not ripe. Edward was not ready to keel over just yet, and in February 1305 Bruce attended parliament at Westminster to advise on the Ordinance for Scotland’s new government. This was a surprisingly conciliatory effort on Edward’s part to include the Scottish magnates in his administration: Bruce, now thirty years old and in the prime of life, was rewarded with the revenues of the earldom of Mar.

No amount of gifts and compromise would conceal the hard fact that Edward was once again overlord - ‘Lord Paramount’ - of Scotland, and that he called the shots. Bruce bided his time, perhaps encouraged by the increasing frailty of England’s king. Of more concern was the growing power and influence of the Comyns in Scotland. Since he gave up the guardianship, the Comyns had come to dominate affairs north of the border, which presented Bruce with another problem. Edward had defeated John Comyn, or at least persuaded him to submit, but (most annoyingly) allowed the man to live. Indeed, the Comyns had flourished since: most of the Scottish delegates to London, chosen at Perth or Scone in May 1305, were of their faction.

This was no good at all. Bruce had to change tack, and the result was the famous meeting at a church in Dumfries on 10 February 1306. Here, John Comyn and his uncle were done to death by Bruce and his followers in an almost certainly pre-meditated double homicide. After the bloody deed was done, Bruce went into open revolt.

The news of the crime, when it reached Edward, was almost too shocking to believe. At first Edward had no idea who was responsible. When he found out, according to John Barbour, the king temporarily lost his reason:

“And when King Edward was told how the Bruce, who was so bold, had ended the life of the Comyn, and then had made himself King, he nearly went out of his mind.”

The rest is well-known. Edward spent the remaining months of his life attempting to catch ‘King Hobbe’ (as he termed Bruce) from a sickbed. At first Bruce suffered a string of defeats, but emerged from hiding in the spring of 1307 to harry Edward’s forces. The dying king executed every male Bruce he could lay his hands on, and shut up the women in solitary confinement, but his chief quarry always remained beyond reach. In the end Edward was striking at a mirror of himself:

“A crowned warrior, careless of men’s lives, who meant to have his way at any price.”

The mirror finally crack’d for Edward on 7 July 1307, at a bleak outpost in the Cumbrian marshes. King Hobbe still had a long war ahead of him, with no guarantee of success, but the first hurdle was overcome.

 

The magic foot of Saint Simon

In late 1266, while Henry III was struggling to put down rebels in East Anglia, a fresh revolt blew up in distant Northumbria. Unable to go himself, Henry sent his heir the Lord Edward to deal with the rising.

Alnwick Castle

The ringleader was John de Vescy, lord of Alnwick. Vescy had been one of Simon de Montfort’s phalanx of bachelor knights, who followed him about like a latter-day Praetorian Guard. At the bloodbath of Evesham in 1265, where Montfort was hacked to pieces, Vescy managed to escape with one of his beloved master’s severed feet. He returned to his northern fastness and donated the foot to a local priory. The grisly object was placed inside a silver shoe, of all things, and worshipped as a relic with magic healing properties. It was noted that this ‘foot of incorruption’ exhibited a wound, either made by a hatchet or a sword.

Vescy entered into a pact with certain other northern barons. According to the chronicler Thomas Wykes, they swore that each would adhere to the other and thus, being reliant on mutual aid, restore their lands seized by the king. In reality Vescy’s followers may have not had much choice in the matter. It is possible to trace at least two of them, Henry de Bilton and William de Lisle, both tenants on the Vescy estates. As such they were obliged to obey their lord and offer him ‘mutual aid’, whether or not they wanted to.

He may have recruited some allies from north of the border. The Meaux Chronicler in East Yorkshire mentions Scots among the Alnwick garrison. This seems inexplicable, as England and Scotland were not at war at this time. Perhaps Vescy hired a few wandering Scottish mercenaries; alternatively, the Yorkshire-based chronicler was unable to tell the difference between Northumbrians and Scotsmen!

Edward raced north to contain the revolt. A true son of the Devil’s Brood, he marched with the same breathless speed as Henry FitzEmpress or the Lionheart: one of his followers, Richard Clifford, recalled in later years the prince’s army marching ‘day and night continuously with horses and arms’. On the way he raised the militia of the northern counties, a ‘large multitude of fighters’, and then pressed on towards Alnwick.

The arms of John de Vescy

Vescy chose to retreat inside his stronghold. The usual tactic was to throw a garrison inside a castle and remain outside with a flying column to try and break the siege lines, but Vescy found himself bottled up inside four walls. Perhaps Edward moved too quickly for him. Few details survive of the siege that followed, except for the curious tale of William Douglas and Gilbert Umfraville, Earl of Angus.

While the siege was in progress, Edward was approached by Angus. The earl accused Sir William Douglas, known as Longleg for his height, of being a traitor. Angus asked Edward to confiscate Douglas’s manor at Fawdon and give it to him: it just so happened that Douglas was one of the earl’s tenants.

Edward agreed, provided Douglas was convicted by a jury. At the trial, held at Boulton in Northumberland, the accused was cleared of all charges. The enraged earl sent his retainers to seize Douglas’s goods at Fawdon. When the court ordered him to give them back, Angus went a step further. He and his lieutenant, John Hirlawe, raised a hundred riders of Redesdale, for centuries a notorious den of thieves, and set them on Douglas and his family. William and his wife and children were dragged about from place to place, tortured with fire, and his son William junior sliced through the neck with a sword. He survived and was known afterwards, appropriately enough, as William le Hardi (the Hardy).

A Border Reiver in silhouette

A second trial was held in October, where Angus denied all the above. He seemed in remarkably good humour, and asked the jurors when all of this was supposed to have taken place. When they gave him a date - 19 July - he smiled and pointed out ‘there were many days in a week’. The jurors lost their bottle and acquitted Angus of his misdeeds. Poor old Douglas was found guilty of false accusation and sentenced to a brief term in prison.

None of this was any help to John de Vescy. In the summer of 1267 he surrendered to Edward, who pardoned the lord of Alnwick and his followers. How the castle fell is something of a mystery. John Fordun, writing decades later, states that Edward took it by stealth. Perhaps he had a spy among the garrison, as he did in Hampshire and other rebel headquarters. The northerners expected to be punished, and the prince’s mercy took them by surprise. Edward took the sting out of the revolt by permitting the rebels to recover their lands, though for a price. John de Vescy later had to find 3700 marks, borrowed from an Italian creditor, to redeem his lordship.

This brief northern revolt is a footnote in the story of the Montfortian wars, but contains much of interest. Students of the Border Reivers may be intrigued to find the lancers of Redesdale, a notorious ‘riding surname’ of the Tudor era, very much alive and kicking several hundred years earlier. It seems you can’t keep good men down, or bad ones either.

 

 

Dastardly invasions

Part of an idea I have for a (nonfiction) book, showing how wars are not isolated events.

As every fule nose, in March-April 1296 the armies of Edward I overran the lowlands of Scotland. What is sometimes not appreciated is that this was part of a much wider conflict, and that Edward’s dastardly invasion took place at the same time as an equally dastardly French invasion of Plantagenet Gascony. If we’re talking moralism and the right to autonomy, then a medieval Gascon had just as much right to these things as a medieval Scot. But might makes right…

In April 1296 Robert II of Artois was appointed the French lieutenant in Gascony and the duchy of Aquitaine. He was given extensive powers by Philip le Bel to act ‘as if the king were personally present’. He was to issue pardons, negotiate alliances and truces, conclude ‘paréages’ (a form of land transaction), inspect garrisons and fortresses, instigate inquiries into the crimes of royal officials and confer knighthood. Robert was also to take homages, fealties and oaths from all those living in the lands ‘which the king of England was wont to hold within our kingdom’. Edward had been treated by Philip in exactly the same way as Edward treated John Balliol, all part of the vicious merry-go-round of medieval politics.

Robert was effectively appointed as Philip’s viceroy in Gascony, a territory which the French had laid claim to via perfectly illegal means: this was an even more naked power grab than the invasion of Scotland, but who cared so long as you got away with it? At the start of April, just a day or two after the sack of Berwick in Scotland, Robert took an army of Artesian and other northern French troops into Gascony. On the 28, the same day as Edward arrived at Dunbar, he had reached Angouleme. Here he summoned nobles of the surrounding region for two months’ service in the host, before moving on to Périgord.

King Caupens

Yesterday I forgot to post on the anniversary of the Battle of Roslin in 1303, so here’s another tidbit from the Wars of Independence.

In the spring of 1304, on his way to reduce the last patriot garrison at Stirling, Edward I was met at Findo Gask in Strathearn by a band of Scottish women. They came not to hurl jibes at the foul tyrant but serenade him. The entry for their payment, by the king’s gift, translates:

“To the seven women who met the king on the road between Gask and Uggelville, and who sang in his presence as they were accustomed to do in the time of Lord Alexander, late King of Scotland, this is as sent as the king’s own gift.”

Possibly the meeting was spontaneous, though a nasty suspicious person like me might see it as a clever bit of PR, cooked up by Edward’s advisers to project his takeover of Scotland as a natural progression from the days of Alexander III. There was, of course, no mention of John Balliol.

Edward was certainly fond of Scottish music, and employed two prominent Scottish musicians at his court. One was James de Cowpen, who first performed for the king at the wedding of his daughter, Princess Joan, to Gilbert de Clare in 1290. James was described as ‘King Caupenny of Scotia, who came to Westminster to the feast of the aforesaid nuptials’. He was paid the considerable sum of 50 shillings, by the king’s gift, for performing as ‘Rex Haraldorum’ or King of Heralds.

These heralds were officials at the court, responsible for organising jousts and tournaments and drawing up lists of knights for muster. They were also employed as messengers and spies. James de Cowpen appeared again at Edward’s court in 1296, after the deposition of John Balliol, and appears frequently in the accounts after that date. He received many gifts of favour from the king, including jewellery and a horse, and his name appears as Jakketus de Scotia, Monsire Capenny, Capigny, Capainy, Capini, Capin and Copyn.

In the last reference, dated 1307, he is “Roy de Copiny, harpour’. In 1306 James travelled north to Lanercost, where he played to the king to soothe the pain of Edward’s final illness. His last payment is dated 13 June 1307, at Carlisle, after which he vanishes. One of his descendants - or a copycat - played for James IV in 1503 under the name ‘Johne de Cowpanis’.

The second musician was Master Elyas, once the personal harper of Alexander III. Edward first heard Elyas play at Westminster in 1278 and awarded him 60 shillings. Elyas transferred his services to Edward after the death of Alexander in 1286, and was afterwards known as the King’s Harper or Master Elyas le Harpur. In 1296 he was granted lands in Perth and Fife, and was probably one of the five Scottish harpers who played for Edward in 1303 at Sandford near Largo Bay in Fife.

Independence come early

In the summer of 1244, while Prince Dafydd raised war in Wales, Henry III marched north to confront Alexander II of Scotland. Henry had already given orders to mobilise at Newcastle in preparation for a massive invasion, including the construction of siege engines and 30,000 crossbow bolts. If the invasion had gone ahead, the Wars of Independence might have come early with Longshanks (born in 1239) barely astride his first pony.

The cause of the trouble was apparently a statement by Alexander, who declared he held nothing of his realm from the King of England. There was also a hefty dollop of intrigue, with a band of Scottish exiles at Henry’s court accusing the King of Scots of plotting an alliance with France. As with Henry’s Welsh campaigns in this decade, the situation eerily foreshadowed the later conflicts under Edward I.

The details are confusing. Henry’s specific allegation against the Scots was that Walter Comyn and other Scottish nobles had fortified two castles in Galway and Lothian, to the prejudice of the king of England, and contrary to the charters of their ancestors. Comyn had also entered into a secret alliance with the French, and received outlaws and fugitives from England. He did this, Henry alleged, to draw men away from the king’s allegiance.

Alexander moved first and invaded England. According to Matthew Paris, he pitched camp near Newcastle with an army of a thousand mounted knights and a hundred thousand footsoldiers; an impossible figure, though Alexander had obviously come fully loaded. Henry advanced to confront him with five thousand knights, which again sounds impossibly large: Edward I could only raise two thousand knights for the Falkirk campaign in 1298, when he raised the largest army seen in the British Isles since 1066.

Battle was avoided thanks to the efforts of Walter Gray and Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother, who brokered peace between the two armies. Alexander promised not to enter into any foreign alliance against Henry unless he was ‘unjustly oppressed’ by him.

In the charter or peace agreement, Alexander referred to Henry as his liege lord. Possibly that only applied to Alexander’s lands in England, though the text doesn’t say as much. The pope was then asked to confirm the agreement, and to restrain and censure Alexander and his heirs if they ever deviated from it.

Fate is inexorable

Maurice Powicke on the last years of Edward I of England:

“His good fortune, once praised by the poets of the Midi, deserted him. He was dogged by mischance: dark forces which no judgements in parliaments, no rapid campaigns followed by conciliatory measures could overcome, gradually beset him. At one time he was driven to fall back on the law of necessity, at another to turn to the pope for sworn absolution from his own undertakings. He had no comprehension of what we call nationalism, but thought in terms of law and rights and obligation to maintain the ‘state’ of crown and realm. The French, in his view, had tricked him, the Scottish lords and prelates betrayed him, the archbishop and earls deserted him. His mood hardened. He coped with the English recalcitrants, came to terms with Philip the Fair, crushed William Wallace, and drove Archbishop Winchelsey into exile, but in Robert Bruce, whose grandfather had fought on his side at Lewes, he found a new kind of enemy. He faced him and his followers, men and women alike, in a spirit of savage and ruthless exaltation”.

Or, to quote Uhtred of Bebbanburg - Wyrd bið ful āræd (Fate is inexorable). Another historian described Bruce as Edward’s mirror image, so in the end the king struck at a version of himself: “A crowned warrior, careless of men’s lives, who meant to have his way at any price”.

A judgement of blood

In 1305, as most of us are aware, William Wallace was executed in London. That year witnessed another ‘state trial’, just as notorious at the time in England, though all but forgotten now.

The trial concerned Nicholas Segrave, younger brother of the John Segrave who was captured at the battle of Roslin and later presided over the sentencing of Wallace. In 1304, when the English army was in Scoland, Segrave quarrelled with another knight, John Cromwell, and challenged him to trial by combat.

Segrave knew the king would forbid the duel, and so asked Cromwell to accompany him to the French court in Paris, where trials by combat were permitted. Cromwell’s response is unknown, but Segrave deserted the army and fled south. He was arrested at Dover while trying to find a ship to carry him to France. While he awaited trial at Westminster, Segrave was imprisoned at Dover Castle. King Edward caustically ordered the constable of Dover to allow Segrave to exercise in the castle grounds, since “we well know that knight has no little talent for escape”.

Segrave was brought to trial in February 1305. He was charged with deserting the army in time of war, thus exposing the king to danger from his enemies. He was also charged with adjourning his case to the French court, thus subjecting the king and realm to the authority of a foreign power. After three days of deliberation, the earls and barons of England gave judgement that Segrave was guilty of treason, and therefore the penalty was death. They also gratuitously informed the king that he might show mercy, if he chose. At this Edward snapped:

“Fools - of course I can, but I will give no more mercy, just for your sake, than I would show a dog!”

When his feathers had settled down a bit, Edward declared he preferred the life to the death of one who had submitted to his will. Therefore he reversed the judgement of blood and decreed that Segrave should be pardoned and allowed to go free. In exchange the prisoner would find seven men to act as sureties for his future good behaviour. These sureties were called ‘manucaptors’, and they undertook to deliver Segrave to prison if he offended again.

The acquittal of Segrave stands in contrast to the judgement on Wallace, just a few months later. Edward’s attitude was not coloured by one being an Englishman and the other a Scot: the king did not comprehend nationalism and regarded the two peoples as being one and the same, certainly at aristocratic level. Possibly Segrave was pardoned because he submitted himself to the king’s grace and will, which Wallace refused to do.