A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (49 page)

This, then, was how Edward I understood the relationship between England and Scotland. In Scotland, however, little boys were told a very different story. When Alexander III was installed as king of Scots in 1249, a Highland historian appeared before him and read out, in Gaelic, a list of Scottish kings. Like the royal pedigrees recited in England, immeasurably elongated and enhanced by the fantasies of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Highlander’s list was a genuine genealogy of recent rulers, extended into the remotest past by invention. The eight-year-old Alexander was reminded that his dynasty began with Scota, a warrior princess, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, who had wrested northern Britain from the heirs of Brutus and renamed it in her own honour.
³⁶

As well as highlighting the different histories that the English and Scots told themselves in the thirteenth century, Alexander’s inauguration also reveals another source of contention on the issue of overlordship. The king-making ceremony of 1249 took place, as it had always done, at Scone Abbey. A hefty stone of ancient provenance, used for such occasions since time immemorial, was carried out of the abbey church and into the churchyard, where it was probably placed in the base of an oaken chair. On this the young Alexander would have been seated for his transformation into a king. He was acclaimed, mantled and invested with the Scottish regalia, which included a sword, sceptre and a crown. Despite the use of this last item, however, and in spite of the best efforts of the Scots, this was not quite a coronation. Alexander was not anointed by anyone, nor was his crown blessed by any of those churchmen present. Since the start of the thirteenth century, Scottish kings had been applying to the pope for permission to sacralise their ceremony at Scone. Every time, though, they were rebuffed, thanks to English intervention. Their friends south of the Border might acknowledge that the rulers of Scotland were kings, but they firmly maintained that there was only one true Crown in Britain – the one worn by the king of England.
³⁷

All of this makes it sound as if the English and the Scots, with their differing histories, asserting superiority on the one hand and independence on the other, were bound to fall out. In fact, Edward I remained on quite cordial terms with Alexander III for the rest of the latter’s life. Henry III may not have succeeded in exacting homage from the Scottish king in 1251, but that hardly mattered. Alexander had witnessed the awesome power and majesty of the English court at first hand, and realised from a young age that he was in no position to challenge it. The result of the royal wedding in 1251 was not hostility but increasingly warm and friendly relations. Five years later, following his own marriage to Eleanor and his return from Gascony, Edward took the trouble to visit Scotland to see his sister and brother-in-law; a little later still, at the end of that same summer, Alexander and Margaret journeyed south to be entertained at the English court. In 1260 they came south again, this time for the birth of Margaret’s first child. And when, in the summer of 1268, Edward paid another brief visit to Scotland, he was reportedly delighted with his sister’s children. The evident affection between the English and Scots now that they were part of one extended royal family meant greater political co-operation, not increased friction. Alexander sent a force of Scots to fight for Edward at Evesham (too late to be of any use, but surely appreciated as a gesture) and also permitted Scottish nobles – Robert Bruce, for example, and the older brothers of John Balliol – to join Edward’s crusade.
³⁸

Such amicable relations meant that for a long time the issue of overlordship could be avoided. Those occasions that might in other circumstances be interpreted legalistically, as one king rendering service to another, could be cast simply in terms of friendship. When Edward returned from his crusade and was crowned at Westminster, nothing could have been more natural than for his sister and brother-in-law to take precedence among the distinguished guests. Edward himself may have attempted to exploit the situation: in a letter written a few weeks beforehand he alluded to ‘the service’ owed by the Scottish king, perhaps anticipating that Alexander would agree to carry a sword during the coronation procession, just as Auguselus had done for Arthur. Sadly, we have no way of knowing whether or not Alexander obliged, though it seems most unlikely: at this point the Scottish king also seems to have been able to avoid doing homage to Edward.
³⁹

What undoubtedly refocused everyone’s attention on the overlordship question was the behaviour and subsequent punishment of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The Welsh prince, having pointedly failed to attend Edward’s coronation and then withheld his homage, was torn down to size in 1277 by an angry Edward at the head of devastating armies. When, the following year, a much diminished and chastened Llywelyn was permitted to marry his fiancée (in England, before the English king, on the feast-day of England’s premier royal saint), Alexander, now a widower, was again among the guests. Before crossing the Border he had insisted on an escort of English earls and bishops to emphasise his importance and his independence. But the knowledge of what had happened to the prince of Wales must have impinged heavily on the king of Scotland’s consciousness, for Alexander had come south at Edward’s bidding in order to perform his homage.
⁴⁰

This was not necessarily the major concession it might sound. From the mid-twelfth century the kings of Scotland had held certain lands in England (Tynedale and Penrith). Since Alexander held these estates from Edward, it was entirely right and proper that he should formally acknowledge the fact. The homage he owed, in other words, was personal and private, and should not have affected his status as king of Scots. After all, Edward I, as duke of Gascony, had himself done homage on two occasions to consecutive kings of France, with no prejudice to his position as king of England.

Edward, however, was determined on this occasion to make more of it. When Alexander offered to do his homage soon after the wedding at Worcester, his brother-in-law demurred. It would be better, Edward explained, if the act took place before his full council in Westminster in a fortnight’s time. The English king was clearly angling for a major concession and wanted to be sure that everyone saw him land his catch. Anxious not to offend, Alexander and his advisers agreed, but once again stressed that they were only condescending as a favour. The ceremony finally took place on 28 October in the king’s chamber at Westminster, as Edward had planned, but accounts of what happened differ depending on whether they are Scottish or English. What is clear is that, as in a game of poker, everyone kept their cards concealed until the last possible moment. When Alexander came to speak his lines, he did the limited, personal homage that was appropriate for his English estates. Only then did the English show their hand, when the bishop of Norwich interjected that the Scottish king should also do homage to Edward for Scotland. According to the Scottish source, this provoked Alexander to respond with a robust rejoinder. ‘Nobody but God has the right to homage for my kingdom of Scotland,’ he declared, ‘and I hold it of nobody but God himself!’
⁴¹

At the time of Alexander’s death, therefore, overlordship was an old controversy, but still a live one. It would remain so until the English agreed to drop their pretensions or until the Scots agreed to accept them. Consecutive kings of Scotland had proved staunch in defence of their independence. But now the Scots had no king, only a succession crisis that they needed English help to resolve. Edward I saw a great opportunity.

In the spring of 1291 the Scots were given to understand that the king of England was ready to offer them the friendly and neighbourly advice that he had allegedly promised the previous autumn. We do not know precisely what messages had been exchanged in the interim. But by May that year, probably at Edward’s suggestion, the Guardians and many other leading Scots had assembled in Berwick. This was an obvious location for the transaction of Anglo-Scottish business. Not only was it the largest and richest of Scotland’s royal burghs; it was also the closest to England, for it sits by the coast on the north shore of the River Tweed, fixed since 1237 as the eastern part of the Border. As for Edward himself, the Scots knew that he was headed for Norham, where an English parliament had evidently been summoned for 6 May. Situated some five miles upstream from Berwick on the Tweed’s opposite bank, Norham was a much smaller settlement, but had the outstanding attraction of a magnificent stone castle, established in the twelfth century by the bishops of Durham. It was the northernmost point at which the king and his court could be accommodated in any comfort prior to leaving England.
⁴²

Leaving England, however, was not part of Edward’s plan. By 9 May the Scots gathered in Berwick had received the news that the king expected them to come to him. This was an unsettling invitation: they had assumed that the business of choosing between John Balliol and Robert Bruce, being a Scottish matter, would be transacted in Scotland. If it were done in England, there was the risk that, now or later, this might be interpreted as a sign of Scottish submission. Against such anxieties, though, the Scots did have Edward’s promise from the previous year that Scotland would remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’, and their confidence was further bolstered by the letters they secured from Edward on 10 May, promising that no prejudice should arise from their actions. Thus reassured, a delegation of Scotsmen crossed the Tweed to Norham later that same day.
⁴³

It was, in fact, far worse than they had feared. Once inside the castle at Norham, the Scottish delegates were treated to an introductory speech by Roger Brabazon, an English royal justice. After a lot of flowery rhetoric about the beauty of peace and so on, they were told that Edward had come north to do right to
anybody
who had a claim to the Scottish throne. This implied that the king envisaged other candidates besides Bruce and Balliol, which would, in turn, alter the nature of his intervention. With more than two claimants, a straightforward arbitration of the kind anticipated by the Scots would become impossible. Edward was therefore proposing an alternative arrangement, namely that he should act, not as arbiter, but as judge. This was a role that he naturally felt entitled to assume, given the fact that he was Scotland’s rightful overlord.

The Scots were stupefied. It was surprising enough to discover that there were apparently other claimants besides Bruce and Balliol, but the corollary was outrageous. The king of England their overlord? They protested, with pardonable exaggeration, that they had never heard of such a novelty.
⁴⁴

Edward had expected such a reaction – he had, after all, received a similar response from his late brother-in-law in 1278. Accordingly, he had taken the trouble on this occasion to prepare his ground thoroughly in advance. Two months earlier, a search of the archives had been ordered – and not just the royal ones. In abbeys and priories all over England, monks had been made to ferret through their chronicles and muniments in an effort to build the king’s case. Given that the trawl was so extensive, the haul was disappointing (inevitably, of course, given that the superiority that Edward took for granted was built on exceedingly weak, and for the most part fantastical, foundations). Nevertheless, in the days before the Scots had crossed to Norham, a crowd of clerics had told the king what he wanted to hear: his was indeed the superior right. This enabled Edward to present the Scots with a two-fold challenge. If they would not concede his overlordship as a matter of course, he said, they should disprove the facts set out in his new dossier. Or, as an alternative to both these options, they could decide the matter by force.

It was Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow and Guardian, who recovered himself sufficiently to respond on behalf of the startled Scots. In the first place, he said, it did not matter what they, as temporary custodians, might or might not concede: only a king of Scotland could answer such a momentous demand. Secondly, the bishop took Edward to task over his reasoning:
they
were not obliged to prove him
wrong
; rather
he
should prove himself
right
. Thirdly, and more caustically, Wishart reminded the English king that he was supposed to be a crusader, and observed that a threat to unleash war against a defenceless people did him no credit. At this last Edward was predictably enraged, and prompted to issue a new threat. He would indeed lead a crusading army, he declared – against the Scots!
⁴⁵

Amid these acrimonious scenes, the meeting at Norham broke up, with nothing agreed between the two sides beyond the need for a three-week adjournment. For the Scots, obviously, it had been a total disaster: they had come to the Border expecting the happy resolution of their problems by a friend, only to be confronted with ultimatums and undisguised belligerence.

Yet for Edward, too, the encounter had been highly unsatisfactory, and had turned out quite contrary to expectation. The king, to be sure, had anticipated some opposition to his demands – hence the massive effort to prove himself right by documentary means. But the scale and fervour of Scottish resistance had left him reeling, with no response other than angry threats of force. And force, as the bishop of Glasgow had discerned, was an inappropriate answer in present circumstances.