A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (51 page)

The scale of the threat was made manifest in October when Edward arrived in the March to assert his authority in person. In a specially convened session of the council at Abergavenny the king imperiously insisted that the rights and dignity of his Crown were superior to any Marcher liberties. Gloucester was called before the court and found guilty, not of having waged war, but of having done so in spite of Edward’s express prohibition. Hereford too, much to his surprise and chagrin, was found guilty on similar charges of contempt (for having retained some cattle his men had seized during the course of the dispute). Both earls were bailed to appear before a parliament at Westminster in January, at which point they were sentenced to imprisonment and the loss of their Welsh estates.
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Naturally, neither of these great men was deprived of his lands or liberty for very long (Gloucester, after all, had lately become the king’s son-in-law). Within a few days both had been released from captivity, and a few months later their lordships were ordered restored. What Edward had wanted from each of them, and from the Marchers in general, was an acknowledgement of the Crown’s supremacy. That point had now been clearly conceded. The Marchers, it was allowed, could keep their liberties, but on the understanding that in the final analysis there were no areas into which the king of England’s authority did not reach. This fact was nicely reinforced in the spring of 1292 when fate finally caught up with Rhys ap Maredudd, the fugitive leader of the last Welsh rising. Taken in the Tywi Valley, Rhys was sent in chains to Edward and sentenced to be drawn and hanged. Whether in the March, or in the valleys of the interior, the English king’s mastery in Wales was now seen to be complete.
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It remained to demonstrate that the same was true in Scotland. By 1 June 1292 Edward was back in Berwick, and on the following day – even as Rhys ap Maredudd was being dragged to his death through the streets of York – the proceedings to select the new king of Scots were resumed.
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Unfortunately, the first two weeks of this second session are shrouded in mystery. One would assume, since he was officially the cause of their long adjournment, that the auditors began their deliberations by considering the business of Florence of Holland. If this was the case, however, then no verdict was reached: during this fortnight the count’s claim was neither upheld nor thrown out. The tribunal, it seems, was experiencing procedural problems – hardly surprising, given its unwieldy size and experimental nature. By the middle of June the auditors had admitted as much to Edward, who responded on 16 June by announcing that he wished to ‘hasten’ the proceedings. Accordingly, Florence was persuaded, not to abandon his claim, but to stand aside while others advanced theirs (possibly in return for a payment of £1,250, which he received from the king around this time). As far as Edward was concerned, the count had already served his purpose by prolonging English overlordship of Scotland. It was now imperative that they got to the heart of the matter and heard the arguments between John Balliol and Robert Bruce.
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These arguments hinged, as we have already noted, on the descent of both men from David, the younger brother of William the Lion, sometime king of Scots. David had continued his family’s line by fathering three daughters. Bruce was the son of the middle daughter; Balliol was the grandson of the eldest. In the view of Balliol and his supporters, the argument was therefore simple. Their candidate was descended from the senior line, and thus his was clearly the superior right.
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Not so, said Bruce, whose argument was much more complex, and yet had a certain compelling logic. In the first place, Bruce observed, primogeniture did not apply to women. If matters really were as simple as Balliol made out, and Scotland were an estate like any other, then by rights it should be split up and shared equally between all the descendants of David’s three daughters. From the outset, however, all the parties involved in the Great Cause had agreed that the kingdom should remain intact. In other words, said Bruce, kingdoms were clearly exceptional. Their descent was not governed by the customary law that applied to other estates, but by a higher law, which was written, ancient and imperial (and, he might well have added, were they not sitting in a court configured along ancient, Roman lines?). According to this law, Bruce asserted, primogeniture was irrelevant; what mattered most was nearness of degree in blood. He was the son of one of David’s daughters; Balliol was merely the grandson of another. Therefore he, Bruce, had the stronger claim.
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Thus, for the auditors, it was not simply a matter of deciding between two rival candidates; it was also a matter of deciding which species of law ought to apply, and this proved altogether too taxing. After ten days of debate the court was still deadlocked, and Edward called proceedings to halt. It was clear that, unless they took wider consultation, their deliberations could go on for ever. The question of which law ought to be used, the king determined, should be put to the lawyers at the university of Paris, whose authority on such matters was second to none. This meant, frustratingly, that there had to be a third adjournment, albeit not as long as the second, spurious interruption. On 25 June the court was disbanded and told to reconvene in three months’ time.
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It was not, therefore, until mid-October that the English and Scots reassembled in Berwick for what all hoped would be their final session. Edward (who had occupied himself in the interim by touring northern England) was by this time as anxious as anyone to wrap things up. Although his decision to suspend proceedings in the summer had apparently been conscientious, his actions in the autumn were rather more impatient and less even-handed. In terms of personalities, the king probably had no strong preference for Bruce or Balliol (even though he might have been expected to favour Bruce, as the more obviously obsequious candidate). When it came to the law, however, Edward leaned instinctively towards Balliol’s customary case. In this he was almost certainly in step with the majority on both sides of the Border. Bruce’s arguments were certainly cogent, and they did flag up the inherent contradictions in the customary claim. But were the traditions common to England and Scotland really to be set aside in favour of the ancient but alien concepts advanced by Bruce? And was the contradiction of accepting female primogeniture but rejecting partition really so insuperable? After all, just two years earlier, the English succession had been fixed, in default of male heirs, on whichever of Edward’s five daughters was eldest. There had been no question of dividing England among them.
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The English precedent was probably a crucial factor in finding a verdict for Scotland. It was awkward that, when the time came to consider the opinions of the learned clerks of Paris, they weighed in favour of Bruce’s imperial law. But only slightly awkward because, while the court had been in recess, Edward had decided to adjust its workings. In October it was not the eighty Scottish auditors who were asked to rule on which law should be used, but the English king’s council. By 5 November the latter had reached their decision, and the following day the auditors concurred: customary law should apply. Bruce’s appeal for imperial law was thrown out.
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This did not make Balliol the winner by default, for there was still the matter of hearing the claims of the other, lesser candidates. But it did make Bruce the loser, and prompted the old man to try a series of drastic last-minute expedients. On 10 November, for example, Count Florence of Holland put forward his claim for a second time, only now with Bruce as his backer. During the summer, at the moment when Florence had been induced to stand aside, the two men had struck an extraordinary agreement, whereby whichever of them became king would compensate the other with a third of the kingdom. The count’s candidacy therefore held for Bruce the prospect of a considerable compensation prize (or perhaps even the throne, if he could buy his partner out). When Florence went on to present his case, however, it was an embarrassing mess. Despite his ten-month adjournment, the count was still unable to produce the alleged documents on which his claim depended. They had, he now claimed, been stolen. But if the court would permit him an inquest …
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Seeing Florence flounder, Bruce tried one last, desperate roll of the dice. From the outset he had reasoned that, if the kingdom was indivisible, customary law should not apply. Now, since that reasoning had got him nowhere, he stood the argument on its head. If customary law
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apply, it surely followed that the kingdom should be divided. On 14 November both Bruce and John de Hastings (a claimant descended from the youngest of David’s three daughters) applied in this way for a third share of the kingdom. The following day they received their final answer. The kingdom was not partible. There would be no three-way split. And there would be no further argument.
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Edward desired to draw matters to a close. He had expected that the business of selecting Scotland’s new king would be concluded during the summer, yet here he was, still north of the Border, watching as the winter set in. In the final days of the proceedings, his council not only summarily rejected the plea for divisibility; they also dealt swiftly with the lesser claimants, including Florence of Holland. Edward had no further use for the count’s far-fetched story that had earlier enabled him to prolong his overlordship. Now the king wanted resolution, not a pantomime that would run and run. Bruce had had his day in court and lost. Balliol was the popular favourite, whose claim was supported by the law that Edward, the English and the great majority of Scots felt was the most natural. On 17 November judgement was pronounced in Balliol’s favour. Two days later, Edward gave orders that the kingdom and its castles should be handed over.
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For the Scots, the most important matter now became the enthronement of their new king. As luck would have it, the Great Cause had concluded with just enough time for everyone to get to Scone Abbey before the end of the month. There, in the abbey churchyard, Balliol was seated on the sacred stone and crowned as King John I. The ceremony took place on 30 November, the feast of St Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint and protector.

Edward was not present to witness it. To his mind, kings of Scotland should attend the creation of kings of England, but not vice versa. It was sufficient for English interests that two royal henchmen oversaw Balliol’s inauguration. For Edward, the installation of a new king of Scots was only a secondary concern, just as the selection process had been. His declared priority over the past two years had been ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scotland to his authority’: an attributed declaration, admittedly, but one entirely borne out by his bullying behaviour at Norham and the preposterously long adjournment he had ordered at Berwick. English domination was the major project, and it had yet to be completed. As far as Edward was concerned, the crucial ceremony was still to come.

Before leaving for Scone, Balliol had sworn fealty to the English king, and done so in the most explicit terms. Not only were his words spoken in England (Edward had returned to Norham especially in order to hear them); they also applied unambiguously to the kingdom of Scotland. To complete the process, therefore, it remained to receive Balliol’s homage, and this was duly obtained at Christmas. It was at Newcastle, on 26 December, that the newly made king of Scots knelt before Edward and became his man.

For those Scots who had taken a stand against English assertions of overlordship, this was a grave disappointment, but not unexpected. Balliol, like all the other candidates, had entered the race admitting that the king of England was his overlord. Now he had emerged as the winner, the new Scottish king was simply being made to reiterate his previously stated position.

Far more startling to the Scots, though, was the subsequent behaviour of Edward. In the short interval between Balliol’s fealty at Norham and his homage at Newcastle there had been a small but alarming development. On 7 December a burgess of Berwick, dissatisfied with several judgements given against him during the time of the Guardians, had appealed to the English king as his superior lord; Edward, in response, had proceeded to review the case at Newcastle and, on 22 December, had overturned one of the original verdicts.

To the Scots at Newcastle this constituted a clear breach by the English king of his earlier promises. Had he not assured them, in June the previous year, that their laws and customs would be maintained? And had he not, more to the point, accepted in 1290 that Scotland should remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’?

Edward’s answer was given in two parts, first by proxy, then in person. On 30 December an English royal justice informed the Scots that any promises that had been made before Balliol’s enthronement had been only ‘for the time being’: they were no longer applicable in the present. This was affirmed the following day, when Edward addressed his critics directly. In no uncertain terms, the king declared that he would not be bound by his earlier words. As superior lord of Scotland, he would hear appeals wherever and whenever he wanted; if necessary, he would summon even the king of Scotland himself to appear before him in England. Lest there should be any doubt on these matters, Balliol was obliged in the days that followed to seal a series of written instruments, acquitting his overlord of any earlier promises he might have made, and specifically those resonant assurances of independence made in 1290.
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