A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (61 page)

Thus, as the tumultuous year 1297 drew to a close, the atmosphere everywhere was one of anxious anticipation. The earls and barons of England readied themselves to ride north, and the Scots steeled themselves for the oncoming assault. In Wales large numbers of men were recruited to provide the English with the necessary infantry, and in Flanders their king waited to see whether the essential diplomatic breakthrough could be achieved.
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For Edward, the anxiety ended on 28 January 1298, when an agreement with France was finally reached. Under its terms, both sides agreed to suspend hostilities for a further two years, and to put their quarrel over Gascony to the judgement of the pope. If this was not the permanent peace that the English king had hoped for, it was nevertheless about as good a deal as he could reasonably expect in the circumstances. His legal and moral case for retaining the duchy was likely to be far more persuasive than the distinctly limited military pressure he had been struggling to apply for the past three-and-a-half years. In the immediate term, moreover, the new truce meant that he could stand down his forces in Flanders and return home: a week after it was sealed, the king ordered a hundred ships to come and carry him back to England.
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A ceasefire with France also meant a rethink for Scotland. As soon as the truce was in place, Edward sent letters postponing the planned invasion until his return. On the face of it this was a terrible waste of resources: by the time the royal messengers arrived, the English army, 16,000 men strong, had already relieved Roxburgh and Berwick, and was just about to advance into the Scottish interior. From the king’s point of view, however, it was more important that he should lead the assault in person. An under-resourced or ill-commanded effort (and, though Edward can hardly have known it, the earls’ army was already facing shortages) ran the risk of another failure and that was a completely unconscionable prospect. By the same token, the thought of victory being achieved in his absence was not an altogether happy one either. The diminished army now paused on the Border was composed in large part of men who had opposed him the previous year, and he did not wish to hand these individuals any further political advantage. When Edward returned from Flanders – he landed at Sandwich on 14 March 1298 – it was with a determination to reassert his authority not only in Scotland, but in England as well.
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But Scotland had to come first, which meant that for the time being the king had to continue to appease his English critics. Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun were equally determined to defend the guarantees of good government they had obtained the previous year, and so the parliament that was summoned for York at the end of May could well have proved contentious. (It would be the first occasion that Bigod and Edward had stood face to face since their row at Salisbury fifteen months earlier.) In the event, though, the meeting seems to have passed without incident; it may have helped that, immediately after his return, as was his wont, the king had launched a major inquiry into ministerial abuse. Soon the assembly at York was over, and an ostensibly united English army rode out from the city to deal with the Scots. Some suspicion still lingered within their ranks. As they rode north, Bigod and Bohun heard it whispered that Edward was secretly planning to disregard the Confirmation of the Charters on the grounds that his ratification had been given overseas; when they reached the Border, the earls refused to go further without reassurances that this was not the case. Once again, the king adopted a conciliatory line, and induced four other magnates to swear on his soul that, once the Scots had been defeated, he would address his critics’ concerns. Bigod and Bohun declared themselves satisfied, and the army began its advance.
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It was massive. The infantry alone, as their pay rolls attest, amounted to almost 26,000 men; the cavalry, numbering perhaps as many as 3,000, was also mightily impressive. Clearly, Edward had been wise to postpone: the French truce had not only allowed him to redeploy his forces from Flanders; the spring had also witnessed the return of the English veterans from Gascony, led by the earl of Lincoln, who now rejoined the king. Patriotism, too, goes some way to explaining the large cavalry numbers, for the English military classes burned to avenge Stirling Bridge. The main reason, however, for the exceptionally high turnout probably lay in the nature of the campaign, as confirmed in the recent parliament. The Scottish nobility – many of whom had been released in return for fighting in Flanders – had also been summoned to appear at York. But inevitably they had failed to do so, and as a result had been declared disinherited. The English were setting out, said Peter Langtoft, ‘to take vengeance, and to deprive the Scots of land and tenement’. This, in other words, was not a punitive campaign like that of 1296, intended to bring errant vassals back into line: it was a new war of conquest, of the kind that had led to the carve-up of Wales. Victory in Scotland now held out to the English aristocracy the enticing prospect of rich and (to judge from Dunbar) easy pickings. They had been summoned to fight by virtue of their fealty, but they turned out in great numbers in expectation of gain.
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Before this redistribution of wealth could occur, however, there was a dragon to be slain in the form of the Scottish army and its undisputed leader, William Wallace (or rather
Sir
William Wallace, for the people’s champion had since been knighted and named as his country’s sole Guardian until John Balliol could be restored). The only problem lay in locating the beast. As the English advanced into Scotland, burning and wasting as they went, no sign of the enemy was seen, and no intelligence could be had. After a week of fruitless provocation they paused at Kirkliston, a few miles west of Edinburgh, where supplies were expected by sea. But another week passed with no word of Wallace and, worse still, no food from England. Contrary winds prevented the majority of ships from getting through; those that did arrive were mostly carrying wine. Drunken fighting soon broke out between the English and Welsh infantry, and the latter withdrew, threatening to side with the Scots. According to Guisborough, Edward showed only cool disdain, saying, ‘Who cares if our enemies joined together? We shall beat them both in a day.’ But there could be no disguising the fact that his campaign had run into serious difficulty.

Then, suddenly, on the morning of 21 July, the longed-for news arrived. The king was about to retire to Edinburgh to reconsider his strategy when a spy reported that the Scots were just twenty miles to the west, readying themselves to attack the English army as it retreated. ‘Praise God, who up to now has delivered me from all difficulties,’ said Edward. ‘They shan’t have to follow me, for I shall go to meet them this very day.’
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It was not, in fact, until the dawn of the next day that the king finally caught up with his quarry, whose spears were spotted on high ground close to the town of Falkirk. For the English this brought a welcome end to weeks of uncertainty, and an especially restless twenty-four hours. They had spent the previous night camped at nearby Linlithgow in fearful expectation of a Scottish ambush: every rider – including Edward himself – had slept on the ground next to his standing horse (‘with their shields as pillows,’ said Guisborough, ‘and their armour as bedclothes’). For one fraught moment it had seemed that their foes were indeed upon them; a rumour that the king had been wounded had caused an abortive rush to arms. Edward, it turned out,
had
been hurt in the night, but by rather more prosaic means. His horse, carelessly kept by its groom, had trodden on him.
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Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the foot soldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.
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The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the Battle of Falkirk began.
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At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.
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The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow,’ said Guisborough, derisively.) This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realised that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.
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The decision of the Scottish nobles to flee the field, far from condemning their country to defeat, in fact proved to be its saving grace. Had they been captured at Falkirk, as they had been at Dunbar two years before, resistance would have come to a swift end. As it was, their flight meant that the recent battle, although extremely bloody, was quite indecisive. Edward had succeeded only in killing a lot of Scottish commoners (and, to judge from the sudden drop in his infantry wages, a lot of English ones as well). Irritatingly, he now had no choice but to conduct a massive manhunt. The king therefore dismissed his surviving foot soldiers and set out with his cavalry to catch the Scottish fugitives.
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His first target (after the castle at Stirling, which fell in a fortnight) was Robert Bruce. It is not known whether the young earl was among the Scottish nobles at Falkirk (frustratingly, very few of their names are known), but certainly Edward’s decision to pursue Bruce destroys the fanciful notion that he had fought on the English side. When, in August, the king and his men rode west into Bruce’s earldom of Carrick, it was with the clear hope of capturing a man whom they regarded as one of the main leaders of Scottish resistance. Once again, however, their quarry eluded them. By the time they reached the west-coast town of Ayr, Bruce had burned his castle there and disappeared. Once again, the English ran into difficulties when their fleet failed to make the appointed rendezvous. After a week of waiting in vain, the king was forced to cut short his operations. Plans to move into Galloway were abandoned, and the cavalry instead rode down Annandale, seizing the Bruce castle of Lochmaben, but heading in the direction of England.
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