A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (70 page)

As his strength finally began to fail him, Edward knew that he must look to others to take up the struggle. His contemporaries were almost all gone. John de Warenne, the ancient earl of Surrey, had died soon after returning from Scotland in 1304. Roger Bigod still lived but was himself too ill to campaign. Only Henry de Lacy, the fifty-six-year-old earl of Lincoln, was conceivably fit enough to fight. The conclusion was inescapable. Command must pass to a new generation. It was Aymer de Valence, the son and successor of his late uncle William, whom the king sent north in April to lead an immediate counter-attack.
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Above all, though, the burden of leadership must now fall to his own son and heir. The arguments of the previous year would have to be forgotten. Edward of Caernarfon, it was announced, would be commanding the main royal army that was ordered to assemble at Carlisle in July. Before then, it would be necessary to enhance his authority. On 7 April, the prince was granted Gascony by his father. Around the same time, word went out that there was to be a great ceremony in Westminster at Whitsun. The king would be knighting his eldest son, and all those who wished to receive the same accolade were invited to attend.
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Part of Edward’s motivation for promoting the prince was financial. Custom entitled a lord to levy a tax in such circumstances, and the king was quick to do so on this occasion. But the ceremony was also intended to serve a higher purpose. The young noblemen of England – ‘tyros’, as one chronicler termed them – were to be bound together in a new cause, much as their fathers and grandfathers had been united by their oaths to liberate the Holy Land. When the day itself arrived, Edward knighted his son in the palace chapel, and they then proceeded to the abbey, where the prince performed the repetitive task of knighting around 300 others. The choice of date was probably significant: it was at Whitsun that Arthur was supposed to have held his celebrated ‘plenary’ court at Caerleon. Certainly, once the dubbing ritual was over and the newly ennobled company had repaired to the palace, their feast assumed an unmistakably Arthurian air. The king himself vowed revenge against Bruce, and promised that once his enemy had been vanquished he would head straight for the Holy Land. The prince followed suit, swearing that he would not sleep two nights in the same place until the Scots had been defeated, a vow clearly modelled on Perceval’s declaration in the story of the Holy Grail. The feast was evidently magnificent, with a multitude of minstrels paid to perform, and each knight uttering his vow over two specially prepared golden swans. These, it seems, were an innovation, but one that set a fashion for swearing oaths on birds for the next two centuries.
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Assuming his vow was genuine, Edward of Caernarfon must have set out for Scotland more or less immediately. Two days after the feast, the king wrote to Aymer de Valence, saying that he was sending his son north with a strong force. He also added – perhaps surprisingly, given his condition – that he would follow in person as soon as possible.
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By the time these letters reached him, Valence was already well ahead with his advanced operations and scoring notable victories. In early June, having crossed the Forth, he captured both the bishop of St Andrews and the bishop of Glasgow – the latter was found holding the castle at Cupar in Fife ‘as a man of war’. A week or so later, the lieutenant came close to apprehending his principal target. On 18 June, after the English had reoccupied Perth, the new king of Scotland approached with his host, hoping to provoke battle. Valence declined to respond immediately, but the next day advanced his own army to nearby Methven and fell upon his enemy’s camp in the pre-dawn light. Many Scots were killed or captured, though Bruce himself escaped, fleeing west into the mountains with only a few hundred men.
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The king of England, meanwhile, had set out to join the fray but was heading nowhere fast. Ten days after leaving Westminster, Edward had travelled no further than Dunstable, a distance of only thirty miles. In the weeks that followed his progress continued at the same laborious rate, suggesting that he was in considerable pain. The agonies he suffered, both physical and mental, are also reflected in the remarkable preamble to an ordinance about the Royal Forest issued in the days before his departure. ‘While we behold the imperfection of human weakness,’ the king began, ‘and weigh with attentive consideration the widespread burdens that lie upon our shoulders, we are indeed inwardly tormented … tossed about by the waves of diverse thoughts, and are frequently troubled, passing sleepless nights, dwelling in our inmost soul about what ought to be done.’ His chief concern, he explained, was the ease of his subjects, ‘in whose quiet we have rest’, and he trusted that God, ‘in the clemency of his goodness, will mercifully look upon and supply our deficiency’.
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Edward’s own reserves of clemency and mercy were by this point entirely exhausted. It had taken six expeditions across eight years, countless expenditure and bitter compromises to subjugate the Scots, and it was only a matter of months since they had sworn to uphold his new scheme of government – a scheme that he considered to have been very generous and accommodating. Now his generosity had been thrown back in his face. The king was at the end of his tether, and his only thoughts were of vengeance. Valence had been told to take no prisoners, but seems to have interpreted his brief leniently: at least some of the knights taken at Methven had been subsequently dispatched into England to await sentence. In early August, however, on Edward’s express orders, the killings began, and the aristocratic status of the captives availed them nothing. ‘They bore arms against their liege lord the king and are prisoners of war,’ read the royal writ that condemned these men to be drawn through the streets of Newcastle and hanged.
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Nor did the status of the clerical captives count for much on this occasion. Edward, though pleased by the early arrest of the bishop of Glasgow, had instructed Valence ‘not to have any regard for his estate of prelate’, and Wishart can have anticipated little sympathy, for he presented the very model of rebellious ingratitude. A recent royal gift of timber, intended for the repair of his cathedral, had been used by the firebrand bishop to build siege-engines. On 10 August he was brought before the king, by this point in County Durham, along with the bishop of St Andrews and the abbot of Scone. Their tonsures were sufficient to save them from the scaffold, but at Edward’s command all three were sent south in chains, to be kept in castle dungeons.
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In Scotland the fortunes of King Robert had continued to deteriorate. Support for his rebellion, slight from the start, was waning visibly in the wake of his defeat at Methven. In July Bruce had been beaten for a second time at Dalrigh, near Tyndrum, and by a force of his own countrymen. Again he had escaped, but the net around him was drawing ever tighter. By mid-July the prince of Wales and his army of young tyros had left Carlisle and retaken south-western Scotland, closing off one set of escape routes, and by early August they had moved up to Perth to link arms with Valence. In desperation, therefore, Bruce decided to split his party in two. His wife, daughter and the other womenfolk were sent north-east, with the hope that they might make it to Orkney or even Norway. Meanwhile, Bruce himself fled in the opposite direction, and hid among the lochs and islands of Scotland’s western seaboard.
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During the second half of August King Edward was in Northumberland but evidently very ill. In the middle of the month, while he rested at Hexham Abbey, one of the monks was paid a pound for his medical efforts, and for the next fortnight the king remained motionless at nearby Newbrough. Most ominously, at the end of August Edward made assignments of land to his youngest children, including his new baby daughter, Eleanor. Thereafter, however, he appears to have rallied, and the court resumed its slow progress in the direction of Carlisle. ‘He is hearty and strong enough, considering his age,’ wrote an unnamed courtier on 21 September, and at the same time Edward himself sent letters to the king of Castile, indicating that he had now recovered from his recent infirmity. Yet one week later, with their destination just ten miles in the distance, it was once again decided that the king should move no further. The court had reached Lanercost Priory, which was close enough, and would make a comfortable headquarters for the time being.
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In any case, the war was all but over. Everywhere in Scotland was back under English control, or in the hands of non-rebellious Scots. In September military efforts were concentrated on just two castles: Dunaverty, on the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre, where Bruce was believed to be hiding, and Kildrummy in Aberdeenshire, where his female relatives had sought refuge. When the former fortress finally fell, the besiegers were disappointed. The king of Scots was already gone, escaped across the sea to Ireland. The women, however, were not so fortunate. Before Kildrummy was captured they made a last dash for freedom, escorted by the earl of Atholl and Bruce’s brother, Neil. Having reached the far north of Scotland, they were taken at Tain by adherents of the Balliol–Comyn cause, and sent south to face Edward I.
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Despite pleas for clemency from Queen Margaret and several English magnates, the killings continued. Neil Bruce was dispatched to die in Berwick, where he was drawn, hanged and beheaded. Atholl was condemned to a similar death in London, regardless of the fact that English royal blood flowed in his veins (he was a great-great-grandson of King John). This was a true watershed moment: no earl had been executed in England for 230 years, and Edward acknowledged it by having Atholl hanged on a gallows built thirty feet higher than that of his fellows, then beheaded and burned. Even the women prisoners, if reckoned to be complicit in the revolt, were subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. Isabella, countess of Buchan, who had participated in Bruce’s coronation, and Mary, the new king’s sister, were imprisoned in specially constructed cages, set high in the towers of the castles at Roxburgh and Berwick. As living spectacles, they sent out the same message as the mutilated remains of their menfolk. This was the new and terrible price of rebellion against the king of England.
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The execution of rebels was now officially proclaimed policy. After Edward’s arrival at Lanercost, it was announced that all those involved in Comyn’s murder would themselves be killed, as would anyone who had assisted Bruce or who was taken fighting in his name. Only those who surrendered would escape the noose, and even they faced an uncertain future of indefinite imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. The men carrying out these orders, of course, had a vested interest in seeing to the immediate dispatch of their enemies, for the rebellion had led to the territorial settlement of the previous year being torn up. Rich estates had once again been declared forfeit and were being regranted to the loyal. The result has been described as a ‘reign of terror’. ‘Alas, the noble blood that was thus spilt!’ lamented Peter Langtoft, a man not normally given to expressions of sympathy for the Scots.
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But besides the butchering of Scotsmen there seemed little left to do, and so, in a bout of self-congratulatory jubilation, some of the younger English nobles took themselves off to tourney, even going overseas. The king was enraged, and ordered the arrest of twenty-two named individuals, even demanding that they be imprisoned in the Tower. Many of them were associates of Edward of Caernarfon, though whether the prince had personally absconded is unclear. In December he was certainly staying by the Kentish coast, but this was probably in order to welcome Cardinal Peter ‘the Spaniard’, come to England to help finalise the French peace. When, in the new year, young Edward and his friends returned to Carlisle in time for the parliament that was being held there, all was forgiven. Thanks to the intercession of the queen, most of the errant knights were pardoned or had their presumptuous behaviour overlooked.
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In February 1307, however, a fresh and furious row erupted between the two Edwards over the treatment of one of these men. According to a London chronicler, the king ‘saw that his son, the prince of Wales, had an inordinate love for a certain Gascon knight’. The knight in question was Piers Gaveston, a young man of similar age to the prince and a member of his household for several years. Conventionally, and probably correctly, their relationship has been construed as homosexual; other chroniclers wrote of the ‘undue intimacy’ between the pair. Whatever the case, it was certainly regarded by contemporaries as wholly inappropriate, and the cause of the king’s wrath in 1307 was an inappropriate attempt on the part of his son to promote Gaveston far beyond his comparatively humble station. Walter of Guisborough describes the scene in dramatic terms, and explains how the prince first asked Walter Langton, the treasurer, to put a request to his father on his behalf. When Langton in due course did so, Edward was incredulous, and angrily ordered his son to be summoned.

‘On what business did you send this man?’ he demanded.

‘That I might, with your assent, give the county of Ponthieu to Sir Piers Gaveston,’ the prince replied.