The Ghost (Highland Guard 12) (51 page)

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
Bannockburn is one of the most important battles in Scottish history. With the seven-hundred-year anniversary in 2014, there has been increased interest and scholarship in what is often hailed as one of the greatest Scottish victories (or worst English defeats) in history. I was fortunate to be able to take advantage of quite a few of the new books on the subject, as well as attend the “Bannockburn Live!” anniversary celebration, which featured some wonderful reenactments of the battle. One of the highlights for me was coming face-to-face with Sir Alexander Seton—or at least the reenactor playing him. I’m sure I probably scared the poor guy with my excitement.

Sir Alexander Seton, a Scottish knight who was fighting for England, did famously switch sides at a critical juncture on the night after the first day of battle. The information he provided helped persuade Bruce to fight the next day. Seton’s key part in the battle was related by Sir Thomas Gray in
The Scalacronica
, a historical chronicle written about forty years after Bannockburn. This Sir Thomas Gray is the son of the English knight Sir Thomas Gray, who was taken prisoner by the Scots on the first day of the battle—he is the prisoner who I have addressing Alex as he goes into Bruce’s tent—who was presumably in a position to know.

Alexander Seton is usually said to be the brother of Bruce’s closest friend, Christopher Seton, who was taken prisoner and executed after Methven in 1306. He is also probably the same Alexander Seton who entered into a band with Neil Campbell and De la Hay (Thomas or Gilbert) in 1308 to support Bruce “till the end of their lives” (
Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland
, Edinburgh: G.W.S. Barrow, Edinburgh University Press, 2005; p. 291).

This promise didn’t last long for Seton. By November 1309 he is in England, receiving a “cask of wine” for his “sustenance,” along with other notable Scots in the English service such as Sir Adam Gordon (also one cask), Sir Edmond Comyn (two casks), Sir Ingrim de Umfraville (four casks), and Malise of Strathearne (four casks) (
Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, Vol. III (1307–1357)
, edited by Joseph Bain, Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1887; p. 23).

What caused Seton to defect to the English after signing the band isn’t known, although it is certainly conceivable that the no-win, catch-22 situation of the Border lords played a factor. There were many Scots who thought their best bet was with the English, and given the circumstances you can’t really blame them. No one could have predicted Bannockburn. Whatever his reasons, after Seton’s timely return to the Scottish fold during Bannockburn, he serves Bruce faithfully until his death.

After the battle, Seton was rewarded by the king with more lands in East Lothian and was appointed a steward in the royal household. As I noted in the epilogue, Seton is one of the signatories on the seminal Declaration of Arbroath (“. . . for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”), a precursor to our Declaration of Independence, and is appointed governor of the Castle of Berwick in 1327. The marriage of Prince David to Princess Joan did indeed take place at Berwick Castle the following year. Bruce dies about a year later, on June 7, 1329, but he is said to have been ill for some time.

Most sources name Seton’s wife as a daughter of Francis Cheyne, but a reference in a genealogical chart said that she was the daughter of Isabel, the daughter of John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, and Isabella MacDuff, which gave me the idea for the connection and my fictional Joan. Readers of
The Viper
will recall that most sources say that Isabella MacDuff and John Comyn did not have any children.

Alice and Margaret Comyn, Buchan’s nieces, were his co-heiresses. The fight over the Buchan lands in Scotland would eventually lead to what is known as the Second Scottish War of Independence from 1332 to 1357. Margaret Comyn was a ward of her brother-in-law de Beaumont when she was married sometime around 1315 to John Ross—a loyal Scot. As a result, she lost her claim to the Buchan lands in England. It seemed strange to me that she would be allowed to marry a Scot. Although it gave de Beaumont the English lands of Buchan outright, it gave her an easier claim to the Scottish lands, which he also craved. But it did give me the idea for her part of the story.

I hope the members of the Seton family/clan will forgive me for adding a wyvern to their arms, but early on I needed a good war name and, well, I liked Dragon.

The attempt by Edward Bruce to take Carlisle Castle that Alex foils in chapter 2 happened the week after Easter 1314—around the sixteenth of April. Edward Bruce was sent to Cumbria by his brother to harry (possibly for nonpayment of tribute) and gather supplies for the army. While doing so, he makes something of a haphazard attempt on the castle.

Historians don’t agree on the exact dates for Edward Bruce’s siege of Stirling Castle, but the April raid in Cumbria could have been either after he makes his agreement with Sir Phillip Moubray (the former Scot patriot now holding Stirling Castle for Edward II) or during—possibly to relieve the boredom of the siege.

Conventional wisdom has viewed Edward Bruce’s truce with Sir Phillip Moubray, whereby the Scots would lift the siege on Stirling with Moubray agreeing to hand over the castle to Bruce if he was not relieved by St. John’s Day, as a major tactical blunder on the part of the king’s brother. The eager-for-battle, aggressive, hotheaded, and impatient Edward Bruce (who is said to have hated sieges) essentially throws down the gauntlet to the English, forcing the very thing his brother had been trying to avoid for eight years.

But recently, some historians have suggested that perhaps it wasn’t a blunder at all—that Edward Bruce’s actions were actually directed by his brother. Historian and author Chris Brown posits that Bruce might have deliberately chosen Stirling as a target for Edward II, and then spread the news of his dismay with his brother as a means of propaganda to not alert the English (
Bannockburn 1314: A New History
, Chris Brown, Gloucestershire, England: The History Press, 2009; p. 216). Not only does the truce give Bruce a place to wait and prepare for the English army, which at this point Bruce already knows is marching, it also gives him the benefit of terrain of his choosing, and he doesn’t have to spread his men out.

When coupled with the gauntlet Bruce himself had thrown down the year before, threatening to forfeit the land of all the Scots fighting for Edward II if they did not submit to him within a year’s time (which he knew Edward II would have to respond to), and the fact that the Scots left the English unmolested on their march to Stirling—completely forgoing their usual guerrilla tactics—I think it’s a very sound theory and decided to go with it rather than the conventional wisdom of an Edward Bruce blunder.

After the execution of Edward II’s favorite, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, in 1312 by some of his barons, the king seems to have been in a period of mourning. Although he had a few favorites in between—Roger d’Amory, Hugh de Audley, and William de Montacute—I decided to bring forward the much more important (and better known) Sir Hugh Despenser the younger, whose “reign” as favorite probably didn’t happen until a few years later. He did fight at Bannockburn with the king, however, having been offered the big plum of the earldom of Moray—for which he reportedly brought along furniture, as I mentioned in the story.

I also pushed back Despenser’s marriage. At the time of
The Ghost
, he would have been married to Edward II’s niece, Eleanor de Clare. Eleanor was the sister of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, whom Edward II accuses of being cowardly and who was killed on the second day of Bannockburn without his surcoat.

Like Gaveston before him, the favoritism shown to Despenser by King Edward II, and Despenser’s own greed and quest for power, will earn him the enmity of the other barons. But Despenser’s influence will prove even more destructive to the king than Gaveston’s, eventually leading to Edward II’s forced abdication early in 1327 in favor of his son Edward III at the hand of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer.

The pair are said to have had Edward II killed later that same year—the official proclamation went out in September—but there is some debate about whether he was actually kept alive. Similarly, although the hot poker up the bum story of his manner of death has passed into history and was circulating not long after Edward II’s supposed death, recent scholarship casts doubt upon it.

Also like Gaveston before him, Despenser’s reign as favorite does not end well. He, too, was executed—in some descriptions quite gruesomely—after a trial before Queen Isabella and Mortimer.

It is a fascinating period of history, of which the above is only a taste. Much has been written on the Despensers’ war, but I highly recommend the very readable biography of Roger Mortimer by Ian Mortimer,
The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England: 1327–1330
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005).

In
The Ghost
, one of the key uncertainties and information that Joan is trying to uncover is whether the powerful Earl of Lancaster will answer Edward II’s call to muster and bring along with him his five hundred cavalry. To put that number in perspective, that is about the same number in total that Robert Bruce had at his disposal. But Bruce’s cavalry were “light” horses and not the “heavy” armed warhorses of the English. The overall numbers for the armies at Bannockburn are disputed and vary widely, but an estimate for the English is about 12,000 to 15,000 infantry and 1,600 to 2,500 horses. The Scots were at about a third to a half of that: 5,500 to 7,500 infantry and 350 to 500 horses. In any event, I probably overstated the “mystery” of whether Lancaster would show, as he was a hardened opponent of the king. He did refuse to answer the muster himself and sent only the minimum required men for his service.

Lancaster, a direct descendant of Henry III, and cousins with Edward II, held five earldoms (Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln, and Salisbury) and was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. He was the leader of the baronial opposition to King Edward II and had a hand in the death of Gaveston. He opposed Despenser as well, but this time it was the king’s favorite who came out on top. After being taken prisoner in battle, Lancaster was brought to trial and executed by Despenser and Edward II in 1322.

Reducing one of the great battles of Scottish history to a few pages wasn’t easy, but I tried to stay as close as possible to the accepted history of Bannockburn as I could, while simplifying and trying to make it understandable. It wasn’t an easy task.

There are some controversies and unknowns, however, including the location of the battle itself. But a recent archeological investigation undertaken by the BBC in anticipation of the anniversary lends support to the Carse of Balquhiderock as the battle site.

The great chivalric moment of Bruce in meeting the reckless charge of Sir Henry de Bohun and felling him with one blow of his battle-axe also isn’t universally agreed upon. In one of the primary English sources,
Vita Edwardi Secundi
, written in the decade after the battle, the chronicler states that Sir Henry was trying to return to his men when Bruce struck him down, and his squire who tried to save him was also killed. Not surprisingly, I like the other version better.

As the circumstances of Clifford’s death are also unclear, I gave him the chivalric death I thought he deserved by pairing him with Sir Giles d’Argentan, reputedly the second-best knight in Christendom, who did die as I described by essentially going down in a blaze of glory. After seeing King Edward II safely away from the battlefield and knowing the battle is lost, the great knight can’t contemplate fleeing and returns to lead one last valiant charge.

As significant and important as the victory was at Bannockburn for Scotland and Bruce—essentially putting God’s stamp on his kingship—it was the de facto rather than the de jure end to the war, which didn’t come until the treaty fourteen years later.