Authors: Thomas B. Costain
Robert the Bruce had not intended to declare himself as early as this. It was known that Edward had only a short time to live, and Bruce was wise enough to realize it would be the better part of valor to wait for the death of that stout warrior before unfurling the Scottish royal flag. But an incident forced his hand.
On the tenth day of February, 1306, he went to Dumfries and there met John Comyn the Red in the Franciscan monastery. Dumfries stood on the north bank of the Nith and, despite the fact that it was a peaceful and prosperous town of wide and friendly streets, it had become the scene of much fighting and bitterness between the adherents of Scotland’s many monarchial parties. The town had been originally of Baliol sympathies because the Princess Devorguila, mother of John de Baliol, had built its stone bridge of nine tall spans. Why Bruce and Comyn met there has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is believed they came by appointment to discuss the situation. There was no love lost between them certainly. At an earlier meeting in Selkirk Forest, the Red had leaped upon the younger Bruce and threatened to kill him. The same trace of black blood showed itself at once, although this time it was Bruce who attacked the other. It was in front of the high altar that this occurred, and Bruce’s passion ran so high that his dagger struck deep into the Comyn’s side. And so the man who had thought himself entitled to command at the battle of Falkirk and had left Wallace to face the attack while he rode off ingloriously with the Scottish cavalry, fell to the stone floor.
There is a legend that Bruce came out of the monastery very pale of face and agitated of spirit to join his friends who had waited outside.
“I sank my dagger in the Comyn’s side,” he said. “I think he is dead.”
“Then I shall go back and make sure,” declared one of his men, drawing his own dirk, which was one of the long and heavy variety used by the men of the Highlands.
Comyn was still alive, and so the follower of Bruce stabbed him again and thus made certain of his death.
The same legend has it that, before going to meet Comyn the Red, Bruce had received from a friend in England twelve pennies and a pair of spurs as a warning of treachery. It is a good story, and although it smacks of minstrelsy and invention, it is worth the telling.
The die was cast. There would be no forgiveness after this, even if Bruce had sought it; and at last he saw the light and was prepared to fight now in spite of everything. He proceeded to act with creditable dispatch. He went to Scone, where he was met by that brave churchman, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, and given absolution and the coronation robes. It was an illustrious company which assembled there to declare their support to the new leader. In addition to Wishart there were the bishops of St. Andrews and Moray; the earls of Lennox, Atholl, and Errol; young Sir James Douglas, a nephew of the king and later the Earl of Moray; a considerable smattering of the gentry bearing such names as Barclay, Fraser, Boyd, and Fleming; the four brothers of Bruce—Edward, Nigel, Thomas, and Alexander—and last but certainly not least Isabella, Countess of Buchan.
It was, in fact, an imposing representation of the nobility of Scotland. What a different reading it might have given to history if all these blue-blooded Scots had assembled on the hilltop near Falkirk and ranged themselves behind the leader with the heavy claymore, William Wallace!
The right spirit certainly was displayed by the Countess Buchan. She was a daughter of Duncan, Earl of Fife, but her husband was a Comyn (popularly called Patrick-with-the-Beard) and on that account a bitter enemy of the Bruce. She stole away from home, ordering the fastest horse in the stables to be saddled for her use. Arriving at Scone before the ceremony, she announced that, as her brother, the present Earl of Fife, was away, she had come to place the crown on the head of the new king in his stead. This honor was conceded to her.
Edward had been so certain that the conquest of Scotland was complete that he had set himself to the task of establishing administrative machinery
for that country after the order of things in England. For the purpose he had summoned to Carlisle a small group of barons and bishops, English as well as Scottish. The outcome was a division of the northern country into judicial districts over which justices and sheriffs were appointed. Edward signed the necessary papers and threw down his pen, convinced that he had completed his task.
Almost immediately, however, the word reached him that new fires of rebellion were blazing on the hillsides in the north and that Robert Bruce had been crowned at Scone. He swore a mighty oath that this time there would be no compromise. Aymer de Valence, a relation of Edward’s in descent from the second marriage of the beautiful widow of King John, was his lieutenant in Scotland. Orders were sent him that all who had taken up arms must be killed or made prisoners and executed. In the meantime an army was assembled in England and was started north under the nominal command of Prince Edward. To prepare him for his responsibilities, the young prince was knighted at Westminster. In turn, then, the prince knighted two hundred and seventy young gentlemen who were to have their baptism of fire with him.
Conferring knighthood had developed into a complicated and rather beautiful ceremony since the beginning when the accolade, a tap on the shoulder with a sword, had sufficed. It began the previous evening when the candidate was shaved and then taken to a special chamber where a bath was prepared with scented water and a covering of linen and rich cloths. While he bathed, two old knights talked to him solemnly about the duties of the order. Later still he was led to the chapel, where he stood throughout the night, keeping watch over his armor and saying prayers and meditating. At break of day he bathed again, confessed, heard mass, and offered a taper with a piece of money stuck in the white tallow. With his future squire riding before him and carrying the sword and the gold spurs which were to be attached to his heels, he made his way to the great hall. Here he knelt on one knee and was given the accolade. The knight who performed the ceremony would say a few words, not the usually accepted phrase, “I dub thee knight” (this came in later, when the ceremony had been much simplified), but some felicitous message such as, “Be thou a brave and gentle knight, faithful to thy God, thy liege lord, and thy lady fair.” Finally there would be feasting and drinking and telling of stories and listening to the minstrels. At one time the candidate was supposed to confer his spurs on the cook of the establishment as a fee, but this was never general, nor did it survive long, for gold spurs were not easily come by and a cook, after all, was only a cook.
In order that all this shaving and scrubbing and standing vigil could be carried on with two hundred and seventy candidates at one time, very special arrangements had been made. Some of the trees in the Temple
Gardens were cut down to make room for the tents of this great mob of embryonic knights and their squires and servants. Some stood watch over their armor in Temple Church, but most of them performed this essential part of the ritual at Westminster Abbey. The next day the young men, their faces glowing from the unusual attention of two baths in a few hours, their eyes shining with the proper exultation, were led up one by one for the official tap on the shoulder. The crush was so great in the abbey that two men were suffocated in front of the high altar. There could not have been any room left in the great church for the sanctuary seekers who infested it ordinarily, lurking in the shadows, begging furtively for food, and under no circumstances venturing outside. Perhaps they had been herded together and shut up in the crypt until the ceremony was over.
It seems certain that the king, who could more accurately be called longheaded than long-legged, had planned this brilliant ceremony for a double purpose: to present his tall son to the people of England in the most favorable light, and to impress on the idle mind of that young man a fitting sense of the important part he would soon be called upon to play.
After the ceremony of knighthood was over, there was a feast for all who had taken part, a truly gargantuan meal, with great haunches of venison and roasts of beef and mutton and scores of casks filled with the best wines from Bordeaux. Near the end of the feasting and drinking, two swans under folds of gold network were placed on the table before the king. He swore “by the gracious God of all and the two swans” that he would avenge the death of Comyn the Red and not rest himself until he had killed Robert the Bruce. It was then the turn of Prince Edward, and he proceeded to swear, also over the brace of swans, that he would never rest more than one night in the same place until the land, meaning Scotland, had been conquered. It will be observed that both father and son were more sensible in the nature of their vows than most kings on the point of riding out to war. It had been the usual thing for them to swear never to bathe, never to have a haircut nor to have a beard trimmed until their objectives had been attained; with the result that it was often impossible to tell a mighty king or a bombastic knight from the
shrewels
that scared crows away from the grain fields.
One of the candidates who was awarded his spurs on this busy day was a dark young man whose family had played an active and not always admirable part in the Marcher country. His name was Roger de Mortimer and his bright dark eye was destined to win the favor of a certain beautiful lady far, far above him. Included in the number also was a handsome young fellow named Hugh le Despenser, junior. These two were to play spectacular parts in the painful story of Edward II. It would have been better for both of them, and certainly for poor Prince Edward, if they had overslept that morning and never had the opportunity of being knighted,
and so have been prevented from getting into things at all; for both of them, after periods of strutting and imposing their wills on others and earning the hatred of everyone, would die the painful death reserved for traitors, while Edward, largely because of their activities, would suffer a still more ignominious end.
Aymer de Valence was not a brilliant soldier but he was crafty. When he reached the neighborhood of Perth and found the Bruce ready to meet him with an army hastily assembled but filled with new fire and zeal, he declined the invitation to fight a pitched battle. Later in the day, when the Scots had dropped back to Methven and were unprepared, he attacked them suddenly and won a complete victory.
Bruce retreated into the hills but, realizing that his cause was a lost one for the time being, he finally found refuge with the small force still faithful to him in the western isles. The rest of his men, who had returned to their homes, were not so lucky. Many were captured and either hanged or beheaded as the old king had ordered. Nigel Bruce was captured in Kildrummy Castle and taken to Berwick, where he was hanged. Thomas and Alexander were defeated in an effort to land a force at Lockryan and were sentenced by Edward himself to be dragged at the tails of horses to the gallows and there executed. Sir Simon Fraser was sent to London to provide a spectacle for the citizens. Here he was executed in what had now come to be the accepted way; he was hanged first, then drawn and quartered and his head cut off to be placed in the noble company of what little was left of Wallace’s head rotting on London Bridge.
Edward seems to have had an ingenious turn for devising punishments. When he learned that the Countess of Buchan had been captured, he had her sent to Berwick and ordered that a cage be constructed there in which she was to be confined “at his pleasure.” The cage was built in one of the high turrets of Berwick Castle, in the shape of a crown, in view of the nature of her offense. It was of strong latticework, crossbarred and strengthened with iron. Here the brave countess, refusing to express any contrition, was kept, as one chronicle phrased it, “like a wild beast” and was an object of curiosity to all visitors at the castle. Two women, both English and so not likely to feel sympathy for her, were selected to keep a watch on her and supply her needs.
The king’s original purpose may have been to hang the cage outside the turret where all who passed could look up and see the prisoner. It was found that the weather was too severe for this, what with the heavy rains
and the bitter cold of the winters. A compromise was made by which the cage was suspended outside only when the day was fine.
Here the brave lady remained for four years, as Edward II continued her punishment after his father’s death. Her husband, who was called Comyn the Black because of his beard, made no effort to get her free. He was so determined to avenge the murder of Comyn the Red that he took up arms on the English side. He never forgave his wife, and it was not until his death in 1313 that she was freed from the less rigorous confinement in a monastery to which she had been sent after her release from the cage.
There is a legend that in the next century Louis XI took a leaf from the English king’s book and punished Cardinal Balue for an act of treason by putting him in an open cage elevated on the tower of one of the royal castles. Here the cardinal, who had once been entrusted with most of that sly king’s dirty work, was kept for eleven years, through rain and sleet and frost, a supply of food and a bottle of wine being lowered to him on the end of a rope once a week.
Robert the Bruce had struck too soon and it had been costly, in lives, in possessions, and in prestige. But he would come back. The next spring would see him land again on the west coast, with small forces but with high hopes. The days of indecision, of time-serving, were over. From this time onward he would have one thought only, one purpose in life, to break, no matter at what cost, the chains that Edward had riveted on Scotland.
I
T is unfortunate that the war-making years of Edward came in the late period of his reign rather than early. He is remembered, not so much as the fair and thoughtful king who won the love of his subjects by his genuine interest in their welfare, but rather as the conqueror who concealed all traces of the well-doer while he carried fire and sword into the lands he was determined to subdue. And yet the good king manifested himself in even the most sanguinary interludes.