The Three Edwards (25 page)

To the panic-stricken English this could mean only one thing: that reinforcements had arrived for the Scots who were so eager to take a hand in the fighting that they had not chosen the slower course around the foot of the hill but had come charging over the crest. The faltering English line broke at this. Gilbert of Gloucester tried to rally the troops but was killed. Clifford fell into one of the pits and was killed before he could extricate himself. Twenty-seven other barons fell in the pandemonium.

Edward and his closest advisers had watched the confusion into which the army had fallen with bitter wonder and dismay. When the retreat from the hillside turned into a rout, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who knew a defeat when he saw one, having figured in many in his time, seized the reins of the king’s horse. It was time for Edward to leave. Surrounded by the five hundred picked horsemen who served as the royal guard, they
rode at a furious gallop around the left of the Scottish lines and cut north in the direction of Stirling Castle. One of the knights with the king was a Gascon named Giles de Argentine, who stayed with the beaten monarch until they shook off a fierce attack by Edward Bruce. “It is not my custom to fly,” he said then. Wheeling about, he rode straight for the Scottish lines, crying, “An Argentine! An Argentine!” In a very few minutes he had begun a flight to wherever it is that brave soldiers are transported.

On other occasions Edward had not shown much courage in battle, but now, perhaps in desperation, he showed some of the Plantagenet mettle. They encountered more pursuers and an effort was made to drag him from his horse. He beat the enemy off. With a mace, which became a lethal weapon in his strong hands, he cut his way through to safety.

At Stirling Castle the royal party was refused admittance. It was pointed out that, inasmuch as the effort to relieve the fortress had failed, the castle must now capitulate. They did not want the king stepping into that kind of trap. Accordingly Edward and his morose followers rode sixty miles to Dunbar, where they made their escape by sea.

What part did St. Magnus play in the victory? All Scotland was thrilled with a story that late in the morning he appeared from the clouds above Aberdeen in a coat of shining mail and on a great white horse. He rode down the streets of the granite city, crying out in a mighty voice that Robert the Bruce had that day defeated Edward of England on the field of Bannockburn.

The pursuit of the English was conducted briskly but not to the exclusion of looting. The equipment of the beaten army had not only been ample but luxurious. An estimate places the loot taken from the field at two hundred thousand pounds, but this seems as exaggerated as the figures given of the size of the armies. It was considerable enough, however, to compensate the people of Scotland for the losses they had sustained in the twenty years of warfare. In addition to what had been left on the field there were many hundred knights captured, and the Scots saw that each of them paid a heavy ransom.

Scotland had been a poor country to begin with; and the continual burning of the countryside and the destruction of their herds and flocks had brought the people close to starvation. Bannockburn paid most of it back.

There were exchanges, of course. The Earl of Hereford had been taken prisoner on the field and the Scots demanded for him fifteen prisoners
held by the English. These included the wife and daughter of Robert the Bruce and the venerable Bishop of Glasgow.

When Robert Burns sat himself down to write his famous war song,
Scots wha hae
, he intended to set it to the air of the Bruce marching song,
Hey, Tuttie Taitie
. His publishers did not approve the idea, thinking the air lacking in distinction and grandeur. It was for a time sung to that measure, nonetheless, with great success. A new setting has been used ever since for this famous epic.

The Scottish victory at Bannockburn did not bring peace. The Scots, having driven the last of the Sassenachs across the border, save for the city of Berwick, were willing and anxious to discuss terms. The English, humiliated and angered beyond measure, were not so disposed; they proceeded to take the military command out of the feeble hands of Edward and entrusted the army to Cousin Lancaster, who, as it soon developed, was no better. Realizing that the end to the long struggle was not yet in sight, Robert strove to make the English realize the cost of war by striking fiercely at the border counties. As a further measure he sent troops into Ireland in an effort to divert the attention of the foe. Edward Bruce was put in command, and it was announced that the King of Scotland intended to raise his resourceful and ever daring younger brother to the Irish throne. Roger de Mortimer, who has been mentioned as one of the young knights who won his spurs during the wholesale knighting of adolescent Englishmen by Edward I, was in command in Dublin at the time.

The resourcefulness and daring of Edward Bruce were not equal to the task. He established his rule over Ulster and remained there until 1318, when he sallied out to attack a large English force in a particularly foolhardy mood and was defeated and killed. In the meantime the mercenary Mortimer had also departed, leaving behind him personal debts contracted during his term of office amounting to one thousand pounds, “whereof he payde not one smulkin.” A smulkin was a pleasantly characteristic Irish word for a brass farthing. This act of high-handed unconcern for everything but his own interests was the first in a career which would be marked by an insolence greater even than the open mockery of Gaveston and an avarice beyond all measure.

Bruce became doubly anxious for peace when he realized that a touch of leprosy which he had acquired in his wanderings was beginning to tighten its grip on his system and to rob him of power in his limbs. The
mickle ail
, it was called in Scotland, where it was widely prevalent. Every
town had been obliged to provide some kind of leper hospital, which had its own churchyard, chapel, and ecclesiastics, even though the building itself might be no more than a frame shack on the edge of a wind-swept moor. It was highly ironic that the great fighting king, after struggling so long and enduring so much hardship, should thus be barred from the peace and comfort for which he had longed.

Realizing that his days were numbered, King Robert appealed to the Pope to bring about peace between the two countries. In 1320 he directed a message in the name of the barons of Scotland to Pope John XXII. It was a well-reasoned presentation and contained one clause which tells in a heartfelt way the plight of the northern kingdom.

It was unfortunate for Scotland that John XXII was Pope at this period. He was an appointee of Philip the Unfair and had been elevated to the papacy at Avignon through the efforts of that monarch; after, it may be added, a stalemate of two years. He proved to be a heavy-handed pontiff, as witness his course when a second pope was raised to the Vatican in Rome through German influence. This was a Minorite friar named Pietro Rainalducci de Corbara, who was given the title of Nicholas V. When the German influence declined, leaving Nicholas alone, he sought to make his peace with Avignon and was brought into the presence of John with a halter around his neck. A sentence of perpetual imprisonment was passed on him and he died in a prison cell in Avignon.

John disregarded the Scottish appeal. In fact, he went to the other extreme and in 1323 laid all Scotland under an interdict.

I
N 1315, the year after Bannockburn, England experienced heavy and continuous rains. There was something strange and fearsome about them. They were not of the steady, mizzling variety nor the pleasant rains which blew up suddenly and as suddenly passed, leaving the air cool and the earth sweet. Instead they came in the wake of sullen gray-black clouds from the northeast which closed off all view of the sky and of the sun by day and the moon and the stars by night. The lashing downpour turned the ground into quagmires, and the continuous drip from the trees and underbrush and from the eaves of the houses drove people finally into a state of despair.

Everything was going wrong since the old king died and this foolish, feckless son had taken his place. The national pride had been humbled at Bannockburn and now a divine hand was showing its disapproval: so ran the story throughout the country.

The crops rotted in the fields and the fruit on the trees did not ripen. Lucky the husbandman who had cut and stored his hay early, for his stock at least would have something to eat. The inevitable sequel followed: the rivers grew swollen and overflowed their banks. Even the smallest brooks and becks became angry and vehement. Whole villages were inundated. The toftman whose home had been destroyed or carried away found small comfort in the wreckage deposited by the hostile waters on his land.

Finally the rain stopped and the waters receded, becoming gentle again. Somehow the people of England lived through the dismal winter that followed. But in the spring it was the same again, and the untilled and unplanted fields became soggy and rank. There was a serious famine in 1315. A plague carried off the cattle, and it became commonplace to find on the highways and under the trees the bodies of the homeless who had died of starvation. None of this could be laid at Edward’s door, and there
may have been some slight consolation for the unhappy and hungry people in the lack of bread at times on the royal table. In their minds, however, there were bitterness and a sense of dissatisfaction. Would not a good king, an energetic king, have been able to do something for his people?

During the Whitsuntide festival the king and queen kept court at Westminster. One evening they were dining in public in the great banqueting hall; a foolish thing to do, for the sight of ladies and gentlemen in fine silks and furs regaling themselves with meat and wine is certain to rouse resentment among people who are gaunt and ill from hunger. In the midst of the meal a woman on horseback and wearing a mask guided her mount in through the wide-open door and rode up to the head table. Without a word she delivered a sealed letter into the hands of the king.

Edward, suspecting nothing, had it opened and read aloud, discovering to his anger that it contained an indictment of his conduct as king. The woman, who had tarried outside the hall, was unmasked and brought in again to the royal presence. She had no hesitation in naming the knight who had entrusted the missive to her: the scion of a good house and known for his bravery and sobriety. When apprehended, the knight said “he had taken this method of apprizing the king of the complaints of his subjects.”

In the meantime things seemed to be going wrong in every way. The Scottish raiders ranged as far south as Furness, a part of Lancashire which includes the Lake District. They came close to getting their hands on the wealth of Furness Abbey, one of the richest in England. Whatever the rains and the floods had left, the Scots burned behind them. Philip the Fair lived long enough to learn of his son-in-law’s failure at Bannockburn and then turned away from life, perhaps to answer the summons issued from the flames by the dying Grand Master of the Templars. Llewelyn Bren, dispossessed by the heirs of the Earl of Gloucester and brushed aside scornfully when he complained to Edward, rose in rebellion with his six sons and seized all of Glamorganshire. The son of a tanner named John Drydras, although sometimes spoken of as John of Powderham, took advantage of the general discontent to announce himself as the real son of Edward I and to declare the ruling king a changeling. The man was an impostor, for he had no kind of proof whatever, save long legs and blond hair, but for a time people listened to him and wondered. In the end, of course, they took Master Drydras and hanged him with the usual extremes of cruelty. The queen bore another son at the royal castle of Eltham, a healthy specimen who was given the name of John and who would live a rather uneventful and not long life as a bachelor. Edward was so pleased that he gave one hundred pounds (an absurd extravagance at such a time) to Sir Eubulo de Montibus, the bearer of the good tidings. The queen
increased her popularity with the people by pleading for the life of one Robert de Messager, who had been convicted of speaking “irreverent and indecent words” about the king.

It happened that before Bannockburn the Earl of Lancaster had displayed his lack of patriotism in a rather extraordinary way. He did not accompany the royal army and he did not send any of his men. Instead he assembled quite a considerable army at his castle of Pontefract in the openly expressed belief that if Edward were successful against the Scots he would return with his victorious army and compel the barons to give up the concessions they had won from him. This sorry pretense paid him golden dividends. Edward returned a fugitive to face an angry Parliament at York; and there was Lancaster with his fresh troops to make sure of the king’s submission. It was said that the earl had stood on the battlements of Pontefract as the defeated Edward passed and had jeered at him.

The recalcitrant barons contented themselves at York with demanding the dismissal of the king’s chief officers. Archbishop Reynolds, who had been filling the role of chancellor as well, had to surrender the Great Seal to John de Sandale. This mediocre individual did nothing outstandingly right in his term of four years, nor anything particularly wrong. He was guilty of one error of common decency in using his position to get delicacies for his table in the middle of the famine. Two purchasers were sent out to all parts of the country to take the best poultry they could get their hands on, with letters patent under the Great Seal to compel compliance. While England starved, the good chancellor lived, literally, off the fat of the land.