The Three Edwards (8 page)

Wax candles burned without dimming around her tomb in the abbey for more than three hundred years, a proof that the affections she had inspired were not soon forgotten.

I
T becomes necessary at this stage to consider the character of Edward not only in the light of his earlier record but also with regard to what follows. He had been a great king and he would continue to be great, but in a far different sense. The wise lawgiver, the just administrator give way now to the conqueror. A modern analysis might suggest that he had a split personality, but this would not be accurate, for the qualities that begin to come out strongly in him had always been there. While engaged in the heavy task of codifying the laws, he had been dealing with Wales. The precision and dispatch with which he concluded the Welsh campaigns had stamped him as a military leader of high mark, but in the settlements he made with the people of that country he had been decisive rather than admirable or just.

There have always been forces at work in the world which override justice. The sufferings that the defeated Saxons endured for two centuries after Hastings were gradually forgotten in the fusing of the two races. Who will say that the Indians of North America should have been allowed to keep that continent for themselves? Down through the ages empires have fallen, generally through the aggression of inferior races, but out of the resulting confusion good has come. It may have been that the English people, who were stirring and moving toward greater things, could not have endured forever a troublesome neighbor on their very doorstep; and this can be cited, perhaps, as in some measure a justification for Edward in the case of Wales.

But Scotland was a different matter. The Scottish people were troublesome neighbors also, and the border line between the two countries would inevitably have been the scene of continuous forays back and forth. But the trouble was far enough removed to make a solution possible that would fall short of absorption. The full blame for what happened cannot, however,
be laid on the shoulders of Edward. The selfishness, pride, and treachery of many of the leading noblemen of Scotland made it impossible for them to agree among themselves. They invited Edward to come in and allowed him arbitrary powers. His culpability lay in his willingness to take full advantage of this and to wield the weapons thus placed in his hands with the thoroughness of a conqueror and, at times, the machiavellian skill of later-day diplomacy.

It has already been said that Edward was a thorough, if superior, Plantagenet; and the members of that gifted and dynamic family had always displayed the conquering strain. Edward was not the first king of England to cast covetous eyes on Scotland. It was unfortunate for his place in history that the great opportunity to act came in his day. It is hard to believe that the king who was so temperate and just in so many things could have allowed the hates engendered in war to lead to the butchery at Berwick and to the execution with such barbarity of the great Scottish leader, William Wallace. Otherwise his case might have rested on his work as a maker of forward-looking laws and as the foster father of the House of Commons, and he could have been acclaimed without any reservations as the best of English kings.

The waters of St. Tredwell’s Loch, which always turned red when a death occurred in the royal family of Scotland, must have astonished the natives one autumn night in the year 1290 by the vivid color they assumed. The Maid of Norway had died, and her death was to involve the country in years of such sanguinary strife that many other waters would run red with blood.

The Maid of Norway was the granddaughter of the very pretty Princess Margaret of England, oldest daughter of Henry III, who had been married when eleven years of age to Alexander III of Scotland. This vivacious and dark-eyed child had been taken to Edinburgh by her strait-laced Scottish guardians and confined most strictly in the castle, to prevent her from seeing her husband, who was only ten years old. She was given nothing to eat but oaten bannocks and “paritch” and for recreation she could look out into the foggy skies and listen to a piper in the courtyard below. She was not released from this dismal life until an English army appeared at the border to demand her liberty. Later she was very happy with her husband, to whom she presented three children, two sons and one daughter, named Margaret also. The daughter in course of time married Eric II of Norway and died after giving birth to a third Margaret, who was called thereafter the Maid of Norway.

In the meantime the first Margaret had died and within two years both of her fine sons, Alexander and David, had passed away, leaving the succession to the infant princess in Norway. King Alexander, most reluctantly, for he had been very much in love with his English wife, married then a daughter of the French Count de Dreux, whose name was Joleta, in the hope of having more sons. Pending this development, it was agreed by the nobles of the country that the third Margaret should be considered the successor to the throne.

At this point Edward of England showed signs of possessing what was called in Scotland “the sign of the thread”; in other words, an instinct for bargaining. Seeing a way to bring England and Scotland together under one ruler, he negotiated with the King of Norway a marriage between the Maid and his son Edward, who had now reached the age of six and showed evidence of becoming a very handsome fellow indeed.

The hand of fate then intervened to give the situation a final ironic twist. Alexander of Scotland, still without children by his second marriage, came one night to Burntisland on his way to Kinghorn, where his wife was staying. It was dark and stormy and he was urged to delay his departure until morning. But the king was not one to be balked by inclement weather and, like Tam o’ Shanter, he started out into the wild night. His horse missed its footing on the edge of a steep cliff and Alexander was killed in the fall.

He had been a good king and all Scotland mourned for him. As one chronicler put it:

The people had every reason to mourn, for now all hope of a peaceful accession was centered in the small child in Norway. Arrangements were made to bring her at once to Scotland. A well-equipped ship was sent for her, fitted out with everything to please the heart of an infant queen-fine clothes and bonnets, soft mattresses, and sweetmeats and frails of dates and figs (a frail being a large basket), and all manner of toys, including perhaps a crown.

Playing cards had not yet been introduced into western Europe, but if they had it might have been said that now Edward of England had all the trumps in his hands. He arranged at once for a meeting at Salisbury to which commissioners from Scotland and Norway were summoned, to make the needful arrangements for the succession and marriage. Under the pretext that the rights of the youthful pair must be conserved, he demanded that Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, be made governor of Scotland in the interim. This was reluctantly agreed to, for the Scottish commissioners,
having a trace of the same thread, knew a shrewd maneuver when they saw one.

When the ship returned from Norway and put in at the island of Orkney, the news was conveyed to the anxiously waiting people of Scotland that the little queen had succumbed to the hardships of sea travel while crossing the stormy waters between the two countries.

Almost immediately no fewer than thirteen claimants to the throne came forward. The land was threatened with civil war, and in desperation the lords of the northern kingdom appealed to Edward to act as arbitrator. This duty he undertook with readiness.

A mystery developed almost immediately in connection with the death of the Maid of Norway. It was whispered about that it was not the princess who had died, that in fact she had been spirited off the vessel before it sailed; how or why being left to the individual imagination. In 1301 a handsome young woman came to Norway from Leipzig and gave it out that she was the Princess Margaret. Her story was that she had been kidnaped by a woman named Ingeberg, the wife of Thor Hokansson, and sold into servitude. She bore sufficient resemblance to the deceased Maid to win her some adherents. Her story could not be substantiated in any way, however, and the law did not delay in dealing with the matter. The pretender was imprisoned and later burned at the stake as a witch. She became, to those who had believed in her, a legendary figure and for a long time she was revered as a saint.

The thirteen claimants were a contentious lot, although few of them had more than a shadowy case. There would have been fourteen if Alan Durward, Earl of Atholl, who had married a natural daughter of Alexander II, had not died a short time before. However, one Nicholas de Soules was there, having married another natural daughter of the same king, Ermengarde by name. The two Comyns of Badenoch were on hand, called the Black and the Red, and the first named was inclined to push his rights, which had to do with his descent from a Princess Devorguila. He occupied somewhat the same position as a favorite son in a presidential nomination race in America. He put himself forward but made it clear that, if necessary, he would retire and throw his support to the leading candidate, John de Baliol.

The decision lay in reality between two men, the already mentioned John de Baliol and Robert de Bruce of Annandale, although a third candidate, one John Hastings, was in the running briefly. Baliol was a grandson
of Margaret, the eldest daughter of David, brother of William the Lion. Bruce was a son of the second daughter, Isabel, and based his claim on being of an earlier generation than Baliol. Hastings was the grandson of still a third daughter, Ada. Bruce had been acknowledged as his successor by Alexander II when it seemed unlikely that he would have an heir, but the subsequent arrival of a son, who became Alexander III, had nullified that preference. In any event, there was some doubt about the acknowledgment, nothing being on record to prove it had been made.

It seems to have been considered, with good reason, a rather poor choice. Baliol had the better claim from a legal standpoint but he did not appeal to popular sentiment. He lacked the qualities of leadership, being of a retiring character, if not actually timid. The pawky common people had nicknamed him
Toom Tabard
, which meant
Empty Jacket
, and suggests that he was held in rather low esteem.

Bruce was the stronger man of the two, but he was getting on in years, a circumstance that was offset by his having a solid male line of succession to offer. He had at the time a middle-aged son and a sixteen-year-old grandson, who would become Robert the Bruce, victor at Bannockburn and king and national hero of Scotland. A large group favored the Bruce claims, known as the party of the Seven Earls, which indicates that the landed interests were behind the lord of Annandale. This constituted a weakness as well, for the Bruces and practically all of their supporters had a strain of Norman blood in their veins. Bruce had extensive estates in England and Ireland, as well as his lands in Carrick from which he derived his earldom. The Scottish people wanted a king with nothing but Celtic blood and undivided sympathies.

This was the issue which Edward was asked to arbitrate.

He summoned the lords of the north to attend him on May 10, 1291, at his castle of Norham, which stood at the border line between the two countries. There was not sufficient room in the tall square structure at Norham for all the claimants and their friends and their respective trains, and so the first meeting was held on the haugh along the riverbank. The proceedings there were opened by the chief justice of England, Roger de Brabazon, who made it clear that the first step must be an acknowledgment of Edward as the supreme and direct lord of Scotland. At this the Scots became painfully aware that their feet were on alien soil and that an alien voice was making a claim that struck at the very core of then-independence. They looked at one another in uneasy amazement and finally they asked for time to discuss the point. This was granted and they withdrew across the river to Scottish soil, where their tongues were free to express what they felt. They returned to the haugh on the English side with a demand for thirty days’ delay for consultation with the leaders of Church and state at home.

When they arrived at the end of the thirty days, there were only eight claimants in the party. The others, realizing the weakness of their cases or feeling an unwillingness to accept Edward’s terms, had remained at home. The two parties met in Norham Church, and the Scottish spokesman, with a reluctance that attested the bitterness of the struggle from which they had emerged, announced their willingness to accept the overlordship of the English monarch. The remaining claimants swore in turn to abide by Edward’s decision as that of the sovereign lord of the land.

It was decided then to have the case debated before a body made up of forty judges selected by Baliol, the same number from the Bruce side, and twenty-four Englishmen appointed by Edward. The hearings before this body were protracted over a long period of time, and it was not until the following year that a meeting was held in the Dominican chapel close to the castle of Berwick. It was here announced that they had found in favor of John de Baliol.