Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 43

William King of Scotland, having chosen for his armorial bearing a Red Lion, rampant … he acquired the name of William the Lion … William, though a brave man, and though he had a lion for his emblem, was unfortunate in war.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

The majestic ruins of Arbroath Abbey, on the Angus coast about thirty kilometres east of Dundee, retain memories of many significant events in the story of Scotland’s nationhood struggle: it was here that the Declaration of Arbroath was prepared and signed in 1320 (see Chapter 11), and it was on the foundations of the High Altar that the Stone of Destiny was laid in 1950 after it had been spirited away from Westminster Abbey by four young Scottish Nationalists (see here).

On the turf a few metres in front of the High Altar, sheltered now only by the gaunt remains of the east gable wall, an incised slab of red sandstone commemorates the burial, somewhere in that area, of the royal founder of the abbey in 1178: King William I, ‘the Lion’.

William the Lion is one of the least known and most disregarded of Scotland’s kings. Despite the fact that his was the longest reign by a medieval Scottish monarch (forty-nine years, from 1165 to 1214), he is strangely unknown to the general public compared with his grandfather David I or his successors (his son Alexander II and grandson Alexander III). Indeed, some historians have been scornfully dismissive of him:

Of this king little can be told that is creditable to himself, of advantage to Scotland or, indeed, of interest to the reader. He reigned for almost half a century but achieved practically nothing.

P. AND F.S. FRY, THE HISTORY OF SCOTLAND (1980)

But was William really as toothless a lion as that? Geoffrey Barrow, Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University and an eminent scholar of late medieval Scotland, has stressed that William successfully extended royal authority over the remoter Celtic and Scandinavian areas of the kingdom (the far north and west), and greatly improved the feudal administration of Scotland. His major failure, however – a failure which cost Scotland very dear – was his attempt to recover, as his personal fiefdom, the northern provinces of England: David I had assigned to William’s father, Prince Henry, the earldom of Northumberland, but William’s predecessor on the throne, his elder brother Malcolm IV, had surrendered it to the King of England.

And therein lies the paradox at the heart of William’s reign. Totally committed as he was to consolidating Scotland’s independence, he was nonetheless forced to pledge the nation’s vassalage to England as a result of his disastrous obsession with the lost province of Northumbria.

Yet when he ascended the throne in 1165 at the age of twenty-two, William must have looked every inch the part of a native Scottish king. He was red-haired and powerfully built, a man of lusty energies and appetites (he fathered six illegitimate children before his marriage in 1186 at the age of forty-three), a reckless young knight who lacked both the political guile of his grandfather David I and the artistic sensibilities of his brother Malcolm IV, a blustering, headstrong fellow, the sort of captain of men who could today win a rugby international at Murrayfield single-handed and just as easily throw away the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham.

The most useful way of assessing his long reign is to divide it into four distinct periods.

The first nine years, from 1165 to 1174, was a time when the new king enjoyed comparative peace. But he quickly signalled his obsession with the earldom of Northumberland by badgering Henry II of England about it at every opportunity – so much so, as reported in a private letter reproduced in Sir Archibald Lawrie’s Annals of the Reigns of Malcolm and William, Kings of Scotland (1910), that

the mere mention of William’s name caused Henry to fly into a violent rage, tearing at his clothes, ripping the covers on his couch and even gnawing at handfuls of straw snatched up from the floor.

The second period, the fifteen years from 1174 to Henry II’s death in 1189, marked the most humiliating period of William’s reign – the long and bitter subjection to English overlordship. Disregarding the counsel of his senior advisers, William thought he could take advantage of a rebellion fomented by Henry’s sons against their father and recover the northern counties while Henry’s attention was distracted. He sent his younger brother, David, the Earl of Huntingdon, south to the English barons as an earnest of his good faith, while he himself mounted an invasion of Northumbria which became (in English minds, at least) a byword for merciless ferocity. But his attempt to bludgeon Henry into agreement failed disastrously. David was quickly made a prisoner; worse still, William himself was captured at Alnwick in July 1174.

There is an air of tragi-comedy about that capture. William’s army had failed to capture Newcastle and was now besieging Alnwick. One day William was out riding with a small group of men-at-arms when he detected, through the early-morning mist, a band of cavalry approaching. William thought they were a detachment of his own army; when he realised they were English knights, he charged at them, lance at the ready, shouting, ‘Now we shall see which of us are good knights!’ Hopelessly outnumbered, he was unhorsed and taken prisoner. His captors retreated swiftly with their royal prisoner and he was taken to King Henry at Northampton with his legs tied under his horse’s belly like a common felon. Henry incarcerated him in a dungeon in the castle of Falaise, in Normandy, and kept him prisoner there for five months. Eventually, through the Treaty of Falaise (December 1174), William was forced to pay Henry explicit homage not just for himself but also ‘for the kingdom of Scotland and his other lands in England’, directly subject to the overlordship of the king of England and his heirs. The implication was clear: Scotland was only held by the King of Scots as a fief from the King of England as his overlord. English garrisons were installed in the castles at Berwick-upon-Tweed, Edinburgh, Jedburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling (all at Scotland’s expense), the Scottish bishops were required to make submission to Canterbury (which they resisted successfully), and the sons of important Scottish nobles were taken as hostages.

For fifteen years the Treaty of Falaise remained in full force, and until the day he died Henry II extracted every drop of homage and humiliation he could from William, demanding the scrupulous fulfilment of every letter of the treaty. Perhaps the most humiliating sign of William’s subjection to Henry was his marriage in 1186. Not only did Henry choose William’s wife for him (Ermengarde, the daughter of a minor Norman vassal, Richard de Beaumont), he gave the new Scottish queen a cheap (for him) and cynical wedding-gift – Edinburgh Castle.

The English stranglehold on Scotland was loosened only when Henry II, brought to bay in France by another rebellion stirred up by his sons, died in the summer of 1189. His death ushered in the third major period of the reign of William of Scotland, from 1189 to 1209 – a twenty-year period of independence and peace with England and comparative prosperity. The new King of England, Henry’s eldest surviving son Richard I (Richard Lion-Heart), had already taken a vow to go on the Third Crusade to drive the Saracens out of Palestine, and was desperate for money to finance the expedition. The castles north of the border still in English hands were returned to Scottish ownership, and William and the Scottish nation willingly paid ten thousand Scottish merks for the abrogation of all the terms of the Treaty of Falaise, in what is known as the ‘Quitclaim of Canterbury’ (1189): ‘Thus, God willing, he worthily and honourably removed the heavy yoke of domination and servitude from the kingdom of the Scots’ (Chronicle of Melrose).

No sooner did William get back the unfettered feu of his kingdom, however, than he was riding his relentless hobby-horse to Northumbria again. In 1194, after personally subscribing two thousand merks towards Richard’s own ransom after his capture by the German Emperor in 1192, William offered fifteen thousand merks for Northumberland, more than he had paid for Scotland itself – but Richard would have none of it, if it meant acknowledging Northumberland to be part of Scotland.

But where it mattered – in Scotland – the decade of Richard’s tenure of the English throne saw William reach the peak of his predominance at home, building up his military power to deal with domestic insurrection and knitting his kingdom together. From the accession to the English throne of Richard’s treacherous younger brother, John ‘Lackland’, in 1199, it all began to go downhill. As usual, William lodged another claim for Northumbria and, as usual, it was turned down. John was much more skilfully ruthless than William, much better versed in the subtleties of power-politics. Relations between them, which had been strained from the outset, reached breaking-point in 1209 over the building of a new English castle at Tweedmouth, facing the vital sea-port of Berwick, which was then part of Scotland.

This trouble ushered in the fourth and final period of William’s reign, from 1209 to 1214. William was a relatively old man by now, in his mid-sixties, and his health was beginning to fail. He had lost the initiative in the power-play with England. In 1204, in an act of blatant provocation, King John had given orders for the Tweedmouth fort to be built where it could menace Berwick. The Scots had responded by levelling the half-built castle to the ground – twice. The two kings held peace talks in Norham Castle, but nothing came of them. In 1209 John returned to Norham with a huge army. William, in response, assembled a force at Roxburgh, and full-scale war threatened. This time, however, William drew back from the brink. By the Treaty of Norham John agreed that the castle would not be completed, but in return for this ‘concession’, and as compensation for damage inflicted, William had to pay fifteen thousand merks ‘for having the goodwill of King John’. William also had to relinquish all claim to the northern counties, and to hand over his two elder daughters, Margaret and Isabel, to be married off by John, on the vague suggestion that they would eventually marry John’s sons. Nothing came of that, and William would never see them again; in the event they were married off to high-ranking English noblemen many years after his death.

The Treaty of Norham was another grave setback for the Scottish monarchy. The last six years of William’s reign became a sort of interregnum: the ageing king was steadily losing his vigour and drive, and the young heir to the throne, the future Alexander II, was barely out of childhood (he was born in 1198, twelve years after his parents’ marriage), too young and inexperienced to take over the reins of leadership with any confidence. Little wonder, then, that King John was able to impose himself so aggressively on the Scottish kingdom and its subjects.

William had a year of illness and convalescence in 1213, but was sufficiently recovered by the following year to march north to Caithness to impose the king’s peace there. In September he was back in Stirling, where he succumbed to his final illness. He died on 4 December 1214, at the age of seventy-one.