Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 54

Edward defeated the Scottish army in a great battle near Dunbar, and Baliol, who seems to have been a mean-spirited man, gave up the contest.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI

It was the end of the ‘rebellion’. Scottish resistance simply collapsed after Dunbar Castle surrendered. The castles of Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth followed suit. Scotland lay paralysed and helpless. John Balliol sent a letter to Edward in Perth, suing for peace, but Edward would be satisfied with nothing less than unconditional surrender. On 2 July 1296 Balliol met Bishop Bek of Durham at Kincardine Castle, where he issued his document of surrender:

…seeing that we have by evil and false council, and our own folly, grievously offended and angered our lord Edward, by the Grace of God, King of England … Therefore we, acting under no constraint, and of our own free will, have surrendered to him the land of Scotland and all its people …

A week later, on 8 July, at a humiliating ceremony in Montrose, Balliol formally resigned his kingdom to Edward and was subjected to the ultimate ignominy: he was stripped of his crown, sceptre, ring and girdle, and the red and gold royal insignia were ripped from his surcoat, giving rise to that nickname of ‘Toom Tabard’. He and his son were sent into captivity in the Tower of London, along with the last of his supporters still at large, including John Comyn the Elder of Badenoch and the Earl of Buchan. Balliol was soon moved to more comfortable house arrest in Hertford, and after three years he would be released into papal custody and permitted to retire to his family’s estates in Picardy in France, where he died in 1313.

Steve Boardman is more sympathetic to John Balliol than Sir Walter Scott was:

I think of Balliol as one of those unfortunate figures who simply gets run over by history. At one stage he tried to assert his own power as Scottish king and to govern effectively, but he was faced with one of the most powerful kings in Western Europe, a massively prestigious figure. Edward I had destroyed the power of the Welsh princes in the 1280s, and in the 1290s he wanted to make his rights in Scotland stick: he wanted to make something concrete of the vague claim to overlordship which previous English kings had occasionally asserted. Edward was in the position and was of the mind to make these vague claims to overlordship a reality in the years after 1292.

In that sense, Balliol was caught in a unique situation: because of the nature of the competition for the throne, he had already acknowledged Edward specifically as the overlord of Scotland. He was dealing with a very powerful adversary, and his own support within Scotland was limited by the disaffection of the Bruces and their supporters. He was simply unable to cope with that combination of circumstances. But that does not mean that when he came to the throne he intended to be any less of a king than any of his predecessors had been; he was, quite simply, hopelessly outgunned.

From Montrose, Edward I made a triumphal progress north as far as the Moray Firth. Then he ransacked the country, systematically and purposefully. The Great Seal of Scotland was ceremoniously broken in two. The Stone of Scone was removed and sent south to Westminster Abbey, where it was placed in the chapel dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The state archives were packed into fifty-three containers and shipped out of the country. Edward also ordered the removal of the Scottish regalia (the crown, sceptre, sword, ring and royal robe) and the precious relic of Scotland’s only royal saint, the Black Rood of St Margaret, which had comforted her on her deathbed; it was never seen in Scotland again.¹

Dauvit Brown has studied Edward’s motives for the looting of the symbols and the raiding of the government archives:

The English kings and their government had by this stage become one of the most bureaucratic in Europe. The reason why they took all the Scottish government records was not to suggest that Scotland had never existed as a kingdom, but because Edward I, as the sovereign lord, had taken control of it and because, in order to govern Scotland properly, he needed to have on file all the previous records of the kings.

It was typical of their approach to their task that they did not just throw things into sacks and take them south; they compiled an inventory of what they were taking. There is a lengthy and impressive list of the titles, at least, and brief descriptions of what the documents were. Sadly, the documents were lost en route: they sank with their ship on the way south, which was a great loss. If those records still existed we would have a much more complete set of evidence relating to government in Scotland and many more royal charters and official documents of that kind.

It has been claimed that Edward also ransacked the country for any histories and chronicles which existed and took them away, too – which was why chroniclers like John of Fordun had to start writing Scotland’s history from scratch. But, in fact, narrative histories were not listed in the inventory of documents removed; they would not have been part of the government archives.

Edward also clearly believed that taking the Stone of Scone, the inaugural stone of the kings of Scots, was the absolute and final symbol that Scotland had ceased to be a kingdom. But what seems to have happened is that the Stone and its legend became even more famous; references to it as the ‘Stone of Destiny’ start now, along with the story that wherever the Stone is, the Scots will rule. Edward may have thought that it represented a full-stop and a final statement of Scottish existence; but as far as the Scottish people were concerned, it was the beginning of a new chapter.

That new chapter was still a long way off, however. Before Edward left Scotland, a parliament was held in Berwick on 28 August, at which a compilation was made of more than 1,500 earls, lords, bishops and leading burgesses who had sworn fealty to him and formally recorded their homage to him as King of Scotland. This document has come to be known as the ‘Ragman Roll’ from the tangle of ribbons which hung from the seals of the signatories.

John Balliol’s name is there. So is that of Robert Bruce, son of Bruce the Competitor (who had died in 1295), and of his twenty-two-year-old son Robert, Earl of Carrick. Every notable family, every major landowner, every significant member of the gentry – all were required to make legal acknowledgement of Edward’s overlordship. But one name among the lesser gentry is missing: the name of William Wallace.

Only hindsight can claim to know how significant an omission this was. The Comyn-led government of Scotland was discredited, with most of its leaders incarcerated in castles throughout England. Of the aristocratic families of Scotland, only the Bruces were still in favour with the autocratic King of England – but even the Bruces had been contemptuously dismissed. When the older Robert Bruce, father of the future king, importuned Edward about the cherished Bruce claim to the throne, Edward is said (by Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon) to have given the withering reply, ‘Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?’

What was the driving force behind Edward’s single-minded, ruthless treatment of Scotland? Fiona Watson finds it an enigma:

Edward was already embroiled in a bitter dispute with France over Gascony, of which he was Duke. But that made no difference – he simply ditched Gascony (temporarily, in his mind) to go for Scotland. And that makes no sense: Gascony was one of the richest parts of the English empire, and to lose it for a cold, fairly barren northern kingdom is bizarre. But Edward was the sort of man who never gave up: if he wanted something, he went for it, again and again and again.

Edward was absolutely determined to subdue Scotland, but one cannot be sure why, other than sheer pride and stubbornness. He did it in the face of mounting protest at home over the expense of his seemingly endless wars and the ever-increasing burden of taxation. So there are some large unanswered questions about Edward’s character and motives; but ultimately, to my mind, he was simply an obsessive who refused to be balked from his purpose. That made him very dangerous indeed as far as Scotland was concerned.

Edward I left his newly acquired kingdom in the hands of the Earl of Surrey as Governor and Hugh de Cressingham as Treasurer. An exchequer was established at Berwick on the Westminster model. English sheriffs and justiciars were appointed the length and breadth of the country. English soldiers garrisoned the major castles. The subjugation was complete; it had taken Edward I only five months to achieve.

Perhaps Edward thought to himself, that, by uniting the whole island of Britain under one king and one government, he would do so much good by preventing future wars, as might be an excuse for the force and fraud he made use of to bring about his purpose. But … the happy prospect that England and Scotland would be united under one government, was so far from being brought nearer by Edward’s unprincipled usurpation, that the hatred and violence of national antipathy which arose betwixt the sister countries, removed to a distance, almost incalculable, the prospect of their becoming one people, for which nature seemed to design them.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI

King Edward thought he had settled the ‘Scottish question’ once and for all. There is a story, recorded by Sir Thomas Grey of Heaton (near Newcastle) in his Scalacronica (written while he was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle in 1355–57), that as Edward left Berwick in September 1296 he said to his companions (in French), ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’ (Bon besoigne fait qy du merde se delivrer). But if Edward thought he was rid of the business, he was very wrong.

1 The Great Hall of Berwick Castle, which had fallen into a ruinous state by the seventeenth century, fell victim to the building frenzy of the Railway Age in the nineteenth century. In 1844 an Act of Parliament was passed to permit the linking of the North British Railway line from Edinburgh to Berwick and the Great North British Railway line from London to Berwick. The ruined castle, hard by the north end of Stephenson’s magnificent Royal Border Bridge over the river, was considered the most suitable site for the station, which was formally opened in June 1846.

1 An ‘Eleanor Cross’, erected by Middleton Barry in 1865, stands in the forecourt of Charing Cross Station in London; it is a replica of the original which King Edward put up in the ancient village of Charing.

1 Nothing remains today of Annan Castle. The large oval site of the original wooden motte-and-bailey castle at Lochmaben is now the fourteenth tee of the golf course to the south-west of the modern town; the ruins of the thirteenth-century stone castle which superseded it occupy a promontory at the southern end of Castle Loch.

1 Berwick-upon-Tweed had been given its royal charter by David I in 1120. From then on the town and its castle bore much of the brunt of Anglo – Scottish border conflict. Once Scotland’s richest port, it changed hands between Scotland and England no fewer than thirteen times before it was finally surrendered to England in 1482. It was the scene of umpteen sieges and sackings, and especially of the savage massacre of 1296.

1 It comes as a surprise to discover that the solid, Romanesque St Cuthbert’s Church at Norham today, set in a huge graveyard which testifies to its antiquity, is the very one in whose chancel Balliol paid homage to Edward I all these centuries ago. Its survival through all the alarums and excursions of the Middle Ages is little short of miraculous.

1 Tradition has it that it was returned to Scotland as part of the 1328 Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton (see here), and recaptured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. A list of relics which arrived at Durham Cathedral after 1346 included ‘a silver gilt cross, with part of the middle of black wood’. It disappeared during the Reformation.