Читать книгу Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots - Ronald McNair Scott - Страница 9

3

The year 1286 was ushered into Scotland by storms so thunderous and recurrent that many a wiseacre shook his head and doleful men predicted the imminence of calamity. A strengthening rumour rippled through the countryside that 18 March was to be the Day of Judgement. On that very day Alexander III called together at Edinburgh Castle the lords of his council in conference and after the meeting entertained them at dinner. The feast was long, the Lanercost Chronicle relates, the cups were filled, the King was in tearing spirits, chaffing his companions about the prophecies of doom, passing to one of his barons a dish of lampreys, bidding him to eat and make merry for he should know that this was judgement day, to which the baron replied, ‘If this be judgement day we shall arise with full bellies.’

As the red wine of Gascony mounted in his veins, the vision of Yolande, the young bride he had left in the royal manor of Kinghorn, twenty miles away, became more and more alluring. In spite of the tempestuous weather outside and the remonstrances of his nobles, he called for his horse and followed by three squires made haste along the road to the ferry at Dalmeny. When he reached the village the ferry-master urged on him the hazards of the crossing and begged him to return to Edinburgh.

‘Are you afraid to die with me?’ asked the King.

‘By no means,’ replied the ferry master, ‘I could not die better than in the company of your father’s son,’ and forthwith rowed them across the two miles of turbulent water to the burgh of In verkei thing.

Landing in profound darkness they were met by Alexander, the royal purveyor, who, recognizing the King’s voice, called out, ‘My Lord, what are you doing here in such storm and darkness? How often have I not tried to persuade you that these midnight rambles will do you no good? Stay with us and we will provide you with all that you want until the morning light.’

But the King, still impelled by the dual urge of royal duty and private pleasure, asked only for two countrymen to guide him and set off with his escort along the coast road to Kinghorn. In the howling wind and darkness the little party soon lost all contact with each other and next morning the King was found dead on the seashore below the cliffs, his neck broken.1

A great grief fell upon the kingdom and apprehension for the future. The heir apparent was a small girl in a foreign land, and although at Scone in 1284, in the presence of Alexander III, the magnates of the realm had promised, failing his direct issue, to recognize his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, as ‘their liege lady and sovereign Queen’, many who had so promised under the eye of their King when the possibility seemed remote, now that the King was dead began to have reservations. No woman had ever before become the ruler of Scotland. Some harked back to the old Celtic tanist tradition under which when a king died, the nearest male relative took over the reins of power: others began to edge closer to one or other of the two powerful families, the Comyns and the Bruces, who numbered among their members males of the royal blood. Like two stiff-legged dogs circling with hackles raised the two families eyed each other ready to launch into action if any move was made by their rival. The whiff of civil war was in the air.

But Alexander III had left behind him a firm infrastructure of government. The chancellery, the civil service of the time, was largely manned by clerics. The Church had her fingers on the pulse of administration and the Church was the one single coherent institution which covered the whole country. Next to the Crown she was the largest landowner in the kingdom. Her many tenants – lairds, thanes and smallholders – were men of the native race, rooted deep in the soil, a solid substratum of Scottish men beneath the shifting oligarchy of Normans whose lands and loyalties were split between Scotland and England. With undeviating purpose, but often by devious means, she was determined to preserve the independence of Scotland and the Scottish Church.

As soon as the royal funeral had taken place on 29 March 1286, Bishops Wishart of Glasgow and Fraser of St Andrews dispatched two Dominican friars to Edward I, brother-in-law of the late King and hitherto a good friend to their country, to inform him of the event.2 A month later, when Queen Yolande’s claim to be pregnant proved illusory, they summoned to Scone the bishops, abbots and priors, the earls and barons and good men of the country to pledge their fealty to the young Queen over the water, Margaret of Norway, the last survivor of the House of Canmore, and to swear, on pain of excommunication by the bishops, to protect and uphold the peace of her land.3 To this end a regency was appointed to represent the community of the realm, communitas regni Scotie, the whole body of the free subjects of the Crown.

The regency consisted of six guardians of whom two were earls, those of Buchan and Fife, two were churchmen, the Bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, two were barons, James Stewart and John Comyn.4 Of these the first-named three were responsible for Scotland north of the Forth and the other three for the south. Deliberately, neither Robert the Competitor nor John Balliol of Galloway, both of whom had pretensions to the throne, was elected but of the guardians the Earl of Buchan, the Bishop of St Andrews and John Comyn were there to safeguard the interests of John Balliol, whose sister was married to John Comyn. The others were supporters of Robert Bruce.

It was in all a carefully thought-out constitutional compromise and, as a neighbourly gesture and diplomatic courtesy, three envoys, the Bishop of Brechin, the Abbot of Jedburgh and Sir Geoffrey de Mowbray, were commissioned by the Scone parliament to seek out Edward I in Gascony and acquaint him with the arrangement. In the meantime a seal was struck for the guardians without which no ordinance in the future would be accounted valid.

Edward I received the envoys early in September 1286 at the town of Saintes. He was then actively engaged in arriving at an agreement with the King of France over various disputed territories in Normandy, Limousin and other areas, defining the boundaries of Gascony and reforming its government: enterprises which were to occupy his attention until his return to England in August 1289. He dismissed the envoys courteously with expressions of goodwill to the guardians and the promise, at their request, to shelve a border dispute which was causing friction between the two countries.5 But he kept his own counsel about the future he had already envisaged for Scotland.

Edward I was one of the most able and ably advised of all the monarchs of England. The foundations of English legislature and parliament were laid in his reign: the pretensions of the Church were reduced and contained; the system of feudal levies was adapted and transformed to provide a fighting force of immense flexibility and power.

He was a man of commanding presence, tall, handsome and spare. On the field of battle he was fearless: in his private life chaste. He was sober in his mode of living, dressed simply and was constant in his religious devotions.

But the overriding element in his character was his unquestioning belief that whatever he desired was right and in the interests of all concerned. A contemporary wrote:

He is valiant as a lion, quick to attack the strongest and fearing the onslaught of none. But if a lion in pride and fierceness, he is a panther in fickleness and inconstancy, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech. When he is cornered he promises whatever you wish but as soon as he has escaped he forgets his promise. The treachery or falsehood by which he is advanced he calls prudence and the path by which he attains his ends, however crooked, he calls straight and whatever he likes he says is lawful.6

When the news had come of his brother-in-law’s death, he pondered deeply on the consequences. Hitherto, if he was involved in continental warfare, he had known that he had a friendly ruler at his back. Now no such certainty obtained. The French already had links with Scotland through Alexander’s widow Yolande de Dreux, and could strengthen them to their advantage. Above all, the Maid of Norway, with the Scottish kingdom as her dowry, would soon excite the interest of royal suitors from the courts of Europe. It was essential that he had as much control of Scotland as he had of Wales.

His first move was to make sure that there should be no consort for the young Queen of Scotland other than his youngest and only surviving son, Edward of Carnarvon, who had been born in 1284. For that end he had already prepared the way. On 29 March 1286, within a few days of Alexander’s death, he had put the Maid of Norway’s father, King Erik, in his debt by making him a personal loan of two thousand pounds sterling7 and had resolved the problem of his own son’s marriage being within the forbidden degrees of the Church by obtaining from the Pope, in May of that year, a bull dispensing with the impediments of affinity and legitimizing any issue that might result.8

The groundwork had been laid but young Edward was barely two years old and the time was not yet ripe for the next move forward.

The return of the Scottish envoys to their country, bringing with them the approbation of Edward I, was a welcome support to the guardians in a critical situation. During the envoys’ absence trouble had flared in the southwest of Scotland. Robert the Competitor and his son the Earl of Carrick, gathering their retainers together, had seized the two royal castles of Dumfries and Wigton and the Balliol stronghold of Buittle,9 and on 20 September 1286 had entered into a sworn agreement with James Stewart, one of the guardians, Angus Macdonald, Lord of the Isles, the Earls of March and Menteith and other noblemen to band themselves together.10

Robert the Competitor had been stirred from his retirement by two strong motives: first, to secure his base by hemming in the Galloway domain of his rival John Balliol and so keeping open the Nithsdale route between Annandale and Carrick; second, by seizing the castles and signing the Turnberry bond to indicate to King Edward, his old companion in arms and fellow crusader, that at a nod from his royal head the Bruces had the potential to take over the government of Scotland.

But no sooner was it known that the guardians had received the backing of Edward I than the raised fists were folded in peace. Robert the Competitor was too shrewd a magnate to pursue his purpose without the support or tacit approval of the English monarch.

A calm descended upon the country and for four years the guardians, backed by a permanent council of magnates, were able to carry out their administration without further incident. In 1289 their number was reduced to four. The Earl of Buchan died from old age and the Earl of Fife, described by the Lanercost Chronicle as ‘cruel and greedy beyond average’,11 was murdered by his kinsmen. It was fortunate that among the survivors were the two bishops. For these were the professionals: trained in law and diplomacy and determined to uphold the national identity of Scotland. Their skills were shortly to be needed in the negotiations with Edward I.

As soon as Edward I returned to England in the late summer of 1289 he moved cautiously towards his objective. Exercising his moral authority as brother-in-law of the dead King and great-uncle of the young Queen, he invited the King of Norway and the Scottish regency to send commissioners to confer on her future. The King of Norway sent ambassadors. Edward himself appointed the Earl of Pembroke, the Bishop of Winchester, the Earl of Surrey and Antony Bek, the militant Bishop of Durham, to act on his behalf, and the Scottish regency empowered three of the guardians, John Comyn of Badenoch and the two bishops, together with Robert the Competitor, to treat ‘with due care, in all possible contingencies, for the honour and liberty of the Scottish realm.’12

The plenipotentiaries met at Salisbury in October and by 6 November had reached an amicable agreement: that the Queen should be sent to Scotland or England by 1 November 1290 but without prejudice to the question of her marriage; that if it was in England she landed she should be delivered to Scotland provided it was in a safe and peaceful condition, and that the Scots should refrain from engaging her in any marriage contract without the consent of her father and great-uncle.13

Encouraged by the smooth passage of these negotiations, Edward I, within a few weeks of the Treaty of Salisbury being signed, brought at last into the open the project on which he had been quietly working over the past three years. He produced a bull from Pope Nicholas IV granting dispensation for the marriage of Margaret, now six years of age, to his five-year-old son.14

This proposal for the union of the Crowns was received in Scotland with wary approval. For a hundred years there had been peace between the two countries and, with that peace, prosperity. The marriage of Margaret and young Edward would give assurance of that peace continuing: the authority of the Queen would be enhanced by her relationship to a powerful monarch and the pretensions of ambitious vassals would be abated. On 17 March 1290, therefore, letters were sent to the Kings of England and Norway in the names of the four guardians, ten bishops, ten earls, twenty-three abbots, eleven priors and forty-eight barons, speaking for the whole community of Scotland, agreeing to the marriage in principle.15

But the churchmen of the chancellery were not unaware that the see of York nursed claims for supremacy over the Scottish bishoprics and the Scottish magnates who had done homage for their English lands to Edward I in person knew well the imperious temper of that monarch and his consolidating ambitions. Even King Erik of Norway had his reservations and when a Yarmouth ship, specially equipped by Edward I with sweetmeats, fruit and gingerbread for the comfort of Maid Margaret, arrived in May 1290 at Bergen to carry her back to England, he dismissed it empty-handed.16

So the Scottish commissioners conducted their negotiations with all the caution of a reluctant virgin in the presence of an ardent suitor, and when the Treaty of Birgham was signed on 18 July 1290 in the village of that name, there had been written in specific conditions for the protection of Scotland’s independence as strong as any parchment could create.

The laws, liberties and customs of Scotland were to be observed at all times. The great offices of state were to be held only by Scotsmen. No writ of common law or letter of special favour could be issued except by the ‘King’s Chapel’, the royal chancellery. No taxation of the Scots should be levied except for the needs of the Scottish kingdom. No vassal of the Scottish Crown was to do homage for his Scottish lands outside the kingdom. No Church matters were to be subject to interference outside the kingdom. No Scottish subject was to be answerable at law outside the kingdom. No parliament dealing with Scottish affairs was to be held outside the kingdom.

The whole emphasis was on the separateness of the Scottish kingdom from that of England. There was to be a union of the Crowns indeed, but the two countries were to remain as distinct sovereignties ruled respectively by their native queen and king.17

Agreement to these terms was endorsed by Edward I at Northampton on 28 August 1290 and many historians have applauded his statesmanship in showing such consideration to the demands of the weaker party. On the surface this would appear to be so. But it is noticeable that after the resounding affirmation that the Scottish kingdom should be ‘separate, apart and free in itself without subject to the English Kingdom’, there is slipped in a clause ‘saving the rights of the King of England … which may justly belong to him’:18 a clause identical to that he inserted in the Forest Charter Laws forced upon him by his barons and on the strength of which he claimed legal justification when he reneged on his undertakings. Even while the commissioners were still discussing the Treaty of Birgham Edward I sent Walter Huntercomb with an armed force on 4 June 1290 to seize the governorship of the Isle of Man. An integral part of the Scottish realm, of strategic importance, was thus transferred into an English protectorate.19 In August he attempted still further pressure by asking the Scottish regency to allow Antony Bek, his chief negotiator at the Treaty of Birgham, to be viceroy in Scotland for Queen Margaret and her husband designate and to accept his ruling in all matters appertaining to the ‘governance and peaceful state of the realm’ – yet another pointer to the fact that however accommodating his reaction to the Treaty of Birgham, his settled purpose remained the subservience of the Scottish kingdom to the national interest of England.

Nevertheless, for the moment the Scottish rulers conditioned themselves to see only his Janus face of peace and throughout September, that best of months in Scotland, a mood of optimism spread through the country at the prospect of the royal marriage. A voyage by sea of the Maid of Norway to the Orkneys was put in hand and to that outlying possession of the Norwegian Crown a deputation from the kingdoms of Scotland and England made their way while other magnates began to gather at Perth to await her progress south and her inauguration at Scone.

But all was for nothing. The little Queen Margaret fell ill on the voyage from Norway to Orkney and soon after landing there, on 26 September 1290, she died in the arms of the Bishop of Bergen. The succession to the throne was now wide open.20