by Jack Whyte
Will moved quickly to change his role as it was perceived by the people around him. He rapidly established himself as verderer for the thriving community that had grown up around his original encampment in the forest, and he did it simply by convening a gathering of all the local folk and talking to them seriously about the need for conservation and the careful husbandry of the wild forest animals, to avoid depleting the health and numbers of the deer herds. He undertook to become the warden of the forest marches for the outlawed folk, exactly as he had been for his uncle Malcolm in Elderslie, gathering tallies of the local herds and their territories, marking their patterns and their breeding numbers, and culling them for food without being wasteful. He then selected six men, each of whom had had some degree of training as either verderers or foresters, to work with him in organizing new coppices and cultivating arable plots in suitably isolated areas of the forest.
That done, he casually appointed three of his former lieutenants as joint commanders of the local forces and publicly relinquished his duties to them. Long John of the Knives, Robertson the archer, and Big Andrew Miller, the wiry little fighter with the ever-present crossbow, quietly took over the responsibilities that had gradually become Will’s over the preceding few years. The transformation was well on its way to being achieved.
By October of that year, relations between Scotland and England had deteriorated almost beyond redemption. Edward Plantagenet had not relented for a moment in his quest to have the Scottish castles passed into his jurisdiction as overlord of Scotland, and King John, backed by his council of the strongest and most powerful earls and barons in his realm, had been equally intransigent in his refusal to cede a single stronghold, despite the increasingly bellicose English threats of reprisals aimed at enforcing their King’s documented rights in that matter. It mattered nothing to Edward and his barons that the “legal” statutes they brandished had been prepared by English lawyers upon the self-important instructions of England’s King; or that the rights of overlordship to which they referred so pompously were the self-assumed rights of that same English King; or that the application of such rights in Scotland, the sovereign realm of another, legally anointed monarch, was illegal. Such minor details had no relevance at all in the matter of Edward Longshanks’s drive to subsume Scotland as he had Wales mere decades earlier. That became abundantly self-evident as September came to an end amid rattling drums and the braying of recruiters’ horns in England.
But Longshanks had overplayed his hand this time. The collective awareness of his determination drove the Scots nobility to unite, at last, behind their own King at a parliament of the realm—the eighth and last of King John’s reign—held in Edinburgh that October. They were unanimous in their formal refusal to give up a single Scottish castle to the English.
Barely a week later, the delegates King John had sent to France on his behalf months earlier signed a treaty of alliance with Philip IV and the realm of France. It was a treaty of mutual support and assistance in all things military, commercial, and diplomatic, designed to bring the two realms together in mutual amity and interests. To mark the grandeur and historic significance of the treaty, the parties agreed that Prince Edward Balliol, King John’s eldest son, would marry the Princess Jeanne de Valois, whose father was Charles Capet, Count de Valois, brother to King Philip IV and titular Emperor of Constantinople. The treaty would have to go before the Scots parliament to be ratified, and until it had done so nothing could yet be certain, but no one doubted that the ratification would occur.
Edward Longshanks, of course, was incensed. And when that happened, someone—or someplace—invariably was made to suffer.
The news of his rage had barely been spread when more word arrived from the south, unconfirmed but barely questioned, since it merely added flesh to the stories that had been filtering up from England since September. Edward, according to these reports, was assembling an enormous army in northern England, at Newcastle on the River Tyne. No one doubted the tidings, for that was the historic gathering point for any army planning to march north into Scotland.
Yuletide came and went, as did the start of the New Year, 1296. That winter was a cold and brutal one for soldiers under tents, for it was windy and sleety and sustainedly miserable, never quite cold enough for snow or freezing temperatures but never warming up sufficiently to dry out sodden clothing and footwear. But since the soldiers enduring the misery and freezing in their rusting armour were Englishmen preparing to invade us, no one felt any sympathy for their plight, and those who thought of it at all might reasonably have wished for the weather to deteriorate even further.
In the meantime, little William was the delight of his parents and admirers, including his priestly godfather. His long, black tresses had vanished soon after his birth to be replaced by a thicker, more substantial growth, tinged this time with a fiery chestnut red that emphasized his deep blue eyes and drew involuntary gasps of delight from every woman encountering him for the first time. Added to that, his ready grin, infectious in its appeal and challenging in its bright-eyed directness, attracted everyone who encountered it, men and women both, cajoling them to come and play with him and pay no attention to the tiresome details of what was transpiring in the unseen world beyond the iron-hinged doors of solid oaken planks that kept him and his family safe.
He was industriously studying locomotion, crawling everywhere before he was fully six months old and endlessly exploring the wonders of every place where he was not supposed to venture, so that, one morning in January, after early Mass, I found him at the entrance to the byre, eyeing the cattle with delight. He had escaped, somehow, out from under the eye of his mother or the cook in whose charge he had been left, and, clad in nothing but a loincloth, had made his way right across the inner yard, which was inches deep in icy muck. I stopped short, because he was doing something I had never seen him do before. He had pulled himself upright, using the chinks in the rough, narrow logging of the door, and was standing on his own, barefoot but heedless of discomfort and swaying slightly as he peered into the beast-warmed gloom of the cowshed, gurgling to himself in enjoyment. He caught sight of me from the corner of his eye and swung to face me, crowing ecstatically over his own cleverness. But even as I began to move towards him he tottered alarmingly, fighting to retain his balance for at least two steps before landing flush in a pile of wet dung. His howls of outrage were spectacular. I carried him home very carefully, attempting to keep him at arm’s length to protect my priestly robes, but it was a hopeless task, because he was so slippery with mud and dung that I had to hold him close to prevent him from slipping right through my fingers.
A very different kind of crisis occurred the following month, when Bishop Wishart and Canon Lamberton once again turned up unexpectedly on our doorstep. Will was the first to see them coming, and he set aside the arrow he was fletching and strode into the middle of the clearing that served us as a village square. He gave a shout of welcome and stood awaiting them, hands on hips and a broad grin on his face. I had heard his shout and come outside to see what had occasioned it, and I was in time to watch his face settle into lines of apprehension and even trepidation to match the look on our visitors’ faces.
We stood silent as they dismounted with the merest nod of greeting, and then Will gestured wordlessly and spun on his heel to lead us into his hut. As soon as we were all inside, he closed the door and leaned against it.
“What?” he growled, looking directly at Wishart. “What’s happened?”
“We are at war with England.”
“What? We’re at war? Sweet Jesus, has Balliol gone mad? We are not fit to fight among ourselves, let alone go to war with England! What happened?”
Wishart was shaking his head. “John had little to do with it, Will. It was Edward who declared war, on us. He’s had an army gathering at Newcastle for months. We all knew that, but we assumed he was merely flaunting his displeasure, threatening us. We didn’t seriously think he would invade.”
“But he did. What caused him to?”
Wishart glanced at Lamberton and nodded to him to respond, and the younger man straightened up and sucked in a quick breath. “Displeasure with King John,” he said quietly. “John summoned an assembly of nobles to Dunfermline to ratify the French alliance.”
“A parliament? Then he must have done it in secrecy. We would have heard of such a thing even here in Selkirk.”
“It was not a parliament,” Wishart muttered. “It was an assembly, far less formal.”
“Formal enough yet to involve the nobility and offend Edward of England sufficiently to launch a war. What happened at this assembly that prompted such a response?”
Lamberton cleared his throat discreetly. “Perhaps I can answer that. His Grace is correct, this was not a parliament. Those who were there referred to it as a gathering of the community of the realm. But the truth is that in certain respects it proved to be more noteworthy, and perhaps more important in terms of influence, than a true parliament might have been.”
“Evidently so, given the result.” Will’s voice was redolent of disgust.
“It achieved what it was intended to achieve, and quickly. In a matter of hours, the new treaty with France was ratified and a marriage proposal between King John’s son Prince Edward and the Princess Jeanne de Valois of France was approved and witnessed in writing by all present, including four earls of the realm, eleven barons, four bishops, and five abbots. All of which is well and good, but something far more significant occurred in Dunfermline. This truly was a gathering of the community of the realm. For the first time official representatives of the burghs of Aberdeen, Berwick, Edinburgh, Perth, Roxburgh, and Stirling were invited to participate, and for the first time the voice of the burgesses was officially added to the public record.”
Will nodded. “And Longshanks responded with war.”
“Almost instantly,” Wishart said. “He must have had a spy there, because the word went back to him as though on wings. His reaction was spectacular, I’m told. He upended his table and cried upon God to witness that these ingrate Scots upstarts had finally exhausted his long-suffering patience. He declared war on us then and there and summoned his dukes and barons to invade.”
“Hmm …” Will crossed the room to the nearest chair and sank into it, his eyes gazing into nothingness, and the silence stretched, broken only by the sounds of movement as the rest of us seated ourselves, too, each one of us momentarily lost in his own thoughts.
Finally Will straightened up again. “So what happens next? Where are my people to go? We’re practically astride the main invasion route.”
Wishart glanced at Lamberton. “Father William, you might like to answer that, since you and I were talking about it on the way here.”
Lamberton nodded, solemn faced, then spoke directly to Will. “The honest answer is that we don’t know. You might be perfectly safe here—and by you I mean, of course, your womenfolk and children. You are a mile or two off the main road, and that might be enough to safeguard your settlements. The English armies will be moving quickly—at least through the thickest parts of the forest here—so they won’t have much temptation to stray from the high road. And it’s safe to say that the English commanders will be taking precautions against desertion, so they won’t be letting their people into the woods, for fear of losing them. So your distance from the road certainly makes your situation quite promising. But it is also precisely the kind of situation than no one can judge in advance.” He paused.
“Were I in your shoes, Will, I would prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. I would get the women and children safely away from these settlements and into defensible, out-of-the-way areas, and I would set up a strong but mobile screen of bowmen between them and the road. That way, if the English pass by without stopping, you will be able to move back into your homes in a matter of hours, and if anyone does come into the woods looking for you, the bowmen can deal with them.”
Will nodded. “Aye, that is much like what I had already decided to do. Have you any other tidings?”
Lamberton turned to Wishart, and the older man spoke up quickly. “Of course, as you might imagine, we have been taking advantage of our foreknowledge of Edward’s preparations and making arrangements of our own to counteract his threats.”
“We being the maggots, you mean.”
“Of course. Who else should I mean? This new community of ours may speak with one unanimous voice, but it cannot yet fight with one unanimous incentive. The armies must still be raised by the earls who control them, and commanded by the barons whose responsibility such things have ever been. But I am happy to be able to tell you, Will, that matters have improved in that respect since last we spoke. The commanders of the realm stand united today, and they are confident, as am I, that we, under the banner of King John and with the blessing of God, will acquit ourselves more than honourably in the fight ahead.”
Will blew a puff of air from his cheeks, dismissing the opinions of the magnates. “That is all very fine, my lord, but can we win? Acquitting ourselves well and losing in spite of that has no appeal for me. And I know it will not appeal to any of the men who have to march through rain and mud, carrying spears and pikes. Besides, the English share our God with us, and they will swear, to a man, that He is on their side. What about the Bruces?”
The Bishop blinked. “What about them?”
“Annandale and Carrick are two of the most powerful men in Scotland. Where do they stand on all of this? For I tell you frankly, if Bruce is not with us in this war, then it were best to sue for Edward’s peace this minute. Where do they stand? More simply, where is the young pup Carrick?”
“The Earl of Carrick …” The Bishop cleared his throat, looking away into a corner. “I do not know his exact location.”
“Nor do I, my lord, but I would be willing to wager that you would find him in King Edward’s court, for that is more home to him than is Scotland. The earl, whose title makes him one of this realm’s most illustrious peers, is a popinjay, a spoiled brat who enjoys draping himself in outlandish clothes and disporting himself with other men’s wives, playing at being a man himself while spending his sponsor’s money like a fool. There’s precious little of the Scot in him, from what I hear. He is young—what, twenty, one and twenty? And I have been told he is engaging, pleasant, and amiable when he wishes so to be, but he is also completely irresponsible. Edward dotes on him as though he were a favourite son and spoils him ruinously. He gives him leave to abuse anything and anyone he wishes to. And when he tires of indulging the young earl’s rebelliousness, he summons him back into the fold with a click of his fingers. You mark my words, my lord. Bruce is an ill name to employ in demonstrating solidarity, or anything purely Scottish and admirable, on the part of the magnates.”
The Bishop opened his mouth to speak, but Will ignored him.
“The Houses of Bruce and Comyn have been at daggers drawn for long years now, and the Bruces, God knows, are no great supporters of King John Balliol. They see in him, right or wrong, an upstart and a weakling, thrust into kingship by England and held in place only by the power and support of the Comyns. And the young earl is not the only one we need to be concerned about. His father is another matter altogether. The Lord of Annandale is currently castellan of Carlisle, is he not?”
When the Bishop nodded, Will grunted. “Very well, then. Let us consider the unthinkable. Now that the two realms are at war, one of our first moves must be to march against Carlisle, to shut off the English approach to the Solway Firth and neutralize the threat of invasion from that direction. So the question becomes this: which way will Robert Bruce of Annandale declare himself? Will he support his anointed King and open Carlisle to a Scots army? Or will he cleave to his much-acknowledged overlord and benefactor and defend Edward’s Carlisle Castle against his true King’s advance? I have my own opinion on that matter, but yours, my lord Bishop, is the one that matters here. Until you and your advisers can answer
that single question, beyond a doubt and without reservation, I suggest you would be foolish to trust the fate of this realm to any assumptions having to do with the name of Bruce. I do not enjoy saying that, for my family have always been Bruce men, and I have no doubt that you are not happy to hear me bring my doubts to your attention, but that is the truth as I see it today.”
Robert Wishart rubbed at his eyes. “I know, my friend, I know. But that, at least, is a matter that will not take long to resolve, for we must put it to the test sooner than later, and by the time we do, we will know how to proceed in either circumstance. In the meantime, I am assured that the earls have matters well in hand. John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, is fortifying Annandale, since Bruce himself is in the English camp for the time being. Lord John de Soulis’s nephew Nicholas commands in Liddesdale, and between the two of them, the south is well cared for. Sir William Douglas holds the castle at Berwick, and Sir James the Stewart has charge of Roxburgh Keep. We are well prepared and in good hands.”
Wallace stood up and moved to a cupboard against the wall, from which he withdrew a jug of wine and a pair of cups, signalling to me to bring out more. He placed a cup in front of the bishop, but before he could pour any wine the old man waved him away, and so he stood there for a few moments, holding the jug between his hands and looking from one to the other of us. “Well,” he said eventually, “I hope you’re right and that the hands in which we rest are truly good, for if they hesitate or fumble, this land of ours will go down into chaos, and the groans of the folk crushed under England’s heel will assault the gates of Heaven itself.” He placed the jug carefully on the table, untouched. “I hope you’re right, and I will pray that you are.”