Douglas’ word could not be trusted. This Edward knew well and when the garrison of Berwick surrendered in 1296, Douglas was exempted from the terms granted to the two hundred members of the garrison. In his case, Edward insisted that Douglas remain with him until the end of the campaign. Douglas was still with Edward in June 1296, when he swore allegiance to him in Edinburgh. Two months later, he again swore allegiance to Edward, this time at Berwick.58 What his motives were in subsequently joining Wallace is unclear. At least one authority on the Douglases sees him as a patriot59 and his death as an English prisoner, by some attributed to murder,60 may help to portray him as such. But he was a restless, brutal man, drawn by the prospect of action, not merely against the English. Wallace, at this time possibly an outlaw and of an inferior class, was not a natural ally for Douglas, who not long after the attack on Scone returned to his normal environment, association with with his peers. Even there, some doubts exist as to that relationship. As unreliable to the English as Douglas himself was Robert Bruce, the future king. Because of this, Guisborough reports,61 Bruce was required to swear allegiance by the bishop of Carlisle, John de Halton. He did so, and to prove his loyalty raided Douglas Castle and carried off Douglas’ wife and children. Bruce’s biographer describes this venture as ‘a mock attack … to deceive the English’,62 an opinion also found elsewhere.63 He is then said to have attempted, fruitlessly, to persuade the men of Annandale to join him against Edward; his words, if reported accurately, are indeed stirring.64 But we cannot be certain that the raid on Douglasdale did not have some other motive, perhaps personal; Douglas was, as we have seen, an erratic man, like Bruce himself, and it is not inconceivable that at this time there was bad blood between them.
Whatever Douglas’ motives, he proved valuable to Wallace after Lanark. The raid on Scone, some eighty miles from Lanark, was carried out on horseback. The mounts may have been Douglas’ contribution to Wallace’s force. Wallace almost succeeded in his intention. Ormsby, however, learned of his approach and fled, but, like Edward II after Byland, was forced to leave valuables behind.65 He was back in England in August, still retaining the confidence of his king; it was to Ormsby that Edward entrusted the investigation into the affairs of the see of Durham, when Bishop Bek had fallen foul of Edward.66 If Wallace had failed in his primary intention, of freeing Scotland from another English official, the raid encouraged further action against the forces of the occupation. The rebellion flared between the Forth and the Tay, with the support of Macduff, the son of the earl of Fife. The English were forced behind the walls of their castles, against which the Scots could do little, although Wallace himself would later return to besiege Dundee.
At his trial in 1305, Wallace would be charged with atrocities committed during the war. These included the murder of English clerics. This was not a charge he dignified with an answer, perhaps because it was true. If the worst atrocities were committed either at his order or in defiance of him during the raid into England after Stirling, it seems that as early as the summer of 1297, attacks were being made upon English clergy. If we are to believe Guisborough,67 the Scots, foiled perhaps by the retreat of the English soldiers into their castles, vented their spleen on such unfortunate clergy as they could lay their hands on. Neither age nor sex saved lives: ‘They [the Scots] took old men, priests and women of the English nation (whom they had specially kept alive for the purpose) to bridges over the rivers; and when they had tied their hands or feet together so that they could not swim, they threw them or pushed them into the water, laughing and jeering as they struggled and went under.’ For sport, others were brought to trial before Wallace himself, ‘that bandit’ as Guisborough calls him. Still others were seized from sanctuary and butchered.
If Guisborough was not concerned, any more than other chroniclers, with strict accuracy as regards Wallace, it is to be expected that the Scots would not distinguish between any of the hated English who fell into their hands. Berwick was too recent a memory and the Scottish clergy themselves were not moved by Christian charity towards their English brethren. We should not be surprised if English clergy in Scotland were viewed with hostility. Before the outbreak of war, the expulsion of foreign nationals had become the practice on both sides of the border. Matters deteriorated with the murder in Berwick of some English merchants, an event which moved the English king, himself not free of the charge of xenophobia, to an indignant outburst.68 English clergy who remained in Scotland would in all probability be viewed as a potential fifth column, to be dealt with as harshly as circumstances might suggest. The Church in Scotland itself cannot be cleared of complicity in the maltreatment of the English. One authority has argued that the Church ‘preached the sacred duty of war against the English yoke and in the persons of her bishops and her priests often led the way on the field of battle itself’.69 Bishop Wishart was no warrior, unlike William Sinclair, bishop of Dunkeld under Robert I, but Wishart, from what we know of him, could inspire by words rather than deeds. In all likelihood, the lesser clergy were as bellicose as their betters; the case of Thomas of Edinburgh, who dared to excommunicate Edward I publicly, cannot have been unique.70 With the Church so militant, the laymen of Scotland had an example to follow in the matter of captured English clergy. A precedent and a tradition of violence had been set from the beginning of the war and Wallace would not restrain his men even if he had wanted to. As he had shown at Lanark, he was fully alive to the use to which atrocity could be put. It had brought him recruits then and stultified the English response; he had no cause to change his approach afterwards.
Whether inspired by the example of Wallace or not, those Scots who had failed against Edward in 1296 were ready to try again. Wishart and James the Stewart had plucked up their courage and with Robert Bruce, grandson of the Competitor and the future king, were in rebellion independently of Wallace. Douglas, from the vicinity of Perth where he had been with Wallace, joined with them, as did others. This aristocratic uprising did not endure. The participants were not sustained by a single-mindedness similar to Wallace’s. If it is unnecessary to disparage their motives, we may question their dedication. Wishart and James the Stewart were not without courage but were not in military terms heroic figures. Their strength was in political manoeuvring. Bruce, although Barrow’s defence of him is, as always, authoritative,71 cannot easily be cleared of the charge that his cause was always Bruce. Unlike his father, who remained faithful to the English king who so despised him, Bruce was not unworthy of the English suspicions to which the bishop of Carlisle gave expression.72
The English had no difficulty in dealing with the Scots. Already in June, Henry Percy, grandson of Edward’s viceroy Warenne, and Robert Clifford, a member of the great Westmorland family, had received their instructions from Edward.73 The two were to ‘arrest, imprison, and “justify” all disturbers of the peace in Scotland’. Cressingham was ‘to give his personal aid and counsel’ to the northerners. Percy and Clifford did not delay. Perhaps in part motivated by the knowledge that any success by the Scots might lead to an invasion of the north of England with consequent effects upon their own lands, they gathered levies in the Border counties and by the end of June were at Ayr.74 In choosing to move against Bruce, the Stewart, and Wishart, Percy and Clifford achieved much at little expense. They had no difficulty in facing down the Scots lords who surrendered to them at Irvine (see Chapter 4) without striking a blow.
NOTES
1 Scalacronica, 17.
2 `A man does well to rid himself of shit.’
3 It is Cressingham who is generally considered the more arrogant of the two. Certainly he was not spared in the chronicles, e.g. Guisborough, 294, 302, 303. His birth may have counted against him. Surrey had no such excuse for his arrogance towards the Scots.
4 Prestwich, The Three Edwards, War and State in England, 1272–1377, 50: ‘Edward’s successes were achieved as a result of well-organised logistics, not by tactical or strategic skill.’ For Edward’s wars consult principally J.E. Morr
is, e.g. The Welsh Wars of Edward I, 1901; Bannockburn, 1914, chap. 3 entitled ‘Tactics before Bannockburn’. For a more specialised aspect of the war with Scotland see his article, ‘Mounted Infantry in Medieval Warfare’, Trans. Cumb. & West. Ant. & Arch. Soc. 23 April 1914.
5 Barron, 77.
6 We are in any case left to guess what Barron meant by the term ‘an army’.
7 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 216, writes of Methven as ‘a rout rather than a battle’.
8 Guisborough, 294.
9 Prestwich; Edward I, 27–28.
10 A characteristic more evident in his campaigning than in his politics.
11 On the trial see Bellamy, op. cit., 24 ff. Prestwich; Edward I, 202, comments that ‘a judgement of blood’ was expected from the parliament.
12 Dictionary of National Biography.
13 His own brother, Edmund of Lancaster, may be cited as an example.
14 Dictionary of National Biography.
15 Guisborough, 216; Clanchy: From Memory to Written Record, 1979, 21–28.
16 Guisborough, 303.
17 Prestwich: Edward I, 124.
18 Ibid., 123.
19 Ibid., 124.
20 Guisborough, 303.
21 Watson: Under the Hammer, 38.
22 Barron, op. cit., chaps 3–6, has the fullest account of these uprisings.
23 Lanercost, 122.
24 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 114. For the role of the Scottish Church in the war, see Barron, op. cit., 24–25, and Barrow: Kingdom, chap. 8.
25 Guisborough, 299.
26 Lanercost, 163.
27 But see below, chap. 5, for the famous incident at Hexham.
28 See below, chap. 4.
29 As Wallace is linked with Wishart, so is Murray with his uncle, David of Moravia, who became bishop of Moray in 1289; Barrow: Kingdom, 238–39.
30 Barron, op. cit., 32–57, is the major, if partial source, on Murray.
31 Cal. Docs Scot., ii 742.
32 Barron, op. cit., 33.
33 Cal. Docs Scot., ii 922.
34 Ibid., 922, 931.
35 Stevenson (ed.): Docs Illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1288–1306, ii, 212.
36 Guisborough, 297.
37 Of Rait Castle, near Nairn. He was a neighbour of Andrew Murray.
38 Barron, op. cit., 56.
39 Similar suspicions are to be found in Guisborough, 297.
40 5 August 1297.
41 See below, chap. 4.
42 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 117 n, argues the case most convincingly for this spelling in preference to any other. Kightly, op. cit., 158, has ‘Haselrig’.
43 Sixth Book. The modern version is to be found in McNair Scott: Robert Bruce, 1982, 39.
44 Harry, Sixth Book.
45 Ibid.
46 We may take leave to doubt the episode, although Randall Wallace in the script for Braveheart, cannot resist it. It is in an English atrocity, recounted by Harry, that we find Sir Reginald Crawford hanged, not at, as is historically correct, Carlisle but at the Barns of Ayr. The same inaccuracy occurs in Barbour: The Bruce, ed. Duncan 1997, 152. Wallace, according to Harry, exacted a fearful revenge at the same place. The poet dwells with relish on the burning alive of English soldiers here.
47 The Scalacronica, from which this excerpt is taken, was written when the author was a prisoner of the Scots a generation after Lanark. He has surely captured the horror of the event.
48 See below, chap. 10. Also Bellamy, op. cit., 36 ff.
49 Although in the indictment, mention is made of the offer of a pardon, which, presumably, included the murder.
50 Barbour, op. cit., 90.
51 Guisborough, 295.
52 See also Bower, Book XI.
53 Watson: Under the Hammer, 58.
54 Rishanger, 373.
55 Fraser: The Douglas Book, vol. I, 1885, 60.
56 Ibid., 75 ff; Barrow: Robert Bruce, 83; Cal. Docs Scot., ii, 357, 358, 365, 429, 431, 466.
57 Interestingly, however, the Guardians, anxious to preserve the integrity of the Kingdom of Scotland, were loath to hand over Douglas and his new wife when Edward I demanded that they be handed over to him after the marriage: Fraser, op. cit., 76–77.
58 28 August 1296.
59 Fraser, op. cit., 102. Barbour, op. cit., 60, refer to him as ‘a martyr’.
60 Scalacronica, 124.
61 Guisborough, 295.
62 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 84.
63 McNair Scott, op. cit., 40–41, tells us that Edward I had ordered Bruce through his father to attack and seize Douglas Castle.
64 Guisborough, 297–98.
65 Guisborough, 295.
66 Prestwich: Edward I, 544.
67 Guisborough, 295.
68 Edward’s attitude was not always consistent, he had no trouble in enlisting felons, including murderers, to campaign against the Scots. His opinion of the Scots was made clear in his comment to Warenne, which see above.
69 See Barrow: Kingdom, chap. 8. Sinclair, who repulsed an English invasion in 1317, was called ‘my bishop’ by Bruce. On Sinclair’s subsequent career, note Conclusion, below.
70 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 154.
71 Barrow, op. cit., 119ff.
72 John de Halton became a staunch opponent of Bruce after the latter’s rebellion.
73 Cal. Docs Scots, 887.
74 Guisborough, 297–8.
4
The Time of Revenge, 1297–1298
‘We shall prove this in their very beards’
Wallace shared with the great commanders of history the ability to recognise and take advantage of an opportunity.1 Lanark and Scone had brought him to prominence. It was not merely those of his own station who rallied to him, for according to Guisborough, while he was at Perth, he was approached by representatives, who came to him ‘in great haste on behalf of certain magnates of the kingdom of Scotland’. This has been taken to mean that these messengers were acting for the Stewart, Bishop Wishart, and Bruce.2 Such an opinion concurs with the belief that they were behind Wallace’s uprising at Lanark in May; they were now seeking, that is, more directly to involve him in their endeavours. Whether or not that is the case, in July 1297, they were now to present Wallace, albeit inadvertently, with a crucial opening. Irvine marked a significant stage in his public career, perhaps more so even than Lanark. He was, as so often, swift to profit from it.
Wallace and Andrew Murray, alone of the Scottish principals in the events of that summer, were untainted by the fiasco of Irvine. It is not clear whether, like Douglas, Wallace had ridden south to join with Bruce and the others. If present at all during the preliminary manoeuvrings,3 he had left, it may be guessed in disgust, before the capitulation to Percy and Clifford on 7 July.4 The failure of the nerve of the Scots leaders had one interesting consequence which may help us to understand Wallace’s own attitude to his colleagues. So distressed was he by the behaviour of Bruce, Wishart and the Stewart, that Sir Richard Lundie switched to the English side.5 He was a useful acquisition.6 That contemporary criticism of the Scots leadership cannot be discounted. It is impossible to believe that others did not share his despair, even if they did not at this point defect with him. His action has, however, been balanced by a more sympathetic view of those he had criticised, and a different role suggested for them. Thus a connection has been drawn between the undoubtedly protracted negotiations with the English at Irvine and the freedom these same negotiations offered to Wallace.7 That the Scots had a definite purpose in prolonging the talks with Percy and Clifford appears to be the opinion of at least one English chronicler. For him the link with Wallace is evident: ‘And there [i.e. at Irvine], day after day slipped by in time-wasting bickerings and arguments, while that bandit Wallace gathered the people to him … By now, indeed, he had raised an immense army.’8
Wallace was extremely active in the month after the surrender at Irvine.9 To see in him one who was in any part of a plot hatched before Irvine stretches the imagination. He is more likely
to have gone ahead with his own plans in contempt of the other leaders in the west. His vigour contrasts starkly with their hesitation. One factor must not be overlooked in the light of their future attitude to him. They were intent upon protecting their position and their lands, something denied to Wallace who because of the murder of Heselrig, was an outlaw. They were, at Irvine as ever, both more realistic and self-seeking than he was or became.10 By seeking terms on 7 July, they must have enraged if not yet alienated Wallace. His reaction to the disgrace at Irvine was a sharp raid on Wishart’s palace at Ancrum.11 From there he carried away not only a number of the bishop’s possessions but also his sons who are, perhaps for reasons of delicacy, referred to as his nephews. But the grudge which the raid suggests he bore against Wishart did not last.
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