15 There are certain periods of Bruce’s career which pose difficulties even for the most dedicated of his biographers. If Falkirk is perhaps the most obvious of these, his actions after Irvine remain unclear also. At what stage he became, as McNair Scott says (53), once more the ‘leader of the resistance in the south west’ is open to question. Not even Barrow, who describes Bruce (Robert Bruce, p. 119) as ‘inept’ at Irvine explains how he might have achieved the necessary ability, after Irvine, to rank high in the Scottish leadership. It is, of course, true that as a major contender for the throne he could never be ignored.
16 McNamee, op. cit., 43.
17 The comparison between Irvine and Stirling must, equally, have been obvious to contemporaries.
18 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 127.
19 Dickinson, Donaldson, Milne (eds): A Source Book of Scottish History, I, 1985, 136–37.
20 Guisborough, 306.
21 Kightly: Folk Heroes of Britain, 168; McNamee, op. cit., 56–57.
22 Summerson: Medieval Carlisle, the City and the Borders from the Late Eleventh to the Mid-Sixteenth Century, 1993, vol. I, 194.
23 Ibid.
24 McNamee, op. cit., 44. Wallace’s reputation after Stirling Bridge was such, however, that present or not, his was the name heard.
25 Bower, Book XI, tells that the castle was surrendered by the garrison, terrified by news of Stirling Bridge.
26 Guisborough, 304.
27 This also we learn from Guisborough, while the Lanercost Chronicle, for good measure, has the Scots ‘committing arson, pillage and murder’.
28 McNamee, op. cit., 47. That Wallace could come late upon the scene and take control of marauding bands, already heady with success and laden with plunder, accustomed to ranging over a wide area, and weld them into a coherent force, is evidence of his personality and character.
29 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 131.
30 In 1315, the citizens of Carlisle defied Robert Bruce with as much determination and, considering the circumstances, greater success.
31 Guisborough, 305. McNamee, op. cit., 49ff, argues that, contrary to recent wisdom, it was here rather than in Northumberland that the greater damage was inflicted.
32 For a stern judgement on Wallace’s leadership during the invasion of northern England, the reader is recommended to turn again to McNamee, op. cit., 56ff.
33 The earliest use of the title.
34 McNair Scott, 241.
35 Wright: Political Songs, 172–73.
36 On the career of Fraser, see Barrow: Robert Bruce, passim, and the same author’s Kingdom of the Scots, 236–38 and 246.
37 Wright: Political Songs, 172–73.
38 His relationship with Wallace, like that of Wishart with Wallace, was a strange one. Although he did not cease while in France to exhort Wallace to continue the fight against Edward, he did not himself find it a problem to collaborate with the English king in 1305.
39 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 130.
40 Wright: Political Songs, 214.
6
The Time of Despair, 1298
‘Let them perish entirely, both fathers and sons’
It took just over two weeks for reports of the catastrophe at Stirling Bridge to reach London. Defeat, as no one could have anticipated, eased Edward’s position at home. The slaughter of an English army, the undignified escape by Warenne, the treatment of the body of the dead Cressingham, Edward’s treasurer, these were insults not to be borne. There is no evidence that the English as a whole had formed a more favourable opinion of the military prowess of the Scots because of Stirling. Undoubtedly, however, there was a spirit of revenge in the air and immediate action was called for. A muster was ordered for Newcastle on 6 December, with thirty thousand infantry summoned.1 With Edward still on the Continent, his son now aged fourteen was the intended leader of the punitive expedition. Warenne, summoned to London to explain his failure against Wallace and Murray, must have been persuasive, for in the event it was he to whom command was entrusted. The earls of Gloucester, Hereford, Norfolk and Warwick were to participate as, was Henry Percy.2 Scottish magnates were not exempted, Dunbar and Angus, always pro-English, Comyn of Badenoch, Menteith, and Buchan, were among those named in writs.3 Inevitably, with the approach of winter, the response to the Newcastle muster proved disappointing and Warenne, nor surprisingly, was late.4
The English managed one foray into Scotland before the end of 1297. Robert Clifford, captain of the Carlisle garrison, who with Henry Percy had faced down the Scots at Irvine,5 led a force into Annandale, burning and killing in the traditional manner.6 With this done, Clifford left behind him a hundred soldiers. This precautionary measure was undertaken because of a rumour that the Scots were advancing; no one could be sure that Wallace was not once more intent on action south of the Border. In early 1298 Warenne’s army moved at last. He was able to relieve both Roxburgh and Berwick but made no further progress. Supplies, a perennial problem, were short and desertions numerous, and by the middle of March Warenne’s army had shrunk to a fifth of its original size. What the earl, a few months after his disgrace at Stirling Bridge and now becalmed in a hostile land, would have made of the situation, we can but guess. He was spared embarrassment by an instruction from Edward to delay a campaign against the Scots until he returned from Flanders; the king meant to lead his army in person.
Whatever problems Edward had faced before his departure for the Continent, he returned to a country united against the Scots in general and against Wallace in particular as it had never been. The threat of civil war had been lifted.7 The discontent of the nobles, led by Norfolk and Hereford, had already been alleviated in the king’s absence when Prince Edward, acting as regent, had become reconciled with them in the previous October.8 From Ghent Edward had accepted his son’s action, and he declared himself ready to give his assent to undertakings given in his name by the prince. These he would confirm at a parliament called for Whitsuntide. The clergy, no less by the need for reconciliation, produced subsidies for the forthcoming campaign from the provinces of York and Canterbury. Mindful as the clergy were of the opportunities which the subjugation of Scotland offered, such subsidies, involving as they did the protection of England, were to be distinguished from others intended for use in foreign adventures. The chronicle and songs of the period sustained the vilification of Wallace which was essential if Edward was to be certain of the goodwill of his subjects.
Edward was back in England from Flanders on 14 March 1298. He was not slow to act in the matter of Scotland. On 8 April he called Warenne, together with Norfolk, Gloucester, Hereford and Warwick, all of whom had remained at Berwick after Warenne’s army had disbanded, to a council at York later that month. Secrecy was essential, the earls were warned, lest the Scots learned of Edward’s intentions. On the same day, summonses were issued for the army to muster at Roxburgh on Wednesday 25 June.9 York became the seat of government for the next six years, with the transfer there of the exchequer and the common law courts. With his usual care Edward summoned the Scottish lords to attend him in council there. Their failure to come to York allowed him to pass a sentence of forfeiture on them. He thus had at his disposal lands in Scotland with which he could reward those of his subjects who joined him in his great endeavour against Wallace.
In his determination to avenge Stirling, Edward was at pains not to neglect any potential sources of support. Before going to York for the parliament summoned for Whitsuntide, he toured a number of shrines in the south of the kingdom, notably that at Walsingham in Norfolk, to seek inspiration and guidance. Walsingham, with its shrine to the Virgin Mary, held a special place in Edward’s affections.10 But in 1298 it was upon the northern saints, over whose jurisdiction Wallace had ranged the previous winter, that he concentrated his attention. He first went as a supplicant to the shrine of St John of Beverley and bore away the saint’s banner as insurance against defeat in the campaign.11
It was an action sure to win favour with his army, for Edward was a
ware of the propaganda value of what he did. John, bishop of Hexham from 687 and of York from 705, enjoyed great and deserved popularity with the English. His power was well attested. Even after the translation of his remains from their original resting-place to the grander location of York on 25 October 1037, his shrine at Beverley continued to be a centre of pilgrimage. It was assured of his protection against enemies of whatever kind. In 1069, while William I was crushing the last of rebellion in the north of England, Beverley was saved from destruction by the intervention of the saint. John was especially potent in battle; his name had been on the lips of the English in the savage wars of the Scottish border for centuries. The passage of time did not detract from his authority or his fame. Henry V, the equal of Edward I as a soldier, ascribed the victory of Agincourt to John.
Edward’s visit to Beverley has been seen12 as a deliberate imitation of that undertaken by Athelstan, king of the English, who at Brunanburh in 937 defeated the alliance of Constantine, king of Alba, Owan, king of Strathclyde and Guthfrithson, leader of the Danes of Dublin. Constantine lost his eldest son in the battle, and no fewer than five minor kings and five earls are said to have died with him. Athelstan, in traditional fashion, went on to ravage Scotland. Edward, a propagandist of no little skill if no exceptional honesty, would be content to let the parallel between himself and his successful predecessor be remarked among those he commanded.
To the banner of one saint he next took the precaution of adding another, that of Cuthbert of Durham, whose reputation as a defender of the English, miracle worker, and inveterate foe of the Scots outstripped even that of John of Beverley. Less than a year before Edward’s appeal to him, Cuthbert had given evidence of his awesome power over the affairs of men. It was then that he turned back Wallace and his army from the borders of Durham. Not only had the saint aroused in the men of the country the will to challenge the hitherto invincible Scots, he had called up a winter storm of such ferocity that Scots died where they stood and Wallace was forced to abandon his plans.13
Far from being the routine behaviour of a superstitious man, Edward’s public veneration of the northern saints and his enlisting of their raid was part of the policy, initiated upon his return from Flanders, of maintaining that feverish hatred of Wallace which sprang from the latter’s achievements. Not until the murder of Comyn in February 1306 would Edward again be able to rouse his people to such a pitch of patriotic fervour. Under his direction the campaign of 1298 was assuming the nature of a holy war. Wallace had challenged the king’s supremacy and must be made to pay. The English might continue to grumble at the increasingly heavy taxes they were made to pay to subsidise the war in Scotland,14 the nobility might still regard their king with some suspicion, but Edward rode to battle in the well-founded belief that the country was with him. For Wallace there was no such certainty. In a song of the period,15 written shortly after Falkirk, the mood of the English is unequivocal. The English, as might be expected, are conquerors, compared to angels, provoked into righteous retaliation by the perfidy of their enemies. Edward’s wrath, great though it is, is just. He is the chosen of God, from whom he derives the strength to chastise the Scots, as he had already chastised the Welsh and the French. Wallace is not spared. He is ‘a robber’, ‘unworthy’, ‘scarcely better than a mouse’. His cruelty and viciousness in the north of England are recorded. Those he leads are ‘filthy’, ‘swine’, ‘malignant’, ‘savages’, ‘murderers’. They cannot expect to escape punishment for that treachery which alone explains the success they have had. ‘Let them perish utterly both fathers and sons’, the song calls. This, although common some thirty years later’16 is far beyond the ritual exchange of insults in which both sides had always indulged. Now, with the absolute certainty that the saints watched over his venture, knowing that his people, however much they might complain, were united behind him in his mission to deal with Wallace, Edward made his way into Scotland by way of Newcastle and Alnwick, where he rested briefly before proceeding to Roxburgh. There he arrived in early July.
Edward’s army in 1298 has been described as ‘formidable’17 and ‘impressive’.18 It is difficult to argue with these judgements. The foot alone reached a massive total. One authoritative assessment of the numbers of foot gives a total of almost twenty-six thousand immediately before Falkirk.19 That figure had been exceeded in 1294–95, albeit not for long,20 but after Falkirk Edward was never again able to raise foot in numbers comparable to that campaign.21 Certainly, in his attempts to deal with Robert Bruce in 1306–07 he could find no more than three thousand foot.22 In preparation for the 1298 campaign 12, six hundred Welsh, together with a thousand foot from Lancashire, were summoned to appear at Carlisle by 17 June.23 Contributions from Ireland, and from Shropshire and Staffordshire and elsewhere in England, added to the total. Over a thousand foot were brought from the garrison of Berwick. It appears that the most significant factor in the foot recruited, in terms of numbers and of potential impact, was provided by archers. The Welsh had a high reputation in this element, but, as will be seen, they proved unreliable at Falkirk, and Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire proved to be the areas whose archers did the greatest damage to the Scots.24 Figures for the cavalry, the elite, on whom Edward would rely heavily and against whom the Scots were prone to be vulnerable before Wallace, suggest a total of between fifteen hundred and two thousand.25 The army marched in four brigades or ‘battles’.
That part of the Falkirk campaign which began with the departure of the English army from Roxburgh has, perhaps not surprisingly in view of the importance attached to the battle itself, received less attention than it deserves. This neglect of a significant phase of the campaign has damaged Wallace’s reputation, unjustly. Once Edward set out from Roxburgh a pattern developed, soon to become familiar and destructive of the morale of successive English armies in Scotland. As a matter of policy, Edward devastated the land over which he passed. The consequences of such a policy appear to have escaped as seasoned a soldier as he was. It is, of course, possible that he was relying for the provisioning of his troops on the grain ships which were then making their way up the east coast. But there is some evidence that, although he meant to settle with Wallace, he was also intent on a punitive expedition;26 he did not eschew destruction for its own sake and as a warning to the Scots. They, meanwhile, had retired before him, in the belief that the situation was to their advantage. The country south of the Forth was empty of inhabitants; Edward was short of intelligence, his men of sustenance.27 Wallace knew very well the value of such a withdrawal, which formed an integral part of his strategy. Such a technique was not the creation of Robert I, although his successful employment of it against the armies of Edward II has somewhat obscured the fact. There is a parallel here with Edward II’s invasion of 1322; so lacking were the English then in food that they are reported to have found in the whole of Lothian only one cow. At that, the earl of Warenne, son of Wallace’s old enemy, commented that he had never seen dearer beef.28 His father, riding with Edward I and in similar straits, would have understood the sentiment. How close Wallace came to victory over Edward without a fight will emerge. It is too often forgotten that only with hindsight do the events of July 1298 assume their familiar shape. Wallace was content to draw the English on, and the wisdom of that tactic was to become apparent.
Although we lack precise evidence as to his movements at the time of the English advance, we may reasonably make certain basic assumptions. There must have been a strong temptation to meet the English early rather than later; there always was. Wallace cannot have taken the decision to avoid confrontation with the English in the south-east without great thought. Edward had chosen to lead his army through an area which was, and would remain, a fighting-ground, where the Scots, although often unsuccessful, had engaged the enemy on numerous occasions. Dunbar had been but one of a series of defeats suffered by the Scots in this part of the country. Pinkie, and again, Dunbar, lay in the future. The route which Edward followed, through Laude
rdale and thus to the outskirts of Edinburgh, which he reached on 11 July, was that favoured by English armies invading from the east. It was therefore a natural focal point for an assault upon the invader. News of his ravaging of the land would reach Wallace. It would rouse the anger of his men. It is not unlikely that Edward intended this.
Yet Wallace was not tempted. He did not deviate from his plan. He waited, as Robert I would wait in other campaigns. Wallace’s decision to stand on the defensive, to allow for the wasting of the English army, had been taken well in advance of the invasion. He must have known that an opportunity to attack was possible. In the kind of war in which he believed, intelligence had a great role. Barrow has shown29 how in this campaign he used contingents from the Lowlands; among these were men who came from the very area through which Edward was passing. From them would come the information he required. Nor would he be free of pressure from the nobles. Dunbar had taught them nothing; their inclination, like that of their English counterparts at Falkirk, was still to go on the offensive. Somehow, he had convinced them of the need for that restraint which not even harsh experience had shown them to be necessary. Wallace’s own following, as will shortly be argued, was not inconsiderable. He may have used the threat of deploying it independently to force the nobles into agreement. It is equally possible, however, that he was forced to bargain with the nobles in order to secure their compliance. Their role, and, interestingly, that of the English nobles in the forthcoming battle, indicate that the relationship between leader and led was neither an easy one nor strong even in the heat of events.
The price of that restraint which Wallace urged on his noble allies was to prove a serious one. Because he fought at Falkirk it has always been assumed that he intended from the beginning to give battle to Edward. Wallace’s own inclination, however, was the quick strike and retreat, the mounted attack and withdrawal before a counter-attack could be made. Even Stirling does not contradict this; it proves rather that he was adept at seizing the God-given moment. Wallace’s great achievement in keeping a Scottish army in existence and, without committing it, almost bringing Edward’s plans to frustration, has not been sufficiently recognised. No one has explained how Scotland was to be defended without any army; we cannot be sure that Wallace saw the existence of the army he raised solely in terms of pitched battles. The disaster at Falkirk – for such it was and not just in terms of numbers killed – has proved too tempting for historians. It fits too well into the theory that there, Wallace’s period of supremacy was tidily if bloodily ended. What must be said is that no Scottish leader at this time would have scorned battle with the English, not least because of the practical difficulties of keeping an army unemployed in the field. Each would certainly have fought, and equally certainly, under more difficult conditions than those which Wallace provided for the Scots on 22 July.
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