by Marc Morris
Yet even before this minor victory had been obtained, the wheels of the English war machine had started to wobble. Although only days had elapsed since their departure from Carlisle, the infantry were already beginning to desert in droves. On 15 July, as he moved from Caerlaverock to Dumfries, the king gave orders that all such fugitive foot should be arrested. But as he moved further west, the haemorrhage continued: on 27 July, orders were sent out to raise replacement contingents. The Scots, who on this occasion had wisely decided to avoid battle, were able to watch from a distance as their enemies evaporated. By the time Edward finally caught up with them on 8 August, half his army was gone. All that followed was a brief, botched skirmish on the banks of the River Cree near Wigtown, which saw the Scots running for the hills and the English, as in the past, left with nothing to do. After a week of pointless waiting, the king turned around and headed back in the direction of Dumfries.72
As the end of August approached, Edward drew up his depleted forces just south of Dumfries and encamped them in the once-serene surroundings of Sweetheart Abbey. Like nearby Caerlaverock, Sweetheart was another recent addition to the local landscape – it had been founded by John Balliol’s mother – and it bespoke a similar, sadly misplaced confidence that Border warfare would remain a thing of the distant past. Now, as a frustrated English king paused in its precinct and considered his diminishing range of military options, the abbey found itself in the middle of a war zone – a situation that made the unannounced appearance of the archbishop of Canterbury all the more surprising. Winchelsea, rather shaken from a perilous journey across the quicksands of the Solway Firth, came bearing a letter from the pope.73
Edward might well have anticipated news to lift his spirits. Boniface VIII, elected in 1294, was not only the broker of the slowly progressing Anglo-French peace but an old personal friend. The two men had met over thirty years earlier, during the last stages of the Montfortian civil war, when the then-young papal notary had been among those trapped in the Tower of London, until the then-young Lord Edward had secured his deliverance. The episode had apparently had a lasting impression on Boniface: even now, as the king was sat in Sweetheart Abbey, the pope was in his palace at Anagni, recalling it for the benefit of English ambassadors. ‘It was then,’ he said, ‘that we gave this king our par ticular affection, and formed the opinion … that he would be the finest prince in the world.’74
But Boniface’s fond memories of Edward in 1300 only made the content of the letter that Winchelsea now read out all the more ironic. The pope had written it the previous year, after discussions with an especially persuasive Scottish embassy. Although it started in affectionate terms, it soon moved on to take the king to task over his intervention in Scotland, rehearsing in the process many of the Scots’ historical arguments for their independence. Edward was accused of having ignored these arguments; of having longed to occupy ‘a realm which was then destitute of the help of a king’; and, as a consequence, of having committed numerous ‘outrages of justice’: causing heavy losses to Scotland’s inhabitants; imprisoning Scottish clergymen until they died; occupying Scottish castles and monasteries (this last charge being especially pertinent, given the king’s current location). The pope concluded by telling Edward that ‘out of reverence of God, the Apostolic See and ourselves’ he should leave Scotland alone.75
Such an unequivocal admonition from God’s representative on Earth could not be ignored, and would require a carefully considered response. In the immediate term, however, it made no great difference. The cold weather was already starting to set in, and the king’s army had crumbled away to nothing, leaving his campaign dead in the water. At the start of September, Edward dismissed those troops still with him and took ship across the Solway Firth to England.76
Outwardly, he blamed everybody but himself for this latest military failure. In an undated letter to his new chief minister, Walter Langton, the king ordered the punishment of both the deserters themselves and the officials responsible for their recruitment. He also demanded the names of any lords who had obstructed the recruitment process, and insisted that any sheriffs who had failed to provide supplies should be chastised ‘so that they may be an example for the future’. As this list of scapegoats suggests, however, the real reason for the expedition’s collapse was a lack of resources and, above all, a lack of money. The cavalry, obliged to serve at their own expense, had on this occasion stayed the course; it was the infantry, starved of food and wages, that had deserted right from the start – an exodus that, as the best-informed chroniclers attest, had ultimately scuppered the English campaign.77
Privately, of course, Edward appreciated that scarcity had been the root of his failure. He had gone to war knowing his treasury was short of funds, and embracing the desperate (not to say deluded) notion that this deficit could somehow be made good by tapping the wealth of Wales. As a result, he had succeeded merely in proving an obvious point, namely that the Welsh were insufficiently well-off to subsidise an English conquest of Scotland. What was needed, as the king had known all along, was a sum of money such as could proceed from only one source. Towards the end of September he bowed to the inevitable. Parliament was ordered to reassemble in January.78
In the meantime, Edward remained in Cumbria, where he was rejoined by his new queen, Margaret. This reunion must have brought him some cheer, not least because Margaret had recently been safely delivered of her first child, a boy, born at Brotherton in Yorkshire and christened Thomas. Yet even this event, happy as it was, highlighted the contrast between the king’s current situation and his fortunes of old. His previous son had been born in the wake of a successful conquest, rather than in the middle of a seemingly endless war. In the autumn of 1300 Edward’s last act before returning south was to recross the Border for talks with the Scots. His distaste at having to compromise with men whom he considered to be rebels and traitors was clear, and he scoffed at their offer of a permanent peace. ‘Every one of you has done homage to me as chief lord of Scotland,’ he reminded them. ‘Now you set aside your allegiance and make a fool of me as if I were a weakling.’ In the end, all the king would grant was a six-month truce, and his promise that he would return in the spring to lay Scotland waste from sea to sea.79
When parliament reconvened at the start of 1301 – in Lincoln, un accountably – Edward made no bones about the reason for the recall. ‘I am without money,’ he reportedly told the assembly. ‘I must have aid of my land if I am to recommence the war with Scotland.’ Such was his poverty, in fact, that the king now proposed that the knights and burgesses should grant him a fifteenth of their goods, rather than the twentieth they had offered the previous year. At this, says one chronicler, there was much disgruntled muttering.80
Edward, of course, knew what parliament’s price would be. The perambulation of the Forest, so long postponed, had finally been performed during the past summer, and the results were now in the king’s possession. As he had feared, they weighed heavily against the Crown. Roughly half of the Royal Forest, it had been found, was an unjust extension; thousands of acres all over England were earmarked to be returned to ‘the community’.81
Lately, by dint of necessity, Edward had started to take the demands of his subjects seriously. In the autumn of 1300, for example, he had quietly instructed his officials to ensure that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were kept in all their points. The perambulation of the Forest, however, he continued to regard as a ludicrous affair, and not without reason. The men appointed to determine the extent of the Forest had to rely in practice on the testimony of local juries, yet the very fact that these juries were local inevitably affected the nature of their testimony. Those who lived within the bounds of the Forest were only too happy to swear – as, for instance, they had just done in Warwickshire – that once upon a time their region had contained no Royal Forest at all. And ‘once upon a time’ was the perambulation’s second laughable aspect. The Forest Charter asked jurors to recall what the extent of the Fore
st had been at the start of the reign of Henry II – that is, in the year 1154. Even in 1225, when the Charter had first been published, this was a question that set great store by the collective memory of local communities. By 1300, to anyone even slightly bother ed about the burden of proof, it must have made the entire exercise seem invalid.82
That was certainly the way that the king saw it, and he came to parliament prepared to argue his case. Edward had never trusted the flexible collective memory of his subjects. His first recourse had always been to the written record, and it was to the written record that he now once again turned. In the months leading up to the Lincoln assembly, royal clerks had been ferreting through their rolls, and even leafing through the venerable pages of the Domesday Book, in a quest for evidence with which the findings of the perambulation could be challenged.83
On this occasion, however, the king’s resort to the documents had come too late; the time for negotiation had passed. Edward’s continual evasiveness and demonstrable bad faith in recent years had eroded his subjects’ goodwill and trust, and with it their willingness to compromise. It was now politically unrealistic for him to imagine that the country would accept anything less than a full endorsement of the perambulators’ findings. The fact that he may have had a strong case for contesting them was as irrelevant as it was ironic. The king had finally been backed into a corner, and faced a stark choice: approve the perambulation in its entirety, or forego the much-needed tax.
In desperation, Edward threw the challenge back into the face of his opponents. They too, he reminded them, were bound by their oaths of homage to uphold the rights of the Crown, just as he was bound to uphold them by his coronation oath. He would let the perambulation stand, but only if his critics advised him to do so; the responsibility for forcing his hand would thus be theirs. A committee of twenty-six men (its membership unknown, but presumably including Bigod and Winchelsea, both of whom were present) agonised, afraid they might one day be accused of treachery for their actions, and begged the king to take the decision himself. But Edward remained stubborn to the last, saying ‘he had no desire to ease his people with what was his’. In the end, therefore, the decision was left to the committee, and they chose the Charters over the Crown. On 14 February 1301 the king issued a new confirmation, and ordered that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter should stand ‘in all their points’. The findings of the perambulation, it was announced, would become effective without delay; ‘the community’ would be put in possession of what had become their Forest.84
It is important to keep the scale of Edward’s defeat in perspective. What had happened to him in 1301 was nothing like what had happened to his father in 1258. During the great crisis of his reign Henry III had been reduced to a mere cipher, and executive power had been seized by his barons. Edward, by contrast, had been beaten only on a single issue; in all other respects he remained very much the imperious master of his own affairs. Indeed, when the Lincoln parliament had dared to complain about Walter Langton, the king’s palpably corrupt chief minister, and called for his dismissal, Edward had flown into an indignant rage, and silenced his critics with an impromptu lecture on the proper nature of lordship. ‘Perhaps everyone should have a crown,’ had been his sarcastic suggestion.85
Nevertheless, defeat on the Charters, and in particular on the issue of the Forest, was painful and humiliating for a king who attached such overriding importance to the Crown’s rights and the sacred oath he had sworn to uphold them. Edward would never forget how ‘the stress of great necessity’ in 1301 had led to ‘the surrender of his hereditary right’. Nor would he forgive those whom he regarded as having forced this surrender upon him.86
Although Edward considered the Lincoln parliament to be the lowest point in his political fortunes, it did at least solve his financial crisis – a new tax was set for collection in the autumn – and silence his domestic critics. His international affairs, on the other hand – the threefold problem posed by France, Scotland and the papacy – remained in seemingly insoluble disarray. It was now well over two years since the pope had ruled in favour of Gascony’s return, yet the French had still not surrendered possession. That left Edward reliant on continued papal pressure but, given his recently declared support for the Scots, Boniface now seemed an uncertain advocate for English interests. What if he were to insist on the Scots’ inclusion in the Anglo-French peace? The French had been arguing in favour of such a move for the past two years, almost certainly as a cynical tactic to frustrate the whole process. Even now, in the spring of 1301, French and Scottish ambassadors were meeting at Canterbury to put the suggestion of a three-way peace to Edward’s own representatives.87
Edward, naturally, had no intention of accepting their proposal, nor even of renewing his truce with the Scots, which was set to expire in May. It had been expressly for the purpose of subduing his northern enemies that he had compromised his coronation oath; the first writs of summons for a new campaign had been sent out on the very day that the unpalatable deal with parliament had been struck. The king’s utter antipathy towards further negotiation is evident from his absence. At the time of the Canterbury talks Edward was in the west Midlands, having gone to Gloucestershire for the funeral of his cousin, Edmund of Cornwall – a black event more in keeping with his general mood.88
Having reached its lowest point, however, the wheel of fortune began to turn slowly but perceptibly in the king’s favour. Soon after the Canterbury talks had ended, Edward was joined in the Severn Valley by several old and loyal friends, chief among whom was the earl of Lincoln, Henry de Lacy. Some six months earlier Lacy and his colleagues had been dispatched to the papal court, partly to fortify the existing English embassy there, and partly to offer a preliminary response to Boniface’s censorious letter. They now returned with glad tidings. Although nothing decisive had been achieved in relation to either Gascony or Scotland, the earl and his party had received a far more favourable reception from the pope than his letter had led them to expect, and this goodwill had translated into an immediate and tangible advantage. Boniface had lately joined Edward in his desire to subjugate a small but troublesome neighbour – in this case, the ever-tumultuous kingdom of Sicily – and to this end he had been trying for several months to levy a 10 per cent tax on all the churches of Europe. The ambassadors had therefore been able to strike a deal. It had been agreed that the pope could raise his tax in England for the next three years – and that half the profits would go to the king.89
Here was excellent news! For the past five years the English Church, guided by Winchelsea, had refused to vote Edward any financial aid at all, on the grounds that such grants required prior papal approval. Now, on the pope’s express authority, the clergy would be obliged to furnish the Crown with a three-year tax of 10 per cent. This was definitely one in the eye for the stiff-necked archbishop and his supporters. Moreover, gloating apart, it meant a huge and unforeseen addition to the royal war-chest, already about to be replenished by the recent parliamentary subsidy. Together, these taxes would provide the king with the funds for a decisive Scottish campaign.
It only remained to wait for the return of his son. Edward of Caernarfon, lately turned seventeen, had grown to be tall, good-looking and physically accomplished, and his father – fast approaching sixty-three – had evidently decided that a transfer of authority would be timely. During the controversial Lincoln parliament the king had endowed his eldest boy with a substantial appanage, much as his own father had done almost half a century earlier. The grant included the earldom of Chester, but its principal component was the royal estate in Wales, and as such it came with a new title. ‘Prince of Wales’, used in the past only by the rulers of Gwynedd, was now revived for the heir to the English throne (in which capacity it has been used ever since). Young Edward, of course, born in Caernarfon, had been predestined for some kind of role in Wales, but he had not been back to the land of his birth until this moment. In April 1301 he returned to the principality, there to rece
ive the homages of the Welsh themselves and also of the lords of the March. One month later he rejoined his father, who had been occupying himself in the Severn Valley with pilgrimages and hunting. They met at Kenilworth Castle, where the queen and other members of the royal family were also in residence. A fortnight later they rode north. Edward of Caernarfon had participated in the previous campaign, but his role, as nominal commander of one battalion, had been only a minor one. Now, as prince, his responsibility was greatly enlarged. As the king himself had explained in a letter to the earl of Lincoln, he hoped that his son would have ‘the chief honour of taming the pride of the Scots’.90
Edward’s plan, revealed by his letters, was ambitious. Two separate armies, one led by the newly invested prince, the other by the king himself, would advance into Scotland from both ends of the Border, taking the south of the country in a pincer that would close at Stirling. From there they would march together into the north, leaving the rebels with nowhere left to run. This was to be the decisive campaign.91
The forces were accordingly formidable. For his own army Edward individually summoned over a thousand English landowners to provide cavalry service (a request that, now that the king had answered their criticisms, would be difficult to refuse). Royal recruiting officers, meanwhile, eventually rounded up some 7,500 foot soldiers – a figure not terribly impressive by itself, perhaps, but on this occasion the English were not fighting alone. Edward of Caernarfon’s army was mostly drawn from his new dominions in Wales and the March, and it was considerably larger than that commanded by his father; total expenditure suggests that the prince had almost twice as many infantry. Nor, moreover, was it just the Welsh who were rejoining the fray. For the first time since 1296, the justiciar of Ireland had been ordered to assemble an army, and the magnates of Ireland had been induced to participate by the pardon of their debts to the Crown. Some 650 additional horse and 1,600 extra foot were as a result ready to cross the Irish Sea. From every obedient quarter of Edward’s ‘British’ empire, men and matériel were being marshalled in great quantities so that the one remaining rebel province should finally be subjugated.92