by Robyn Young
The like of this army, formed of three thousand cavalry and over fifteen thousand infantry, hadn’t been seen in Scotland for years, but by all accounts it needed to be, for reports from those Scots still loyal to King Edward informed them that Robert Bruce had been gathering large numbers of men in the woods south of Stirling. Edward hadn’t come just to answer the challenge of the Scots and save the castle: he had come to destroy the enemy and their rebel leader once and for all. The king needed this victory. Despite the peace made with his barons at the autumn parliament, the rifts in his realm remained, starkly evident in the absence of many of his earls from the field. Thomas of Lancaster, Guy de Beauchamp and Henry Percy, along with Arundel, Surrey and Oxford, had sent the obligatory number of men, but no more. They themselves had not come.
Humphrey, with Aymer de Valence, Robert Clifford and Ralph de Monthermer, was one of the few involved in the conspiracy against Gaveston who had joined this campaign. Despite everything that had happened – despite the lies Longshanks had told him and the weakness of his son – he felt duty-bound to serve. He had devoted his life to the crown and his father had died honourably in service to it. For him, the call to arms had been one he hadn’t been able to ignore. Even so, he had still borne the brunt of the king’s anger.
The king’s lack of faith in him – or perhaps venom towards him – had been made clear in his decision to appoint Gilbert de Clare commander of the vanguard and, worse, joint constable of the army, a role that was Humphrey’s hereditary right, passed down from his father. Swallowing his pride, he had tried his best to work with the king’s nephew, but the arrogant young earl was making that task increasingly difficult.
Approaching Gloucester’s camp, through crowds of infantry slumped around low-burning fires, Humphrey saw it had already been dismantled, Gloucester’s servants strapping bags on pack-horses and kicking earth on the fires. Half the earl’s knights were mounted on their caparisoned destriers, armed in bulky coats-of-plates, mail hauberks, greaves and gauntlets. Their shields, slung over their backs, were painted with their lord’s arms – three scarlet chevrons on gold. Squires would bear their helms and lances. There were other companies here too, all part of the vanguard, formed of four hundred mounted men. Among them, Humphrey caught sight of Gilbert’s stepfather, Ralph de Monthermer, and his own nephew, Henry de Bohun, one of Gloucester’s closest friends.
Feeling a fresh spike of anger, he marched the last few yards to where Gilbert de Clare was mounted on his warhorse, a tan stallion from Andalusia. Hugh was there talking to the earl, who seemed focused on getting his squire to adjust his horse’s girth strap.
‘Sir Gilbert.’
The young man turned at Humphrey’s curt call. He feigned a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Sir Humphrey.’ He looked him up and down, appraising the state of his dress. ‘Will you not be joining us?’
‘I wasn’t aware we were leaving,’ said Humphrey, trying to keep his tone measured.
‘The king wanted us to set off as soon as the light broke. We must make haste if we are to relieve Stirling’s garrison in time. Were you not told? I swear I sent messengers to all the men of the vanguard.’
‘Mine must have gone astray.’
Gilbert shifted in the saddle and glanced at his squire. ‘That will do.’ He shortened the reins, pulling the horse’s head up sharply. ‘I would advise you to hurry, Sir Humphrey, we cannot wait for stragglers.’ His lip curled. ‘Not when there’s a slaughter of Scots to be had.’
Pricking his spurs at the warhorse’s sides, Gloucester urged the animal into a trot. Those already mounted followed him, others swung up into their saddles. As Humphrey moved back out of the way, he caught the gaze of his nephew, but Henry rode on past him without word. They had barely spoken since his part in the plot against Piers had been discovered.
Calling for Hugh to follow him, Humphrey, fuming, strode back to his own camp, passing scores of infantry, who were slowly rising with the dawn, the toll the forced marches were taking plain in their haggard faces.
From behind the cover of a cart, Alexander Seton watched Humphrey de Bohun stride past, the earl’s face like thunder. It had been years since they had seen one another, but he didn’t doubt the man would recognise him. It was, he knew, hard to forget the face of someone who has threatened to kill you. Up until now, the vanguard, middle-guard and rearguard of the cavalry had been so many miles ahead of the columns of infantry there had been little risk of being spotted.
Alexander watched Humphrey pass by the camp of Aymer de Valence. Last night, when his company had arrived and he had seen those blue and white stripes, it had taken a fierce effort of will not to go looking for Pembroke – the man who reneged on his word and executed his cousin. Alexander waited until Humphrey was gone, before returning to his fellow soldiers.
‘Looking for something good to break your fast with?’ asked Luke. The burly miller from Kent held up a crust of bread in question as Alexander squatted down by the fire.
‘Just having a piss.’
Luke tore off half the bread and handed it to him. ‘The rats in my mill eat better fare.’
‘We’ll be grateful for it later,’ murmured Nigel, a spindly-armed mercer’s apprentice from Suffolk. ‘I heard our good captain saying we’ll be marching twenty miles today.’ Nigel’s eyes darted to the captain who led their company of one hundred men, shouting from the comfort of his saddle for them to move their damn legs.
Alexander, chewing on the dry crust of bread, heard several of the others curse bitterly at this. The forced marches through the hot days had made their muscles sing with pain and cut their feet, clad for the most part in soft hide shoes, to bloody ribbons. Most men on this campaign had been pressed into service by their local sheriffs. Those who could afford it had bribed their way out, leaving the poorest and weakest of their districts to make up the numbers required by the king’s summons. When asked, Alexander had told Luke and the others that he too had been forced, but the truth was that when the commissioners of array came to the market cross at Cheapside he had been one of the first to volunteer.
Using coins won in a cockfight he bought himself a sword, his own having gone years ago to pay his debtors. It was a falchion – the sword of an infantryman – and one of inferior quality at that, but it was more than many of these men had. Some, it was true, were skilled fighters, such as the corps of crossbowmen from Bristol, the spearmen from Ireland and the longbowmen from south Wales. But most – called up from Kent and Sussex, Yorkshire and Devon – were untrained and untried. Only a few had armour, just the odd stained gambeson or ill-fitting helm among them. The one thing all of them did have was a white band of cloth, emblazoned with the red cross of St George, tied around their upper arms and worn with pride and reverence; as if this emblem would somehow protect them against the enemy, in place of armour or a weapon. Alexander had one too. It bound his arm, always in his vision.
‘Do you think the rumours about the Scots are true?’
Alexander glanced round at the question to see one of the younger men staring at him. ‘Rumours?’
‘That they’re savages.’
Alexander laughed dryly. ‘No more than you or me.’ His smile faded quickly. When asked about his strange English, he had told these men he was from France. It hadn’t been hard to fool them – as a nobleman he’d spoken French rather than Scots.
‘I hear they eat the dead and their leader converses with the devil,’ piped up another.
Luke patted the red cross on his arm. ‘St George will soon put the fear of God in Bruce and his men.’
Alexander said nothing. As the sun poured golden light over the sprawling encampment, his eyes drifted to the broken battlements of Edinburgh Castle. Despite the ruinous state of the place, his heart sang to be back in these lands, where once he had been lord of a rich estate and a warrior in a band of brothers.
Chapter 46
Bannock, Scotland, 1314 AD
Robert’s company crowded a
mong the trees on the edge of the New Park. The hunting reserve, established years earlier by Alexander III and formed of well-spaced woods and open ground, lay two miles south of Stirling Castle. Before them, the ground sloped down to the Bannock Burn, a wide stream, through which the Roman road from Edinburgh ran. The burn, about half a mile distant, was a line of glimmering gold in late afternoon sun. The wheel of a mill, downstream from the ford near the village of Bannock, was just visible, churning slowly in the water.
The men were so quiet the birds had started chattering in the treetops again. All the men were fixed on the road, sweat beading their faces. It was midsummer’s eve and the air was close, even under the cool canopy. Insects swarmed in hazy beams of light, which slanted through the branches to glint on helms and spear-heads.
Robert, seated astride a dappled grey palfrey, glanced round as Angus MacDonald handed him a water skin. The steel plates on his mail gloves flexed as he took it. The spring water flooded his parched throat. No wine today and no food other than bread – all of them fasting for tomorrow’s feast of St John the Baptist. As Robert passed the skin back to Angus, the hand axe Christiana had given to him shifted against his side. Reaching down, he slid the weapon from the loop of leather that secured it to his belt, opposite his broadsword. The blade flashed in the sunlight as he swung it loosely in his hand, testing its weight. There were scars in the smooth handle and in the steel edge. He wondered whose blood it had been christened with.
Yesterday, as he drew his army back from the camp in the Torwood, Christiana had retreated to the safety of a nearby hill, along with the other women and camp followers. They had taken the general supplies with them, although the stockpiles of grain and meat that would provision his troops were secured under guard in nearby Cambuskenneth Abbey. Robert and his captains had taken up positions in the New Park. Split into four companies, each made up of around fifteen hundred men, the majority on foot and armed with twelve-foot-long spears, they were spaced out through the woods, set for retreat.
Furthest to the north, in the shadow of St Ninian’s kirk, Thomas Randolph had command of the vanguard, made up of men from his earldom of Moray. Young Walter Stewart and his cousin, James Douglas, held joint command of the second company, composed of men from Douglas’s lands and the Stewart lordships of Renfrew, Bute and Kyle Stewart. The third, not far from Robert’s, was captained by his brother, Edward, near to where the marshal, Robert Keith, was stationed with the five hundred light horsemen. Robert himself commanded the rearguard, joined by Islesmen under Angus MacDonald and men of Lennox under Earl Malcolm, along with a large number of Carrick knights.
To the west, the land rose into hills and moors. To the north and east lay a boggy plain known as the Pows: a labyrinth of streams and tidal pools bordered by great loops of the River Forth. This left only two viable routes by which the English could attempt to reach Stirling Castle: the Roman road through New Park, or a longer more circuitous path that led through crop-fields to St Ninian’s kirk. Thus, Robert’s company would most likely be the first to encounter the army that, any moment, would rear its monstrous head on that sunlit road.
Earlier that day, he had sent James Douglas on a reconnaissance to check on the approach of the enemy and their numbers. James had returned some hours ago looking grim. In private, he described to Robert the huge host that was coming their way – filling the road for miles, so it seemed the whole horizon was a creeping forest of lances, ablaze with banners. Robert, disquieted by the news, ordered the young man to keep it to himself, not wanting to sow seeds of panic among the company.
As he twisted the axe in his hands, rolling his shoulder muscles, stiff from the weight of his hauberk, Robert’s eyes drifted over the verge to either side of the road. The smooth-seeming land there was a lie. His men had spent yesterday afternoon digging scores of small pits, which now pocked the area, each hole filled with a sharpened spike then covered over with leaves and twigs. These snares, which would seriously injure horse or man, would hamper the English army’s ability to fan out in their deadly cavalry charge and, instead, keep them bunched in a tight formation that would funnel them straight to him. He and his men would lead a lightning strike against them, doing as much damage as possible, before retreating north. His trap was laid. Now, to draw them in.
Robert’s grip tightened on the axe as he heard the distant, but unmistakable thudding of hooves, like a heartbeat in the earth.
The Road to Stirling, Scotland, 1314 AD
The steady clop of many hooves and the ringing of bridles vied with the snorts of horses and the murmured voices of the men. Dirt rose from the road in choking yellow clouds. It had been a dry start to the summer and there had been no rain for days. Dust covered the silk trappers of the knights’ destriers and the surcoats and mantles of the men, clogged the links of their mail coats and powdered the steel plates of greaves and vambraces, and the domes of their crested helms. The mouths of the horses were foaming around their bits. The beasts, Humphrey knew, would need watering soon. He glanced left and right, looking for signs of a stream, but the tangled sprawl of trees disappeared in a leafy gloom through which he could see little.
The vanguard had entered the ancient Torwood that morning, having followed the Roman road from Edinburgh, the route taken by Edward Longshanks sixteen years earlier when he marched on the Scots at Falkirk. Humphrey remembered that journey well, riding in the retinue of his father. It had been a different atmosphere then: the knights filled with a grim resolve to punish the Scots under their leader, William Wallace, who had so gravely humiliated them on the field at Stirling. That determination was still there, but in veterans like him it was now tempered with caution. These past years they had learned not to underestimate their enemy. The growing tension wasn’t helped by the breathless air or the oppressiveness of these endless woods. This was favoured ground for the Scots – the perfect territory for ambush. A bird flickering through the canopy would turn the heads of many and have them reaching for their swords. But not all the men of the vanguard were quite so guarded.
A short while ago, the middle-guard, captained by Robert Clifford and Henry Beaumont, had split off from the road, taking another route to Stirling, as determined in council with the king. The two forces would form a pincer movement, approaching the castle from different directions. King Edward had given Beaumont the title Earl of Buchan and had promised he could claim this Scottish earldom if he was victorious, engendering in some of the men the sense that this was a race. It was a race Gilbert de Clare seemed determined to win.
The earl had pressed the vanguard on hard through the afternoon leaving the rearguard, commanded by the king, many miles behind, the tramping columns of infantry and the baggage train stretching even further back towards Falkirk. The head of the formidable snake they had formed had broken from the body and was now isolated. Humphrey had tried to impress upon Gloucester and his young comrades the danger they were in, but Gilbert, whose retinue outnumbered Humphrey’s, refused to curtail their speed, saying the deadline set by the Scots for the relief of Stirling was tomorrow and time was running short. When Humphrey reminded him the king had put them in joint command, Gilbert rudely retorted that was merely a concession. The king wanted new blood on this campaign and men he could trust in charge of it. Humphrey, incensed, but unwilling to divide their force when it was at its most vulnerable, relented, allowing the earl to lead them on.
Up ahead, men’s voices lifted as the trees began to thin. Humphrey squinted at the brightness as the afternoon sun stabbed down through the breaks in the branches. The woods gave way to a patchwork of fields interspersed with blackened expanses where crops had been burned to stubble. There was no sign anywhere of either humans or livestock. The men didn’t comment on the desolation, used to such sights in the march from the Borders. Further along, the road dipped down towards a wide stream, beyond which it rose again and disappeared into more woods. Suddenly, there was a shout from one of the men at the front. Humphrey rose quickl
y in his stirrups to see what had alerted them. As the sun filled his vision, he raised his hand to shield his eyes. There, in the shade of the distant trees, were figures – hundreds of them. It was hard to tell with the distance and the sunlight, but it appeared as though they were scattering.
Gilbert clearly thought so, for he let out an excited yell, ‘The Scots! The Scots! They’re fleeing! On them!’ Snatching his lance from his squire, the Earl of Gloucester spurred his warhorse along the road, followed by his men, among them Henry de Bohun.
Humphrey yelled a warning, but the din of hooves drowned it out. Spitting a curse, he snapped down his visor and wrenched free his broadsword. ‘With me!’ he roared at his knights and squires, kicking hard at the sides of his horse.
As he charged with the rest of the vanguard, through the rising plumes of dust, stones skittering off his helm, kicked up by the destriers in front, Humphrey fixed on the figures beneath the trees. There was one man on a grey horse out in front of the others. He caught a flash of red on his yellow surcoat and the gold gleam of a crown mounted on his helm.
Robert.
St Ninian’s Kirk, Scotland, 1314 AD
The tower of St Ninian’s rose from the green shroud of the woods, its stone walls blushing in the sun. The fifteen hundred men of Thomas Randolph’s company sat on the grass in its cool shadow. Earlier all of them had been poised and ready, spears in their hands and helms on their heads, but as the day wore on the heat and the wait had taken their toll. Now, most of them had removed their helms and had set down their spears. Some talked, while others dozed.
Thomas Randolph leaned against the low wall that ringed the church’s cemetery and took another draught from his water skin. Bees thrummed in the long grass that had grown up either side of the track that led to the church. In front of him, the land sloped into a broad meadow, dappled pink with orchids. Beyond, woodland rose. A heat haze rippled over the trees, distorting the air. Swilling the water around his mouth, Thomas glanced behind him at the resting men. He’d heard several of them muse that the English wouldn’t show themselves today and, if they did, it would be the king’s force that encountered them. While proud to be the commander of one of the king’s companies, Thomas couldn’t help but feel restless, wanting to be in the fight with his uncle. His victory at Edinburgh had given him a taste of fame that he didn’t want to see fade in the face of other men’s glory.