The Lion at bay tk-2

by Robert Low

  Bruce did not need to ask if Kirkpatrick was sure. Instead, he turned away, blinded by a sudden spring of tears and Kirkpatrick looked on, amazed; the Covetous King had slaughtered three of his brothers, imprisoned his queen, his sisters and daughter — yet Bruce wept for him.

  Bruce was surprised himself, yet he knew the lie of it and knew, also, that everyone had seen the same and was marvelling at it. The tale would spread, of the saintly king who could weep for the death of his worst enemy, though the truth was something Bruce would never admit — that it was simple relief and release.

  Longshanks was dead. This is the moment I should have waited for, he thought, the moment to claim the throne. If he had waited until now, if he had never gone to Greyfriars, so much might have been different — Thomas and Niall and Alexander…

  He threw it from him with a violent shake of his head and turned into Kirkpatrick’s worried frown, not helped by the sight of his king’s face, the livid scar above and below the left eye and the still unhealed blight of his right cheek.

  Yet the King was smiling and his eyes glittered as he looked at all the expectant faces.

  ‘The pard is dead — now the lion can roar,’ he said and they murmured their approval. The abbot began offering thanks to God, sonorous and fervent, while folk bowed, crossed themselves and knelt.

  Bruce had a sudden vision of his grandfather’s face, grim as a shroud. The Competitor had been the one who had dinned into him the justice and rights of the Bruce claims to kingship, pointedly ignoring the disapproving scowls of Bruce’s own father, who seemed to have turned his back on all of that.

  Until now, Bruce had reviled his father for his lack of spine, for not having the commitment that drove The Competitor and himself. Hag-ridden, he had thought, by the Curse of Malachy.

  Now he knew the truth that his father had realized long before — there was no God in the right of the Bruces to rule. Brothers, friends, marriage, the grace of golden opinion, peace of mind, the very wine of life — even eating and sleeping — had all been subsumed and sold for a throne and what went with it. Smiling lies and mouthed honour, deceptions, delusions and the accusing whispers of Judas. Scorpions of the soul. The Curse of Malachy.

  Ambition, he now knew, was the Devil.

  Burgh-on-Sands, Cumbria

  Feast of St Swithun, July, 1307

  The world had ended days ago, yet somehow people moved and spoke and acted as if it had not. The Royal clerk himself found that there were still matters to attend to, ones which always took him back to the room, laden with sweet-smelling flowers and herbs and burning incense that still failed to hide the stink.

  He was here again, standing at the door of the room where the world had ended, with his head down so that all he saw were the clacking boots that arrived — green and red leather, fine heels and Cordoban workmanship, all muddied with hard travel.

  ‘You are?’

  He raised his head into the eyes of the Lord of Caernarvon, seeing the resemblance, like a blur in water, to his beloved king. He is as tall, he thought…

  ‘Norbert the Notary,’ said a voice at Caernarvon’s elbow as the clerk hesitated. The Lord Monthermer, he noted, struggling to find his voice.

  ‘You took my father’s last words down?’ demanded Edward and Norbert nodded, fumbling for the parchment; Edward waved impatiently, then indicated the closed door.

  ‘In there?’

  Norbert nodded again and Monthermer stepped forward and flung it open, then recoiled at the smell, cupping his nose and mouth with one hand.

  ‘A week dead,’ Edward said thinly, ‘in this damp heat and having died of a bloody flux of the bowel. You should have expected that, my lord — what did he say, at the end?’

  Norbert, taken by surprise at the last sharply-barked question, hummed and erred, then brought out the parchment of it, though the truth was that he knew it by heart.

  ‘He wishes his heart removed to the minster in London,’ he croaked. ‘His body is to be boiled and the bones casked up and placed at the head of the army, for he swore to invade Scotland and so he will.’

  There was silence, for a moment, then Edward stirred.

  ‘Did he now. Nothing else?’

  Norbert cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘Pactum serva,’ he answered and saw the prince’s drooping eye flicker a little. Pactum Serva — hold to the vow.

  ‘Is there more?’

  Like a father’s love, thought Marmaduke Thweng, coming up in time to hear this. You will find none of that, new little king, only your da’s reminder of what you swore at the Feast of Swans. Then he took to breathing through his mouth against the smell, noting the surreptitious attempts by all the others in the coterie to ward it off in some way.

  Edward did not seem to notice them or the smell, but his next words gave the lie to it.

  ‘Cask him up. Lead line it — strip the church roof here if you have to. We will take him south for burial.’

  Norbert blinked.

  ‘My lord,’ he began. ‘The King’s command…’

  ‘Is that you tomb up the dead man in the room,’ Edward declared in a grim voice. ‘And do something about the stink. Am I understood?’

  He did not wait for a reply, but walked off, while Monthermer closed the door on Edward the First and turned to Norbert.

  ‘You have annoyed your king, notary,’ he said with a sharp smile. ‘I would start running and catch up with events if I were you. That and look for a new position.’

  Norbert swallowed hard and then looked at the lists clutched to wrinkled ruin in his sweaty fists, all the prisoners awaiting the King’s pleasure in castles scattered all over the north. The most dangerous, those who had assisted in crowning the rebel king or colluded in the murder of the lord of Badenoch, had been granted the King’s peace until he decided on their fate.

  Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barley-corns, he thought, the mystical radius of the verge of the King’s peace. Within it, no man was to come to harm. But the world had ended and that king was dead — did his peace still exist, in law or under God?

  It was clear that the insouciant new king — Norbert still could not accept it completely — was in no mood to consider the matter. So let the captives languish, he thought, with a sudden, sharp rebellion of his own, until this new king is remembered of them and comes to me. Or someone like me, he added, recalling Monthermer’s parting words.

  Out in the air, folk breathed easier, benisoned by the persistent cold drizzle of rain which had suddenly relieved the oppressive heat in a thunderstorm the night before.

  ‘What of the army?’ asked Marmaduke Thweng. ‘Do you join it, my lord? Or go south with your father?’

  Edward sighed. The army waited under de Valence to lumber north on a pointless exercise that would add to the crippling debt that was his inheritance. Debt and boiled bones my father left, he thought bitterly, yet no loving final words for me.

  He wanted to be in Langley, swimming. Digging a ditch. It came to him, in a sudden heady rush, that he could do that without worry now.

  He looked round at the assembled lords, more suspicious of them than he was of the Scots; Monthermer arrived, smiling blandly and bowing and Edward bowed back. A mummery, he thought savagely — his sister, Joan, had just died and she had been Monthermer’s wife, so that the lowborn former household knight had enjoyed the titles of Earl of Hartford and Gloucester, and added Earl of Atholl to them after Strathbogie had been hanged.

  Now, of course, he had nothing — Joan’s young son Gilbert had the first two titles restored to him on his mother’s death and young David Strathbogie had been given his Atholl lands back, so that Monthermer had a pile of gold in lieu.

  Half of it from the royal coffer, Edward realized with bitter anger, yet another debt my father left. From having three earldoms Monthermer now had no title at all — and Edward did not trust him; Gaveston had been sure the man had been too friendly with B
ruce years before.

  Gaveston. The ache for him was intolerable…

  ‘Bruce is gathering strength, Your Grace,’ added a voice, deep as a bear’s. ‘Since he kicked de Valence’s arse at Loudon Hill, he and the raggle he commands have been strutting. Folk believe more and more in him and that cursed lie being preached by hedge-priests, that the death of your father is a prophecy from Merlin heralding liberty for Scots and Welsh, in concert against us.’

  It was delivered firmly by Sir John Segrave, all grim in black and silver, and had obviously been rehearsed — though Edward knew the truth of it well enough already. Bruce, curse him.

  ‘We must let them know differently,’ Segrave added and Edward closed his eyes briefly against the beat of it.

  The truth was that the army his father had so expensively and painstakingly gathered would never meet a Scots army stupid enough to face it. It would march up and down in a pointless chevauchee and then retreat south again, before it melted away. Everyone knew it, but the ritual dance of it would have to be followed one more time.

  After, Edward thought viciously — the crown is on MY head…

  ‘First, I will have to at least escort my father some of the way south,’ Edward pointed out and no-one could argue with that. ‘To York seems fitting enough. Then I will need to be crowned king, my lords, before I lead any army.’

  In my name, he thought triumphantly. Not my father’s, nor led by his bloody boiled bones. His time is done — an exultant thought struck him like a thunderbolt.

  ‘Send to France,’ he ordered to anyone who was listening. ‘Fetch my loving brother Lord Gaveston and the others who languish there. If we are to have a coronation and a war, we will need all the lords of the realm.’

  Segrave looked darkly at Thweng, who merely drooped his moustache a little more and cocked a jaundiced eye at the rain. St Swithun’s Day, he noted — there will be forty more days like this if the prophecy of the saint holds true.

  Hopefully, by the time the King is ready for the army, neither it nor its commanders will be too damp or hungry to appreciate it. He looked at Segrave and saw the scowl that gave lie to hope.

  Thweng hunched his shoulders, against the weather and the bad cess of the moment. Once more, he thought, we will scour the north and bring fire and sword to everyone in it, making a place where wolves survive while sheep go under. And all the fighting men of that land have wolves as godfathers; one day those beasts will bite us back…

  Cold rain and Black John, he thought bleakly. Not the recipe for a happy war.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The era portrayed here is one which defined both the Kingdom of Scotland and its people, large and small. The initial heady rush of rebellion, the successes — and disasters — of Wallace’s tenure as Scotland’s leader are long gone and only the iron will of the man himself remains, unbending and resolute.

  It is easy to hold Wallace and Bruce up against one another and see the black and white of the former and the many shades of grey in the latter — but, as always, the world is more complex than that.

  Wallace’s adherence to the kingship of John Balliol is never fully explained in any account. It seems obsessive and stubborn to me, which is the stamp of the man in general. In the end it was also pointless and Bruce, who had realized this long before, could not fight for the return of a Comyn-backed king who not only represented the end of Bruce hopes for the throne, but a man who did not even want the crown.

  Kept alive by Comyn desires, until it was clear there was no hope, exiled John Balliol had only one function left — to pass on the legacy to his son and so keep alive the claims and hopes of the Dispossessed, those Scots lords who had lost their lands in supporting King Edward.

  By the opening of this book, the small battle at Happrew — in Scotland most battles were between no more than a few hundred men a side — throws the whole of Scotland’s grief into stark relief.

  On this bleak moorland in the Borders, Bruce fought for the English and Wallace for the last dying echoes of the rebellion crushed at Falkirk years before. Whether they met in personal combat on that field is unknown, but given the small size of the forces, the delicious what-if of it is too good to pass up.

  Wallace, last hold-out of a war-weary Scotland, is not only increasingly isolated but vilified by the commonality; the darling freedom-fighter of earlier years is now simply standing in the way of everyone else’s peace to raise crops and family.

  Did Bruce betray him? Probably not, but he was capable of it — and some Scot did, for the point of King Edward’s cunning exercise was not only to capture this rebel figurehead, but have his own former supporters do it.

  The Apostle rubies, of course, are fiction — though the Holy Rood of Scotland is not. Taken south with other coronation regalia, it would have been placed in the Minster Treasury, which was robbed in 1303 by Richard of Pudlicote and others. The equivalent of a year’s tax revenues was removed and most of the thieves got away.

  King Edward’s wrath was considerable, so much so that he had Pudlicote flayed and his skin nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey. Yet the Longshanks character is such that it is perfectly possible for him to have pardoned Wallace if that man had shown the least remorse for his alleged crimes. The Bruce character is such that, knowing this, he might easily have taken steps to ensure that it could never happen, by planting evidence of Wallace involvement in the Minster burglaries. That King Edward would never forgive.

  But this is primarily a story of relationships. Bruce with his perceived friends and known enemies — and himself. King Edward with his son, his barons — and himself. Hal, Isabel, the Earl of Buchan, Lamprecht and the secretive Kirkpatrick — the complex weave of plot, counterplot and paranoia are the pillars of a kingdom at war with itself.

  So, by the time of the murder in Greyfriars, when Bruce slays Red John Comyn, Hal cannot be convinced that the soul-searching agony of Bruce is entirely real — and that view has persisted. Did Bruce plan the murder of Red John, removing yet another impediment to the throne? Or was it a moment of madness, which resulted in a premature rebellion? Some 700 years later, I still cannot make my own mind up and neither can most scholars.

  The end result, planned or not, was a disaster for Bruce — the small support he garnered was smashed apart by the rout at Methven, so that only his own loyal retainers stayed with him. Yet, just as all seemed lost, the Cause recovered and, falteringly, began the long return to strength.

  As ever, treat this as an uncovered cache of monkish scribblings which, when read by a flickering tallow candle, reveal fragments of lives lost both in time and legend.

  If any mistakes or omissions jar — blow out the light and accept my apologies.

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  Addaf the Welshman

  Typical soldier of the period, raised from the lands only recently conquered by Edward I. The Welsh prowess with the bow and spear was already noted, but the true power of the former — the massed ranks of Crecy and Agincourt — was a strategy still forming during the early Scottish Wars. Like all the Welsh, Addaf’s loyalty to the English is tenuous, especially since, in the years since his involvement in the craft of war, he has become a contract captain — a mercenary.

  Badenoch, Lord of

  The Badenochs were of the Comyn family and known as Red Comyn, because they adopted the same wheatsheaf heraldry as the Buchan Comyns, but on a red shield instead of blue. Sir John, second Lord of Badenoch, died in 1302 — of what had happened to him while a prisoner in the Tower, it is alleged — leaving the title to his son. Despite being married to Joan de Valence — sister to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke — John the Red Comyn was a driving force in early resistance to Edward I — and truer to the Scots cause than Bruce at the time. Despite the fact that the Earl of Buchan was, in the hierarchy of the time, ranked higher in stature than the Lord of Badenoch, it was the Red Comyn who held the bloodline claim of the Comyn to the throne. His murder by Bruce and his men in Greyfriars
Church, Dumfries in February 1306 spurred the Bruce lunge for the throne — and all that followed.

  Bangtail Hob

  Fictional character. One of Hal of Herdmanston’s retainers, a typical Scots retinue fighter of the period — Chirnside Rowan, Sore Davey, Ill-Made are names of others, the common men of Lothian and the Border regions, the March, who formed the bulk and backbone of the armies on both sides.

  Bellejambe, Malise

  Fictional character, the Earl of Buchan’s sinister henchman and arch-rival of Kirkpatrick.

  Beverley, Gilbert of

  A real character, though I have maligned him here. Mentioned in the 15th century epic poem on William Wallace by Blind Harry — which is one of the main ‘source’ documents for this period — Gilbert is probably Gilbert de Grimsby, whom Wallace’s men rechristened Jop. Described as a man ‘of great stature’ and already ‘some part grey’, he was a Riccarton man by birth and had travelled far in Edward’s service as ‘a pursuivant in war’ — though Harry says he consistently refused to bear arms. No doubt he was the ‘Gilbert de Grimmesby’ who carried the sacred banner of St John of Beverley in Edward’s progress through Scotland after Dunbar, a distinguished service for which Edward directed Warenne to find him a living worth about twenty marks or pounds a year. Whether he was a Wallace relation is unknown, though I have intimated that because of his stature, the fact that he came from Riccarton, a Wallace stronghold, and that he quit the army shortly after his twenty marks had been confirmed (on October 13 1296) and supposedly joined the rebels.

  Bissot, Rossal De

  Fictional character, though I have made him a descendant of the family who helped found the Templar order. Aware of the secret machinations to undermine and destroy the Order, he is attempting to prevent this.

  Bruce, Edward

  Eldest of the Bruce siblings and the most reckless, with ambitions of his own. Impatient and impulsive, he was the strongest and most loyal right hand Robert Bruce had, though his ambition was eventually his undoing. His other brothers — second oldest Niall and the youngest, scholarly Alexander — did not survive the struggle to put brother Robert on the throne and, of Bruce’s sisters, only Mary and Christina make an appearance here. Edward Bruce was eventually given the task of invading Ireland in the year after Bannockburn, a task he succeeded in, becoming High King of Ireland. However, in true rash style, he overreached himself once too often and died in the Battle of Faughart, 1318.