The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  On 27 June, in an assault carefully planned by someone with knowledge of tides as well as Berwick's mural weaknesses - one thinks immediately of John Crabb — the English ships and landward soldiers went into action. Seeing the ships approaching the town, at high tide, the Scots set alight a quantity of pre-prepared tar-soaked faggots, and launched them at the assailants. But their strategy met with disaster, for some of the faggots went awry and were blown back over the walls. These set some houses alight. The fire then spread to other buildings, until their desperate defence against the English had become a defence against the ravages of the fire. Edward watched, contented, and when they sent to him begging for a truce, he assented, on condition that Sir Alexander Seton, commander of the castle and town, surrender twelve hostages. The hostages were all to be children of the prominent men of the town. The truce was to last fifteen days; if the Scots army had not come to relieve the town by then (thus allowing Edward a pitched battle), then its occupants would surrender.

  Seton had already lost two sons in the war against England. The eldest, Alexander, had been killed resisting Balliol the previous year. The next, William, had drowned the previous day while fighting off the English attack from the Tweed. He had tried to jump from one Scottish boat on to an English one, but a sudden surge in the river, which was tidal, swept his vessel away, and he had fallen between the two boats and drowned. Now Seton's last remaining son, Thomas, was sent with eleven other sons of prominent men to Edward as hostages. Sir Alexander probably thought that this would be taken as a gesture of sincerity. Ironically, his own compatriots would destroy all hope of that.

  On the last day of the truce, Sir Archibald Douglas reached Berwick. Behind him marched the whole Scottish army, drawn from all over the kingdom.70 His men forded the Tweed and razed the English settlement of Tweedmouth on the other side of the river, killing the inhabitants and burning the buildings. Edward could only look across the river as the smoke rose, and as the Scots crossed back over by low tide to hurl meat and bread over the walls of Berwick to the besieged. Some of the Scots under Sir William Keith even tried to cross the bridge, which had been in ruins for the last thirty years; and after a sharp engagement with Sir William Montagu, they managed to enter the town. Keith claimed that he had relieved the siege, and, in view of this, he replaced Seton as commander of the town and the castle. Counter to Seton's orders, he declared there would be no surrender.

  Edward was utterly furious, not just because of the relief of the town on die last day of the truce but by the continued defiance of his will. The relief had come from the English side of the river, he claimed, and therefore was not valid. He wanted a battle. But most of all he was angry because the Scots were not yet afraid of him. He wanted them to bend to his will. He was determined to rid them of the notion that he was as weak as his father. When Douglas brashly sent messengers announcing that the Scots would now attack England, and in particular Bamburgh Castle, where Queen Philippa was lodged, Edward decided only a vindictive and personal attack on the Scots' leadership would make an impression. He ordered a particularly high gallows to be erected outside the gates of the town. And then, when it stood there, defying the Scots, he dragged out young Thomas Seton, the last and youngest of the Seton sons, and hanged him there and then, in front of his father's eyes. He sent a message to Seton and Keith that each day he would hang two more of the boys, until they were all dead. And that would teach the Scots to break their covenants.

  It was a hideously cruel act. But the hanging of Thomas Seton more than anything else impressed Edward's seriousness upon his adversaries. They now saw that this was no self-indulgent Edward II-figure; this was a new Hammer of the Scots, with the capacity for utter ruthlessness. Rather than see the high gallows used again, Keith sent messengers to seek another truce. On 15 July it was agreed that if the castle and town had not been relieved by vespers on 19 July, the following day everything would be handed over to Edward. Keith was confident that the huge number of men with Douglas and their long years' experience of fighting the English would prove more than a match for Edward's army. Under the terms of the new agreement, Keith left Berwick and crossed the Tweed to find Douglas, who was destroying the neighbourhood of Morpeth in an attempt to draw Edward's attention away from Berwick. The two men decided they would meet the English in a full-scale battle.

  On the morning of Monday 19 July the Scots began to move over the hills towards the English position. Even though they tried to approach from the north, hidden by the higher ground, Edward's scouts soon established where they were. The Scots intended to appear on the higher hill in the full force of their numbers, which chroniclers on both sides state far outnumbered the English, hoping to terrify their enemy. Edward arranged his army on Halidon Hill, a carefully chosen position. To reach it the Scots would have to descend and cross a marsh, and then climb the steep slope. In case they tried to relieve the town from another angle, by skirting the English, Edward despatched five hundred men to guard the approach to the town.

  The Scots drew up their forces, and waited. Edward had set his army into three battalions, facing them. The battalion on his right was commanded by his uncle, the earl of Norfolk, and Sir Edward Bohun. That on his left was placed under the command of Edward Balliol. Edward himself assumed command of the central battalion. Then, with Dupplin Moor in mind, Edward ordered all his knights to do a very unknightly thing: they were all to dismount and fight on foot. Edward alone remained mounted, but only so he could ride up and down the lines of his men, urging them to win honour for their country, and to avenge the murders which the Scots had perpetrated in the north of England. Then he too dismounted, and sent his warhorse away. This was the moment he had been trained for, and for which he had waited all his life. Above him, and all around him, the cross of St George flapped on a thousand pennons. Beside him, was displayed the banner of St Cuthbert, whose shrine he had visited at Durham. This was the ultimate test of royalty. He took his place on foot in the front line of his battalion.

  The Scots delayed, waiting for the tide to shift. With superior numbers they believed they could force the English back into the swollen river. Their champion, a giant called Turnbull, stepped forward and challenged any Englishman to single combat. A Norfolk knight, Sir Robert Benhale, begged Edward to allow him to answer this challenge. Edward assented. Benhale proved the better man, his sword play being quicker than that of the giant, whose limbs he sliced off. It was a good sign for Edward. But then, among men nervous with the approach of battle, he watched as the Scots advanced. There were thousands of them. And as they advanced he heard Sir Archibald Douglas call out the chilling declaration: 'No prisoners'. No one was to be taken for ransom. Edward had no choice but to respond with a similar call. The English too would fight to the death.

  Edward and his commanders had chosen the site well, knowing the Scots would have to come at them in order to relieve the town. The Scots' only alternative was an indirect approach between the hill and the river, and that was too dangerous by far. But the Scots had the advantage of numbers, and now they chose to charge directly at the English ranks. As they lumbered forward, they were slowed by the marsh and the slope. The English watched, and waited, and when the Scots were committed, the trumpets sounded for the English archers to attack. Immediately wave after wave of arrows flew down the slope into their enemies' faces. Then Balliol's own trumpets blasted the infantry advance, and his men rushed forward to engage the front line. The Scots, turning their heads away from the arrows, could not muster their courage to charge and found themselves trapped between their fellow men still advancing behind them and the deadly arrows ahead. So it was with those facing the central English battalion. Edward himself was the first man to throw himself into the difficult, hand-to-hand combat. Soon the whole hill was a mass of bitter, fighting, dying men, terrified by the arrows, furiously battling for every inch of hillside. Ranks of brave Scotsmen came forward, but none could break through the English lines, not even those who had been detail
ed specially to cut their way through to the town under Archibald Douglas. These men especially won the respect of the English, their fighting spirit pushing them on far beyond the point when their adversaries believed they would retreat.

  Towards evening, the men fighting uphill, wearied by the effort and dispirited by the constant raining down of arrows, began to slip back. Balliol's battalion broke through the Scots' lines, forcing them to retreat and then flee. As soon as this first section was in flight, Edward knew it was only a matter of time before the others too would break. He pressed his advantage, yelling encouragement to his hard-pressed men. And they responded. Although the earl of Ross shouted a challenge for all the Scots to fight to the death, and made a stand, the rearmost had already begun to make their escape. The second and third lines of the Scots retreated, then turned and ran for their lives. The earl of Ross stood his ground, and fought on, as the men beside him were hacked down one by one, until eventually he too was killed.

  Now Edward sent for the horses. He wanted revenge for the insults, peace treaties, disrespect, and the hostility shown lately to his queen. He had much to prove. The Scots were now set to pay for the years of humility which had been forced upon him by Bruce, Philip of France and Mortimer. And having offered no quarter, despite facing the king of England - their overlord, in Edward's opinion - they could expect no mercy. He rode with his knights here and there in pursuit of the Scots, striking down everyone whom he could reach. As one contemporary put it:

  there men might have seen the doughtiness of the noble King Edward and of his men, how manly they were in pursuit of the Scots, who ran in dread. And there might men have seen many a Scottish man cast down on to the earth, dead, and their banners displayed and hacked to pieces, and many a good hauberk of steel bathed in their blood, and many times the Scots regrouped in companies, and every time they were defeated.

  The devastation was utter. No quarter had been ordered and no quarter was given. Most of the earls of Scotland who had not been killed at Dupplin Moor lay dead: Carrick, Ross, Lennox and Menteith. Sir Archibald Douglas himself was killed. Chroniclers reckoned the Scottish dead in tens of thousands. Berwick had fallen. The Scots had been defeated. But far more than this, Edward had proved himself in battle, and against superior numbers. His enemy had flaunted its strength at him, and had issued the challenge of a fight to the death, and he had responded. He emphasised his point on the day after the battle, when he ordered one hundred captured Scotsmen to be beheaded. No prisoners. The town and castle of Berwick was a smoking, dilapidated wreck, largely destroyed by his guns and siege engines. Amid the gore and terrible destruction, Edward had proved himself a terrifying king.

  FIVE

  Warrior of God

  Halidon Hill answered the two most important questions in Edward's mind in 1333. He had proved he could lead his men into battle - a test of his confidence in himself as much as theirs in him - and success had shown that God favoured him. In England there was general delight at 'this gracious victory', as one chronicler described it.' After the battle, the Scots surrendered Berwick, and Edward returned to England 'with much joy and worship'. In London, the citizens followed their clergy in procession from St Pauls to Trinity Church, solemnly singing thanks to God. The English poet Laurence Minot was moved to write his first extant poem, and exemplified the shifting of opinion, from his initial fears - 'of England had my heart great care, when Edward first went to war' - to his pride in England's victory, which he specifically associated with the king: 'the Lord of Heaven might Edward lead, and maintain him as he well may'. All the 'great care' and caution of parliament in January 1333 was forgotten.

  Thanks were due to God as well as to his fellow fighters. Three days after the battle Edward sent letters to all the archbishops and bishops in England, Wales and Gascony requesting that they give thanks for his victory. A week later he set out south, first making for Bamburgh Castle, where Queen Philippa was waiting for him. He stopped at most of the shrines on the way south and gave alms at each of them. He returned to Durham, and gave thanks at the tomb of Saint Cuthbert, beneath whose banner he had fought. As he approached East Anglia he made a brief visit to the great shrine at Walsingham. Some chroniclers described this victorious journey southwards as a pilgrimage. He gave alms to those who had been injured in the battle, and paid a hermit who lived near Norham to assist in the burial of the dead. In order to commemorate his victory he ordered a nunnery in the locality to be repaired at his cost. It was a symbol of victory in more ways than one. The money was to be paid by the people of the wrecked town of Berwick.

  Edward clearly wanted to project a religious dimension to his victory, to emphasise that he - and thus the English - had been favoured by God. But how religious was he? Edward's reputation as a paragon of religious kingship was firmly established by the end of the 1340s, and thatreputation never diminished in his lifetime. But was it real or just another part of his chivalric propaganda programme?

  In considering this we need to be aware of a whole string of problems affecting past judgements on his religious life. First it has to be said that most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians labelled Edward unreligious because they wished to castigate him as a warmonger. Since their own interpretation of Christian doctrine excluded the promotion of war, they decided Edward could not possibly have been a religious man, thereby completely disregarding the differences between their own steady, supposedly enlightened age and the fourteenth century. In Edward's day, war could be seen as an instrument by which leaders carried out God's will. We also need to remember that even though Edward consciously used religion to bolster his reputation, it does not necessarily follow that he did it cynically, or only for this reason. His coronation had been laden with religious symbolism, and was basically a ritual designed to establish the changed earthly and spiritual status of the king; but there is no reason to believe such a demonstration did not have as profound an effect on the king as on his subjects. It is die same with his other religious demonstrations, including those during and after a battle. They had a political purpose, but that does not mean that Edward did not believe in them.

  Edward was still not yet twenty-one, and this alerts us to another misjudgement frequently made in historical assessments of medieval spirituality. We cannot presume that a man's faith remained consistent throughout his life, and that his spiritual outlook was the same at twenty as it was at fifty. This is not to say that Edward experienced a 'road to Damascus' conversion at any point in his life, but it does mean we should be cautious about reaching for evidence from his fifties or sixties (when the reformer John Wycliffe was influential at court) to explain his religious outlook at the age of twenty. Indeed, in 1333 the great religious debates of the fourteenth century were still in their infancy, and William Ockham (who was in the vanguard of the reformers) was a refugee from papal censure, in exile, having been imprisoned by Pope John XXII for heresy. It is not surprising therefore that Edward's life was largely unaffected by popular religious dissent."

  Edward himself was a religious man. He was chosen by God to be king, that was a fundamental and widespread understanding. As an anointed king, he was the instrument through which God might cure men and women of certain diseases, notably the King's Evil (scrofula) and epilepsy. Edward undertook 'touching' for the King's Evil in thousands of cases in the 1330s and 1340s. When processing into a city, he often distributed alms to all the main orders of friars, not just the Dominicans (his father's choice) or the Franciscans (his mother's) but Carmelites and Austins as well. But if we try to differentiate between his religious acts and his actual faith, we may observe that many of his religious acts were routine. Religion formed his outlook on a world which was largely Christian or Moslem, as far as he knew. Every feast day and every Sunday he would hear a mass. Family events required religious observance, such as the birth of a child or the mother's churching a few weeks later. Visits of certain dignitaries - especially emissaries from the pope - required ecclesiastica
l audience. Religion was thus a function of his everyday life, and a part of his royal status. Piety and power went hand-in-hand, and it would have been difficult for him to further his political and diplomatic ambitions without seeming a perfecdy religious king. Edward needed religion to reassure his people (bishops and archbishops included), so they would have faith in him as worthy of God's favour and their respect.

  In keeping with his royal status, Edward possessed many religious objects. The keeper of his wardrobe in late 1332 reported that he had a gilded silver crystal reliquary vase bearing divers precious stones topped by an engraved silver image of the Crucifixion. The same source mentions two gilded silver basins engraved with images of Christ, and numerous ecclesiastical bowls, chalices, vestments and candelabra. There were also many, religious books - chorals, missals, graduals, antiphons, martyrologies and gospels -including a text of the gospels illustrated throughout with silver and gilded images. Interestingly, one of the ceremonial copes worn by Edward's priests included images of the martyrs and their sufferings - Saints Thomas, Laurence, Denis, Blasius, Edmund and Stephen, and the beheading of Saint John the Baptist - all ornamented with gold and silver. Physical suffering as worship, and ultimately a means of obtaining redemption - the cult of the crusader - was here apparent for him to dwell on, if he felt so inclined.