The weakness of such reasoning lay in his limited options if the English were not rebutted and gained the ascendancy. The schiltrons were admirably drilled to hold their ground but in the time allowed him and with his soldiers’ inexperience he had been unable to extend their movements to the more complex ones of moving off the field in a cohesive fashion or – if it had ever crossed his mind – the far more difficult one still of taking the offensive against their opponents.
In the early stages of the battle Wallace’s tactics seemed fully justified even when he faced the English cavalry totalling some 2400 riders formed into three divisions. Of these no less than 1300 were full-time (including some mercenaries from Gascony) together with 1100 nobles who, accompanied by their retinues, were honouring their feudal obligations to the king.11 He not only succeeded in beating off the first two attacks but he inflicted heavy losses on the aggressors.
The balance began to move in favour of the English after Wallace’s cavalry fled but even when his schiltrons lost their covering archers and were pinned down and surrounded by the English cavalry it took massed bowmen firing from the shortest range into their packed ranks to seal their fate. By this point, however, Wallace had no further alternatives. He was forced to watch the destruction of his army, and families across the whole of Scotland would be obliged to mourn men lost in the battle, including short bowmen who, until new archers had completed their comparatively lengthy training, were irreplaceable. Wallace himself was forced to give up the guardianship and during the next seven years before his terrible death at the hands of the English never again commanded any sizeable military force.
CHAPTER TWO
DIVIDED LEADERSHIP
‘For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound who shall prepare himself to the battle?’
1 Corinthians 14:8
THE SEVEN YEARS OR so between Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk and Robert Bruce’s final commitment to the nationalist cause proved cruel ones for Scotland, despite the country’s fleeting diplomatic and military successes which delayed Edward’s programme of conquest and at one stage even promised to unravel it. At no time did the Scottish forces feel themselves capable of standing in battle against the main English armies. By 1304, when Edward extinguished the last remnants of Scottish resistance by capturing Stirling Castle, prospects for Scotland’s survival as an independent kingdom seemed extremely poor. Its former allies had disappeared like snow in springtime, with France moving into the English camp and a papacy becoming unsympathetic. Equally serious was the disunited nature of Scottish leadership during the period. With the absence of the lawful king, John Balliol, attempts to rule through guardians acting on his behalf were seriously hampered, largely because rivalry between the Bruce and Comyn factions prevented them from acting with the same authority and single-minded commitment shown earlier by Wallace. The most notable result was that, after taking part in the uneasy system of joint guardianship, Robert Bruce, heir elect of his powerful family and a man with the potential to become a genuine leader of the first rank, both on and off the battlefield, had, by 1302, deserted the Scottish national cause and made his peace with the English king.
It was a less surprising decision than might be considered today. While the Comyns had continued throughout to support John Balliol, for much of the time the Bruces offered their fealty to Edward I, the scourge of their countrymen, in the conviction that if Balliol were deposed Edward would support their own candidature for the Scottish kingship, even if he was likely to demand some restrictions on its power. Indeed, it was Edward’s reneging on his promise to Bruce’s father with regard to the Scottish throne and his attempt to incorporate Scotland within the English crown that in 1297 first led Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, to take the momentous decision of taking a contrary course to his father – who remained true to the English king – and join the opposition forces in Scotland.
At the time Edward I was still confident enough of both Bruces, father and son, for him to order Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale and Governor of Carlisle, to charge his son with seizing the Douglas estates after Sir William Douglas had united with Wallace. Unexpectedly Bruce, who had only recently regained his lands from Comyn control following the English victory at Dunbar, made no more than a mock attack on Douglasdale and, after assembling his father’s knights of Annandale, explained that his oath of fealty to the English king had been given under duress and as a consequence he had decided to move into the nationalist camp. He justified his decision by citing the loyalty he felt for his followers on the Carrick estate and to his country of Scotland. ‘No man holds his own flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception … I must join my own people (the men of Carrick) and the nation in which I was born.’1 There seems no reason to doubt Robert Bruce’s feelings for both his own followers and the land of his boyhood, those wide Carrick estates that he had ridden and hunted across with his brothers and sisters. Allied to this was the belief which had also fired his grandfather, that his family’s royal blood gave them an undeniable right to occupy the throne of Scotland. It was this that became the very purpose of his life and with the removal of John Balliol he might well have considered that many Scottish patriots would now turn to him as the most likely contender for the Scottish throne. In the event most of the Annandale knights refused to join him since their own lord still took the part of the English king.
Robert Bruce, however, was not to be deflected and, after raising additional recruits from among his followers at Carrick, he took the dangerous step of moving to join James Stewart and Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, at Irvine. Following their tame surrender to the English, Bruce paid the price for his show of patriotism – and possible early bid for the Scottish throne – by being deprived of his lands once more. This time they were required by the English who also directed him to hand over his daughter Marjorie, as surety for his continuing good behaviour, a directive he managed to avoid.
It was as well Bruce did so for after Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge in September 1297, he and his men of Carrick were out again. In March 1298 it was probably Bruce who knighted Wallace for his achievements and, although Bruce himself remained in the southwest of Scotland it is likely that he provided mounted elements for Wallace’s army at the battle of Falkirk in July 1298. Having defeated Wallace at Falkirk, Edward I showed he recognised Bruce’s ability and potential threat by attempting to go on and deal with him as well, but Bruce was too quick for him; after burning Ayr and destroying its castle he and his followers moved into the desolate hill regions of Carrick out of the king’s reach.
When Wallace was compelled to surrender his sole guardianship of Scotland young Bruce became an obvious candidate to replace him in heading the opposition to the English king, the other outstanding contender being another young nobleman, John Comyn the Red, head of the senior branch of the Comyn family. Unlike Bruce, John Comyn had never wavered in supporting his kinsman John Balliol. In April 1296 he had accompanied the Scottish forces that crossed the English border during the first engagement of the Independence Wars, and he was not likely to forget that when the Scottish forces failed in their attempt to take Carlisle Castle it was being held on behalf of the English king by Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, Robert Bruce’s father. Following the Scottish army’s defeat at Dunbar and the fall of John Balliol, John Comyn had been one of the many Scottish nobles imprisoned in England, whereas Robert Bruce had been granted the return of his lands at Carrick which John Balliol had confiscated on behalf of the Comyns. Although the senior Scottish prelates and nobles appointed them as joint guardians to orchestrate resistance against the English, the chances of their success were not helped by the fact that, powerful figure as he was, Comyn entirely lacked Bruce’s magnanimity and could never equal his powers of leadership. The intense rivalry between their two families did not augur well for a smooth working relationship and, in
