Atholl, Lennox, Mar, Menteith, Ross and Strathearn rallied to the side of Bruce and claimed that they alone had the ancient right of instituting a king and had invited Edward of England to arbitrate.2
No wolf invited by a flock of sheep to nominate their leading ram could have felt more satisfaction at this juncture than Edward I. In response to their appeals he set in train his movement northward. But at Hardby in Lincolnshire his beloved consort Eleanor fell ill and in November 1290 died of fever.3 All matters of state were immediately put aside. Although his marriage to this half-sister of the King of Spain at the age of fifteen had been one of dynastic convenience arranged by his father, he had for thirty-five years devoted himself to her with a fidelity and attachment notable in any class and rare indeed among monarchs. ‘I loved her dearly during her lifetime,’ wrote Edward, ‘I shall not cease to love her now that she is dead.’
Her body was borne in stately progress to its last resting place in Westminster Abbey, and at every nightfall stopping place a cross was erected in her memory, the last at Charing Cross.4 Her death wrought an evil change in Edward’s nature. The savage streak, inherited from his Angevin ancestors, ‘the Devil’s breed’, which had expressed itself in his youth by acts of wanton cruelty, had been tamed and softened by her gentleness. From now on, without her restraining influence, it was to break out in barbarous reprisals against those who thwarted his purpose.
Raw from his bereavement, he delayed no longer to reveal his ambitions. Confidentially informing his barons in council that he intended to subjugate Scotland as he had Wales,5 he moved north to Antony Bek, the Bishop of Durham’s castle at Norham on Tweed and from there invited the representatives of Scotland and the various competitors to meet him on 30 May 1291,6 with the assurance that their appearance on English soil would not be taken as a precedent.7 At the same time, he gave orders to his armed forces to join him on 3 June.
The Scotsmen, assuming that his action was that of an unbiased arbitrator, duly arrived in his presence. He received them with ostentatious ceremony surrounded by the high officers of his court, and began the proceedings by informing them through his chief justice that he had come to resolve the dispute among the claimants to the Scottish throne not as friend and umpire but as lord paramount and feudal superior of the Scottish realm. ‘Can you,’ his address concluded, ‘produce any evidence to show that I am not the rightful Suzerain?’8
Taken aback, the Scots asked for time to consider their reply and were granted twenty-four hours and then, after their expostulation, three weeks, by which time King Edward knew that he would have his army at his side.9
If the Scots had chosen to invoke the legalistic formulas by which the King liked to cloak his designs, they would have pointed out that if he genuinely believed he was lord paramount he could already, on the Maid of Norway’s accession to the throne, have claimed the right according to feudal law of administering her heritage while she was still a minor, and the right as her guardian of marrying her to whom he chose. Instead, by signing the Treaty of Birgham, he had accepted that Scotland was an independent kingdom and had guaranteed that it should so continue.
They could have reminded him that though by the Treaty of Falaise between Henry II of England and King William I ‘the Lion’ of Scotland, King William had agreed in 1174 to accept the overlordship of England in order to be released from captivity, this treaty had been abrogated by Richard I, Coeur de Lion, in 1189, and that when Alexander III, on Edward I’s accession to the English throne in 1278, did homage to him for his English lands, he stated categorically, ‘I become your man for the lands which I hold of you in the Kingdom of England for which I owe you homage, saving my Kingdom. To homage for my Kingdom of Scotland no-one has any right but God alone, nor do I hold it of any but of God.’
But guided almost certainly by Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, that continuing champion of Scottish freedom, they went straight to the vital point: that they could not answer for a future king of Scotland. In a memorable letter, ‘in the name of the community of Scotland’, delivered to King Edward at the end of May, they wrote, after a courteous preamble referring to his claim to suzerainty:
Sire, to this the good men who have sent us here say that they know full well that you would not make so great a demand if you did not believe that you had good right to it: yet of any such right or demand made or used by yourself or your ancestors they know nothing. They answer, with such authority as they possess, that they have no power to reply in the absence of a ruler over them to whom such a demand should be addressed and who could reply to it. For even if they did reply it would not increase your right nor take away from the right of their liege lord. But the good men of the Kingdom are willing that whoever shall be King shall perform to you whatever right and law require, for he and no-one else will have the power to do this. Meanwhile they can only refer to the oath they took after the death of the late King, saving your faith and theirs and to the treaty confirmed in your presence at Northampton.10
Brushing aside this petition as containing nothing to the purpose (nihil tamen efficax),11 Edward demanded that as his title was disputed by none his overlordship should be recognized by all.
The Scots were in a helpless situation. Edward lay on their borders with a formidable army at his command. Their country had been so long at peace that it was ungeared for war. The natural military leaders were bitterly divided by the empty throne. They had no alternative but acceptance or annihilation. Nine conferences were held between 2 and 13 June, but the upshot was that all the claimants to the Crown swore to the King in person and then publicly repeated their oaths before the assembled lords that they accepted King Edward I as their feudal superior with lawful right to decide their case;12 and shortly afterwards the guardians of Scotland and the magnates of the realm agreed to hand over to him the custody of their country and its castles in exchange for his solemn promise that within two months of his award he would restore them to him ‘who shall gain the right, by judgement, of royalty’, and that on the death of a Scots king he would demand nothing but homage and the rights incidental to it.13
With Scotland in the hollow of his hand, Edward acted with calculated promptitude: on 13 June 1291 on the green at Upsettlington, a little village on the Scottish side of the Tweed opposite Norham Castle, he received the fealty of the guardians and the magnates there present. The four guardians resigned into his hands the office which they had received from ‘the community of Scotland’ and were reappointed ‘by the most serene prince, by God’s grace illustrious King of England, superior Lord of Scotland’, with the addition of a fifth guardian, an English baron, Brian FitzAlan of Bedale. A new chancellor was installed with an Englishman as his colleague. The constables of the Scottish castles resigned their charges and were reappointed as his sworn liege men.
Then, setting out from Upsettlington, he made a ceremonial progress by way of Haddington, Edinburgh and Linlithgow to Stirling. At Stirling he issued a proclamation that by 27 July, on pain of severe penalties, all men of substance throughout the kingdom should swear fealty to him in person or to representatives appointed by him for that purpose. He returned by Dumfermline, St Andrews and Perth with abbots and priors, barons and knights, freemen and burghers coming to kneel before him, and arrived in Berwick in time to open on 3 August the preliminary hearings of the great court case for
