Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
kingdom of Scotland.1
Three days later, after paying homage to Edward, Balliol left for Scone, where he was inaugurated as King of Scots on the Stone of Scone inside the abbey church on 30 November 1292 – St Andrew’s Day. It was to be the last time a King of Scots would sit on the royal Stone at Scone. Within a month Balliol and many Scottish nobles had to travel to Newcastle to swear fealty yet again for his kingdom to King Edward. It was the start of an unhappy four-year reign which ended in humiliation for King John Balliol and disaster for Scotland, and left Balliol with the jeering sobriquet of ‘Toom Tabard’ (Empty Tunic) with which he has come down in history.
There are few details available of Balliol’s reign. It is clear that much of the authority which had been exercised by the Guardians during the Maid of Norway’s minority was passed to the Community of the Realm, in the shape of a parliament; and there is evidence that King John tried to carry out the functions expected of a king, despite the implacable enmity of the Bruces. But Edward I was clearly intent on humiliating him at every turn. He usurped the right to hear appeals from Scottish judgements, and King John was even ordered by the Sheriff of Northumberland to appear before a court in London to account for a wine-bill left unpaid by Alexander III. John never had a chance, according to Fiona Watson:
Balliol was not well known in Scotland before he became king, but he did a reasonable job, considering that he was up against a king who had the best legal mind in Europe – a man, moreover, who was prepared to use military force to back up his claims. From south of the border, Edward was constantly telling him what to do. I do not think anyone could have stood up to Edward; and anyone who tried would have had to fight a war over it. That was a decision which Balliol took a long time to make – quite rightly, because it would plunge Scotland into a war with a very formidable adversary.
I think John Balliol’s reputation is due for serious revision – he certainly deserves much more attention and much more understanding; but that devastating nickname, ‘Toom Tabard’, is difficult to get round, and it is even more difficult to reach the real John Balliol through the propaganda and vilification engendered by the man who usurped his throne – Robert the Bruce.
In 1294, less than two years after his accession, King John was instructed to raise troops to assist Edward in his war with Philippe IV (‘Philippe the Fair’) of France over Gascony. That was one demand too many. In July 1295 a meeting of parliament at Scone decided to put the direction of affairs into the hands of a Council of Twelve, made up of four bishops, four earls and four barons – a new form of Guardianship, in effect. John Balliol remained king, but was effectively sidelined: the real power behind the governance of Scotland was in the hands of Balliol’s main supporters, the Comyn family.
In October the hard-line Council of Twelve decided to look for help abroad. In Paris that month they concluded a mutual defence treaty with Edward’s arch-enemy Philippe IV of France, who was giving Edward as hard a time as Edward was giving Scotland. It was the start of what has become fondly known, in Scotland at least, as the ‘Auld Alliance’. In practical terms, the Auld Alliance was little more than a sentimental association between two countries which for a long time shared a certain antipathy towards England. Historians tend to look askance at it. During the Wars of Independence it proved of some value in terms of French political and diplomatic intercession with the papacy or as a potential threat against England; but there was very little in terms of military co-operation. It helped Scotland to maintain a role as a player in European politics, and was an alliance of mutual self-interest, but there is no indication that either of the allies was ever prepared to go to any lengths to support the other at the expense of its own interests.
The 1295 Treaty of Paris guaranteed that Scotland would maintain hostile pressure on England in return for military aid from France should Scotland be invaded. It was to be cemented by a future marriage between John Balliol’s son and heir, Edward Balliol, and Jeanne de Valois, niece of Philippe IV (in the event, the marriage never took place). The treaty was ratified by the full Community of the Realm at Dunfermline in February 1296. It was an implicit declaration of war on England; Edward I certainly read it as an open act of rebellion by the country over which he claimed overlordship, and in the autumn of 1295 he had put the north of England on a war footing.
Effectively, the Treaty of Paris was the start of what have become known as the ‘Wars of Independence’; to the English they were simply the ‘Scottish Wars’, but perhaps they could more accurately be described as ‘Wars of Preservation’. Buoyed up with the hope of French military assistance, Scotland raised a national army which was ordered to assemble at Caddonlea, the traditional site of a Scottish wapinschaw (‘inspection of weapons’), four miles north of Selkirk, on 11 March 1296. Significantly, but not surprisingly, the Bruces refused to attend the muster; as a result their Annandale lands were declared forfeit by King John, and granted to his father-in-law John Comyn, Earl of Buchan.
King Edward I was also on the move. He had summoned his feudal host to assemble at Newcastle upon Tyne on 1 March; it was a formidable force, comprising an estimated four thousand cavalry and twenty-five thousand infantry – larger by far than the Scottish army which would assemble at Selkirk on 18 March. By the middle of March, Edward had joined the English army in person as it moved to a new encampment near the village of Brunton, north of Alnwick. He celebrated Easter Day (25 March) at Wark Castle, just south of the Tweed, and here he received renewed pledges of fealty from the Bruces (father and son) and other Scottish barons for their lands in Scotland:
I shall be faithful and loyal, and shall maintain faith and loyalty to King Edward, King of England, and to his heirs, in matters of life and limb and of earthly honour against all mortal men; and never shall I bear arms for anyone against him or his heirs …
In his response, King Edward tellingly referred to John Balliol as ‘the former King of Scotland’ (qui fust Roy d’Escoce). The King of Scots was king no more; to the Bruces it could only have meant that the throne was up for grabs again.
It was the Scots who struck the first blow. On 26 March, the day after the ceremony at Wark, a strong Scottish force from the former Bruce fiefdom of Annandale, led by John Comyn the Younger of Buchan, attacked Carlisle Castle, which was held by the dispossessed Lord of Annandale and his son, young Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick; but Carlisle, with its formidable fortifications, was too strong to be stormed, and the attack was repulsed with little difficulty.
King Edward now unleashed the counter-invasion he had been planning all winter. He moved across the border at Coldstream and on 30 March launched a ferocious assault on the royal burgh of Berwick, which was then the wealthiest commercial town in Scotland. The timber palisade walls of the town offered no defence, and Berwick was sacked with terrible brutality. The inhabitants were massacred without mercy – women and children as well as men. Of the town’s 12,500 inhabitants, only five thousand survived the slaughter. The wholesale destruction of Berwick quickly became a byword for savagery, the ultimate war atrocity. The castle held out, however, until the garrison, commanded by Sir William Douglas (who offered himself as hostage), were promised truce and safe conduct from the burning town.
The Scots retaliated with an equally savage raid deep into Northumberland on 8 April, burning villages and abbeys all the way to Hexham. This raid, with English claims of gratuitous cruelty (including the burning alive of schoolchildren in Hexham), became as much of a byword for merciless brutality as the sack of Berwick. Edward I ignored it. He stayed on in Berwick for the next month, supervising the rebuilding of the town and its flimsy defences, and repopulating it with English burgesses; it was now that he ordered the construction of the curtain wall (the ‘White Wall’) from the castle down to the shore.
The Scots raiding force moved back across the border and up to English-held Dunbar, where the castle was opened to them by the Governor’s wife, the Countess of March. Part of the English army, under the command of John de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey (ironically, John Balliol’s brother-in-law), was sent north to retake the castle at Dunbar. Surrey laid siege to the fortress on 25 April. Two days later the main body of King John’s army, under the command of John Comyn (the ‘Red Comyn’), made an attempt