Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots. Ronald McNair Scott
if the revolt was crushed and Balliol deposed, the elder Bruce, now Governor of Carlisle, should succeed to the Scottish throne.40 So they ignored the summons as did the Earls of Angus and Dunbar and many other magnates who followed their lead. In consequence all were instantly deprived of their Scottish possessions. That those of the Bruces were handed out by Balliol to his kinsman, John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, only intensified an already bitter feud.41
The Scottish and English forces were gathering their strength when a love affair sparked off the conflict. Robert de Ros, an Englishman, Lord of Wark on Tweed, had fallen in love with a Scottish girl. As an earnest of his wish to marry her, he joined forces with her countrymen and promised to deliver to them his castle. His brother, hearing of his purpose, sent an urgent request to King Edward for his help. An advance guard of the English was promptly dispatched, but Robert de Ros with men from Roxburgh fell upon them as they lay camped for the night and cut them to pieces. The first blood had been shed. ‘By God’s blessing,’ exclaimed Edward when he heard the news, ‘as the Scots have begun, so shall I make an end.’42
His army made a rapid advance to relieve Wark and on 17 March 1296 King Edward made his quarters there and remained until after the celebration of Easter on 25 March.
Elevated by this greatest of Christian festivals, both sides immediately proceeded to acts of unnecessary barbarity. On 26 March, leaving their country’s eastern approaches unguarded, the Scots, under the Earl of Buchan, poured over the border at its western end, put to sword and flame the scattered villages on the English side and swept to the walls of Carlisle in an attempt to take it by storm. But the gates were fast bolted by the Lord of Annandale and the ramparts manned by the citizens under the command of his son, the Earl of Carrick.43
The Scots, having no siege engines, retraced their steps and a few weeks later turned east over the Cheviots and ravaged far and wide into Northumberland, burning churches, nunneries and villages and crowning their aimless exploits by the incineration of two hundred little scholars in a school at Corbridge.44 From a military point of view these raids were useless and did nothing to distract King Edward from his advance up the main eastern route to Scotland.
As it was, he was able to transport his army unopposed over the Tweed, twenty miles upstream from Berwick, and invade the town. An initial assault was made from the sea but the four leading ships went aground and the defenders, sallying forth, set them on fire and slew their crews. Elated by their success, they manned their precarious defences of earthen mound and palisade and jeered at the English and their King. But their confidence was ill founded. Under King Edward’s lead, his armoured knights crashed through the rotting timbers and drove their adversaries in disorder into the narrow streets and closes of the town. The foot soldiers followed and dreadful slaughter ensued. On the orders of the King that none should be spared, men, women and children were hewn down in their thousands and their corpses gave out a stench so overpowering that when all was over, deep pits had to be dug to bury their remains. For two days the massacre continued until Edward, riding among his men, observed a woman in the very act of childbirth being put to the sword, and at last called off the carnage.
Among the dead all honour must be given to the thirty Flemish merchants, who, in strict compliance to their ancient treaty with the Scottish Crown, resisted fiercely in their depot, ‘the Red Hall’, until it was engulfed by flames and all were burned.
The citadel alone remained intact; but the governor, Sir William Douglas, agreed to surrender himself as hostage so that the garrison might depart unharmed.45
The sack of Berwick, the pearl of Scotland’s commerce, was a crippling blow to her revenues and trade. Never again was the town to recover its ancient eminence. Edward at once had marked it down as the headquarters of his Scottish administration. With feverish energy he collected a vast work force from the neighbouring counties to surround it with massive fortifications – Edward himself set an example by personally shifting earth in a wheelbarrow46 – and brought up from the south English clerks and English merchants to replace the inhabitants who now lay cluttered in a common grave.47
By a macabre coincidence, while the smoke still rose thinly from the smouldering ruins a letter was brought by the Abbot of Arbroath to King Edward in which King John renounced his fealty.48 So late and so ineffective. ‘O foolish knave! What folly he commits!’ exclaimed the English King, ‘if he will not come to us, we will go to him.’49
Learning that the Countess of Dunbar had handed over its castle to a Scottish force while her husband was with the English and that the Earl of Buchan was gathering a powerful host on the heights surrounding the town of Dunbar, he ordered his army, under the Earl of Surrey, to march northwards.
The disciplined columns of the English came up with their opponents on 27 April and began to deploy in the deep valley beneath the slopes of the Lammermuirs, on which the Scots were massed, in order to cross the intervening burn. Stalwart though the Scottish knights had shown themselves in many a tiltyard, they had no experience of the tactics of serious warfare. As the English began to disappear into the dead ground below, they assumed they were seeking to escape. Breaking their ranks, they charged down the hillside in a tumultuous rabble only to meet an ordered battle line which overwhelmed them at the first onslaught. Thousands of Scottish foot soldiers were slain and the knights surrounded and made prisoner. Among those taken on the field of battle and from the castle of Dunbar were the greater part of the principal nobility who had supported Balliol, and no organized resistance remained.50
The rest of Edward’s campaign was a military promenade. Roxburgh, Dumbarton and Jedburgh castles surrendered in quick succession and Edinburgh castle after eight days. Stirling castle was found abandoned with only a porter to hand over the keys. In unresisting Perth, Edward celebrated the feast of John the Baptist and there received letters of abject submission from King John. On 10 July this unhappy monarch appeared before his overlord at Montrose and yielded to him his person and his kingdom, bewailing the errors into which he had fallen ‘through evil counsel and our own simplicity’, and in the presence of all assembled to witness his humiliation had the blazon of the royal arms embroidered on his tabard ripped off and cast upon the floor. Toom Tabard, King Nobody, was king no more.51
Leaving the Earl of Lancaster to transport his captive to the Tower of London,* Edward made leisurely progress northward through Aberdeen and Banff as far as Elgin to demonstrate his might and receive the homage of prominent Scots in the districts through which he passed. Returning by Perth, he commanded that the hallowed Stone of Destiny, upon which from generation to generation the kings of Scotland had been enthroned, should be taken from the abbey church at Scone and delivered to Westminster Abbey. The plunder of this sacred relic and the royal regalia which he had already removed from Edinburgh castle were arrogant signals to all in Scotland that henceforth their country was not a kingdom but a dependent part of England.52
On 28 August he held a parliament at Berwick to which every landholder in Scotland was summoned to appear with signed and sealed instruments of fealty – The Ragman Roll53 – not to a new king of Scotland-‘Have we nothing