Born Fighting Page 5
Having themselves been altered in their blood and traditions by intermarriage with Norman and English royalty, the high families of Scotland now embraced further schemes. In 1286 a quirk of history had made Margaret—at the age of three—the only direct heir to the throne of her grandfather, King Alexander III of Scotland, and thus she was in line to be the queen. Margaret was known in Scotland as the Maid of Norway since her late mother had married King Eric II of that country. Born in Norway, she had never even set foot in Scotland.
“Proud” King Edward I, England’s ruthless and unusually powerful monarch, saw opportunity where others saw tragedy. In his eyes, Alexander’s death could quickly deliver him the prize of Scotland itself.
The thirteenth century had begun a period of great change in Europe that over the next few centuries would cause the transition from the feudal system to the concept of the modern sovereign state. In sovereign terms, the great irritation of a feudal estate was that it could cross national boundaries. As the modern state evolved, this created difficulties not only in terms of military obligations, but also in such issues as taxation and local government. As Princeton’s Joseph Strayer wrote in his classic text Western Europe in the Middle Ages, “Overlapping political authority was just as natural under feudal conditions as it is unnatural in the modern state; the transition from the first to the second was bound to cause conflict. The concept of distinct boundaries, within which one ruler has supreme authority, was new at the end of the thirteenth century. In attempting to draw such boundaries, overlapping rights had to be ignored and tenuous claims of suzerainty exaggerated.”29
King Edward I was a master of this process of exaggerating claims to contested land areas, using it to good effect in the “final conquest” of North Wales, and then setting his sights, or rather his obsessions, on Scotland. Noting the fragility of the Scottish throne, Edward seized the moment, gaining agreement among Scotland’s and Norway’s high royalty that the infant girl should marry Edward II, his eldest son, who would one day succeed him. The arrangement was formally agreed to among Margaret’s four guardians and the king in the Treaty of Birgham-on-Tweed. Ominously, the treaty also guaranteed that young Edward would gain an irrevocable personal right to “the Scottish inheritance” if he produced an heir, with Margaret or any other wife, so long as he and the infant queen had once been married.30 Thus, Edward I had arranged to deliver to England by royal fiat that which it had been unable to accomplish through a thousand years of military effort—a Scotland that would be firmly ruled by English royalty.
The Scottish people and their tribal leaders watched and listened, having already rejected the entire basis of this odd Norman concept whereby the ownership of land somehow equated to the subjugation of peoples. And they were not convinced.
The child-queen mooted the point in 1290 when she died in a stormy sea as she was being rushed from Norway to the royal court. But after her death, civil war threatened Scotland as the Scottish kingdom had no clear line of succession to its throne. Thirteen people stepped forward and claimed the right to rule, and the Scots had no legal apparatus that would resolve their claims. Instead, Scotland’s high families invited the notorious Edward I to reconcile the question, and predictably he acted not as a mediator but as a firm-handed regent. His appetite having been whetted by his earlier attempt to wed his son to little dead Margaret, Edward chose John Balliol, the weakest among the possible successors. At the same time, Edward made clear that he considered himself to be the true overlord of Scotland.
John Balliol might be king, but Edward was going to rule.
Balliol was crowned at historic Scone on St. Andrew’s Day, 1292. He was now king of Scotland, but many of the castles and their soldiers were already in Norman-English hands. Edward I himself lost no effort in humiliating Balliol, and within a year he had claimed the three largest towns in Scotland as his own due to Balliol’s alleged contempt of the throne. Two years later Balliol appealed to the French for help, and in October 1295 he signed a weakly worded treaty with the French. Edward seized upon this desperation as a breach of fealty and decided to march on Scotland.
March Proud King Edward did. Burn he did. Kill he did, earning along the way the nickname “the Hammer of Scotland.” In a campaign more vicious than anything Scotland had seen since the pillage by Roman emperor Severus a thousand years before, Edward set upon the flourishing port of Berwick, then the richest city in Scotland, and literally destroyed everything in it, including its people. On March 30, 1296, Edward entered Berwick with some 5,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry, and in one day killed an estimated 17,000 people. As Churchill rather dryly put it, “Berwick sank in a few hours from one of the active centres [sic] of European commerce to the minor seaport which exists today.”31
Why did Edward do this, and indeed, how could a supposedly Christian monarch have lived with such blood on his hands? Centuries later, in 1937, the Japanese would coin a phrase for such ruthless conduct as they took similar (though not so completely brutal) measures in Nanking, China. In Asia the concept was called “killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.” Laying waste to Berwick was a deliberate act of state terrorism, the medieval equivalent of a strategically placed atomic bomb. It was meant to create such fear in the rest of Scotland that the people would hurry to show their deference to the powerful English king.
Wrong country. Wrong people.
Edward should have read his history more carefully, for he then would have understood that Roman emperor Severus also had underestimated the intransigence of the people of the North in the face of foreign brutality. The English king did predict accurately the actions of many of the high Scottish nobles, but he vastly underestimated the people themselves. The high royalty ran from Edward, but the people did not. In fact, the rape of Berwick had inflamed them.
Edward discounted the people, content with the notion that his intimidation of the Anglo-Norman high nobility had been successful. After Berwick, the hapless Balliol was trapped into a fight, having no choice but to renounce his homage to England, which he did a month later. The trap thereby sprung, a month after that the English routed the Scottish at Dunbar, where ten thousand Scots died and their high nobility literally fled the battlefield. Soon after that, all the great castles belonged to the English. In July, Balliol surrendered himself and his “kingdom” to Edward, and he was taken to England, where he lived a comfortable life for a few years and then retired, equally comfortably, to France. Just after Balliol’s surrender, Edward himself rampaged through Scotland, marching freely throughout the kingdom to demonstrate his invincibility. On his way back to England the avaricious king looted jewelry, relics, and the famed Stone of Scone from Scone, symbolically “uniting” the two countries with the capture of Scotland’s most important ceremonial accoutrements.
Scotland had been subdued, or so it might have seemed. But Proud Edward’s fatal mistake was thinking that Scotland was merely ruled from above rather than driven from below. Instead of frightening the Scots, Edward’s promiscuous violence had roused in them an uncompromising nationalism. The English king had set into motion a spirit of vengeance and independence among the “monkeys.” Indeed, he had awakened, in Churchill’s words, “a race as stern and resolute as any bred among men.”32
Even as the high nobles were crumbling before Edward’s advance, the Scottish people were coming together, and soon they were actively resisting. They had built their nation from below, family by family, glen by glen, oath by oath, not through some impersonal, didactic Norman pyramid based on obligations tied to real estate but instead through the Celtic way of blood loyalty, locked elbows, and the honor of raising swords in unison. They would march and they would fight and many of them would die, all for a new and rare concept that even then they dared to label freedom.
When the moment for fighting and dying came, it fell on two very different leaders to deliver the Scottish people to their future. One leader was a commoner whose fighting spirit, moral courage, and charisma were
so unusual that the world has seen his sort only rarely in the entire annals of history. William Wallace gave the individual Scot his patriotic “brave heart” as well as the certainty of this new national identity, and even today his legacy has the power to inspire great acts and shame those who shirk from challenge. The other leader was of the hybrid–royal blood caste, a ruthlessly ambitious and deeply conflicted man who gained his countrymen’s loyalty and respect only after he had shown a unique form of perseverance that transcended his royal titles. Robert the Bruce gave Scotland its first true moment of independence from England, providing structure and validity to the dream of Wallace. And from that point forward the Scottish people made clear that they might endure, but would never accept, subjugation from the outside in any form.
It is not surprising that King Edward so vastly underestimated William Wallace. So also did the high Scottish nobility. For William Wallace was a historic phenomenon, perhaps the first commoner in modern Western history to lead a national movement. And like the remarkable Andrew Jackson, who would rise up nearly five centuries later from the chaos of the American frontier, Wallace accomplished this unique feat by winning the allegiance of his countrymen through his insistence on their equality, and by his own performance on the battlefield.
Tales of Wallace still resonate, passed down through the centuries until fact, legend, and myth have commingled into an inseparable collage. The millions around the world who have watched the Oscar-winning film Braveheart will be familiar with a stylized but emotionally accurate depiction of his life. Born in the wild part of southwest Scotland that would later provide the bulk of the Scots-Irish migration to Ireland and then America, Wallace was the landless second son of a minor laird who was brutally killed by an English knight. He came of age during the years leading up to the massacre at Berwick and learned early to hate—and to fight—the local English authorities that had been installed by Edward I.
A charismatic leader and smart guerrilla warrior, Wallace avenged his father’s death by assembling fifty men and ambushing the knight, remembered only as Fenwick, killing him and another one hundred English soldiers. Similar successes fed both his reputation and his army. Operating out of the roadless and impenetrable Etterick Forest, he quickly demonstrated military gifts of a high order, not only on the battlefield but also in organization. Characteristically, he built his army from the bottom. As Churchill described it, “Every four men had a fifth as a leader; every nine men a tenth; every nineteen men a twentieth, and so on to every thousand; and it was agreed that the penalty for disobedience to the leader of any unit was death. Thus from the ground does freedom raise itself unconquerable.”33
The famed “fire team” system of the United States Marine Corps took similar shape in later centuries, built tightly from below through interlocking leaders. A four-man fire team is its foundation, three teams building into a squad, three squads into a platoon, three platoons into a company, and four companies into a battalion, making each leader’s span of control efficient and yet complete. The effectiveness of this modern concept remains as testimony either to Wallace’s legacy or his logic.
The incendiary event that launched Wallace’s national reputation grew out of another act of revenge. When Hazelrig, the English sheriff of Lanark, learned that Wallace had courted and apparently married a beautiful woman named Marion Baraidfute, who lived in his jurisdiction, he ordered her brother killed. Wallace responded by raiding the town at night with a handful of guerrillas and killing several dozen English soldiers before melting back into the woods. The sheriff, angry that he had not caught Wallace, retaliated by killing the innocent Marion. And then, as they say, the lid blew off. The grieving Wallace raised a larger force and again entered Lanark at night, overpowering the castle guards and killing the sheriff in his bed. He and his men then rampaged through the town, killing some 240 English soldiers, merchants, and commoners, sparing only women, children, and priests.
For this, Edward branded Wallace a traitor and an outlaw, but among common Scots he quickly became a national hero. Only months before, Edward had massacred virtually the entire population of Scotland’s most important city and destroyed its infrastructure. His army had then burned and sacked the countryside. He had taken the sacred implements of Scone. The high nobility had fled, fearing Edward’s sword more than their loss of honor. Who but Wallace would lead the fight for Scotland?
Thousands flocked to Wallace. The entire country, down to the smallest of landowners, was in revolt. Their unabated guerrilla tactics stunned the English as Wallace’s army swept the countryside. Wallace’s soldiers took Scone, and for a brief time a handful of nobles, including Robert the Bruce, rallied to Wallace’s side. But then Edward, distracted in France, sent an English army north to quell the rebellion. And upon that army’s arrival, every member of the high nobility again abandoned Wallace except for the redoubtable Sir Andrew de Moray, who had brought a band of Gaelic warriors down from the north.
Edward, thinking of Wallace as a mere outlaw, did not believe that the Scottish rebel could actually lead an army. Ever the medievalist, the English king simply could not fathom that thousands of soldiers would fight under a man who was not of high nobility. And he gained comfort in this view from the actions of Scotland’s own high royalty, which collectively had decided that Wallace and his men were a rabble and in some cases dangerous to their own aspirations.
Thus Edward and Scotland’s high nobility seemed quietly to agree on one notion, no matter their lack of accord on others: William Wallace was a threat to their own personal interests.
In September 1297, only a year and a half after the Berwick massacre, Wallace led his fledgling army against the larger and far better equipped English force, whose mission was to break apart his brigands and capture him, thus ending the rebellion. The English were 60,000 strong, with another 8,000 held in reserve. Their ranks included heavily armored cavalry, seasoned longbow archers, and well-provided infantry. Against them Wallace was fielding 40,000 lightly armed infantry and fewer than 200 horses. The high Scottish nobility had deserted him. His soldiers were men from the roughest ends of Scottish life. They wore animal skins or coarse homespun cloth for uniforms. A few had fashioned metal skullcaps, but none had armor. Most had made their own weapons as well, the deadliest being the standard twelve-foot-long spear, or pike, that Scottish soldiers used when fighting from a circular formation called the schilltron. Others simply carried axes, some even knives.
The English army was advancing westward from Berwick. If forced to fight them in open terrain, Wallace’s army would have been quickly decimated, both by the English cavalry and by the highly skilled Welsh longbow archers, many of whom had recent combat experience in France. In a brilliant tactical move, Wallace chose to accept the English advance near the town of Stirling, where the rivers Forth and Clyde would narrow the English advance into hilly, broken terrain. He placed his forces on the steep slopes of the Ochil Hills near the Abbey Craig, looking down on the River Forth, where the English were advancing toward him from the far side.
Watching the English cavalry approach the river, Wallace gave an order that would be repeated five hundred years later by Andrew Jackson as he waited for the British to advance on his position just before the Battle of New Orleans: we are outnumbered, don’t fight too soon. Wallace carried a horn, and the word went out among his men to attack only when they heard its sound.
The English, apparently thinking Wallace’s army was little more than a gang of ruffians, could not have been more accommodating. Instead of fording the river on a wider front upstream, the English cavalry crossed to the other side over a narrow bridge. The crossing was slow. On the Scottish side of the river the ground was boggy, further frustrating the English horsemen. In time the English army was divided on both sides of the river, with its cavalry floundering at the marshy base of the steep hill. And then Wallace’s horn pierced the September air, followed by the unearthly screams of thousands of fiercely charging Scottish spea
rmen.
The Scots made quick work of the English, decimating their cavalry by killing the stalled horses and finishing off the knights, and within a few hours sent its shocked army into full retreat. Wallace and Andrew de Moray followed with a retaliatory offensive that covered much of Scotland and also included a fierce raid into England, although Moray, wounded at Stirling, died shortly after the battle. Wallace was now preeminent. Just as important, the nation had been fully awakened to its possibilities, and even for a short time the ever-vacillating high nobles genuflected toward the rebel leader. In March 1298, Wallace was knighted and given the title “Guardian of Scotland.” Characteristically, he chose to hold the title as a fiduciary for the absent King John Balliol rather than seeking the monarchy himself.
But the indecisive high nobles remained quietly against Wallace, measuring their lands, titles, and personal ambitions against the prospects of his long-term success. If Wallace were to win, he surely would turn against the Anglo-Norman version of the royal system. If he were to lose, Proud Edward would make mincemeat of those who had supported him. And so they waited him out. In July 1298, Edward I again personally invaded Scotland, adamant in his determination to avenge Stirling and destroy Wallace’s nationalist movement. Shortly thereafter, two Scottish lords secretly revealed Wallace’s positions to Edward, and the English army caught Wallace by surprise in the gently sloping, open terrain near Falkirk. As a further blow, a large portion of the Scottish army led by the high nobles marched off the battlefield when the vastly superior English army approached, including the forces under John Comyn, the lord of Badenoch, who remained one of the claimants to the Scottish throne. And Wallace, as well as his army, was doomed.