As Buchan had been moving against Carlisle, though, Edward himself had arrived at Newcastle, in the northeast, and advanced with his main army to the border town of Berwick, Scotland’s most prosperous burgh, on the River Tweed, where he demanded entry. It was a demand that must have been foreseen, but the citizens of Berwick made a grievous error, born of the overconfidence engendered by too many years of peace. They overestimated their own defensive strength, and they underestimated the power and temper of the man whom they defied. They made no secret of their contempt for the English King and his army, and openly laughed and jeered at Edward himself when he rode forward to inspect their walls. Infuriated by this treatment, the like of which he had never been shown by any enemy in a lifetime of warfare, Edward unleashed his full power on the burgh and trampled over its vaunted defences, bringing them down within a single day. When the burgesses and town fathers sued for peace after that, he ignored them, and set out to teach Scotland a lesson on the foolishness of attempting to withstand England’s power. Mercilessly determined to avenge what he perceived to be an insult to his personal honour, he turned his army loose on the populace, and they burned the burgh down, butchering fifteen thousand citizens of all ages and both sexes. Edward permitted the rape of the burgh to go on for three days before calling a halt to it solely because the bodies clogging the streets had begun to rot sufficiently to become a hazard to his own men.
The sack of Berwick was a deliberate, royally condoned atrocity that appalled every person in Scotland, north and south of the Firth of Forth, and so I expected to find Will in a towering rage when I arrived in his camp. But he was quite the opposite, evidently the only man in his entire encampment who was not up in arms. When I asked him for his opinion of the reports we had received, he simply looked away.
“Which reports are you talking about?”
“Why, the Berwick reports,” I said tentatively. “Are there others?”
“Aye. We have reports out of Carlisle, too.”
“Great God! They burned Carlisle?”
His headshake was terse. “Nah. Not them. We burnt it, or we tried to. We set it afire on the outskirts, and it was going well, I’m told, but then the defenders threw us out and tackled the blaze before it could destroy the whole town.”
“They threw us out …”
“Aye, they did, just the way you said they would. It was Robert Bruce we were attacking, and him behind strong walls with his own Annandale men and a garrison of English veterans to back them. The mere sight of Buchan’s Comyn banners coming south at him out of his own lands of Annandale would have been enough to guarantee he’d hold Carlisle forever against such an attack.”
“So what happened to the Scots host?”
Will shrugged. “They turned aside and went raiding south of the border. From what I’ve heard, the five earls split their forces and set out in search of booty. Buchan himself came back to Scotland, and promptly wrote to Bishop Wishart and Bishop Fraser of St. Andrews, reporting Bruce’s perfidy in repulsing the army of his anointed King.”
“You mean they simply split up and disbanded the host? How could they be so irresponsible? They could have ridden to save Berwick.”
“They knew nothing about Berwick, Jamie. In all probability they didn’t even know Edward had come north. The English had already surrounded Berwick by the time Buchan reached Galloway.”
“Dear God in Heaven! What a waste …”
Will shrugged. “Perhaps, but no useful purpose would have been served by dashing across the north to Berwick, even had they known of it. The men of Berwick itself thought they were invincible behind their walls, so we may hardly blame the earls for thinking they could win some time and land and booty while leaving Berwick to fend for itself and hold the English at the border crossing. They had all lost sight—every one of them—of the true savagery and treachery of their enemy.”
I seldom saw my cousin smile in the days that followed, and then it was solely for Mirren or little William. Like the rest of us in Scotland at that time, he saw little in the land to smile about. I knew he was chafing at the restraints he had imposed upon himself, but he also knew there was nothing he could have done to influence what was going on beyond the forest. He had sworn publicly that for as long as the English left him alone, he would leave them alone, and during that spring and early summer, no one came to disturb his tranquility. The English had far more important matters to attend to elsewhere in Scotland.
Three weeks after that talk of ours, on April 27th, Edward’s army, commanded in the King’s name by John de Warenne, the second Earl of Surrey, met and smashed the army of the Scots magnates at Dunbar. John Comyn the Constable was captured and sent to England to be imprisoned there, along with the Earls of Atholl, Menteith, and Ross and, much to the chagrin of Will and me when we heard of it, Sir Andrew Murray of Petty and his son, Andrew Murray the Younger, our greatly admired friend. The day after the battle, Edward himself arrived at the head of his army to demand the surrender of Dunbar Castle, which capitulated without a blow being struck. Three weeks later, Edward arrived in the burgh of Perth, having bypassed Stirling on the landward side on his way north, and while he was there, King John Balliol wrote to him in person, suing for peace.