The Forest Laird(73)

Bishop Fraser, though, had anticipated what would happen when the evil tidings of the Maid’s death became public knowledge, and he reacted even more quickly than Robert Bruce. Within days, he sent messengers riding south at the utmost speed with a letter, composed by him and his cousin Sir John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, appealing directly to Edward Plantagenet, advising the monarch of the death of his great-niece and voicing the writers’ own fears of unrest in the aftermath. In order to avoid civil war and to protect the welfare of the realm of Scotland, the Bishop entreated the English King to use his good offices to ensure the legal settlement of the Scots Crown upon the brows of the best qualified of the various claimants. And thus began the events now known as the Grand Cause—the search for Scotland’s true king.

I cannot think of a single soul among my acquaintances of my own age—and few of those remain alive today—who is not familiar with the events of the Cause. It dominated all our lives for two decades, and thus it seems inconceivable to me that I should now have to set down the details of it here when my main intent is to chronicle the life of my cousin Will. Yet I know I live already in a land full of people who have never known the fear and uncertainty, the daily terrors and hopelessness, that haunted their parents and their grandparents in those now far-off times. The Scots folk today remember nothing of the Grand Cause, apart from dreary, scarce believable old tales told by their elders, who were already forgetful in the telling, insulated from their own memories of horror by the peace and order that had finally come to them through the efforts of King Robert.

From that general and, I fear, irreversible ignorance has sprung the widespread disregard for truth that first spurred me to these writings: the invention, through whispered innuendo and defiantly blatant lies, of a flawless and endlessly admirable, patriotic champion; a hero, near mythical within a few brief years of his spurious creation, called William Wallace—The Wallace.

Thus I am forced, if some future reader is to understand my tale, to deal to some extent, at least, with recent history, if for no other reason than to identify the people and events that were to shape my unfortunate cousin’s destiny.

Edward, of course, agreed to Bishop Fraser’s request immediately, and sent an English army up to Scotland’s border to oversee the peace while his deputies, Antony Bek and John de Vescy, sought out both Bruce and Balliol to inform them that, at the request of the Guardians, the English King had undertaken to adjudicate in the matter of the succession to the Scots Crown.

The hostilities ceased at once. Neither Bruce nor Balliol could claim legitimacy in contesting such a development, for the Guardians had acted authoritatively in accordance with their duty, and Edward of England, who had already successfully negotiated similar disputes in Sicily and Gascony, brought to the proceedings a reputation for probity and integrity. Assuming correctly that neither of the disputing nobles would defy him, Edward convened a great court at Norham, one of his border castles, and for the next two years a cumbersome diplomatic dance ensued.

In the years since then, in view of the revealed monstrosity of Edward’s ambition, Bishop Fraser and John of Badenoch have been reviled for making that first approach to Edward, but as a man of God and only incidentally a man of Bruce during the ensuing conflicts, I believe that they have been unjustly maligned. Both men were Balliol adherents, and unashamedly anti-Bruce, but that has little bearing upon what happened later. When Fraser and Badenoch wrote to Edward in the last days of September 1290, they did so out of genuine concern for the good of Scotland’s realm. No one, in those days, had the slightest suspicion of the canker that was already growing within the English King’s breast.

That was soon to change. Eleanor of Castile, the Queen of England, fell sick in mid-November and was dead before month’s end. Edward was devastated, cut adrift from the solid anchorage she had always provided for him. He was fifty-two years old and he had been married to Eleanor since he was sixteen, and in all of their thirty-six years as man and wife, they had been virtually inseparable, she his strongest bulwark and his most able adviser.

Edward vanished from public life that winter, leaving the affairs of his kingdom inert in the hands of deputies and caretakers. All important matters of state were set aside while the King remained in solitude for months. And by the time he emerged from his selfimposed exile, Edward Plantagenet had become a different man—bitter, less tolerant, and more demanding of everyone around him. He had always been capable and ambitious, but now, lacking his beloved wife to constrain him, he was intransigent and implacable and he evinced a ruthless obstinacy that would brook no interference to his royal will; he had become the man who would soon abandon all the finer achievements of his earlier life and arrogantly proclaim himself Malleus Scottorum, the Hammer of the Scots.