The Forest Laird(74)

He began, in the spring of 1291, by formalizing his status as feudal overlord of Scotland. The matter had arisen before, and without great objection from the Scots magnates, most of whom owned lands and estates in England by Edward’s permission, but now Edward made it the sine qua non of his intercession in the matter of the Scots kingship. The Guardians and the magnates debated it half-heartedly but soon yielded in the face of Edward’s argument, which was that Scotland needed a judge and not an arbitrator. Edward had had extensive experience of both and he could demonstrate, with utter credibility, that arbitration was useless without the strength of authority to support it. By according Edward the full rights of feudal overlord, the Scots nobility would give him the full power to judge the Cause and to pronounce a victor. The solution appeared to be both logical and sensible, as, it must be said, did Edward himself at the time. And so the compromise—the tipping point—was reached.

No doubt sensing that decades of strife and bloodshed lay ahead, Robert Bruce the Competitor, who was over eighty at that time, resigned his claim to the throne in favour of his son, Robert Bruce VI. His son’s wife, Lady Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, had died mere weeks before at the age of thirty-six—far too young to have died so suddenly. The earldom that she held, Carrick, was one of the oldest in the realm, and she had inherited it in her own right, as her father’s sole heir. She had been married young and widowed childless during the Crusade of 1270, and soon after that she had wed Robert Bruce VI, presenting him with an astonishing ten living, healthy children. Bruce had carried the honorary title of Earl of Carrick, purely as Marjorie’s consort. Upon her death, however, in accordance with Lady Marjorie’s wish, he became Earl of Carrick in fact.

Only two days after his father passed to him the claim to the throne, the younger Bruce resigned his newly acquired earldom and invested the title and all its lands and holdings in his own son, Robert Bruce VII, who was then eighteen and living in England, in the household of King Edward. That development, with its realignment of claims and responsibilities, set all of southern Scotland abuzz.

Before anything could come of it, however, the court of auditors declared the following week that John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, had best rights to the kingdom of Scots. And so, Edward chose the weakest of the contenders for the Scots throne as the man who would be King.

No one quibbled at the verdict, for the auditors—a hundred of them in all, appointed from the nobility of Scotland and England—had been debating the question for two years. There were murmurs that the elder Bruce had resigned in favour of his son precisely because his own advanced age was being bruited as an impediment to his success; others said that the emplacement of the younger Bruce would ensure that if Balliol was chosen and then failed—and it was already being rumoured that he would—then the younger Bruce would be ready to step quickly into his place.

By and large, though, the Scots were generally glad to have the matter resolved at last, and to have the realm’s affairs safely back in the hands of a legitimate king. In my own mind I believe that Balliol’s claim was probably stronger than Bruce’s, based as it was upon the law of primogeniture and the inheritance of the firstborn child, a system in which I believe. Balliol, as I knew from my own admittedly brief experience of him, was a forthright and likable man. He had few overt enemies and he was blessed with a pleasant, agreeable personality, combined with great charm and a marked ability to listen to others and actually hear what they were saying. Of course, he had detractors even then, mainly dour old warriors, all of them Bruce supporters, who muttered about his being incapable of dealing decisively enough with Edward of England. They shook their heads over what they saw as Balliol’s lack of backbone and his too-eager willingness to placate the English King, and they warned that he would never find, or show, the kind of courage that would be required to keep the ambitious Edward in his place. Bruce, the proud and unyieldingly arrogant old Competitor, would never have bent the knee to Edward or any other Englishman, they maintained, and said Balliol had been selected purely because Edward believed he could control him.

Indeed, Edward used him from the outset as he would never have dared use the old and autocratic Robert Bruce. He manipulated the new King shamelessly and mercilessly to achieve his own ends, which proved to be the complete subjugation and absorption into England of the Scottish realm. Balliol, poor weak vessel that he was, never succeeded in asserting himself as anything other than Edward’s catspaw.

He was crowned and enthroned at Scone on November 30th, and he took the title John, King of Scotland, thereby claiming kingship of the land rather than of the people and setting himself apart himself from every other monarch, all of whom had ruled the realm as Kings of Scots. The next day, he paid homage to King Edward of England as his feudal superior. His years in Purgatory had begun.