The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Had it been Edward II who had captured the castle, he would have spent a week feasting to celebrate his success. Bruce hardly paused for a moment. He knew that the more he could conquer now, the stronger he would be when the next English army came north. After taking Perth, Bruce took his men to Dumfries; within a month he had managed to starve the castle and town into submission. It was probably soon after news of this disaster reached the king at London that men began to urge on him the importance of a Scottish campaign, and Roger secured the release of the de Verdon rebels to that end. But still Edward did not act. And then Robert Bruce sent his brother against Stirling Castle, the most strategically important of them all.

  Edward Bruce was a competent soldier, and no fool, but he was not a military genius like his brother. There was little chance of him forcing Stirling Castle into surrender: it was so strongly defended, so well supplied and so shrewdly commanded by Sir Philip de Mowbray that his army might have waited many months outside the walls. But when de Mowbray (a Scotsman loyal to Edward) observed the lack of English determination to relieve him, he suggested the following terms: if the English had not come within three miles of the castle with a relieving army within a year, he would freely hand over the castle to the Scottish king. Edward Bruce accepted.

  Robert Bruce was furious when he discovered the terms to which his brother had agreed. The current run of Scottish success was entirely due to the failure of the English to bring a large army into Scotland. Now his brother had ensured that the English would advance within twelve months. Just as it was nearing completion, with only a few castles left to capture, Bruce’s strategy of piecemeal conquest had been undermined by his own brother.

  That was how Bruce read the situation in the summer of 1313. But Edward still refused to countenance a Scottish campaign. His mind was totally set upon his personal battle with the rebel earls; considerations of the wider affairs of state did not interest him. He was waiting for the moment when he could force the Earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Hereford and Arundel to kneel before him and ask for his pardon. This finally occurred, after lengthy negotiations, in October 1313. The following month he finally gave orders for preparations for a Scottish campaign. But even then it was with no particular regard for Scotland. Edward was using the Scottish threat as an excuse for raising an army to destroy not just the Scots but the rebel earls as well. Their begging for pardon was not enough. He hoped to lead an army into the north of England to crush Lord Lancaster and take revenge for the death of his beloved Gaveston, whose body still remained embalmed and unburied at a friary in Oxford.

  In December 1313 ninety-five English earls and barons, including Roger and his uncle, were summoned to assemble with their retinues at Berwickon-Tweed to relieve Stirling Castle. The date of the muster was to be 10 June, which gave the army a full six months to prepare. It also gave the Scots time to continue their onslaught on the English castles. Not that they had paused while Edward had dithered over the question of war. In September a Scottish carter named William Binnock had been hired to bring in the hay cut for Linlithgow Castle. He carefully chose a time when some of the garrison were out helping with the harvest. With eight armed Scotsmen concealed within his haywain, he drove towards the open gate and stopped it just across the drawbridge. The men leapt out and killed the porter. Binnock’s boy, sitting on top of the cart, uncovered his axe and cut the ropes by which the drawbridge could be raised. As the portcullis came down, the cart was only partly crushed, and it allowed the rest of the Scots waiting nearby to gain entry. After a short fight, the castle was taken. The remainder of the garrison returned from the fields to find their own castle held against them.

  On the dark night of Shrove Tuesday 1314 James Douglas and a band of knights, with their armour covered in black surcoats, crept on their hands and knees towards Roxburgh Castle. Using their trusted rope ladders the Scots were soon on the walls. The watchman at the top was silenced. Few of the garrison, celebrating Shrove Tuesday with the overindulgence traditionally expected, lived to regret it on Ash Wednesday. Not to be outdone by this bold manoeuvre, another Scottish knight, Sir Thomas Randolph, led a party to Edinburgh, an even more strongly defended castle, being built high above the town on volcanic rock. There he enlisted the help of William Francis, who had grown up in the castle. As a young man, Francis had been in the habit of visiting a woman in the town, and had learnt how to scale the rock face. On 14 March, another moonless night, the main Scottish force threw themselves at the east gate. As they fought in vain against the great defences of the castle, William Francis and a handful of knights silently crept up the huge rock. At the top they again used their rope ladders and entered the castle, killing the guards they found in the dark corridors within and making their way to the gate to welcome in their compatriots. With the exception of the border fortress of Berwick, the English were left with only three castles in Scotland: Bothwell, Dunbar and Stirling.

  English military preparations continued while the Scots seized the fortresses. In March Roger was ordered to find three hundred footsoldiers in his lands in South Wales. Lord Mortimer of Chirk, in his capacity of Justiciar of Wales, was ordered to find three thousand fighting men from the principality. Every port was ordered to provide ships and sailors; every county to provide large numbers of men. Edward was taking no chances; his campaign was going to be the largest and best equipped the island had yet seen. In all 21,640 men were summoned, not including a significant contingent from Ireland, and although not all of these arrived, the vast majority did, and their numbers were supplemented with men from Gascony, Germany, France, Brittany, Poitou and Guienne.7

  Gathering the men and forcing the march north was a huge effort. The footmen mustering at Wark and the nobles at Berwick all had to converge on Stirling before 24 June. Huge amounts of food were needed, requiring wagons which, had they all been put in a single row, would, it was said, have stretched for twenty miles.8 On 27 May Lord Mortimer of Chirk was ordered to hasten the arrival of his men from South Wales. Gradually the army drew together. On 17 June the huge force set out from Berwick and Wark along the old Roman road north-west through Lauderdale, towards Edinburgh, which the leaders reached over the course of 19–20 June. At Edinburgh they waited for the rest of the army to gather, and then, on the morning of Saturday 22 June, they pushed on.

  It was full midsummer heat. In order to keep on schedule to arrive by Midsummer’s Day the footsoldiers had to cover the twenty miles to Falkirk. Many were tired, having arrived late, and twenty miles had been the distance which many had had to march each day for the past week or more. The sheer numbers contributed to the extra effort; one fit man can easily walk twenty miles but an army of twenty thousand men, lurching forward and then brought to a standstill, carrying armour and weapons, forced to strike camp and then to set up camp again, is another matter. The supplies required to feed that many men, and their carthorses, pack animals and the knights’ destriers (specially bred war horses) added to the logistic problem. Moving all these men, animals, tents, armour and supplies in a coordinated fashion, so that the whole army was equipped and fed, greatly slowed the army. Thus, on the night of the 22nd, as the men settled under their blankets for a short night’s sleep before the last fourteen miles to Stirling, they were very tired indeed. One commentator noted that ‘brief were the halts for sleep, briefer still for food; hence horses, horsemen and infantry were worn out with toil and hunger …’9

  On the 23rd the mounted men began to come within sight of Stirling Castle. The Earls of Hereford and Gloucester led the first wave, the vanguard. The road led down a slight slope and then ran through a wood called the New Park. Here Bruce had assembled his army of about eight thousand men. Hidden by the trees, the Scots were in fact amassed in one great ambushing party. Hereford and Gloucester led the way towards the wood ignorant of the dangers.

  Riding some way behind the vanguard, the Earl of Pembroke looked at the road ahead and recalled his battle with Bruce seven years earlier, at Loudon Hill.
On that occasion the self-proclaimed Scottish king had occupied a road lying across boggy ground, made impassable to mounted knights by earthworks and holes in the road. But although Pembroke was the most experienced leader in his army, Edward did not put him in command. The king was so confident that he regarded the credit for victory as a gift within his power, and placed his nephew, the Earl of Gloucester, in charge of the army. Gloucester was inexperienced in battle. He was a proven tournament champion, it was true, but war was a different matter. The appointment not only disappointed Pembroke, it outraged the Earl of Hereford, the hereditary constable of England, who claimed his hereditary right was being overlooked. As the first footsoldiers trudged into sight of the castle, sweating with their efforts, the huge array of knights before them shifted and seethed like the surf on a beach, uncertain of their next move.

  At this point Philip de Mowbray rode out from Stirling under a pass of safe conduct from the Scots. The king had already relieved the siege, de Mowbray announced to Edward and his assembled magnates. The army had come within three miles of Stirling by the appointed day. There was thus no need to engage with Bruce on such difficult ground. And it was very difficult ground, he informed them. Bruce had blocked every narrow path through the woods. The road had been undermined and covered with caltrops (small iron balls with four evenly spaced spikes), to break any charge of knights. To go to the left of the wood was not feasible owing to the raised ground, which only left the English the option of fighting their way through the trees on foot or trying to manoeuvre through the ground to the right, which was low-lying marsh ground, criss-crossed by brooks and rivulets running into the River Forth.

  While de Mowbray was speaking to the king’s companions, the knights in the vanguard noticed some Scotsmen running at the entrance to the wood, and pursued them, believing them to be in flight. Hidden by the trees, the Scottish battalion at that end of the wood, commanded by Bruce in person, had not expected the English knights to attack before their foot-soldiers had arrived. As the English knights came riding through the wood, Bruce, who was mounted on a palfrey and armed only with a hand-axe, turned to see Sir Henry de Bohun, nephew of the Earl of Hereford, levelling his lance and charging him down. De Bohun had recognised Bruce from his crown. There was no avoiding a confrontation. The young knight came on, doubtless with visions of his moment of glory. Bruce readied himself, and, at the last moment, swerved out of the way of the lance point and, raising himself up to his full height in the stirrups, brought his axe hard down on the knight’s helmet. The axe blade broke the metal, and cleaved into his skull. As de Bohun fell dead, Bruce’s astonished followers and the equally astonished English found themselves gawping at the broken haft of the axe still in Bruce’s hand.

  Suddenly the vanguard and the Scots found themselves face to face, committed to battle. With a cry each side rushed forward and the fighting began. The Earl of Gloucester was pulled from his horse, but supported by his fellow knights he got to his feet and fought himself free of the enemy’s clutches. In the close confinement of the woodland road, the English could not easily turn their back on their enemy and ride to safety, nor could they charge them down. Many men fell before they broke free from the trees, pursued for a short distance by the exultant Scots.

  While this fight was taking place, another large contingent of English knights set off to ride around the wood, through the marshland across which the Bannockburn flowed. Their purpose was to see whether the English could surround the wood, and so attack the whole Scottish army on all sides at once. They too were in for a surprise. Groups of men in close-drawn clusters, called schiltroms, bristling with pikes up to sixteen feet long, advanced from the woods towards them, blocking their way. As the heavily armoured knights rode towards these schiltroms, the Scots held their ground. The technique for breaking up such a dense thicket of pikes was to use archers to open up gaps, but the English knights had no archers. Their archers in fact were still dusting themselves off after their march or still traipsing over the hills several miles away. After a frustrating skirmish, in which the Scots undoubtedly came off best, the English withdrew.

  Now the lack of English strategic thinking began to show. Men were still arriving, and it was impossible to march on without them, for the Scots would simply emerge from the wood and kill them and take their baggage train. Thus the English could neither move on, nor could they remain where they were, in a weak position. They could neither attack nor easily defend themselves. After much debate, Edward decided to advance a little, across the Bannockburn, and to form up there, ready in case the Scots should attack by night, and not beyond reach of the arriving men and wagons.

  It was a catastrophic decision, probably the worst tactical move in English military history. The English footsoldiers, already exhausted, now had to spend the night without sleep as they found ways to cross the streams of the low-lying land around the village of Bannockburn. The village itself, abandoned in the face of the English advance, was pulled to pieces as men took doors and whatever wood they could find to make bridges and paths across the mud. But the army was too big to manoeuvre into such a small area in the darkness. All night men splashed around, hungry, tired and shouting with frustration, completely demoralised.

  The principal reason underlying the English decision to camp in such a poor location was an assumption. They did not imagine for a moment that the Scots would attack them, and thus they did not imagine they would have to fight a battle on that very awkward site. They were aware of the possibility of a night attack, but they were sure that next morning they would be safe. Bruce himself was not certain he wanted to attack the English; his security lay in his position in the wood, not in the strength of his army, and his skill lay in his well-planned surprise attacks. Only when, after dark, Sir Alexander Seton and his men crept away from the English force to meet Bruce and tell him that the English were disorganised and demoralised, and that this was his one chance to defeat them in pitched battle, did Bruce put the question to his fellow band of captains. Their answer was unanimous.

  In the early hours of Monday 24 June 1314, as first light spread, the English saw the Scottish army proceed out of the wood towards them. Edward Bruce led one battalion of men out, followed by James Douglas leading another, who in turn was followed by Thomas Randolph with another. ‘What?’ exclaimed King Edward as he gazed across the land towards the massed Scottish forces, ‘Do they mean to fight?’ Then as he watched, he saw the Scottish army, to a man, go down on their knees. ‘Look!’ he laughed. ‘They are begging for mercy!’ ‘Yes,’ replied Sir Ingram d’Umphraville, ‘but not from you. They are asking God for forgiveness, for their trespass against Him. For those men will either win or die.’10

  D’Umphraville was not the only one who reckoned that the English army was not properly prepared. The Earl of Gloucester also considered that a day’s wait would be to their advantage. Even now, as archers on either side began to loose their arrows off against one another, they did not need to join battle. But the king, who was becoming unnerved by his captains’ hesitancy, accused Lord Gloucester of treachery and deceit. Gloucester, having had to suffer comments on his inexperience as a military leader, had had enough. ‘Today it will be clear that I am neither a traitor nor a deceiver!’ he shouted at the king, and at once he prepared his knights to ride forward. With trumpets blaring, shouts filling the air, and the massed praying of frightened men and the whinnying of terrified horses, the Earl of Gloucester and his five hundred horsemen galloped towards the ranks of James Douglas. Other groups followed him in uncoordinated attacks, until within seconds the situation had slipped from the control of any commander.

  The king saw that there was now nothing to do but fight. With the heroic-to-the-point-of-legendary knight Sir Giles d’Argentein on one side and the experienced Earl of Pembroke on the other, his helmet was strapped on, and his weapons handed to him. Although no sources record the whereabouts of either Mortimer at this stage, it is very likely that they were with the king,
also readying themselves for the charge.11 But as they waited, on the brink of attacking, they saw a group of Scotsmen rush forward. To their horror, amidst the clanging of weapons on armour and the screams of dying men and horses, the Earl of Gloucester’s great war horse was skewered by a pikeman and, rearing up in panic, unseated the earl in its dying throes. The onlookers willed his men to push forward and save him, but, at the very moment when he could have been saved, the Scots rushed forward with a great cry. His men could only watch astonished as he was hacked to death. The second greatest lord of the kingdom, second only to the Earl of Lancaster, died at the hands of Scottish soldiers in the churned up mud of Bannockburn.

  Now the charge began in earnest, the horses galloping forward as Sir Giles d’Argentein led the rush to where the earl had been struck down. Riderless horses which had been wounded on the pikes rushed here and there, creating confusion. Knights’ armoured destriers charged on to the pikes, so that the air was filled with the sounds of pike shafts splintering and cracking as well as the screams of dying horses and men, and the war cries of both sides. At one stage Edward Bruce was struck down, but Thomas Randolph saw the danger in which the king’s brother found himself and launched his men forward, his banner before him, and swept over the place to bring Edward Bruce to safety. The English redoubled their efforts, but Randolph held his ground, and, despite another English onslaught, remained steady.