In MY name, he thought triumphantly. Not my father’s, nor led by his bloody boiled bones. His time is done – an exultant thought struck him like a thunderbolt.
‘Send to France,’ he ordered to anyone who was listening. ‘Fetch my loving brother Lord Gaveston and the others who languish there. If we are to have a coronation and a war, we will need all the lords of the realm.’
Segrave looked darkly at Thweng, who merely drooped his moustache a little more and cocked a jaundiced eye at the rain. St Swithun’s Day, he noted – there will be forty more days like this if the prophecy of the saint holds true.
Hopefully, by the time the King is ready for the army, neither it nor its commanders will be too damp or hungry to appreciate it. He looked at Segrave and saw the scowl that gave lie to hope.
Thweng hunched his shoulders, against the weather and the bad cess of the moment. Once more, he thought, we will scour the north and bring fire and sword to everyone in it, making a place where wolves survive while sheep go under. And all the fighting men of that land have wolves as godfathers; one day those beasts will bite us back …
Cold rain and Black John, he thought bleakly. Not the recipe for a happy war.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The era portrayed here is one which defined both the Kingdom of Scotland and its people, large and small. The initial heady rush of rebellion, the successes – and disasters – of Wallace’s tenure as Scotland’s leader are long gone and only the iron will of the man himself remains, unbending and resolute.
It is easy to hold Wallace and Bruce up against one another and see the black and white of the former and the many shades of grey in the latter – but, as always, the world is more complex than that.
Wallace’s adherence to the kingship of John Balliol is never fully explained in any account. It seems obsessive and stubborn to me, which is the stamp of the man in general. In the end it was also pointless and Bruce, who had realized this long before, could not fight for the return of a Comyn-backed king who not only represented the end of Bruce hopes for the throne, but a man who did not even want the crown.
Kept alive by Comyn desires, until it was clear there was no hope, exiled John Balliol had only one function left – to pass on the legacy to his son and so keep alive the claims and hopes of the Dispossessed, those Scots lords who had lost their lands in supporting King Edward.
By the opening of this book, the small battle at Happrew – in Scotland most battles were between no more than a few hundred men a side – throws the whole of Scotland’s grief into stark relief.
On this bleak moorland in the Borders, Bruce fought for the English and Wallace for the last dying echoes of the rebellion crushed at Falkirk years before. Whether they met in personal combat on that field is unknown, but given the small size of the forces, the delicious what-if of it is too good to pass up.
Wallace, last hold-out of a war-weary Scotland, is not only increasingly isolated but vilified by the commonality; the darling freedom-fighter of earlier years is now simply standing in the way of everyone else’s peace to raise crops and family.
Did Bruce betray him? Probably not, but he was capable of it – and some Scot did, for the point of King Edward’s cunning exercise was not only to capture this rebel figurehead, but have his own former supporters do it.
The Apostle rubies, of course, are fiction – though the Holy Rood of Scotland is not. Taken south with other coronation regalia, it would have been placed in the Minster Treasury, which was robbed in 1303 by Richard of Pudlicote and others. The equivalent of a year’s tax revenues was removed and most of the thieves got away.
King Edward’s wrath was considerable, so much so that he had Pudlicote flayed and his skin nailed to the door of Westminster Abbey. Yet the Longshanks character is such that it is perfectly possible for him to have pardoned Wallace if that man had shown the least remorse for his alleged crimes. The Bruce character is such that, knowing this, he might easily have taken steps to ensure that it could never happen, by planting evidence of Wallace involvement in the Minster burglaries. That King Edward would never forgive.
But this is primarily a story of relationships. Bruce with his perceived friends and known enemies – and himself. King Edward with his son, his barons – and himself. Hal, Isabel, the Earl of Buchan, Lamprecht and the secretive Kirkpatrick – the complex weave of plot, counterplot and paranoia are the pillars of a kingdom at war with itself.