The Three Edwards (13 page)

But France had always interfered in the affairs of the Flemish cities. When Guy de Dampierre, Count of Flanders, entered into an open alliance with England, Philip the Fair took the country over and imprisoned Count Guy in Paris. The Flemish cities were too wealthy and powerful and the citizens too stout of heart to remain under alien control, and in 1301 the weavers of Ghent rose in rebellion and massacred the French garrison. Philip sent an army to subdue the uprising under the command of Robert of Artois, who had won two battles and was regarded as invincible as well as the very pink of chivalry.

The confident Robert took his army up to the city of Courtrai (then a place of 200,000 population, which ranked it second to Paris) without any regard to the conditions he might expect to find there. Courtrai was well situated for defense, being surrounded by ditches and swampy land. The French commander had no belief in foot soldiers. He had a great array of mounted knights and a relatively small force of archers. He sent the archers in first and, when they seemed to have the advantage over the army of weavers, he was in such a hurry to finish the battle with his noble horsemen that he rode over the French archers without giving them time to get out of the way. When his knights came out in the open they floundered in the swampy ground and could neither advance nor retreat.

It was the practice of chivalry to take as many prisoners as possible and hold the captured knights for ransom, a very tidy way of making money. The armed weavers did not seem aware of any such rule. All they had ever wanted was to be left alone to make and sell their cloth and live in comfort and honor. Their idea seems to have been that battles were won by killing as many of the enemy as possible. They swarmed over the soft terrain where the knights were floundering in their heavy armor and proceeded to slaughter them all, including the invincible leader.

This victory has been called variously the Battle of the Bloody Marsh and the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the latter term rising from the fact that more than seven hundred pairs of gold spurs were taken from the heels of the victims and kept on display in an abbey of the city.

Although the English were under obligation to assist the Flemish cities and the French had their alliance with Scotland, neither country seemed
disposed to take such matters seriously. When a plan for a truce between England and France was finally evolved, neither party to it had any hesitation in throwing allies to the wolves. The peace they made, however, was a patched-up affair which was not expected to work for any length of time. The issue between them was too deep to be settled over a council table. The French would never rest until the English had been expelled from the land. On the other hand, every Plantagenet king dreamed still of the days of greatness when Plantagenets held Normandy, Anjou, Brittany, Aquitaine, and Gascony. In the pact they reached, moreover, there was a clause which would later give the English kings a still more glittering objective, the conquest of France.

E
DWARD came back from the continent and proceeded at once to organize his forces for the reconquest of Scotland. He summoned Parliament to meet him at York on May 25 and included the Scottish noblemen. The order was a peremptory one; anyone who did not obey would be considered a traitor. None responded. This did not mean, however, that the nobility of the country had taken their places with Wallace. They still held aloof from the winner of that famous battle of Stirling Bridge. As Hemingburgh says in one of the chronicles of the day, “he was deemed base-born by the earls and the nobles.”

There is much difference of opinion as to the size of the army the English king led into Scotland, some estimating it at more than eighty thousand, some convinced that he had no more than a tenth of that number, three thousand horse and four or five thousand foot soldiers, mostly archers. Although Edward had won an enviable reputation as a general he still held some belief in the theory which led to the defeat of French chivalry at the Battle of the Golden Spurs; he placed his reliance on cavalry and did not depend much on his foot soldiers.

Wallace, lacking the support of the nobility (not one earl was with him in the fatal battle which followed), had a much shrunken army to meet the threat. As at Stirling, the ranks were made up almost exclusively of recruits from the lowest orders; brave fellows, but hurriedly trained and poorly armed. A member of the Comyn family, John of that ilk and known as the Red, was in command of a handful of horsemen, considerably less than a thousand. Again the chief weapon was the spear, twelve feet in length and an excellent thing in repelling an attack of cavalry but of small use in hand-to-hand-fighting.

Wallace’s plans for the battle again demonstrated his skill as a strategist. He had laid waste the English countryside immediately below the border
and had taken the precaution of sending a small force to attack the city of Carlisle, which Edward had selected as his chief base of supply. The Lowland counties, all the way from the border to the Forth, had been burned over, the inhabitants and livestock being moved behind the lines of defense at the Forth. Thus the English king had to move his forces up through bare fields and blackened hills which offered nothing in the way of food. A provision fleet had been sent by sea with instructions to join the army where the tidal waters of the Firth locked horns with the stout stream of the Forth. But Wallace and his small but determined army lay somewhere between.

By the time the English army reached Queensferry, where they hoped to receive supplies, they were close to the point of starvation. Edward, who was now in his sixtieth year and growing irascible with the passing of time, had to wait for several days before venturing farther inland to find and attack the Scots. Among his foot soldiers were many Welshmen armed with a new weapon, the importance of which had not yet been fully realized. It was a bow of unusual length which discharged arrows with sufficient force to pierce the thickest armor and could be used three times in the space required to wind and discharge a crossbow once. The Welsh are given credit for the conception of the deadly longbow, but the English took it over and improved it both in design and deadliness. In the following century the English yeomen would display such skill with this lethal weapon that the whole face of medieval warfare would be changed.

The presence of the Welsh, in spite of their powerful equipment, was not deemed an unmixed blessing. They are described as a cantankerous lot, which is not strange in view of past relations between the two races. There was a clash in camp in which eighteen priests were said to have been killed while trying to restore peace. The Welsh threatened to leave and join the Scots. Edward was reported indifferent to what might happen. “What do I care,” he asked, “if my enemies join my enemies?” But, as things came about, it was a good thing for England that the Welsh did not leave.

It was at this point that a spy, alleged to be in the employ of two Scottish earls, March and Angus, was brought to the king. The army of Wallace, the spy reported, was no more than a few miles away, near the town of Falkirk, in readiness to strike as soon as hunger forced the English to retreat.

Edward was delighted with the news. “They need not follow me!” he cried. “I go to meet them. This very day.”

The army set out at once and by nightfall was close to Linlithgow, where, as the crow flies, they were only a few miles from Falkirk. The troops settled themselves there for the night. It was now that an incident occurred which displayed the mettle of the English king. He was sleeping
on the ground, wrapped in his robe stamped with the royal leopards, when his horse, which was tethered beside him, became restive and trampled on him. Two of his ribs were broken. To prevent any panic, the old king got to his feet, vaulted into his saddle without assistance, and gave orders to strike camp. It was still dark, a murky night without a glimpse of moon or stars. They went so slowly that they covered a few miles only; but when dawn broke, the cautious troops saw the bonnets and spear points of the enemy on a high ridge ahead.

It was to be a different battle from the miracle at Stirling, but Wallace had made the best possible plans for the test. The hillside where his forces waited was high and steep, but he had not stationed his men at the crest. Instead they were disposed for battle on a level spot about halfway up the slope. This arrangement may have been due to a desire to fight the battle there, which led Wallace to abstain from making his position so difficult that he would be drawn away from it by encircling movements on his flanks. As a further advantage, a moss stretched across part of the front, of sufficient softness to hamper, if not actually prevent, the free use of cavalry in attack.

In this position the Scottish leader had drawn up his men in three
schiltrons
, the forerunner of the British square. The
schiltron
was a hollow circular formation, with the spearmen in the front rank, where the length of their weapon was well suited to defense, and with reserves in the center to fill the gaps which would develop in the line. The Scottish archers were stationed between the
schiltrons
to hamper further the English attack. Little was expected of them, for archery had been neglected in Scotland and the bows they used were completely outdated by the deadly longbow of the Welsh. The cavalry, such as it was, was held in the rear as a reserve.

Although scholars fighting the battle over and over again with pen and ink have been inclined to criticize the Scottish dispositions, it has been acknowledged by military authorities that the brave Scot made the best use of the ground with the forces at his command. It has been pointed out that Wellington fought Waterloo on similar ground and with the same distribution of his regiments.

There seems to have been a dispute among the Scottish leaders before the battle began. Both Comyn the Red and Sir John Stewart, who had bluer blood in their veins than any of the others, contended that they outranked Wallace and should be in charge. How Wallace settled the matter is not known, but when the English attack came he was in command. He cried loudly to those about him as the horsemen under the marshal and constable of England came clashing and thundering up the hillside: “I have brought you to the ring! Dance the best you may!”

When Bigod and Bohun, the hereditary holders of those two eminent
posts in the English army, came to the moss, they were checked temporarily (as the French Imperial Guard would be when they encountered the sunken road of Ohain at Waterloo) and had to divert their forces to right and left, for the moss was wide and dank and a much better aid to Wallace than his blue-blooded lieutenants. This took much of the sting and the force from the first blow of the cavalry. The
schiltrons
stood firm, the spear points as lethal as bayonets, the spirit of the men who formed the lines undaunted and leal. But the cavalry under that man of pride, Comyn the Red, melted away at the first sign of attack. They never came back. For the rest of that bitter day the brunt of the heavy, steel-mounted attack was borne by the ill-equipped foot soldiers in their woolen tunics. Sir John Stewart, who commanded the archers, fought with real valor, dismounting to join his clansmen and Lowland clerks and peasants, and dying in the struggle.

The battle continued, and for a time it seemed that the stout defense of the
schiltrons
must prevail. At this critical stage of the struggle it must have occurred to Edward that the pattern of the battle of Hastings was being repeated. He decided to do as William the Conqueror had done on that fateful day. He fell back on the archers. Whether the Welsh had any great part in what followed is uncertain, but the credit undoubtedly goes to the mighty longbow. The shafts, launched up over the rising ground, fell in the
schiltrons
like hail. What chance had those stouthearted Scots with no protection save shirts stuffed with wool? The only hope would have been to scatter the bowmen, but the circles could not be broken up and the Scottish cavalry had gone with the wind—and with Comyn the Red. The ranks began to break. Edward, sitting cramped in his saddle and suffering agonies with his broken ribs, was still the best captain in Christendom. He saw his chance and sent a strong body of cavalry to swing far wide of the moss and attack the Scots from the rear.

The sudden appearance of this body completed the rout. The Scottish ranks broke. It was fortunate that Wallace had given consideration to the consequences of failure. The land behind the hillside at Falkirk was heavily wooded, and so the pursuit of the beaten Scots was very much hampered. Wallace himself is said to have encountered and killed Sir Brian de Jay, the master of the English Templars who thundered after him into a wooded thicket at Callandar.

Ten thousand Scots were killed in this battle and the back of the defense against invasion was, for the second time, broken. The gallant gentlemen who had refused to fight under Wallace the Base-born now emerged to blacken his name and debate the soundness of his judgment. This gave them personal satisfaction, no doubt, but availed the country nothing. Though he had been defeated, the strategic policy of Wallace still stood between the victorious king and the complete subjugation of the land.
Wherever he took his troops, Edward found nothing but wasted country and burned towns. His provisions had not reached him, and his men went for long stretches of time without food. In the end he had to withdraw his army to Carlisle.

The next six years were devoted to consolidating the conquest of Scotland. It was not an easy task that confronted the English king. The Scots were as stubborn as they were brave, and the land itself offered cover to those who still fought against submission. Wallace, no longer regarded as their leader after the failure at Falkirk, was still among the most active of the die-hards.

It is known that he paid a visit to France with a train of five followers to beg assistance from Philip the Fair under the terms of the treaty between the two countries. Philip, who had become quite obese and more taciturn than ever, if possible, promptly made him a prisoner and offered to send him over to England. Edward thanked the French king and asked him to keep the Scot in close custody. Philip, however, had a change of heart. Perhaps he grew to admire the grave and doughty Wallace, or it may have been that he saw more advantage for himself in adopting a different attitude. Whatever the reason, he released Wallace and even gave him a letter to the Pope in which he craved the pontifical favor for the bearer. It is unlikely that the Scot went to Rome, although Blind Harry declares that he did.