Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/509

Rh WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.] SCOTLAND 487 independence of Scotland. They ignored the treaty of Canterbury by which it was restored, the clause of Magna Charta relating to Scotland and the rights of its king, the refusal of the last two Alexanders to render homage for their kingdom, and the treaty of Brigham by which Edward had acknowledged the independence of Scotland. One result of the submission to the English king over- looked by the eager competitors, but not by the lawyers who advised Edward, immediately emerged. An appeal was soon taken from the court of Baliol to the court of his superior at Westminster. Baliol referred in vain to the express clause in the treaty of Brigham that no Scottish suit was to be tried beyond Scotland ; Edward replied this was an appeal from his own officers during the interregnum, but asserted his right to hear appeals in all cases. Other appeals followed, and Baliol weakly surrendered his claim to independent jurisdiction. Shortly afterwards (October 1293) he was himself summoned to Westminster as defend- ant in a suit by Macduff, son of the earl of Fife. Declin- ing to appear, he was condemned for contempt, and three of his principal castles were ordered to be seized. He again yielded and promised to attend next parliament. There could be no longer doubt what had been the effect of sub- mitting the dispute as to the crown to Edward. Instances of homage had not been difficult to find ; but the records might be ransacked in vain for an example of what would now become frequent, the adjudication by the court of the English king on the rights of Scotsmen. The exe- cution of this decision by force in Scotland carried with it at no distant date the subjection of the kingdom. Baliol quitted Westminster suddenly in 1294 to escape .service in the Gascony war. By yielding in the question of appeal he had lost the confidence of the Scottish barons. In the parliament of Scone a council was appointed to con- trol him, and all fiefs held by Englishmen were forfeited. In the following year he formed an alliance against Eng- land with the French king, and his son was promised the daughter of that king's nephew, the count of Anjou, in marriage. The Scottish army headed by six earls then invaded England, but was repulsed at Carlisle (28th March 1296), and Edward, leaving his French campaign, at once marched northwards. Before the end of March 1296 he stormed Berwick. While there the abbot of Arbroath brought him a renunciation of BalioPs homage. Dunbar was taken soon afterwards by the earl of Surrey ; Rox- burgh, Jedburgh, and Edinburgh fell before the end of June ; Stirling, Perth, and Scone surrendered without a blow. At this time no Scottish town was walled and no resistance could be made against the English feudal levy led by such a general as Edward. In the churchyard of Stracathro in Forfar Baliol renounced his alliance with France, and a few days afterwards (10th July) surrendered Scotland to Anthony Beck, bishop of Durham. Edward marched as far as Elgin, but it was a conquest of Baliol, not of Scotland. This impotent monarch was carried captive with his son to London and vanishes from Scottish history. He died at one of his French fiefs twenty years afterwards, never having attempted to regain the kingdom. On his homeward march Edward took and recorded in the Ragman Rolls the homage of the Scottish nobility, and carried to Westminster the sacred stone of Scone, on which the Celtic monarchs had been crowned, and the black rood of Margaret, the hallowed relic of the Saxon line. Surrey was appointed guardian, Sir Hugh Cressingham treasurer, and William Ormsby justiciar of Scotland ; the nobles were treated with lenity and the bishops bribed by the privilege of bequeathing their movables like their English brethren. The most important result of the campaign was the capture and fortification of Berwick. That city, the key to the Lothians, was the commercial capital ; and Scotland was left without one until the rise, after the 1292-1298. union, of Glasgow and the mercantile centres of the Clyde. When the fortunes of Scotland were at the lowest, when Wallace's the country was deserted by the king, and its nobles and stru g le clergy were making terms with the conqueror, Wallace, the man of the people, appeared. The second son of Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie near Paisley, his name in- dicates a remote Celtic origin from a Welsh or Cambrian stock. In the spring of 1297, in revenge for the murder of his wife, Wallace slew Hazelrig, sheriff of Ayr, and burned Lanark. Collecting a band of followers animated with like patriotism, and aided by a single noble, Sir William Douglas, he surprised and drove Ormsby, the justiciar, from Scone and Beck, the bishop of Durham, from Glasgow. Some of the barons, headed by James the Steward, joined him, and Wallace and Douglas carried everything before them in Lennox and Galloway, dis- tricts more favourable to the national cause than Lothian. The nobles fell away from Wallace almost as soon as Percy appeared at the head of an English force, and Douglas, the Steward, Bruce the future king, and others capitulated at Irvine (9th July 1297). Wallace, while engaged in the siege of the castle of Dundee, heard that Surrey and Cress- ingham were advancing on Stirling, and he marched to its relief. There at the bridge over the Forth near Cambus- kenneth he won his most famous victory (llth September). The English were totally routed and Cressingham was killed. The disparity of numbers was great, for the English had 50,000 foot and 1000 horse, against at most 40,000 foot and only 180 horse. The generalship of Wallace, who tempted his adversary to cross the bridge in his face and held his troops in hand until the moment of the charge, won the day, the first in which a feudal army was beaten by light-armed peasants. Wallace attempted to organize the kingdom he had won. He assumed the title of guardian of the realm in name of the Lord John (Baliol), and associated with himself Sir Andrew Moray of Bothwell, son of the only baron who stood by him and who fell in the battle. He held the nobles in awe, while he rewarded his adherents. The grant (fortunately pre- served) of the office of constable of Dundee to Alexander Scrymzeour can scarcely have been a solitary one. He introduced better discipline in the army, and tried also to revive trade. 1 Shortly after the battle of Stirling Wallace carried the war as far as Hexham, whose monks he protected. That he penetrated farther south and won the favour of Eleanor, Edward's wife, is one of the romantic additions to his scanty history in the poem of Blind Harry. Edward recognized the crisis and, leaving Flanders, sent a force before him under Pembroke, following in person at the head of 80,000 foot and 10,000 horse. For a brief space success attended Wallace, who defeated the English in Fife and Ayr ; but the bishop of Durham retook the castle of Dirleton, and Edward himself, by the victory of Falkirk (22d July 1298), in which the nobles again proved false to the popular cause, reversed that of Stirling. Wallace took refuge in France, and, although the French king at Amiens offered to surrender him, he was soon re- leased and provided with a safe conduct to the pope. Papers found on him when captured show that he received similar letters from Haco of Norway and Baliol. Whether he went to Rome is not certain, but he may have been one of the Scots who at this time induced Boniface VIII. to claim the superiority of Scotland. The claim was in- dignantly repelled by the English barons at the parliament of Lincoln ; Edward, however, thought it prudent to lay before the pope a statement in which he advanced not only 1 A letter from him and Moray to the citizens of Liibeck and Hamburg who sympathized with the Scottish commons has been found in the archives of Hamburg.