There must have been tension in the castle among the trio. Edward, in addition to evasions and omissions because of the course of action he had decided upon, was anxious to be with his wife and that great fine man child she had presented to him, and so was impatient of delays. Woman's intuition would tell Isabella that there was something on his mind and it would not be hard for her to make an accurate guess. Nothing that is recorded of Mortimer suggests that he had any subtlety about him, but every time his eye rested on Edward he would see the inevitable end to his day of power approaching and he would puff up with resentment and, perhaps, hatred. If the young king could only be trapped and dealt with as he, Mortimer, had disposed of Edmund of Kent! But that was impossible. The rancor in his mind fattened on the inevitability of his fall.

By some means, not disclosed, Edward had succeeded in establishing communication with his two chief aides on the outside. He got word to them of a secret confided to him by the castellan, William Holland. Centuries before, when the danger from Danish invasions was acute, a secret pa.s.sage had been run underground from the keep to a cave in a woods some distance from the castle, to provide an avenue of escape. It had not been used for several generations, but it was still open. It was arranged, therefore, that on the night of October 19 Montacute would bring a body of armed men through the pa.s.sage and join the king at the stair leading up to the keep.

The plan worked perfectly. Edward made a pretense of retiring early but did not undress, and at the appointed time he made his way cautiously down the stone stairway, becoming aware in doing so of loud masculine voices from Mortimer's room. The boudoir-appointed despot was conferring with his immediate a.s.sistants and confidants. The young king knew, of course, that his mother occupied the adjoining apartment, and a sense of shame for the imputations to be drawn from this undoubtedly hardened his resolution for what lay ahead.

From below him he heard first a sound of shuffling and a faint murmur of voices. Then he was conscious of lights flashing on and off through the murk of the lower depths. Finally it was apparent that his helpers, torch in hand, were emerging from their crawl through the secret pa.s.sage. He made out first the intelligent and confident face of Montacute and then the eager dark countenance of John de Molines. He raised a hand to them and then started to lead the way up to the higher stories of the keep.

The king, for reasons of delicacy, did not accompany his friends when they broke into the room where the voice of Mortimer was still to be heard in loud discussion with his officers. There were four men with him, Sir Hugh Turpington, Sir John Neville, Sir Simon de Beresford, and Sir John Deveril. Swords were drawn, but not in time to present any adequate defense. The first-named pair were killed in the brief and bitter scuffle and Mortimer succeeded in mortally wounding one of the king's men. It was a brief encounter and Mortimer was quickly disarmed and his arms bound behind his back.

At this point the queen mother broke into the room from the apartment she occupied. It was clear she had been asleep, for she wore little clothing and her hair was disheveled; and she was in a state of desperate dismay and fear. The young king had remained in the corridor, not through any disinclination to share in the struggle but because he preferred not to witness the plight of his mother. Isabella could not see him but she sensed his presence.

"Bel filz, bel filz!" she cried in tones of appeal. "Ayez pitie de gentil Mortimer!" (Fair son, fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer!) When she saw that no attention was being paid to her appeal, she said to Montacute, "Do no harm to the person of Mortimer, because he is a worthy knight, my dear friend and well-beloved cousin!"

But the days when men would run to do her bidding were over. They stared at her pale face and unruly locks with the curiosity inevitable when a queen, famous for her beauty, is seen in her shift. But they paid no attention to her appeals. Gentle Mortimer was rudely shoved into the corridor, where eager and far from kindly hands fastened upon him. The castle was filled with his adherents, but they seemed to have little sense of loyalty. No effort was made to rescue him. The knights who had ridden so obsequiously in his train outdid each other in their eagerness to forswear his allegiance. The control of the castle pa.s.sed instantly into the hands of the king and his few followers. The keys were removed from under the pillow of the queen, and Mortimer was ensconced in a deep cell with armed guards outside the door.

Every step had been planned with the care Edward would later display in some aspects of his campaigns in France and had been carried out with boldness and decision. The English Hamlet had now made it clear that he had been biding his time for the right moment. That moment had come and gone, and England was free of the beautiful queen who had gone astray and the lover she had raised to power with her.

Nottingham, called at that time the cave city because of the softness of its sandstone, went mad with joy when Mortimer was led out a prisoner the next morning. It is recorded that a great shout went up in which the n.o.bles joined with the mobs on the street.

The Earl of Lancaster was still the t.i.tular head of the baronage. Although a weakness in his eyes had finally resulted in total blindness, he is said to have been consulted by Edward when he arrived at Nottingham, or certainly by the closest adherents of the young king. The approval of the blind peer had been given to the contemplated coup, although he could not offer his personal partic.i.p.ation. It may have been that he provided some of the men who followed Montacute on his long crawl through the underground pa.s.sage.

When the earl heard the shouts of the mob in the streets, he had his servants lead him out, and when he learned the reason for the jubilation he joined in by shouting as madly as any tinker's apprentice. He is even said to have gesticulated with his arms to show how deeply he was moved.

History does not tell how Isabella traveled to London. She must have been taken there at once under adequate escort, but it seems highly improbable that she went with the king's party. Edward would spare himself as long as possible the frantic appeals she would address to him on behalf of her partner in usurpation. It may have been that he did not see his mother until the case of Mortimer had been disposed of at Westminster and the penalty exacted.

The prisoner was removed at once by way of Loughborough and Leicester and was lodged in the Tower of London on October 27. Edward must have been with the party, for he issued that same day a statement to the people of England that he had taken the government of the country into his own hands, a proclamation which was received with universal approval. If doubts about him had existed in the minds of people because of his seeming hesitation to a.s.sert himself, they were forgotten completely in the acclaim with which his act was received.

Parliament did not meet until November 26, and the first business before it was the disposal of the charges against Mortimer. It is not certain that the prisoner was brought before the house at any time, but this much is known: he was not allowed to make any plea or enter any defense. The peers were asked one by one what they thought should be done with him, and the response seems to have been an unanimous one. Mortimer must be treated the way he had dealt with Hugh le Despenser. He must die the same death without delay or mercy.

The charges laid at his door were many and lengthy, the most important being, perhaps, the allegation that he had "falsely and maliciously sowed discord between the father of our lord the king and the queen, his companion.... Wherefore, by this cause, and by other subtleties, the said queen remained absent from her lord."

This was the closest approach made to including Isabella in the legal proceedings. Pope John had written to Edward, urging him not "to expose his mother's shame," but this admonition was unnecessary. Edward was in every way striving to respect Isabella's position. This may have been due to filial affection or he may have been influenced by the need to protect her name in France. In any event, Mortimer was to bear the full brunt of the blame; which did not matter very much for there was evidence enough, as was said at the time, to hang a dozen men.

The second charge was the most damaging of all. He had procured the murder of Edward II. This was regarded as definitely proven by the carelessness with which Mortimer placed his creatures around the doomed king. The efforts of two of his companions, who died on the gallows with him, Beresford and Deveril, to disclose the whole story of the a.s.sa.s.sination were disregarded. It was believed, naturally, that the refusal to hear them was due to fear that Isabella would be involved. It is most unfortunate from every other standpoint that the stories were not taken down.

Other charges were as follows: He had usurped the powers of the council and regency. He had taught the young king to regard Henry of Lancaster as his enemy. He had procured the execution of Edmund of Kent, although that unfortunate member of the royal family had been innocent of any crime. (Mortimer is said to have confessed privately that he knew Kent was innocent.) He had appropriated to his own use the twenty thousand pounds paid by the Scots as one of the peace terms arranged at Northampton. He had a.s.sumed the airs and powers of monarchy. He had been guilty of great cruelties in Ireland.

The following day, clad all in black, Mortimer was taken through London to the Elms at Tyburn and was there hanged, drawn, and quartered. It is said that this was the first instance of an execution at Tyburn. That section of London Town would be used so often through later centuries that the name would become synonymous with the exaction of the supreme penalty of the law.

The body of this once haughty and unscrupulous man was allowed to hang on the gallows for two days and nights, for the public to see, although there could not have been much left of the frame after the carrying out of that ferocious and b.e.s.t.i.a.l sentence of disemboweling and quartering.

It is recorded that the despair of Isabella, when she realized the fate of her lover, was so intense that she suffered a spell of madness, but there is no official record of this. It may have been no more than a reflection of the inevitable rumors which would spread throughout the country.

CHAPTER V.

The Chatelaine of Castle Rising

1.

IN the loneliest part of East Anglia stood Castle Rising, where a view could be had of the stolid waters on the south stretch of the Wash. About it were stunted trees and drifting sandhills, with no more than a touch of gorse on the high grounds behind, and over all the stillness of desolation. King William, called Rufus, had given eighteen acres there in fief to his cup-bearer, William de Albini. The son of the latter, who was known as William-of-the-Strong-Arm and whose name is generally spelled in history as D'Aubigny, proceeded to make the manor into a castle of considerable strength. He built a ma.s.sive square keep surrounded by walls three feet thick, with three high towers and the whole enclosed by earthen ramparts. Not content with thus achieving security, he put much fine ornamental work into the gatehouse and the great hall. It had a hint of importance about it which belied the dullness of the marshes and the continuously hostile gray of the skies.

Then William-of-the-Strong-Arm fell in love with the widow of Henry I, Adelicia of Louvain, who had been called the Fair Maid of Brabant, a very great beauty indeed with snow-white complexion and abundant fair hair. Adelicia had been selected as the second wife of Henry in the hope that she would supply an heir to replace the unfortunate Prince Henry who went down in the wreck of La Blanche Nef. This she failed to do, but after Henry's death she rewarded the devotton of William d'Aubigny by marrying him. He was an upstanding, honorable, and handsome knight and it is pleasant to record that the stork was kept very busy from that time onward. Adelicia brought seven children into the world in rather rapid succession, four of them sons. The upbringing of this happy brood kept the fair Adelicia so occupied that she seldom stirred from Arundel Castle, the family seat in the south part of Suss.e.x. It was a rare thing for her to find any time for the northern home on which her husband had expended so much effort.

But now Castle Rising was to have a resident chatelaine. The advisers of the young king had convinced him it would be inadvisable to keep his mother at court and that, in fact, she should live thereafter in seclusion. Accordingly it was arranged, with Isabella meekly a.s.senting, that all her dower lands and holdings were to be returned to the crown in return for a steady income, variously estimated at one to three thousand pounds a year. Two years later Edward wrote "that as his dearest mother had simply and spontaneously surrendered her dower into his hands, he had a.s.signed her divers other castles and lands to the amount of two thousand pounds." The dower lands she gave up were mostly in Wales, including the castle of Haverford.

Isabella was thirty-six when she took up her abode at Castle Rising. She still retained some of her beauty, although the turmoil and the stresses of the last years had exacted their toll. It is persistently a.s.serted in the chronicles of the day that she had fits of depression, verging on madness, which began with the events surrounding the execution of Mortimer. There is nothing to prove or disprove this, save that there are no recorded instances of doctors being in attendance or any outlay for drugs or cures. She settled down at once, in fact, to a rather peaceful and certainly a monotonous life. This vital woman who had been active and gay all her days under the admiring gaze of courtiers must have felt a sinking of the heart when she first saw Castle Rising, with no signs of life about it save a gull winging slowly across the Wash with a piteous mew to express the smallness of its hopes. But she accepted her lot with outward equanimity.

It has been stated that she was confined so strictly to the castle that it amounted to a lifelong imprisonment, but this is wrong. As will be shown later, she paid many visits to various parts of the kingdom during the years which followed.

The dowager queen was provided with a household in accordance with her royal rank. She had ladies-in-waiting and a train of knights and squires as well as droves of servants. She had in addition a treasurer, a steward, a seneschal, and grooms, a falcon-bearer, and minstrels to sing during meals and to ease with music the tedious hours. A record in the Peerage of England indicates that she had one fault only to find with her household, the appointment as steward of Sir John de Molines, who had been the first to lay hands on Mortimer on the night of the coup and who, moreover, had slain one of the attendants. His presence is said to have kept her in constant recollection of that grim occasion and to have contributed to her unsettled state of mind. It seems highly improbable, however, that Molines was there. Edward's grat.i.tude to Montacute and in a lesser degree to Molines was so lively that he found many rewards and honors for both of them. The knight's advancement was so rapid that the post of steward to the queen would have been regarded as far beneath his just deserts. If he did hold the post, it could have been for a very brief s.p.a.ce only.

Edward paid regular visits to his mother, some say once a year, others two or three times. From the small fragments of evidence which exist, it is a reasonable a.s.sumption that he continued to feel some affection for her. Sons are always proud of beautiful mothers. Edward had been with her continuously in France during his most impressionable years, particularly that exciting period when she went to Flanders to recruit an army and they visited the home of the Count of Hainaut and his four beautiful daughters. He had ridden with her up and down the Low Countries, observing how she won admiration and support and how contagious was her gift of charm. He had been with her on the adventurous landing and the rapid campaign by which the control of the kingdom had been won. None of this could ever be forgotten or forcibly erased from his mind, even during the soul-searing days when he realized his mother and Mortimer had plotted the death of his father, that she and her favorite were not only living together but were making costly mistakes in the administration of the kingdom which would soon be his. It would be impossible for him to forget the days of mortification when the b.u.mptious, black-a-vised Mortimer had expected him to rise when he, Mortimer, came into the room; when he had to permit his mother's favorite to walk beside him evenly, step by step, instead of following behind as a subject was supposed to do; when, most galling of all, he had to submit to the hectoring, the criticism, of Mortimer and the demands made on him by that shortsighted upstart. But in time, as he observed how quietly his mother was accepting her new and humiliating role, it was inevitable that the black entries in the books would cease to affect him as much as the earlier and brighter memories.

Perhaps when he observed the monotony of her life at Castle Rising he regretted the necessity of keeping her there. One thing is certain: he demanded always that she was to be treated with the utmost respect. No mention of her was permitted in his presence unless it was phrased with decorum. She was referred to in official doc.u.ments as "Madame, the king's mother," or "Our lady, queen Isabella." He was solicitous of her well-being and saw to it that supplies of the best game and fish were sent to her, as well as the delicacies to which she had been accustomed. She had a special liking for sturgeon, and although it was a costly luxury, the records are full of expenditures for barrels to be sent to Castle Rising. A barrel of sturgeon cost something in excess of two pounds.

It is on record that the dowager queen spent some time at Berkhampstead, while Castle Rising was being refitted for her use, that she went to reside at the royal castle of Eltham when she needed a change of air, which happened regularly. She went to Pontefract, and on at least one occasion she spent Christmas at Windsor with her son and his family. In 1344 she celebrated Edward's birthday with him at Norwich. She made numerous pilgrimages to holy shrines, particularly Our Lady of Walsingham.

She was never permitted to take any part in state matters, even when the chancellery or Parliament had knotty points to unravel rising from things she had done while acting as regent. In 1348 the King of France made the suggestion that Isabella and the dowager queen of France be entrusted with the mediation of a peace between the two countries. The suggestion found no favor with Edward. He had conceived a low opinion of his mother's judgment in matters of statecraft. Had he been inclined to the proposal, his advisers would have combated the idea warmly and unanimously.

The slipping of power through hands which have become accustomed to it is one of the hardest things to bear, which is why rulers were so prompt to stamp out anything that bore the faintest scent of treason and to punish with extremes of cruelty anyone who strove to reduce by one iota the royal power. It hardly needs saying, therefore, that Isabella could not have been happy in the seclusion forced upon her. But she does not seem to have complained. If she had loaded her son with reproaches on the occasions of his visits to her, he would soon have fallen into the habit of finding excuses for not going.

She had gambled for high stakes and had lost. That she was willing to pay the price of failure without recriminations is one item, though not a weighty one, to enter on the credit side of the ledger. One other item: she gave no cause for scandal during those last and lonely years of her life.

2.

In the last phase of her life the dowager queen's mind turned to religious observance and to doing penance for the wicked deeds of which she had been guilty. She took the vows of the order of Santa Clara and during the final years she wore the traditional garb. The Poor Clares, as the members were called, lived lives of toil and self-sacrifice and poverty, nursing the indigent and tending the lepers and subsisting on charity. They never allowed time to ease their code, as had been done in the Franciscan order from which they sprang. It is certain, therefore, that the queen had been taken into the third order of St. Francis, which was open to lay penitents and did not involve any partic.i.p.ation in the arduous duties of those n.o.ble ladies, the Poor Clares.

Isabella died at Castle Rising on August 22, 1358, at the age of sixty-three, a ripe age indeed for those days. She had lived in seclusion for twenty-eight years and had done nothing to justify criticism. She had expressed a desire to be buried in the church of the Grey Friars at Newgate in London. With the general willingness to find fault in every particular, some historians have surmised that this was due to the reception there of the mangled remains of Mortimer after his execution. There is doubt whether he was actually taken to Newgate or to a Franciscan church in either Shrewsbury or Coventry. In any event, his widow was permitted to remove the body for permanent interment in the Austin Priory at Wigmore in November 1331, a year after his death. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that this was the reason for Isabella's choice. A better reason is that she would be permitted burial at the Grey Friars in the robes of the order; a precaution against the prying fingers of the devil, whose interest the erring queen had good reason to fear. Queen Marguerite, the second consort of Edward I, was Isabella's aunt and was buried there, as it was through her munificence that the edifice had been raised. This may have been a reason for Isabella's desire.

She had made the request that the heart of the murdered Edward should rest on her breast, and this is accepted as the last evidence of her hypocrisy. Isabella always spoke her mind and did whatever the selfishness or malice in her prompted her to do, but a hypocrite she was not. It seems more reasonable and kindly to a.s.sume that after twenty-eight years to think over the past she had a sincere desire to do this much penance.

Edward saw to it that his mother was buried with proper pomp. The streets of London which the funeral procession would cross were thoroughly cleaned. The body was laid in the choir at the Grey Friars and a magnificent tomb of alabaster was raised over it.

It is a.s.serted in some careless records that Isabella's second daughter, Joanna, Queen of Scotland, survived her by a few days only and that they were interred in Newgate on the same day, the two biers being placed side by side at the high altar. A moving picture, surely; but with one flaw. Queen Joanna did not die until 1362, four years after her mother.

There was little mourning for the deceased queen. If Edward or any member of the royal family attended the services, there is no record of it. The interment was quiet, and this was to be expected, for Isabella of France would be called in history the most wicked of English queens. The best tribute that could have been paid her was that she was not wholly bad. Perhaps-who knows?-a witness to this paused beside her bier to drop a tear to her memory: the little Thomeline who had been saved from the sad fate of so many war orphans and had been sent by the fair queen to London to be raised.

CHAPTER VI.

The Embers Rekindled

1.

THE peace with Scotland did not last long.

Robert the Bruce had died on June 7, 1329, in his castle at Cardross near Dumbarton. There had been some comfort for him in his last days, although he was not to know that the Pope on June 13 of that year issued a bull confirming his sovereignty in Scotland with the right of anointment at coronation. Cardross was less grim than most Scottish castles. It had brightly painted rooms and gla.s.s in the windows and a great tester bed from which the dying monarch could look out at the hills of the country he had fought for so long.

Before dying Robert laid injunctions of various kinds on his followers. They were to swear fealty to his young son David. Randolph of Moray was to act as regent during the boy's minority. That he chose Randolph and not Douglas as regent was not because of any preference. He had a still more personal and binding duty to lay on the st.u.r.dy shoulders of that fine knight whose skill in arms was so great that his face, after a lifetime of cut and slash and come again, carried not so much as a single marring wound. The king had always wanted to go on the Crusades, and this was now impossible. On the Black Douglas, therefore, he laid this sacred duty: he was to go in his king's stead, carrying the heart of the Bruce to be buried by the Holy Sepulcher.

For all the leaders of the Scottish people, he left a set of rules and regulations to be used in the defense of the land which became known in later years as Good King Robert's Testament. These wise directions, which had grown out of all the long struggles by burn and glen, were put into verse by a native bard, the first lines of which ran: On foot should be all Scottish war, By hill and moss themselves to ware: Let woods for walls be; bow and spear And battle-axe their fighting gear.

It was thus made clear that the lessons of war had been truly learned by the great Scot. The mounted knight, with shining cuira.s.s and jingling spurs, would never win Scotland's battles. It was on the st.u.r.dy foot soldier that reliance must be placed.

The Black Douglas set off gladly to carry out his dead leader's injunction. That he was unable to do so was the fault of the times. In all the capitals of Europe there was talk of more crusades, but no effort was being made to fight them. The clock of crusading zeal had finally run down and become silent. Douglas could not undertake a one-man invasion but he decided to do the next best thing, to lend his sword in the wars in Spain against the Moors. His eagerness for a clash with the bronzed warriors who had conquered and held a large share of Spanish territory led him to get too far in advance of his troop. The Moors wheeled about and cut him off.

The Douglas was a great fighting man from the mop of black hair on his brow, which had gained him his name, to the tips of his steel-clad feet. He had, moreover, the fatalistic att.i.tude of most true soldiers. Looking ahead at the jeering, racing hors.e.m.e.n flourishing their curved scimitars in the air, he knew that this was the end. He must go down as befitted the race and the family from which he sprang.

Unclasping from his neck the silver casket in which the heart of Bruce was enclosed, he threw it far ahead of him into the ranks of the eager Moslems. Shouting in his high, lisping voice, "A Douglas! A Douglas! I follow or die!" he urged his steed against the oncoming hors.e.m.e.n.

That he succeeded in cutting his way through the van of the enemy was made clear after the battle was over. Pierced by a mult.i.tude of wounds, his body lay on the ground above the silver casket.

Someone has written, "First in the death that men should die, such is the Douglas's right." Not the valiant Sir James himself, however. There was nothing vainglorious about him. He did his fighting in the field and not around the roaring fires where men sat of winter nights to recount their deeds.

The heart of Robert the Bruce was carried back to Scotland by one of the survivors, where it was ultimately buried beneath the altar of Melrose Abbey. The right was granted to the family of Douglas to carry a bleeding heart with a crown on their shields thereafter.

The peace which had seemed so final before Robert the Bruce died was not to stand against the conditions which now developed. Philip, the first of the Valois kings of France, seemed set on bringing about war with England, and the English were not averse to upholding with their arms the claim of Edward to the French throne. Over all of western Europe hung the gathering clouds of the Hundred Years' War. Scotland's treaty obligations with France made it impossible for her to stand aloof; and so it was to start all over again, the marching and countermarching back and forth across the border, the harrying of adjoining lands, while hate mounted again in the people of both races.

2.

More fighting with the Scots was inevitable but what set the embers to blazing was the appearance in England of Edward de Baliol, son of the John who had reigned briefly over Scotland and who will be remembered best by his nickname of King Toom Tabard. That ineffective man had been dead for many years, and his son Edward had been living on the estates left him in France. The death of Robert the Bruce seemed to present an opportunity for the Baliol claims to be a.s.serted again, and Lord Beaumont arranged an audience at Westminster between King Edward and the Scottish claimant. Baliol, who was as spineless and as lacking in patriotism as his father, offered to do homage to Edward as his liege lord if he were helped to regain the throne.

Edward was guilty of a skillful example of double-dealing at this point. Openly he rejected the Baliol offer and declared his intention of abiding by the treaty of Northampton. He even went to the extent of ordering that Baliol's adherents should be prevented from crossing the border. Secretly he encouraged Baliol to proceed with his plans. He knew the time was ripe for action. King David was a boy and Randolph of Moray, the valiant regent, had died and his place had been filled by Donald, Earl of Mar, who was known to be an indecisive and rather feeble individual. There was in England the nucleus of an army of invasion, the holders of lands in Scotland who had been awarded their confiscated estates by the treaty but had not yet received them.

With the stealthy connivance, therefore, of the English king, Edward de Baliol got together an army of sorts. As his chief lieutenants he had three brisk n.o.blemen, the afore-mentioned Henry de Beaumont, the Lord Wake of Liddell, and Gilbert de Umfraville. They recruited a force of something over three thousand men and sailed northward from the mouth of the Humber. Landing in Fife, they surprised the army of the Earl of Mar at Dupplin Moor and gave him a sound drubbing. The victory was so complete that the opposition to the Baliol claims broke up and he was crowned as Edward I of Scotland at Scone on September 24, 1332.

Edward of England had to come out into the open then. He met the new monarch at Roxburgh on November 23 to receive homage as the overlord of the land. Thus young Edward found himself in the same position that his grandfather had occupied on several occasions, the openly acknowledged sovereign lord of Scotland.

But a Baliol was always a weak reed on which to lean. Edward of that ilk allowed himself to be surprised at Annan by a hastily organized army of Scottish patriots under the command of Archibald Douglas, a younger brother of the great Black Douglas. He was the first of that long line of remarkable men who held the t.i.tle of Earl of Angus down through Scottish history, including Archibald the Grim, that great old Archibald called Bell-the-Cat, another familiarly known as Archibald Greysteel, and finally that handsome fair-haired Archibald who married Margaret Tudor and became a stormy petrel throughout the reign in England of Henry VIII. This particular Archibald was not an astute general, but he succeeded in smashing the Baliol forces and chasing their leader back over the border. The pursuit took the Scots well down into c.u.mberland.

Edward now realized that he would have to take control himself. Declaring that the Scots had broken the treaty (and writing to that effect to the Pope, because he would have had to pay a fine of twenty thousand pounds to the pontiff if he had been guilty himself), he moved with a large army into Scotland. He came face to face with the bold but overly rash Archibald Douglas at Halidon Hill to the west of the town of Dunse.

The military career of Edward III would seem to consist largely of getting himself into a position of extreme jeopardy, as at Crecy, and then extricating himself by great courage and resolution and the employment of brilliant battle tactics. It was so at Halidon Hill, his first victory of any great importance. He was in peril of being surrounded by the enemy and hemmed in by natural obstacles. East of his army was the sea and Berwick with its Scottish garrison, eager to emerge and join in against him. South of him lay the Tweed, and to the north the army of Douglas, which far outnumbered the English.

Douglas, overconfident, having learned little or nothing from Good King Robert's Testament, led his men down over marshy lands to attack the English. Edward had benefited from experience sufficiently to put his reliance in his archers and foot soldiers. The English army was drawn up in four battles, with the bowmen on the flanks; everyone afoot, even the young king himself, who stood in the van. Flushed with his victory at Annan, the brave Douglas charged across marshy land to strike the English all along the line. The Scots ran into a rain of arrows from the English longbows which decimated their ranks. Their losses were so heavy, in fact, that they fell back in a complete rout. The Scottish n.o.bles had led then-clans into the battle. Many of them fell victims to the deadly fruit of the English yew, and it was said afterward that no leader was left to recruit or lead a body of men.

Berwick surrendered at once. Such of the n.o.bility as were still alive gave in their submissions. David, the boy king, had to flee, reaching France ultimately, where he was welcomed by King Philip. In the treaty which resulted all of Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to England, the counties of Roxburgh, Peebles, Dumfries, and Edinburgh-the whole, in fact, of ancient Lothian. Baliol came back to climb on the throne for the second time.

At the age of twenty-two Edward III had completed the work of his grandfather.

Edward de Baliol must have been the original Humpty-Dumpty, for all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put him back permanently on the throne from which he kept tumbling.

The second disruption of his inglorious reign occurred when Andrew Moray, who had been with Wallace in the first days of Scottish resistance, emerged from semi-retirement and took over command of the northern forces. Moray marched through the Highlands and drove far enough south to raid c.u.mberland, sweeping the inept Baliol before him. It became so difficult to gather up the pieces, stick them together, and take this puppet king back for seating again on this difficult throne that finally the English king despaired. Baliol then agreed to surrender the kingdom into Edward's hands by delivering to the English monarch a portion of its soil along with the golden crown. In return for this abject betrayal of his country he received a payment of five thousand marks and a pension of two thousand pounds a year for the balance of his life. This weak son of an ineffectual father lived until 1367 on estates granted to him near Wheatly in England. He left no issue, which may be considered a fortunate thing for Scotland, as the old dynastic dispute thus came to an end. It is recorded that he devoted his declining years to the pleasures of hunting.

CHAPTER VII.

The Great Emergence