Nigel Tranter: The Steps to the Empty Throne

yours. Perhaps it will serve to pay your good fellows. The Jews may give you something for it.”

Something between a sob and a groan arose in that church’—to be swiftly lost in a menacing growl.

The Bishop of Durham, when he had assured that King Edward did not intend to say more, resumed—not at first with words. Stepping close to the taller prisoner, he reached out and took hold of the splendid jewelled and embroidered tabard with the proud red Lion Rampant, grabbing it at the neck. With savage jerks of a short but powerful arm he wrenched and tore at it. To the sound of rending fabric, its wearer staggered, and as the glorious garment fell in ruin to the floor, something of the light and colour seemed to go out of that place.

The Bishop now took the sceptre away, and handed it to the scullion, who stood grinning astride the prostrate person of Buchan the Constable. He took in return the white rod of penitence and humiliation this man had carried, and thrust it at Baliol.

“this is yours, now,” he said. “all you have, or will get! Save perhaps the rope. Now—down on your knees.”

The other took the rod, head shaking. But he remained standing.

“Fool!

Are you deaf? You heard me—kneel. Or do you not value your wretched life? Your traitor’s skin?”

“I no longer value my life, my lord. Or I would not have come to submit to His Majesty, But how could I be traitor? How could the King of Scots be traitor to the King of England? I submit me—but I do not…”

John Baliol was too late by far with any such reasoning. Fierce and vehement hands forced him to his knees, beside the groaning figure of the Constable.

“Speak-for your life,” the Bishop commanded.

“You are now nothing, man. Not even a man. Dirt beneath His Majesty’s feet, no more He could, and should, take you out and hang you.

Draw, quarter and disembowel you. As you deserve. And not only you.

All your treacherous, beggarly Scots lords. Rebels against his peace. All should die. As the scurvy rebels of Berwick town died, who also spurned King Edward’s peace.” Only a month or so before, after the frontier town of Berwickon-Tweed had resisted the English advance, Edward had ordered the slaughter of no fewer than 17,000 men, women and children in the streets, and the burning of every house, in this the richest town and seaport of Scotland. The Bishop’s threats were scarcely idle, therefore.

Baliol sank his greying head.

“So be it,” he said.

“I seek His Majesty’s clemency. For the lives of all who have followed and supported me. Mistakenly. I humbly seek mercy.”

“And for your own life also?”

The kneeling man looked up, from Bishop to King, and for a moment a sort of nobility showed strongly in the weak and unhappy features.

“Very well,” he acceded.

“If that is necessary.

If that is your requirement. I ask for your mercy on myself and mine, also.” He paused.

“That the cup be filled.”

Beck looked a little put out. He frowned, then shrugged mail clad shoulders. He turned to the Plantagenet.

“Sire,” he said.

“All is done. In your royal hands is placed this felon’s life. And the lives of all his people. Of his own will. To do with according to your mighty pleasure. There is no longer a King of Scots. Nor a realm of Scotland. All is yours.” Bowing, he stepped back, duty done.

Edward even now seemed the bored and disinterested onlooker.

He glanced round all the waiting company, as though, like them, he had been a mere spectator of a mildly distasteful scene. He appeared to shake himself out of a brown study.

“My lords,” he said.

“My noble friends. And … others. Have you had enough? I vow that I have. Let us be out of here. This place stinks in my nostrils. Come, Tony.” And without so much as a look at the figure still kneeling there, he urged his heavy destrier forward.

Almost he rode down both Baliol and Buchan, even their escort; only the slow cumbersome movement of the warhorse permitted all to get out of the way of its great hooves. And everywhere the cream of two nations bowed low, as Edward of England passed on.

Or not perhaps quite the cream of two nations. For practically

everyone in the church of Stracathro that July day of 1296, save some

of the humble men-at-arms, was of one stock-Norman French. Edward himself might be an Angevin, Baliol a Picard, Beck, or de Bee, and Comyn were Flemings and Bruce sprung from the Cotentin; but all were basically Normans. Of the true English stock there were none present, though there had of course been some intermarriage. Of the indigenous Celtic Scots, none likewise. Possibly the young Robert Bruce was the nearest to a Scot, for his mother had been the daughter and heiress of the last Celtic Earl of Carrick, of the old stock, whose earldom he had inherited. A Norman-French military aristocracy had for two centuries been taking over both kingdoms, indeed much of northern Europe—but only at the great landowning and government level. Every word spoken in that church had been in French.

The cream of this aristocracy, therefore, both victors and vanquished, bowed as their master rode down towards the door-leaving a somewhat doubtful soldier-knight distinctly uncertain what to do with his utterly ignored and rejected prisoners. A round dozen earls were there, and more than a score of great lords-and some of those with Scots titles bowed lower than the English, not in abject vanquishment but in loyal fealty, for many of them, in unhappy and divided Scotland, considered that they had borne no allegiance to King John, looking on him as usurper, and worse, nonentity, not a few holding almost as large lands in England as here. For such men loyalty and patriotic duty were hypothetical and variable terms.

Edward was half way to the door when a man stepped forward, one of those not in armour.

“Sire,” he said.

“A petition.

Hear me, I pray you.”

Across the church, the young Earl of Carrick, frowning suddenly, made as though to move, to speak, but thought better of it. His hand gestured towards the petitioner, however, eloquently.

But ineffectually.

The King pulled up.

“My lord of Annandale,” he said, blank faced.

“I conceived you to be in Carlisle.”

“You summoned all leal Scots to attend you here, Sire.”

“Your lealty I do not doubt, man. But I appointed you governor of Carlisle. To keep the West Border. And Galloway.

Here is a strange way of keeping it!”

The other bowed. He was a handsome man, of Edward’s own age, quietly but tastefully dressed, with the long face of a scholar or pedant rather than that of a warrior, despite his governor’s position. It might have been a noble face, the noblest in all that company, save for a certain petulant stubbornness.

“The West March is safe, Sire. I have three strong sons holding it secure for Your Majesty. With Galloway. I came to see this good day’s work.”

“Aye—you never loved Baliol, my lord! Nor loved me the more that I made him King of Scots, hey?” That was cracked out like a whip-lash.

“So you came to see the cat my choice? To crow, Bruce? To crow!”

“Not so, Sire. I am your true man. And have proved it. From the first.” That was true, at least. For this man, who bore the lesser tide of Lord of Annandale, should have been the Earl of Carrick since he it was who had married the heiress-Countess;

but he had deliberately resigned the earldom three years before, to his eldest son there across the church, rather than have to kneel and take the oath of homage for it to John Baliol as King. Robert Bruce, the father, was that sort of man.

“I came to see Your Majesty’s justice done on this empty vessel! A good day’s work, as I said. But it could be bettered.”

“You say so, my lord?” Edward looked at him, sharply.