Edward I and the Scottish Succession Crisis of 1290

By James Turner

A long history of Anglo-Scottish relations would lead to Edward I becoming the person who would determine the next King of Scotland.

The death of the forty-four-year-old Alexander III in 1286 placed the Kingdom of Scotland in a precarious situation. Alexander had the unhappy distinction of being predeceased by all of his children, two sons Alexander and David and a daughter Margaret. Margaret had at least died a queen, married to King Eric II of Norway. While Eric and Margaret’s marriage was less than fecund it did produce a daughter also called Margaret born in 1283.

This Margaret, known to history as the Maid of Norway, was the heir to Norway and, as the only surviving grandchild of Alexander III, rightful Queen of Scotland. While Eric could once have claimed the throne of Scotland through his wife, he was now faced with the conundrum of how best to advance his daughter’s claim. She was after all an infant in 1286 and his only heir making the prospect of sending her to Scotland and placing her in the hands of the quarrelsome Scottish nobility appear perilous to the point of foolhardiness.

Prior to his death, Alexander has quite sensible summoned the Scottish nobility to the royal center of Scone extracting from them an oath to recognize Princess Margaret of Norway as his heir. Upon the king’s death the Scottish magnates had elected, from their own number, six guardians who would govern in the new queen’s stead. However, the highly contentious parliament that followed was dominated by disagreements over the succession while Robert Bruce, the father of the future king, came out in open rebellion. After a handful of unsuccessful attempts to install one of his own followers in Scotland as a regent and still unwilling to risk his heir in the tumultuous arena of Scottish politics, Eric turned to Margaret’s uncle Edward I of England for help.

When viewed through modern eyes the Scottish nobility’s ultimate willingness to accept Edward I as first a representative of their new queen and then an outright arbiter in the ongoing succession dispute is a strange one. After all, to us Edward is synonymous with English imperialism and the attempted subjection of his Celtic neighbours. On the contrary, Edward’s proactive involvement in the succession crisis would have struck contemporaries, at least initially, as broadly in keeping with historical precedence.

Anglo-Scottish relations in the Twelfth Century

Edward’s predecessor had, even prior to the conquest, aspired to some form of hegemony and overlordship within the British Isles. Yet these claims were often iterated but seldom enforced. While Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings wielded a great deal of influence within the so-called ‘Celtic Fringe’, their involvement was neither uniform nor consistent. In Ireland and Wales, the authority of the English kings was predicated upon the presence and military activity of semi-autonomous Anglo-Norman warlords. In contrast in Scotland, overlordship was tentatively advanced through close dynastic connections with consecutive Scottish kings and was often the product of extensive negotiations.

In order to secure his somewhat tenuous claim to the throne of England, Henry I had leapt into action upon the death of his elder brother in 1100 to claim England’s two most potent resources. The first of these was the royal treasury at Winchester, the second was a young nun in training, Matilda of Scotland. Matilda was the daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland and his wife Margaret, a descendant of the royal house of Wessex and the line of native kings that had first unified England. Henry’s subsequent marriage to Matilda, therefore, not only brought him the potential support of the Scottish King but greatly enhanced his legitimacy and right to rule in the eyes of his English subjects. This connection was further strengthened by the marriage of one of Henry’s illegitimate daughters, Sybil, to Malcolm’s son Alexander I.

This familial connection defined Anglo-Scottish relations every bit as much as the contrivances of English kings to exert seniority. Alexander’s younger brother and successor, David I, remodelled the royal court and the administrative structures of Scotland on those of his Anglo-Norman relatives, a process which involved the settlement of a number of Anglo-Norman aristocrats and adventurers within Scotland. When David invaded England in 1138, he did so in support of the claim of his niece, Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland, to the English throne. Likewise, David’s grandson, Malcolm IV and his successor, William the Lion, cooperated amicably with Henry II of England to resolve the succession disputes and infighting that had consumed their mutual Gallovidian relatives.

The abrupt change in the largely convivial relationship between the Scottish and English royal families was heralded by William the Lion’s invasion of England in 1173. William’s father, Prince Henry of Scotland, had held two English earldoms, Huntingdon and Northumbria. Generations earlier, David I had been able to secure the Scottish annexation of Cumbria, while William through his mother, Ada de Warenne, possessed a potentially convincing claim to the Earldom of Surrey. Henry II, perhaps understandably, alarmed by the king of Scotland’s growing hold over northern England had confiscated all of William’s English lands with the sole exception of the Earldom of Huntingdon.

After diplomatic efforts to reclaim his lost English inheritance proved to be fruitless, William eventually threw his support behind the rebellion launched in 1173 by King Henry’s eldest legitimate sons. This revolt, fundamentally caused by Henry’s unwillingness to share power or secede territory to his sons, also enjoyed the support of the king of France and large sections of the aristocracy. Unfortunately for King William, his invasion of England was defeated and he himself was captured at the Battle of Alnwick the following year. He was forced to sign the Treaty of Falaise in which he acknowledged a formalized and far more heavy-handed form of English overlordship, while many of Scotland’s most strategically important castles were garrisoned by Henry’s troops.

Within Henry’s grand hegemonic strategy, the Kings of Scotland were to continue to be treated as junior allies and colleagues. However, the English king’s overlordship of Scotland was for the first time articulated in terms of legal absolutes, rather than deliberately vague allusions to seniority which were almost always filtered through personal and familial contexts. Should William be inclined to withhold his cooperation or once again throw his lot in with Henry’s enemies, he would now have to reckon with the mercenaries that Henry had placed within Berwick, Stirling, Edinburgh, Jedburgh and Roxburgh. These forfeitures and the Scottish monarch’s tangible loss of status not only made William incredibly vulnerable to aggressive intervention from his southern neighbour but also had a very real detrimental effect on his ability to project royal authority within Scotland.

The decade following the signing of the Treaty of Falaise saw Scottish control over the relatively recently annexed Galloway become increasingly tenuous, while William faced increasing dissent from members of the Scottish nobility, although his continued cooperation with Henry did secure him the return of the earldom of Huntingdon which he passed on to his younger brother David.

The effects of the treaty, while dramatic, were ultimately short-lived. When Henry II died in 1189, he was succeeded by his eldest remaining son, Richard, who was determined to take part in the impending third crusade, alongside the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. Lion and Lionhearted swiftly came to an agreement in which the Treaty of Falaise was dissolved in return for a substantial cash payment of 10,000 marks. Although William’s canny bargaining saw the restoration of the traditional paradigm between English and Scottish monarchs, he failed to escape the shadow of English overlordship entirety. In 1209 Richard’s brother and successor King John launched an invasion of Scotland.

Scotland and King John

John had previously enjoyed a relatively cordial relationship with his northern neighbour but had come to fear that The Lion would side against him with Phillip II of France. Acting decisively to preempt this threat John’s invasion force cornered William and compelled him to sign the Treaty of Norham which amongst other things gave John custody over William’s two eldest daughters.

This loss of prestige alongside the financial burdens imposed by John’s naked extortion severely weakened the Lion’s position within Scotland and by 1212 he was beset by aristocratic rebellions. John then came to William’s aid, quashing the rebellions his own aggression and heavy-handedness had provoked. Although this placed William further under John’s thumb his decision to support the Scottish king was also an admission that his authority and influence in Scotland were predicated on the cooperation of a local proxy.

At the same time Williams’ son and heir, the future Alexander II, was sent to England, possibly as a hostage. During this stay John knighted Alexander. More than a mere formality or display of martial pageantry, it was understood within the chivalric steeped culture of 13th-century nobility that the process created a permanent almost filial association between the new knight and his sponsor. Crucially though, despite the one-sided nature of William’s relationship with John he successfully resisted formal acknowledgment of John as his overlord.

Scotland and King Henry III

Similarly, despite struggles with aristocratic uprisings and repeated failures to reclaim his family’s continental domains, John’s son Henry III found considerable success in his diplomatic activities within Scotland. In 1221 Alexander II married Henry’s sister Joan restoring a crucial familial aspect to the relationship between the two royal lines.

In 1237 Henry, having successfully ejected Alexander and enterprising elements from the lands they had occupied in northern England during the furor and chaos of the Baron’s Rebellion, convened a council under the auspices of a visiting Papal Legate. The resultant Treaty of York secured England’s northern border with the Scottish king definitely ceding all claims to Northumberland, Cumbria, and Westmorland. As compensation Alexander was granted a number of personal estates within these foresworn border regions. Perhaps most momentously of all, Alexander acknowledged Henry as the overlord of the King of Scotland and was due, in principle at least, homage.

In his chronicle Matthew of Paris attests that the negotiations were particularly fraught and that Henry had effectively strongarmed the Papal Legate, Otto of Tonengo. However, Matthew is a writer with a fondness for invectives and a true artist’s eye for drama and it’s quite possible that the relationship between the two kings remained amicable. Far more important to our purposes than whether the two monarchs remained on good terms socially is the fact that Henry’s ambitions in Scotland were limited to securing his northern border and establishing a largely symbolic acknowledgment of his overlordship.

In 1251 Henry arranged for the young Alexander III to marry his daughter Margret. He also took this opportunity to knight his son-in-law further emphasizing Henry’s role as an authority figure within Alexander’s spiritual and personal life. While Alexander was firmly cast in the role of the junior partner, even an outright subordinate, he nevertheless managed to walk back his father’s acknowledgment of English overlordship.

This reversal does not seem to have seriously impaired their relationship however and it seems that Henry was content with the considerable personal and familial influence he had over the Scottish King. Indeed when, in 1255, Alexander and Margret were imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle by a faction of dissident Scottish nobles Henry III masterminded their release and restoration. Once again, an English monarch had decided that their interests were best served by exercising influence over a local proxy rather than by trying to directly wrangle the truculent Scottish nobility.

The Rise of Edward I

In contrast the now irrefutable loss of their family’s prestigious pseudo-imperial status and vast continental domains inspired Edward I to attempt to assert the English crown’s overlordship once again over the entirety of the British Isles. In Wales, parts of which had been under the effective rule of an invasive Norman minority since the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, these ambitions manifested themselves as direct military intervention. Between 1277 and 1283, Edward launched a series of sustained and substantive military campaigns to support the Norman Marcher lords and annex the lands of the remaining independent Welsh princes. These territorial gains were subsequently protected and English royal authority within the region was cemented by the undertaking of a ruinously expensive programme of castle building.

In Scotland Edward sought to project authority and overlordship by presenting himself as a neutral arbiter of the succession dispute that arose following the death of Alexander III in 1286. Edward’s success in the early stages of these negotiations and the obviously large levels of political cache he enjoyed within Scotland appear somewhat incongruous to those aware of the decades of bloodshed that was to follow.

The English king not only reconciled the Scottish nobility to the candidacy of Alexander III’s granddaughter, Margaret of Norway, but had actually managed to secure an engagement between the young queen-to-be and his son and heir, Prince Edward. While the various factions and rival claimants of the Scottish nobility were prevailed upon to support or at least reluctantly acquiesce to both Margaret’s claim and engagement, they were cognizant of the danger the marriage presented to Scotland’s continued independence.

In the second Treaty of Birgham in 1290, the collective voices of the Scottish nobility asserted the continued independence of the kingdom and its institutions, specifying that Margaret was to be crowned without Prince Edward and that Scotland would not simply default into the possession of her husband. However, the English were able to carve enough exceptions into the treaty to successfully muddle this crucial delineation. Regardless of the exact provisions or wording of the treaty, in practical terms Margaret and Prince Edward’s marriage unavoidably left open the strong possibility that one day either he or one of their potential children would rule both England and Scotland.

Even considering the obvious trepidation felt by elements of the Scottish nobility and their insistence on the statutes and restrictions imposed upon the marriage by the treaty, the fact that so many of Scotland’s leading magnates were willing to accept a marriage between their monarch and the future English king is significant. As strange as this arrangement may seem through the lens of modern nationalism, at this point in the Middle Ages power remained principally a personal rather than national or institutional resource. Titles and territory were acquired and retained through familial ties and carefully maintained internal lines of inheritance which frequently, even routinely, cut across cultural and political borders. Royal authority was highly personal in nature and the political integrity of any given kingdom predicated upon the willingness and ability of a monarch to cultivate relationships with their vassals, whoever they happened to be. The exact nature and parameters of such relationships and their mutual obligations were by their very nature varied and flexible.

In this sense, the Treaty of Birgham and the manner in which members of the Scottish nobility came together to collectively bargain over the remit and potential applications of royal authority were far from atypical. Indeed, amongst the nobility, the distinction between Scottish and English is not always immediately apparent and of limited critical use. Generations of intermarriage and ongoing political affiliations meant that many nobles had family and therefore potentially inheritable landed and financial interests on either side of the border. A not inconsiderable number of Scottish nobles, such as John Balliol, already possessed estates in both England and Scotland and therefore owed fealty in one form or another to both thrones. In addition, a large number of the Scottish nobility were, like their English equivalents, partially or even primarily of Norman descent.

What is more, regardless of the exact details of their ancestry or the surrounding culture, all members of the nobility of Christian Europe at this time shared certain cultural touchstones. The most important and obvious of which were the overwhelming use of French as a shared first language and a dedication to the tenets and trapping of the cult of Chivalry which provided the nobility of Europe with a shared culture and martial ethos. The members of the tightly interconnected Scottish and English nobility consequently had far more in common with one another than they did with the lower orders of their respective host cultures.

John Balliol becomes King of Scotland

King Edward’s plans were disrupted by the tragic death of the Maid of Norway on Orkney, the uncrowned queen of Scotland having fallen ill on her long-delayed journey to her coronation at Scone. Instead, Edward convened and chaired a grand council, in 1291, to decide amongst the numerous now far more distant and tangled claims to the Scottish throne. While all manner of claims were considered, even those who traced their descent from the Scottish royal family through an illegitimate line, the two strongest contenders were John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, and Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick.

Both claims were sourced in their mutual descent from the daughters of Prince Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, who had predeceased his father, David I, back in 1114. The principle of primogeniture favoured the Balliol claim since he was descended from Henry’s eldest daughter while the Bruce claim was supported by the principle of proximity since their claimant was a generation closer to their royal ancestor. Inheritance claims based on proximity, sometimes known as Tanistry, were relatively common within Scotland but seldom held little weight within the remainder of medieval Europe.

Ultimately this council, the majority of whose delegates that been appointed by Edward, found in favour of John Balliol. John was duly crowned at the traditional royal center of Scone in November 1292. John’s election was accepted without major incident or coordinated dissent from his rivals. Edward was able to inhabit such a crucial role in Scottish politics because he was the ruler of a powerful neighbouring kingdom and because it suited the various claimants and factions of the Scottish aristocracy to have a prestigious neutral party overseeing what was a largely unprecedented process. However, as part of this agreement John and the other participants of the council had been forced to concede to Edward’s sovereignty and overlordship.

In contrast to his predecessors, who had largely been content to exert a symbolic superiority over their Scottish counterparts, Edward treated John as one of his vassals, routinely and unapologetically interfering in Scottish affairs. Edward’s frequent sidelining of John and heavy-handed management of Scottish affairs proved devastating to the prestige and stability of the Scottish throne. John would reign for just five years until he was overthrown by a cabal of Scottish nobles who had come to view him as a mere English puppet. In response Edward ramped up his military presence within Scotland and began the last precipitous steps to claiming the throne of Scotland for himself.

While so many narratives of Anglo-Scottish relations are dominated by discussions of conflict and the Wars of Scottish Independence Edward’s heavy-handed and aggressive approach to exerting hegemony in Scotland marked a major paradigm shift in the relationship between the two kingdoms. Prior to this conflict and friendship, war and peace, had like so much in the politics of the Middle Ages been fundamentally personal in character. Rather than seeking to exert influence over a junior but often valued and vital partner as his ancestors had done Edward instead sort to exercise hegemony through naked military force.

James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on Twitter @HistorySchmstry