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By now, much of Scotland was under English occupation, with Balliol ceding to England eight of the Scottish lowland counties from Dumfries to Haddington. Indeed, at a meeting of the Scottish Parliament in February 1334, Balliol acknowledge his fealty and subjection to the English king. As a precaution, David II and his queen were sent to France for their own safety in May 1334, where they were to remain for seven years.
But while England was dominant, the Bruce loyalists kept up the struggle. They targeted Balliol’s three main allies in Scotland – Richard Talbot, Henry de Beaumont and David of Strathbogie. Talbot was taken prisoner by Sir William Keith of Galston, de Beaumont was forced to flee to England and Strathbogie, under threat of his life, joined the loyalists. The loyalists were successfully using the guerrilla war tactics perfected by the Bruce nearly 20 years before.
Three cheers for the Auld Alliance!
In November 1334, the Scottish guardian made an appeal for assistance from France under the terms of the Auld Alliance. As a result, Philip VI sent his ambassador, the bishop of Avranches, to England to ask why Edward III was acting against David II and his own sister, Queen Joan. A temporary truce was declared while the English king dodged the question. But really all the truce did was to allow him to organise for another invasion of Scotland – this time with a much larger army of 13,000 men. In a three-pronged attack, Edward established control of Scotland in July 1335, first taking Glasgow and then Perth, and generally turning the country into a wasteland. The ball was back in the French court.
The French king a
In desperation, the Scottish guardian, Sir Andrew Moray, now released from captivity in England, tried to find a path toward peace by agreeing to recognise Edward Balliol as monarch in return for naming David II as his heir. It was a way out, but there was a major stumbling block: the young exiled king refused to agree to the terms of the treaty. However, it did bring a truce of sorts between October and December 1336, which gave Murray time to defeat the turncoat Strathbogie’s troops at the Battle of Culblean, killing him in the process.
English concerns were growing regarding a French invasion. In May 1336, Edward sent Henry of Lancaster to Scotland to deal with the loyalists who had been laying siege to Cupar, Fife and Lochindorb, Aberdeenshire. By June, the siege at Lochindorb had been lifted and the English troops laid waste to everything in their path, culminating in the burning of Aberdeen. Later that month, the Clyde valley and Carrick were subjected to the same brutal treatment by English troops under the earl of Cornwall.
In August 1336, Philip VI declared war on England and attacked English ports: Scotland was being downgraded in Edward III’s strategic plan. With the English king so preoccupied with France and his plans to invade Gascony in the spring of 1337, the Scots made hay. The resistance adopted a scorched-earth policy. They attacked, captured and destroyed castles; they laid to waste land; and they harassed English troops. The ruthless policy of Guardian Moray to leave the English nothing – nothing to eat, nowhere to rest – hurt the Scottish people as much as it did the invaders because famine and disease spread. However, it did not diminish their appetite for battle against the Auld Enemy.
The Scottish spring
Moray and Douglas mounted attacks on English strongholds in Fife and Perth and were met with surprisingly little resistance. By the end of March 1337, Scottish troops had reclaimed most of the country north of the Forth and inflicted serious damage on Balliol’s lands in Dumfries-shire.
Successes bred confidence and what seemed unthinkable just a few years ago happened: the Scots entered the north of England and laid waste to Cumberland. In 1338, Edward III sent the earl of Salisbury north to deal with the situation, but it was too little too late. He couldn’t even take Dunbar Castle after six months laying siege to it!
That same year, Moray died of an illness at the age of 40 and the guardianship passed to Robert Stewart (later the first Stewart king). By this time, Balliol had lost most of his main supporters to the Bruce cause, and the English garrisons tumbled under Scottish attack. Cupar fell in the summer of 1339, then Perth, and finally Edinburgh, which was taken audaciously by William, Earl of Douglas, in April 1341.
The Return of the Boy King
With control established throughout the country and the English repelled, the Bruce loyalists felt confident enough to invite David II to return to Scotland, which he did in June 1341. He was only 18 years old and totally inexperienced in the art of government when he resumed ruling Scotland. After years of civil war, the country was exhausted, divided and impoverished. There was little in the way of crown revenue because taxes weren’t collected during the war-torn years of the 1330s. So, David had his work cut out for him.
His main task was to force the English king to recognise him as the rightful monarch of Scotland and to end, once and for all, Balliol’s claim on the throne. Using the tactic of harassing the north of England in 1342, 1345 and 1346, David II hoped that if he proved a big enough nuisance, Edward III, who was fighting against France, would recognise his claim as a price worth paying for calling off these raids. After all, English troops were being diverted from the main struggle against France to deal with the Scottish intruders.
But the Scottish king was also an ally of the king of France, Philip VI. And the king of France, under the terms of the Auld Alliance, appealed to David in June 1346 to carry out a full-scale invasion of the north of England. This would force the English to fight on two fronts: one in France and the other in England. David reluctantly accepted the request of Philip VI to open up a second front. This was a big mistake.
An army of 12,000 men was raised under the personal command of King David II, with the objective of taking Durham. The Scots never expected to face any difficulty in taking the town, because most of the English troops were at Calais fighting the French. David’s army left Scotland on 7 October and ambled through the north, sacking Hexham Priory on the way, forcing Carlisle to pay protection money. However, ten days later, the army was in tatters. The English had expected an invasion from the north, and they were prepared for it.
Under the supervision of the archbishop of York, a smaller force of around half the size of the Scottish army confronted the Scots on 17 October at Neville’s Cross, near Durham, and routed it. The Scottish king himself was wounded by an arrow in the face, captured and taken off to England, where he remained in captivity at Odiham Castle, in Hampshire, for 11 years.
He’s back, but not for long!
After the defeat at Neville’s Cross, the English army overran much of southern Scotland. Balliol, with a small force, reached Glasgow and reasserted his claim to the Scottish throne. But the Scots were in no more a mood to recognise him now than they had been in the past.
What added to Balliol’s problems was the ransom the Scots were prepared to pay Edward III in return for their king and recognition that he was the rightful monarch of Scotland. The lure of the ransom was too much for the English king to refuse, and he waved Balliol a not-so-fond farewell.
Left to sink or swim, Balliol retreated to his heartland in Galloway, where he finally gave up his claim to the Scottish throne on 20 January 1356 in exchange for an English pension of £2,000 a year. The last 11 years of Balliol’s life were spent in obscurity near Doncaster, Yorkshire, where he is buried, allegedly under a post office there!
Balliol left no heirs, so David II was now the recognised sole king of Scotland. In October 1357, he was released from captivity under the Treaty of Berwick. The Scots agreed to pay a huge ransom of 100,000 merks (£66,666) over ten years. The second War of Independence was over.
The second reign of David II
David II was 33 years of age when he set foot in Scotland once more; he had spent two-thirds of his life in France and England. During what might be called his ‘second reign’, he had two tremendously difficult tasks:
Restore the royal finances.
Restore royal authority.
Restoring the royal finances
The huge ransom – amounting to almost seven years’ total royal income – agreed for his release placed enormous burdens on an economy that had been practically ruined by almost 50 years of continuous warfare. However, David set about the task of restoring the royal finances with enthusiasm. Within two years of his return to power, custom duties on exports had tripled. Furthermore, a new system of direct taxation was introduced to pay for his ransom. But David realised that there was never any possibility of being able to pay the debt off in ten years. The first instalment was paid on time, the second was late and the third never arrived!
What David tried to do was to renegotiate the ransom with Edward III by offering him or one of his sons the throne of Scotland if he died childless. In return, Edward would cancel the payments. This was a shrewd move given David’s age – time was on his side to produce an heir. But the offer would never be acceptable to the Scottish elite; led by Robert the Steward, they revolted.
The proposal to make Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the next king of Scotland was rejected by the Scottish Parliament in 1364. David continued to negotiate with Edward in secret and managed, in 1369, to get the ransom payment down to 56,000 merks. It was never paid in full.
Restoring royal authority
David also faced the problem of curbing noble power, which had grown in strength during the long absences of the monarch. When he returned to Scotland in 1357, he rewarded the men who had done most to rule Scotland while he was in captivity. He rewarded with earldoms his cousin and heir (should he remain childless), Robert the Steward, as well as William Douglas and the earl of March.
But David realised that he also had to create alternative sources of support instead of relying on those three. Besides, he didn’t exactly trust them.(As the old saying goes, ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’!)
Queen Joan died in August 1362, so David took the opportunity to build an alliance with the powerful Drummond family through marrying Margaret Drummond, the widow of Sir John Logie. This decision, as much as the agreement with Edward III over the issue of succession, sparked a rebellion in 1363. However, the alliance David was after floundered, because Margaret failed to produce an heir. David divorced Margaret in 1370 in spite of her appealing to the papacy at Avignon for a reversal of the sentence of divorce.