An Unsuited King
The keep of Conisbrough Castle was a towering, drum-shaped edifice, ringed round by a much lower curtain wall. Its position atop the highest hill in the area meant that Conisbrough stood out like a fang from the south Yorkshire countryside, and Lionel had every opportunity to survey it as the army wound along the road that spiraled in around the hill. The presence of the royal banner, differenced by a label of five points, each marked by St. George's cross, passed as his greeting to the gatekeepers. After all, it was not as if they were unannounced. Conisbrough's most important resident knew to expect him.
Edward Balliol, twice, albeit briefly, King of the Scots, and son of onetime king John Balliol, was expecting the prince. He greeted Lionel from horseback, draped in a red robe trimmed in ermine and wearing a simple gold circlet. It was obvious that the circlet had once been more complicated; the edges of the onetime crown were bright where pieces had been struck away. Balliol had evidently taken time to groom his beard, but not enough - it stuck out in salt-and-pepper bristles, and Lionel saw why the usual cameos of the onetime king depicted him clean-shaven. He ran a hand over his own chin, his facial hair fine and still damnably wispy despite not having shaved since London.
The two royals stood in the castle gate at an impasse, then Edward spoke. "You may approach us, my lord of Mide." Next to Lionel, Simon de Segrave gave a short, barely concealed bark, halfway between laugh and snort. Before Lionel could speak, Segrave called back over his shoulder to the assembled army. "You hear that, lads? Welcome to the kingdom of Scotland!" Edward turned beet-red, doing his best to maintain his precarious dignity as his horse cantled sideways. Segrave's voice as ever filled every corner of the space he occupied, and Lionel forced himself not to look back over his shoulder at the older man. "We have no time for this," he muttered, slinging his leg over and dismounting.
"What forces have you mustered, your majesty?" he asked as he approached Edward, who looked confused. "Ah, that is, we have..." Lionel frowned. "I was told that you would raise such Scots as were loyal to your house."
"He has," guffawed Segrave. "That's the horse, my lord."
Lionel realized, almost too late, that Segrave was essentially correct. Edward Balliol was a spent force, and had been no Edward Plantagenet to begin. Even Balliol seemed to deflate on Segrave's comment. "Never mind," Lionel added, quickly stepping forward. "Constable, see that the army is camped, I will speak with his majesty," he called back at Segrave before leading Balliol's horse by hand back into the castle.
Around Conisbrough, the army went into camp, and in the castle, the prince racked his brains to think of how to proceed. Even the reivers had failed to come to Balliol's banner when promised the wealth of Scotland. Of course, after almost a hundred years of sporadic war, the "wealth" of Scotland was mostly safely behind castle walls now, and mostly English castles at that. He paid little attention to the sumptuous entertainment that Edward Balliol had laid on, the pantomimes and plays - a none-too-subtle story of a usurping Scots king named Macbeth, replaced by the rightful claimant backed by the King of England being the most notable. He ate, true, and ate ravenously, for he was young and active and unlikely to bloat like his ancestor the Conqueror, but unlike Edward Balliol, he drank little. The children of Edward III had been raised from birth not merely to reign, but to rule, and he feared the effects that the amount of wine that Balliol imbibed would have on him.
When the evening's entertainments ended, Lionel retired early, too depressed by the court of "King Edward" to stay and give a speech as might be expected. He might insult Edward by doing so; he no longer cared. Looking out from the keep, he frowned, trying desperately to imagine what might be done to salvage something from this waste of days while the Scots circled around Carlisle. The circling fires of the army were some comfort - surely if such a force of Englishmen could come north, just as in 1346, they could turn back any number of Scots?
At dawn the next day, when Balliol finally woke, he found Lionel seated on the dais in the great hall. "What is the meaning of this?" he spluttered.
"Edward de Balliol... I have weighed your claim to be king of Scotland and found it wanting," Lionel declared. His father could get away with speaking like that; from a barely-bearded boy, it sounded pompous, but he continued doggedly. "I offer you the chance to yield your claim to the rightful king, my father Edward, and to accept your place in his peerage. In exchange, you will continue to live in the style to which you are accustomed."
"But - but - I am king! King of the Scots!"
"You are king of a whorehouse!" Lionel yelled, voice almost breaking as he lurched from his seat. "You, sir, are king of a realm stretching from one thigh to the other of whatever harlot accepts the coin given you by your rightful king! You have neither heirs nor lands, and even were you to produce them as if by the artifice of Merlin himself, even then, a duke Anglois is worth ten kings Scots!" History would record the moment, but even so, he knew that the speech would have sounded better from de Segrave, his own voice too near breaking to contemplate. "You will deed out to the clerks that you recognize my father as the true lord paramount of Scotland, the rightful king thereof, and that you offer your fealty to him," he ground out, the Plantagenet temper flaring his nostrils.
Edward Balliol, at the very end of his career, was a thoroughly broken man, whimpering and retreating before the prince. The man who had once fled his own throne without even the shirt on his back, merely his breeches, yielded even the claim to that crown to a boy barely old enough to have been knighted. Lionel was astounded that it had worked without calling on his armies. He had not slept, had been desperate since conceiving of this idea - to abandon the polite fiction of calling one Edward rightful king in favor of another Edward. Who knew? He might even wind up Lord Lieutenant not of Ireland as hoped, but of Scotland. Scotland was certainly more welcoming than Ireland.
Edward Balliol joined the army with what few retainers he had, one more landless knight hoping for fortune, his bloodline more illustrious perhaps, but no more fortunate than many others. The army lingered at Conisbrough for two days, long enough to receive word that the new army being raised in the west would be ready for a summer campaign - but between now and then, Lionel was on his own.
What he did on his own was to strike David of Scotland outside of Carlisle. There were ten thousand Scots blocking the reach between the Eden and the Caldew, quartered in the old town that had grown beneath the castle. When David heard that Lionel's army was approaching, he took the sensible course: he abandoned the siege and fired the town, knowing that if he defeated Lionel in the field, he could return to Carlisle Castle at will, and in his absence, the border families would do most of his work for him, robbing, raping, and reaving as they could.
The two armies met outside of Carleton, one of half a dozen villages scattered around the town. A valley separated them, more or less an accident of timing rather than a deliberate decision by Lionel. The valley was running at the time, the water frigid and ankle-deep. The Scots drew up on the north side in three sheltrons, large formations of mixed spears and close weapons, each numbering about two thousand jeering, yelling Scots. Most of the foot was drawn from the highland clans, while the lowlanders supplied most of the horse. Only their leadership, and their hatred of England, truly unified them. Just as at Neville's Cross, King David himself led the Scots horse.
The English foot were drawn up in two lines, the first a thin ribbon of archers, numbering no more than a thousand of the total seven thousand Englishmen on the field. The second, much thicker line was made of four thousand men-at-arms, much more heavily armored than their opponents. Where the average Highlander carried a small shield strapped to his left forearm, either a great cleaving sword or a spear, and at most a padded or leather jerkin, the English foot fought behind heavy-bladed poleaxes, arming-swords, and heavy shields, and wore mail or, when their lords were wealthy enough, plated mail. Gaps in the men-at-arms made it possible for the archers to withdraw through them. Behind both lines of infantry came the English horse, deliberately held on the southeast side of the hill. Simon de Segrave had advised this: "Better to keep the horse out of sight of the Scots bastards, or they'll charge off like they're going to ride into Edinburgh from here," he had boomed out the night before.
Segrave, Lionel, and Archbishop Oliver stood atop the hill, astride their horses, with Lionel's royal banner fluttering overhead. Next to it was another banner, new-made for this march and dwarfing the royal standard, a red lion rampant on a gold field, with a hammer suspended head-down over the lion's head. They sat there, and sat there, and increasingly, Lionel fumed. "Why won't they attack?" he demanded.
"Because they're Scots, my lord, not fools. There is a difference," Segrave grunted.
Hoping for a repeat of Neville's Cross, Lionel sent forward the archers, trying to draw forward the Scots. As soon as the sheltrons began to advance, their clan chiefs, more from memory and dread than tactical sense, pulled them back into seething, angry lines. This stalemate continued for the entire first day, and the armies settled into their lines for the night, the English ever watchful for fear that the Scots might sneak forward and massacre the archers.
Lionel, in his tent, paced furiously. "It is no good, Simon. We must do something." Segrave shrugged. "They're Scots. Give them time, they get angry, they attack. It is what they do." He spoke patiently, tapping his gauntleted finger against his knee with each word. Lionel shook his head, glancing at where the archbishop-cardinal continued to read by the flickering light of a glass-paned lamp, a ridiculous extravagance for most men, but for a man who amounted to England's chief clerk, an absolute necessity. "My lord of Canterbury, do your Latins have no advice for this situation?"
Tuchet straightened, shifting to face the prince and frowning in concentration before answering. "When Hannibal confronted the Romans outside Cannae, he feigned a retreat with part of his army, then used his wings to crush Rome. We are told, by no less an authority than the pagan Livius, that this was the greatest victory of the classical age." Lionel's eyes lit up, and he snatched at a camp table, arranging objects so that Segrave could see. "What I wish you to do, lord constable, is take the foot... I will leave the hammer standard here... and pull back to the crest, then a little farther. I will take the horse... tonight... around the abbey at Wetheral, and will, when I receive a rider telling me that the Scots have moved, I will strike them from behind. When you see me, stop the archers and send in the men-at-arms." Segrave frowned; it seemed a complicated plan for what should be a simple straightforward brawl. Nevertheless, he was conditioned to obey the lion's brood. "Yes, my lord," he finally rumbled.
The English cavalry pulled out as quietly as they could, their lead chains and hooves muffled as they withdrew from the battlefield. They moved in a long, silenced column down the path to Wetheral Priory, Lionel at their head, dozing in his saddle. Over them loomed trees dating back farther than the Romans, concealing their movement from the Scots and leaving the Englishmen thoroughly unnerved. At dawn, Segrave did as he was ordered, the royal banner prominently absent, and a cheer roared through the Scots line. The great war drums began to sound, pushing the Scots onward, and the pipes began to skirl. It was precisely why Lionel had insisted on a rider: only a fool tried to use a trumpet when confronted with Scots. At Wetheral, the horsemen heard it begin, and circled between David and the castle at Carlisle.
On the hill northwest of Carleton, the archers, with the rising sun at their backs, began their day's deadly work from the ridgeline. The plan offered no opportunity to plant their sheaves of arrows before the fighting broke out; instead, they drew from their arrow bags. The Scots advanced down into the freezing stream, as heedless of the cold water as they had been at Bannockburn. The archers stood fast, bending and loosing in volleys every dozen heartbeats. They had started a half-mile apart, though the archers had only begun to loose at a quarter-mile, when the Scots began to cross the stream.
The archery barrage would never have worked against the French; even against Scots, the arrows were mostly spent by the time they began to rain down. They acted more like a bullfighter's barbs than as an actual threat, goading the Scots onward. The injured were more incensed than harmed, and the pipes and drums were joined by a deep, primal baying from the creekbed as the Scots began their uphill charge. The ground shook with their noise. "Here they come, lads," Segrave growled out, his voice lower than the Scots' roar. "Hold 'em. Hold 'em! HOLD 'EM!"
The archers kept up their murderous fire as long as humanly possible, their arcs flattening from a high, plunging parabola in the creek to a deadly-flat trajectory that could punch through plate if it struck plumb. The valley was shallow enough that the Scots could come charging up the hill, unlike some parts of Neville's Cross, where they fouled in bad ground. When the archers were able to pick out individual teeth, their collective line just melted - but by then, the sheltrons had disintegrated into a wild, snarling, charging mass of men and steel that collided with the English line with a ground-shaking, bone-jarring thunder. King David and the Scots horse lowered their collective visors and began to walk forward, anticipating a killing charge.
They got their wish.
As soon as the Scots horse had begun to proceed into the valley, Lionel's conroy struck them in the left flank. The line of horse was actually out of place; Lionel had hoped to hammer the Scots from behind. They slammed into the Scots conroy first, obliquely; King David, on the Scots right, was fortunately sheltered from a second ignominious capture. By the time they reached the sheltrons, they were no longer in perfect knee-to-knee killing formation, the valley having diffused them into a broad fan and their own center and right entangled in a brawling, swirling melee with the Scots horse. It did not matter; it only took one sudden check to throw the Scots first into confusion, then utter rout.
Individual heroes became collective corpses, and when one red-bearded giant in leather, targe, and cleaver roared out his challenge over a knee-high stack of English men-at-arms, the English sent forward their answer: Simon de Segrave, one of the few men who could fight in plate for hours on foot without tiring. His plate was dented, and his shield scored, from other encounters. "OUR NED AND SAINT GEORGE!" he roared, bounding forward, taking the Highlander's sword across his shield and turning it to the side. His own sword missed, but his momentum carried him forward into the red-bearded giant, who stumbled back a step and grunted before bringing his sword down in a great overhand arc.
The disadvantage of the great cleaving sword was that it required space, and its blows were signaled ahead of time. Segrave's sword was no shorter, but he was trained to use the point as well as the edge. He stepped forward, the point thrusting into the Scot's thigh and sending him lurching to the side. The shield punched forward as he pulled the sword back, slamming into the Scot's face and dazing him. The enraged giant pulled the cleaver back and up, bringing it down hilt-first, battering at the shield. Segrave hid behind it as it took blow after blow, splintering and then shattering to leave him bare-armed. Instead of striking around or over it, he thrust downward, the blade of his sword gouging and stabbing into the Scot's legs until he threw away the shield. Segrave snarled at the Scot as he finally staggered, some vital tendon cut. "Die, you goddamn ginger bastard!" After tense minutes almost body-to-body grappling with each other, he finally drove the point of the sword into the tough, plaid-swaddled abdomen of the Scots giant, a shower of red and brown following his sword as he twisted it free.
The giant mewled like a kitten, paling rapidly and dropping the cleaver as he toppled completely. A loop of intestine pressed outward from his abdominal wall, slashed and leaking its half-digested contents, the smell foul even over the charnel-house smell of the battlefield. Segrave knelt, drawing his dagger and looking the Scot in the eye as he slit his throat, gently easing his head down to the ground. "You poor, brave, stupid Scot," he murmured, taking the battered, notch-edged cleaver when he stood, suddenly weary. He looked around, seeing Lionel's royal banner at the center of the field, and a man-at-arms approaching the prince with a trampled, muddy gold and red banner, the lion coated in gritty battlefield soil and spattered with blood.
King David rolled some of the army to the southwest and away, desperately disengaging and fleeing northward, and for the second time in King Edward's reign, an English army followed into the Lowlands.
With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.