The Great Cause and the Conquest of Scotland, 1290-1296

A Throne Without an Heir

In March 1286 the Scottish king Alexander III rode home through a stormy night to his new young queen at Kinghorn in Fife. His horse stumbled in the dark; he was thrown from a cliff and killed. With Alexander dead, all his children dead before him, Scotland was left without an adult heir. The throne passed to his three-year-old granddaughter, the ‘Maid of Norway’, Margaret — daughter of his daughter Margaret and Eric II of Norway. A council of six Scottish ‘Guardians’ took over the daily government and looked for a long-term solution.

The Treaty of Birgham, 1290

In July 1290 the Treaty of Birgham agreed that the Maid of Norway would marry Edward I’s six-year-old heir, Edward of Caernarfon. The treaty insisted that Scotland would remain ‘separate and divided’ from England, with its own laws, courts and customs — the two kingdoms united only in the persons of the future king and queen. The arrangement promised a peaceful merger of the two crowns. Then came catastrophe. In late September 1290 the seven-year-old Maid sickened and died in Orkney before reaching the Scottish mainland. The proposed marriage was over; the throne stood vacant.

The Great Cause, 1291–92

Thirteen claimants came forward for the empty throne. The two strongest were John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, descended through the elder daughter of Earl David of Huntingdon, and Robert Bruce the Competitor (grandfather of the future Robert I), descended through the younger daughter but a generation closer. Civil war between their factions looked likely. The Guardians invited Edward I to arbitrate. Edward agreed — on the condition that the candidates first acknowledge him as overlord of Scotland.

In May 1291, on a meadow outside Norham on the English bank of the Tweed, the candidates and the Guardians swore that Edward was ‘Lord Paramount’ of Scotland. The hearings then opened. Over eighteen months — what Scottish writers later called the Great Cause — English and Scottish lawyers heard the rival claims. On 17 November 1292 Edward gave judgement at Berwick: the throne went to John Balliol. The decision was good law — primogeniture through the elder line — but the price was Scottish acceptance of an English overlord with a foot inside the kingdom.

Balliol’s Brief Reign, 1292–96

John Balliol was crowned at Scone on 30 November 1292. His reign lasted less than four years and was disastrous. Edward repeatedly humiliated him — allowing Scottish appellants to bring lawsuits against the king of Scots in the English court at Westminster, treating Balliol as just another vassal. In 1294 Edward summoned Balliol with a feudal demand for Scottish troops to fight in his French war. The Scottish nobles refused. In July 1295 they appointed a council of twelve to govern in Balliol’s name, and in October they sealed the auld alliance with Philip IV of France — the first formal treaty between Scotland and France. From an English perspective this was open rebellion.

The Sack of Berwick, March 1296

Edward responded with overwhelming force. In late March 1296 his army crossed the Tweed and besieged Berwick-upon-Tweed, then Scotland’s richest port and a major centre of Flemish trade. The town’s defences were poor and on 30 March Edward stormed it. What followed was a deliberate massacre. English chroniclers admitted that the slaughter went on for two days; some Scottish accounts put the dead at 7,000 men, women and children. The Flemish merchants of the Red Hall fought to the last and were burned alive when the building collapsed. Berwick’s prosperity was destroyed; the town would never again be the trading capital of Scotland.

Dunbar and the Deposition of Balliol

A Scottish army moved to relieve the border. On 27 April 1296 Edward’s cavalry crushed it at the Battle of Dunbar; the Scottish leadership surrendered en masse. Edward marched north almost without resistance. At Montrose on 8 July 1296 he ritually stripped Balliol of his royal regalia — the empty surcoat earned him the nickname Toom Tabard, ‘empty coat’. Balliol was sent to the Tower of London. Edward took the great seal of Scotland, broke it into four pieces, and sent the symbols of Scottish kingship south — including the Stone of Scone, the ancient inauguration stone of Scottish kings.

By August 1296 Edward had returned south claiming Scotland as a conquered territory. He left an English administration in place under John Warenne, Earl of Surrey. To Edward, the kingdom of Scotland had ceased to exist; it was now simply a province of his realm. To Scots, he had carried out a hostile occupation. The seeds of the long war had been sown.