Scotland under her early kings, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Eben William Robertson

The Scottish Church was to acknowledge the subjection due to the English Church; and the English Church was to possess all those rights over the Scottish Church to which the former was justly entitled.

For the strict observance of this convention, the castles of Berwick, Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling, were to be made over to Henry, and to receive English garrisons, all expenses being defrayed by the Scottish king; David, and twenty-one of the earls and barons of Scotland, were to remain as hostages until the delivery of the castles; while each of these noblemen was further required to give up his son, or his next heir, as a pledge for the due performance of his part of the treaty after his own release. Three days after the conclusion of the convention of Falaise, William was allowed to leave his Norman prison, and proceed, in the first instance, to England; where he was to remain, in a state of comparative freedom, until the castles already mentioned were delivered over to the officers of the English king.[415]

The conduct of Henry upon this occasion has been characterised by his advocates as generous and lenient; whilst it has been stigmatised by his opponents as harsh and illiberal. Neither view appears to be correct. When William, conceiving himself to have been aggrieved, united in a confederacy which, if successful, would have probably confined Henry within the walls of a monastery for the remainder of his life, the Scottish king was fully prepared to profit to the utmost at the expense of his enemy’s weakness; and Henry did no more with the captive of Falaise than William would have done had their positions been reversed. But to maintain, as it has been sometimes asserted, that he might have put his prisoner to death, is to argue with a total disregard of the principles and sentiments of an age in which the death of an independent prince, like William, would have been even more revolting to the feelings of his contemporaries, than the public scourging of Henry in Canterbury Cathedral would be unsuitable to the ideas of the present time. In depriving his captive of his English fiefs, which were justly forfeited, and in extorting liege homage for Scotland, Henry displayed neither mercy nor leniency, simply availing himself, to the utmost, of an opportunity for advancing his own interests at the expense of his unfortunate rival; and his conduct was that of an able and unsparing politician, exacting his own terms from a fallen foe. As such, it must be judged; and, as such, it is far less open to censure, than his repudiation in prosperity of the promises which he made in his adversity to his earliest and most faithful ally.

A. D. 1175.

In the course of the summer after the release of William, both the English kings, who now affected the closest intimacy and regard, repaired in company to York: and here, upon the 10th of August, they were met by the king of Scotland, bringing with him Earl David, no longer lord of Huntingdon, with the bishops, abbots, earls, barons, knights, and other freeholders of Scotland, who united with their king in swearing fealty to the two Henries, and in ratifying the convention of Falaise. All became the liegemen of the English kings in the Cathedral church of St. Peter—a fabric of an earlier date than the present noble minster—and yet further to secure the exact fulfilment of the treaty, the clergy swore to lay their native land under an interdict, and the laity pledged themselves to hold, as true men, to their English suzerains, if ever William of Scotland proved unfaithful to his oath.[416]

For fifteen years the convention of Falaise remained in full force, and every action of Henry, down to the day of his death, exhibits the tenacity with which he clung to its scrupulous fulfilment. Not a papal legate was allowed to enter Scotland who had not first sworn to do nothing detrimental to the interests of the English king, with an additional promise to return through England—a proviso that precluded the possibility of evasion—whilst a similar pledge was exacted from all the Scottish clergy who attended the eleventh Council at the Lateran. William was continually summoned to attend, as a vassal, at the Court of his English lord; and he brought his earls and barons, when required, to assist at the councils of their common superior. He crossed the sea to Normandy, at the command of Henry, to submit to that king’s decision in his dispute about the bishopric of St. Andrews; license was granted for his expeditions into Galloway; and he conducted the lords of that province to perform fealty to Henry, or to promise to abide by the decrees of the English court. In short, a comparison between the usual state of Scotland, and her condition during these fifteen years of real feudal subjection, affords one of the clearest and most convincing proofs of her entire freedom from all dependance upon her southern neighbour, at every other period of her history, before the reign of the first Edward.

The oaths of fealty and allegiance tendered in the church of St. Peter riveted upon Scotland the yoke of feudal dependance; but her Church was destined to vindicate with success her ecclesiastical liberties, and to evade the claims of the English metropolitans, which a special clause in the convention of Falaise had, to all appearance, triumphantly established. The contest which embittered the whole of the reign of Alexander, seems to have slumbered in the days of David, to break out afresh in the time of his eldest grandson, Malcolm, when the papal chair was occupied by Nicolas Breakespear, under the title of Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever rose to be the head of the Church of Rome.[417] His partiality to the land of his nativity was frequently manifested, and availing himself of the papal claim to dominion over all the islands, founded upon the imaginary Donation of Constantine, he willingly lent himself to the ambitious policy of Henry, authorising that king to conquer, and exact obedience from, the people of Ireland for the advancement of the interests of the Roman Church.[418] It is also probable that Adrian was inclined to favour the pretensions of the English metropolitans to the obedience of the Scottish bishops; for, immediately upon his death, a mission was dispatched to the next pope, A. D. 1159. and the successive appointments of the bishops of Moray and St. Andrews to the office of papal legate for Scotland guaranteed, for the time, the independence of the Scottish Church.[419]

Upon the death of the bishop of St. Andrews, Roger, archbishop of York—the same prelate who was the rival and opponent of Becket—obtained the office of legate for England, A. D. 1163.and repaired to Norham towards the close of Malcolm’s reign, to summon the Scottish bishops to submit to his pretensions. Ingelram the archdeacon, and Solomon the dean of Glasgow, with Walter, prior of Kelso, were deputed to maintain the liberties of their Church; both parties appealed to Rome, and the Scots achieved a notable triumph when Ingelram was consecrated to the bishopric of Glasgow in spite of the opposition of the archbishop.[420]

The dispute again languished until the concessions recently extorted from William appeared to deal a death-blow to all the liberties of Scotland. A. D. 1176. A great council was held at Northampton in the January after the meeting at York, at which, in obedience to a summons from his suzerain, William was in attendance with the bishops, abbots, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries of his kingdom, as liege subjects of the English king; and at the conclusion of the council the Scottish clergy were commanded, upon their allegiance, and in virtue of the oath which they had already sworn, to acknowledge their dependance upon the English Church. They denied that any such submission was due; and in reply to the assertion of the archbishop of York that the bishops of Glasgow and Galloway were rightfully his suffragans, Jocelyn of Glasgow, the spokesman of the Scottish party, affirmed that his see was “the daughter of Rome,” and consequently independent of all other authority.[421]

But the cause of the Scottish bishops was best served by the disputes of the English metropolitans, as the archbishop of Canterbury opposed the pretensions of his own see to the rival claims of York; and Henry, foreseeing that he would be called upon to decide between the archbishops, and dreading the very idea of another collision with a churchman, hastily dismissed the Scottish clergy without exacting from them any admission of canonical dependance upon either see.[422] Upon their return to Scotland a deputation immediately set out for Rome,[423] and in the course of the same year an injunction was obtained from the pope forbidding the archbishop of York to press his claims except before the Roman Court:[424] and twelve years later the dispute was finally set at rest by the declaration of Pope Clement III., that the Church of Scotland was in immediate dependance upon the see of Rome.[425]