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Scotland - War With England
Margaret's death (1290) left the Scottish throne with no clear successor, and Edward became the arbitrator between the various claimants to the crown.
He immediately stated that any claimant to the throne would have to acknowledge him as overlord.
With a bevy of claimants, it was not difficult to find a plausible one who would accept this condition: Edward selected him, and John Balliol became king (17 November 1292).
Balliol soon tried to back out of the arrangement, largely because Edward put considerable ingenuity into ways of
emphasising his alleged position as the Scottish king's formal overlord.
In 1295 John renounced his allegiance and entered into an alliance with France. This renewed the Auld Alliance first arranged by William the Lion.
Edward invaded Scotland in 1296 and swiftly brought Balliol to heel, moving to establish full English control over Scotland.
In this environment William Wallace raised parts of Scotland into rebellion. Wallace's army defeated the English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and for a short time Wallace ruled Scotland in the name of John Balliol.
Edward retaliated in 1298 and defeated Wallace, who escaped but lost control of Scotland to John Comyn and Robert the Bruce, the latter the grandson of a failed claimant to the throne during Edward's arbitration in 1292.
In 1304, English troops forced all Scottish notables into giving homage to Edward. Wallace, betrayed, fell into the hands of the English, who executed him (1305).
From this low point, the Scots regained and re-inforced their independence from England during the first two decades of the 14th century.
Robert the Bruce quarrelled with John Comyn for unknown reasons in 1306 and stabbed him to death. Facing murder charges in England, he opted for rebellion.
He had himself crowned as King in 1307, and his forces soon overran the country. By 1314 the English held only Bothwell and Stirling.
Edward I had died in 1307, and his heir Edward II moved an army north to try once again to end Scottish intransigence.
Robert defeated that army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, securing de facto independence.
In 1320 an appeal to the Pope from the nobles of Scotland (the Declaration of Arbroath) then nullified the various acts of submission by Scottish kings to English ones.
In 1326, the first full Scottish Parliament met. The parliament had evolved from an earlier council of nobility and clergy, the colloquium, constituted around 1235, but in 1326 representatives of the burghs — the burgh commissioners — joined them to form the Three Estates.
In 1328, Edward III signed the Treaty of Northampton acknowledging Scottish independence under the rule of Robert the Bruce.
After Robert's death in 1329, however, England once more invaded on the pretext of restoring the "Rightful King" — Edward Balliol, son of John Balliol — to the Scottish throne, thus starting the Second War of Independence.
In the absence of a leader with the military competence of Wallace or of The Bruce, Scotland remained under English control, directly or indirectly, for over thirty years, and only fully regained its independence under David II after Balliol's death, mainly because Edward III's attention had by then turned to France and to the Hundred Years War.
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