The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (14 page)

Edward Bruce landed at Olderfleet, now Larne, in County Antrim, on 26 May 1315. The English lords of the country seem to have been less well-informed than Roger, and were taken wholly by surprise. The native Irish were not much better prepared, despite being sounded out by Bruce in advance. But the change in the weather played into Edward Bruce’s hands. Arriving while the torrential rains of 1315 were threatening to wipe out the harvest, he was able to convince the native lords to adopt a radical solution to their plight. He carried with him copies of a letter from his brother Robert, addressed ‘to all the kings of Ireland, to the prelates and clergy, and to the inhabitants of all Ireland, his friends’:

… [since] our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent over to you our beloved kinsmen, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God’s will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty.
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Robert Bruce hoped the Irish would help his brother win a kingdom but this was not his sole aim, or even his primary one. His real intention was to spread the frontier on which the English had to defend themselves, thus lessening the chances of Edward sending an army to seek revenge for Bannockburn. The native Irish for their part saw the Scots offering themselves as military assistants in their struggles, precisely at a time when many clans were having difficulty finding enough to eat, and several of them gladly gave Edward Bruce their support.

Edward Bruce had come with no mean force of men. With him were the renowned Sir Thomas Randolph, conqueror of Edinburgh Castle, Sir John de Soulis, Sir John de Stewart, Sir Fergus d’Ardrossan and the shrewd Sir Philip de Mowbray, constable of Stirling, now a fully fledged Scottish patriot. They were joined by Donnell O’Neill, king of Tir Eoghain, and lords O’Cahan, O’Hanlon, MacGilmurry, MacCartan and O’Hagan. The Earl of Ulster was at this time in Connacht, too far away to organise any resistance, and those Ulster lords who decided against immediately joining the Scots made little or no immediate attempt to resist them. A few Irish lords, unhappy with O’Neill’s confederacy, and suspecting that the Scots would impose taxation and tribute of their own, decided to resist. They gathered at the Moyry pass, but were crushed by the Scots army as Edward
Bruce and his fellow lords set about their first object: the subjugation of the land nearest Scotland.

On 29 June 1315 Edward Bruce came to Dundalk. Until now he had wooed and coerced the local Irish into helping him, and had divided them amongst themselves so that he could more easily defeat them in battle. As he and his advisers knew well, the only way the Scots would conquer Ireland completely would be if they gained the support of the Irish lords. But now at Dundalk he employed another tactic: terror. The Anglo-Irish gathered in the town had slept poorly the night before the battle, with Bruce encamped at their gates. The following morning, scouts were sent out to assess the size of Bruce’s army. ‘They are nothing; they’re half-a-dinner,’ they reported, and the townsfolk armed and sent forth their men. The battle, however, was hard, and victory was in doubt until the Scots forced the men of Dundalk back into the town. The Irish lords fighting alongside them fled, leaving the Dundalk men to be slaughtered. The mud of the streets turned red with blood. The Scots started looting and killing indiscriminately. They found large stores of wine, and the soldiers went on a continuous drunken rampage, and their lords let them, until the town was destroyed and most of its men and a great number of its women and children had been hacked to death. It was a message to all other undecided Irishmen: turn to Bruce, or the fate which befell the people of Dundalk will also befall you.

Roger was probably at Trim when news of the massacre at Dundalk reached him. It did not spur him to join the army the Justiciar had raised, which met at Greencastle. Nor does it seem that he joined the separate army of the Earl of Ulster, who had summoned the men of Connacht and the vassals of the powerful Irish lord, Felim O’Connor. This is possibly due to a parliament which may have been held at Kilkenny in early July.
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Either way, it seems that it was agreed that Roger’s forces would act as a rearguard, ready to supply reinforcements if necessary. The earl’s army marched through the north of Meath to Athlone, and then north, meeting up with the Justiciar’s army just south of Ardee on 22 July. After a few skirmishes, in which they forced Bruce to withdraw, it was agreed that the earl would proceed alone against the Scots. The Justiciar’s army returned south, as food supplies were short, and apparently a second army was no longer needed. The earl marched north to Coleraine, but Edward Bruce retreated across the deep and fast-flowing River Bann, and destroyed the bridge over it, making a full confrontation between the two armies impossible. Minor skirmishing continued, and the two sides left the country either side of the river devastated. ‘Both armies left neither wood nor plain, nor field nor corn crop, nor residence, nor barn, nor church, without burning
and wholly destroying’, as one chronicler put it.
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Together with the rain, the devastation was terrible. All that was not sodden or rotten already was burnt.

Edward Bruce was not a great strategist, but he did have men with him who were, and he and his advisers saw a way to break up the army massed against them on the other side of the river. To Felim O’Connor Edward Bruce secretly offered the lordship of all Connacht if he would desert the earl. To Felim’s rival, Rory O’Connor, who came to him separately, he promised assistance in his own war over Connacht, as long as he protected Felim’s land. Rory, an old rival of Felim’s, then returned to Connacht and ransacked and burnt all the principal towns in the region, including Felim’s estates. Felim left the earl to return to Connacht to defend his territory, was defeated by Rory, and forced to accept his overlordship. Without having to fight at all Edward Bruce had destroyed most of Connacht, killed hundreds of its men, and had drastically reduced the army at the disposal of the Earl of Ulster on the other side of the Bann.

At this point questions were being raised in England about the loyalty of the Irish. On 10 July Edward had written to all the Irish lords, including Roger and a number of the Mortimer tenants in Ireland, asking for a confirmation of their loyalty to the English Crown. This was probably discussed in common among the lords in the Justiciar’s army, for many of the extant answers, all of which protest loyalty, are couched in similar language.
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Also it is noticeable that none of the replies is from Roger’s knights, and Roger himself sent no reply to the king. This may well signify that he personally took responsibility for the loyalty of his men, showing a great confidence in them.

On 1 September Parliament met at Lincoln and decided to send John de Hothum to Ireland, to keep the king informed about events there. But before he even set out things turned disastrously for the worse. On 10 September the Earl of Ulster and Edward Bruce met in battle at Connor. It seems that, as at Bannockburn, the earl had not expected to be attacked, and that in fact he was retreating to join Felim O’Connor; but the Scots gave chase to the earl’s army, and forced the battle. For the earl it was a disaster. His cousin, William de Burgh, was captured, as were several other lords and heirs, and his army fled to Carrickfergus Castle, where the pursuing Scots immediately set about besieging them. The earl himself slipped away from the battle, joining Felim O’Connor in Connacht, while the remaining English accused him of betrayal behind his back. He was, after all, father-in-law to Robert Bruce. He had not only lost his position as a leader of men, he was suspected of treason.

Roger, along with the other nobles in Ireland, was summoned to a
parliament to meet at Dublin at the end of October. Its purpose was for John de Hothum to coordinate resistance. But the Scottish naval captain, Thomas Dun, maintaining his sway on the high seas, prevented de Hothum setting sail in time, and he did not arrive until 5 November. By then Roger and his fellow lords had left Dublin and abandoned the parliament. There was no time to discuss strategy: almost every town in Connacht was ablaze and under destruction from warring Irish tribes and Scottish plunderers. It was only a matter of time before the destruction came over the border to Meath.

It is not entirely clear what happened over the next month. No chronicler followed Roger as he organised his men on the north border of Meath. The most detailed account of the Scottish campaign, written by a Scottish clergyman back in Scotland several decades later, probably confuses parts of the forthcoming onslaught with the earlier Battle of Connor, at which the Earl of Ulster was defeated. What we do know for certain is that on or about 13 November Thomas Randolph returned from a short visit to Scotland with five hundred fresh, experienced soldiers, and that he and Edward Bruce then began to march south from Carrickfergus, leaving a besieging party there. Cautious about advancing straight into Roger’s territory of Meath, they left a reserve contingent at Nobber, about ten miles north-east of Kells. On 30 November they crossed the River Dee and headed for the River Blackwater.

A week later the two armies met at the town of Kells. Roger had stocked the castle, removed the cattle from the outlying districts, and had placed the gates and walls of the town in a readily defensible state. This was not a preparation for a siege, but to sustain him in the field, for it appears that it was Roger’s choice to fight here, on the north border of Meath, to try to keep the Scots away from his own lands. Details are very scanty, but it seems that, in order to bring the Scots to where he wanted them, he sent two of his vassals, Hugh and Walter de Lacy, to lure Bruce towards Kells.
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Their bait may have been the loyalty of Lord O’Dempsey, an Irish king from Offaly, who had supposedly decided to swear fealty to the Bruce.
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As both sides knew, such promises were Bruce’s only hope of subjugating Ireland. And so he came.

Given that Edward Bruce had left reinforcements at Nobber, on the main road south to Navan, he may have originally planned to bypass Kells altogether. But in the event he came straight to Roger’s army. The outcome was a catastrophe. The Scots began to burn the town. The one chronicler to describe the battle (the annalist of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin) attributes the defeat to treachery on the part of Hugh and Walter de Lacy, who had deserted Roger ‘at the third hour’. This could mean at the third hour of
the battle, or the third hour of the day, i.e. about 9 a.m. It is possible they feigned withdrawal from the battlefield, for the chronicler states they ‘turned their shields’, perhaps implying that they trapped Roger’s army between them and the Scots.
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But this is unlikely, given that several of Roger’s leading vassals later acquitted the de Lacy brothers of directly dealing with the Scots, and these vassals would have been unlikely to support them if they had turned against them on the battlefield.
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A more likely suggestion is that the de Lacys simply fled after three hours of battle, leaving Roger to fight on against a greater force.
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Whatever the cause, Roger was soon in a desperate situation. The chronicler goes on to add that ‘Roger alone with a few others’ survived the battle. It is likely that he withdrew into the town, which was burnt around him, and that he was forced to fight his way out through the Scots, who, to judge from their past strategies, would have held the town gates. For a handful of experienced fighting knights in full armour and on horseback, such a bold manoeuvre was dangerous but well within their capabilities. The end result was that Roger broke free from the carnage at Kells with a handful of knights, and rode towards Dublin. But his army was utterly destroyed, Kells was burnt, and Meath was now, like all Ireland, open to the Scots invaders.

In Dublin Roger met John de Hothum. It was decided that Roger should return to England to report on the recent calamities. The country was all but lost. Only a few castles remained in English hands. English government in Ireland was in tatters. At Christmas 1315, Robert and Edward Bruce could fairly say that they had wrested overlordship of more than one third of the British Isles from the King of England within two years. But while English rule had been obliterated in Scotland, Ireland was not yet wholly defeated; and there were many, like Roger Mortimer, who were determined that the fight should go on.

FIVE

The King’s Lieutenant

THE RAINS CONTINUED
. The harvest of 1314, which should have been taken in by the men who had fought at Bannockburn, was crushed by the appalling weather and rotted black in the fields. The following year was even worse. Animals collapsed and died, and their sodden bodies were to be seen decomposing in the wide stretches of water which had once been lowland meadows. Prices of corn and other foodstuffs in the markets rose alarmingly, and all the chroniclers speak of a terrible famine spreading across England, Wales and Ireland. Society was ill equipped to deal with two harvest failures in a row. It had no means of organising relief for large numbers of people facing starvation. On the political side, it had no means of raising the revenue required to equip itself militarily in a time of dearth. The way of raising revenue for war – a direct taxation of a tenth, fifteenth or twentieth, levied on possessions – was designed to pay wages of soldiers and to buy supplies, not to alleviate suffering, and the families of men required to do the fighting suffered all the more if their menfolk were taken away from their villages. The king could only order that it was illegal to charge more than a certain amount for corn. The result was that people did not sell the corn they had, or sold it furtively. People began to die of starvation. Lords found they had to buy imported grain at high prices, whereas before it had simply been grown and threshed for them on their manors. Providing supplies for garrisons of castles became extremely difficult. At the same time the trade in wool collapsed. Many townsmen lost their livelihoods, and towns lost their revenue from customs and tolls. The terrible economic depression, which over the next five years would reduce the population of England by more than a tenth, had begun.