War with England

Margaret's death (1290) now 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 large number 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 and Andrew de Moray raised southern and northern Scotland into rebellion and were elected as Guardians of Scotland by the nobility in Balliol's absence. Under their joint leadership the English army was defeated at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Moray died of his wounds two months later. For a short time Wallace ruled Scotland in the name of John Balliol.

Edward retaliated and defeated Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk (1298). Wallace escaped but resigned as Guardian of Scotland. John Comyn and Robert the Bruce were appointed in his place, 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 but secret pacts were made by Bruce and others to continue the struggle once conditions were ripe. Wallace was betrayed and fell into the hands of the English, who executed him in 1305 for treason despite the fact that he owed no allegiance to England.

From this low point, the Scots regained and reinforced their independence from England during the first two decades of the 14th century. Robert the Bruce believed that John Comyn had betrayed a secret pact between them and participated in his murder during a private meeting in a church in Dumfries in 1306. Bruce subsequently was crowned as King in 1307, but Edward's forces again soon overran the country after defeating Bruce's small army at the Battle of Methven. Despite the excommunication of Bruce and his followers by Pope Clement V, support for Bruce slowly strengthened and by 1314 with the help of leading nobles such as Sir James Douglas and the Earl of Moray only the castles at Bothwell and Stirling remained under English control. Edward I had died in 1307, and his heir Edward II moved an army north to break the siege of Stirling Castle and reassert control. Robert defeated that army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, securing de facto independence. In 1320 a remonstrance to the Pope from the nobles of Scotland (the Declaration of Arbroath) finally convinced Pope John XXII to overturn the earlier excommunication and nullify the various acts of submission by Scottish kings to English ones so that Scotland's sovereignty could be recognised by the major European dynasties.

In 1326, the first full Parliament of Scotland 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.