Auld Alliance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Auld Alliance was born on the 23rd of October 1295, when Scottish envoys sat down with Philip IV of France in Paris and agreed to a treaty that would bind two kingdoms for centuries. The word auld is Scots for old, and in time it became something of an affectionate term for one of the longest alliances in European history. Two nations separated by the North Sea and England found common cause in a simple principle: if either was attacked by England, the other would strike back. What followed was not just a military arrangement but a living relationship between peoples, shaping battles, royal courts, universities, architecture, and the very language spoken on Scottish streets. How did this alliance hold together across wars, reformations, and dynastic upheavals? And why, even after it was formally considered ended in 1560, did its echoes continue to reach across the Atlantic and into the eighteenth century?

• 2. The Founding Treaty

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  Edward I of England saw his opportunity in the death of Margaret, the Maid of Norway, a seven-year-old queen-designate, in 1290. Her death left Scotland in dynastic turmoil, and Edward moved swiftly to extend his authority northward. The Council of Twelve, which had taken temporary control of Scotland's government, concluded that they needed allies elsewhere in Europe. France was a natural candidate: Philip IV had declared England's possession of Gascony forfeit in 1294, pushing the two kingdoms toward war. That alignment of enemies made a Franco-Scottish pact logical for both sides.

  The terms of the Treaty of Paris were blunt about who bore the greater burden. France was required only to continue fighting England in Gascony. Scotland would absorb the full cost of any war with England that the treaty provoked. Scotland also entered the agreement as what the source describes as a remote and impoverished kingdom allying itself to a major European power. Even symbolic benefits mattered greatly to Scotland in that position.

  The alliance was tested almost immediately and found wanting. Edward's invasion of Scotland in 1296 was swift and devastating, effectively erasing Scottish independence in the short term. Then a cessation of hostilities between England and France in 1299, sealed with a treaty of perpetual peace and friendship, freed Edward to turn his full attention and forces against the Scots alone. Scotland's survival, when it came, owed more to the military skill of Robert the Bruce and the blunders of Edward II than to any French sword. In 1326, Robert the Bruce sent Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray, to France to renew the alliance with the Treaty of Corbeil, a renewal that was at that moment precautionary rather than urgent.

• 3. The Hundred Years War

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  After 1332, when Edward III moved to conquer Scotland while reasserting power in France, the Franco-Scottish alliance acquired what the source calls a sense of emergency. Philip sent a flotilla of ten ships to Scotland in the winter of 1332, but a storm blew them off course and they never arrived. In the spring of 1334, one thousand pounds reached Scotland for its defenders, and young David II, his queen, and a large retinue including the Douglas children and the late regent's sons were given sanctuary in France and installed at Chateau Gaillard. France also paid an annual pension of two thousand pounds for the upkeep of David's court in exile, and when peace talks were proposed in 1334, Philip IV's insistence that the Scots be included caused Edward to break off negotiations entirely.

  In June 1339, Arnoul d'Audrehen arrived in Scotland commanding two hundred French troops, aiding in the capture of Perth. Then in June and July 1346, Philip of France wrote desperate letters to David II begging him to attack England and draw off a looming English offensive. David went ahead with a chevauchee into the north of England even after Edward crushed the French at the Battle of Crecy in August, possibly believing the attack would repay Scotland's considerable debt to France for years of aid. The English raised an effective defence even in Edward's absence, and David II was captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross.

  In March 1355, John II of France sent Sire Eugene de Garencieres to lead sixty knights and their retinues, roughly two hundred men, to join the Scots. The Scots refused to move until they received the promised payment of forty thousand mouton d'or, which was then distributed to their chief leaders. What followed included an ambush near Norham Castle, where Sir William Ramsay lured English defenders out by driving away their cattle before leading them into a trap set by William, Lord of Douglas and the French. The chronicler Thomas Grey was taken prisoner and held for a substantial ransom. The French force eventually returned home.

  Between 1419 and 1424, as many as fifteen thousand Scottish troops were sent to France at the desperate request of the Dauphin Charles VII, who faced the prospect of France surrendering to Henry V. Scottish and French forces won together at the Battle of Baugé in 1421, a turning point in the Hundred Years War. The Scots army was then defeated at Verneuil in 1424, but that breathing space had been enough to preserve French power. In 1429, Scots came to the aid of Joan of Arc during the relief of Orleans, and Scottish soldiers served in the Garde Ecossaise, the personal bodyguard of the French crown. Through the rest of the fifteenth century, the alliance was formally renewed four more times before France's eventual victory in the war.

• 4. Proxy War in England

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  England's defeat in the Hundred Years War left it weakened, and an internal civil conflict, the Wars of the Roses, weakened it further. In 1460, James II of Scotland attempted to retake Roxburgh and Berwick Castle. The siege took Roxburgh, but James II died at twenty-nine when a Scottish cannon exploded next to him. While regents governed until James III came of age, Margaret of Anjou made a deal in 1461, giving Berwick to Scotland in return for Scottish support of the Lancastrian cause. Scotland agreed, and the alliance contributed to victory at the Battle of Wakefield, which brought the death of Richard of York. Margaret of Anjou made a parallel arrangement with France the same year, giving Jersey in exchange for Lancastrian support.

  The logic driving this unusual alignment was strategic. The Yorkists had sided with Burgundy, and a Yorkist England meant a revived English threat against France through Burgundy. Neither France nor Scotland wanted to fight again so soon after the Hundred Years War, so they backed the Lancastrians as a kind of proxy. The plan collapsed when the Yorkists ultimately won and recovered Jersey from France in 1468 and Berwick from Scotland in 1482. Henry Tudor, who had been in exile in Brittany and then France, gained both French and Scottish backing before landing in Wales and defeating the Yorkist Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry VII then gave his eldest daughter Margaret Tudor in marriage to James IV of Scotland and his younger daughter Mary Tudor to Louis XII of France, maintaining peace with the Franco-Scottish alliance as the sixteenth century opened. Margaret Tudor's lineage would eventually produce the joint ruler of both Scotland and England, King James VI and I, forty-three years after the Auld Alliance was abolished.

• 5. Reformation and Collapse

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  The alliance underwent a dramatic revival when it was formally reviewed in 1512 and again in 1517 and 1548. Scotland still bore the wounds of Flodden in 1513, where James IV and most of his nobles died. The most consequential revival came in 1558, when the alliance was revived through the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots to the future Francis II of France. It lasted only until 1560, when Francis died prematurely.

  The Scottish Reformation of 1560 destroyed what Flodden had merely wounded. The Catholic French Regent Mary of Guise was supported by French troops, but the Protestant Lords of the Congregation rejected the Auld Alliance entirely and brokered English military support through their own treaty of Berwick. At the Scottish Reformation Parliament, Scotland was declared a Protestant nation and aligned itself with Protestant England. The Treaty of Edinburgh formally ended ties between Scotland and France. Mary, Queen of Scots, remained reluctant to ratify the treaty.

  Two hundred Scottish soldiers were still sent to Normandy in 1562 to aid French Huguenots in their struggle against royal authority, an echo of older commitments. After Mary's exile to England in 1568, James VI, heir to the English throne, sought close ties with England instead. England's complete withdrawal from the French mainland after losing Calais removed the geographic basis for the old arrangement, and the alliance had outlived its purpose. British historian Siobhan Talbott, after extensive research, concluded that the Auld Alliance had never been formally revoked, and that it endured and even thrived long after the Acts of Union in 1707 and the Entente Cordiale of 1904.

• 6. Cultural and Lasting Roots

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  Architecture, law, language, and cuisine all carry traces of the centuries-long Scottish-French relationship. Scottish castles built with French construction in mind include Bothwell and Kildrummy. Many Scots studied at French universities, a practice that continued until the Napoleonic Wars. David de Moravia, the fourteenth-century Bishop of Moray, helped found the Scots College of the University of Paris in 1333. Among those who studied or taught at French universities were the poets John Barbour and George Buchanan, the historian Hector Boece, Henry Wardlaw who founded St Andrews University, William Elphinstone who founded Aberdeen University, George Mackenzie who founded the Advocates Library, and the translator of Rabelais, Sir Thomas Urquhart.

  France also granted privileges to Scottish vintners. Reciprocal dual nationality agreements existed between the two kingdoms, and Scottish soldiers who went to France could receive lands and titles there. Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many who went chose to stay, becoming naturalised French subjects.

  The Garde Ecossaise, founded in 1418 as the loyal bodyguard of the French crown, continued protecting French kings for four hundred and twelve years, until Charles X of France abdicated in 1830. Some Jacobite exiles in the New World, descendants of those who clung to the old Stuart Catholic cause after Culloden in 1746, aided France in the Seven Years' War and even sided with the Patriots in the American War of Independence. In Edinburgh in June 1942, Charles de Gaulle declared the alliance between Scotland and France to be the oldest alliance in the world, and said that in every combat where for five centuries the destiny of France was at stake, there were always men of Scotland to fight side by side with men of France. In 1995, both countries held celebrations marking the seven hundredth anniversary of the treaty signed in Paris in 1295. Today the Auld Alliance Trophy is contested when Scotland and France meet in the Six Nations Championship, rugby union's annual tournament among England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Italy.