The 1328 settlement in which the English crown recognised Robert the Bruce as king and Scotland as an independent realm, sealed at Holyrood in March and ratified at Northampton in May.
The treaty concluded thirty-two years of war that had begun when Edward I invaded Scotland in 1296. In two documents — one sealed by Robert I at Edinburgh in March 1328, the other ratified by the English parliament at Northampton in May — the English crown abandoned every claim to overlordship and acknowledged Scotland as a separate kingdom under Bruce and his heirs.
It was the greatest diplomatic achievement of Bruce's reign and it did not outlive him by four years. What made it possible was not Scottish strength alone but English weakness: the government that signed it was a regency ruling in the name of a fifteen-year-old king, and it had neither the money nor the authority to continue the war.
Bruce had won the decisive victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, but victory in the field had not produced recognition. The Scots pressed the case diplomatically — the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 put it to the pope in the sharpest terms — and militarily, raiding northern England repeatedly and carrying the war into Ireland.
The English position collapsed in 1327. Edward II was deposed in January and murdered later that year, and the regime of his queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer took power for the boy Edward III. That summer a large English army marched north on the Weardale campaign and was outmanoeuvred completely by Scottish raiders under James Douglas, who at one point nearly seized the young king in his own camp. The English force came home having achieved nothing and having bankrupted the new government, which then had to treat.
Robert I sealed the treaty in the King's Chamber at Holyrood Abbey, Edinburgh, on 17 March 1328, and the English parliament ratified it at Northampton on 1 May. The English crown renounced all claim to overlordship and declared that Scotland should belong to Robert "by God's grace illustrious King of Scotland, separate in all things from the kingdom of England, whole, free, and undisturbed in perpetuity".
The border was to run as it had in the time of Alexander III, restoring the line as it stood before the wars. Scotland undertook to pay £20,000 sterling — framed as reparation for damage done in the raids — and each side promised military assistance to the other, with an exception for Scotland's alliance with France.
The settlement was sealed dynastically. Bruce's heir David, born on 5 March 1324, was married to Joan of the Tower, sister of Edward III, at Berwick on 17 July 1328. He was four years old and she was seven, and a penalty of £100,000 was attached to the failure of the match.
Neither monarch attended in person. Edward III stayed away, an early public sign of how little he regarded a treaty concluded in his name; Isabella and Mortimer, who had negotiated it, were there instead. Joan was afterwards known in Scotland, unkindly, as Joan Makepeace.
English opinion condemned the treaty almost at once as turpis pax, the shameful peace, and the blame attached to Isabella and Mortimer personally — it was among the charges against Mortimer when Edward III overthrew and executed him in 1330.
The practical grievance was narrower and more dangerous than wounded pride. The treaty left unresolved the claims of the Disinherited, the nobles who had held lands in Scotland and lost them by forfeiture for supporting the English side. They were not restored, and they remained a body of men with a legal claim, military experience and nothing to lose, which is precisely the constituency that reopened the war.
Robert the Bruce died on 7 June 1329, leaving a five-year-old king. David II was crowned at Scone on 24 November 1331, the first Scottish monarch to be anointed as well as enthroned — a papal concession Bruce had worked for.
Within a year the Disinherited invaded under Edward Balliol, son of the deposed King John, and destroyed a far larger Scottish army at the Battle of Dupplin Moor on 12 August 1332. Edward III, now ruling in his own right and treating the treaty as void because it had been made during his minority, intervened openly and won the Battle of Halidon Hill in July 1333. David II was sent to France for safety, and the Anglo-Scottish war ran on until the Treaty of Berwick in 1357.