Guardian of Scotland for the exiled boy king David II, who drove Edward Balliol out of the kingdom in his nightclothes in December 1332 and was killed seven months later attacking uphill into English archery at Halidon Hill.
Archibald Douglas governed Scotland for less than a year, in the worst year the kingdom had seen since the Battle of Bannockburn. He was the youngest son of a Douglas who had died in the Tower of London and the half-brother of James Douglas, Robert the Bruce's lieutenant, and he inherited the family's method of war: move fast, strike at night, never stand where an English army wants you to stand. In December 1332 he used it perfectly, scattering Edward Balliol's household at Annan and sending the crowned claimant over the border half-dressed.
Seven months later the method was taken away from him. Edward III of England besieged Berwick and extracted a written undertaking that the town would surrender at sunset on 19 July 1333 unless a Scottish army relieved it. Douglas could lose Scotland's richest burgh or attack an army standing on ground of its own choosing; as Guardian for a nine-year-old king he could not afford the first. He attacked at the Battle of Halidon Hill, across marsh and uphill into converging archery, and died there with six of the nine senior nobles who had come with him.
No record gives the year of his birth. He was a younger son of Sir William Douglas, called le Hardi, the first Scottish noble of consequence to join William Wallace in 1297 and a man who died a prisoner in the Tower of London about 1298; his mother was Eleanor de Lovaine, William's second wife, which makes him the half-brother rather than the full brother of Sir James Douglas. The distinction matters because almost everything said about him in the chronicles is said in relation to James.
He appears on record for the first time in 1320, receiving the lands of Morebattle and Kirkandrews in the Borders, with further grants in 1324 - the ordinary reward of a loyal younger son in the settlement Robert the Bruce made after Bannockburn. In 1327 he rode in the Weardale campaign under his half-brother, the raid that culminated in the night attack on the sleeping English camp at the Battle of Stanhope Park, where James Douglas cut the ropes of the boy Edward III's own tent. It is the clearest single influence on how Archibald himself fought five years later.
The evidence for his character is thin and almost entirely military, so it is worth saying exactly what there is. The chronicles that mention him at all are the Lanercost Chronicle, written in an English priory within living memory of the events and hostile to everything Scottish, and Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, compiled in Fife a century later and committed to the Bruce cause. Neither describes his appearance, his household, his piety or his speech. What they describe is two decisions, taken seven months apart, and the contrast between them is the only real evidence of the man.
The first was the raid on Annan, which is the Douglas method executed exactly: surprise, darkness, speed, and a target chosen for political effect rather than for plunder. It drove a crowned king out of the kingdom in his nightclothes and cost almost nothing. The second was Halidon Hill, where he did the opposite of everything his family had learned since Bannockburn, and where the chroniclers record that he ordered no prisoners to be taken - a commander's instruction meant to steady an army that knew it was attacking the wrong ground, and read since as bravado.
Later Scottish writing has tended to treat him as the man who threw away an army, and the sheer scale of the casualty list among the nobility made that verdict easy. The terms Edward III imposed on Berwick are the part of the story that verdict leaves out: a Guardian governing for an absent nine-year-old could not simply watch the kingdom's richest burgh surrender on a fixed date and keep the authority to govern at all. Modern historians of the campaign, Clifford Rogers and Ranald Nicholson among them, read Halidon Hill as a trap rather than a blunder - which does not make the attack a good decision, but does make it an explicable one.
Robert the Bruce died in 1329 leaving a five-year-old heir, David II of Scotland, and a peace treaty that England's young king had been made to sign and did not intend to keep. In the summer of 1332 Edward Balliol - son of the deposed John Balliol - landed in Fife with a few thousand men, the Disinherited, nobles whose Scottish lands had been forfeited after Bannockburn. On 11 August they destroyed a far larger Scottish army at the Battle of Dupplin Moor, killing the Guardian, Domhnall, Earl of Mar, and Balliol was crowned at Scone in September.
Scotland lost its government in three months. Mar was killed at Dupplin Moor in August; Sir Andrew Murray of Bothwell, who replaced him, was captured by the English at Roxburgh in October. Douglas was chosen Guardian in that emergency, and his first act was tactical rather than heroic: he negotiated a truce with Balliol in October, which bought time and lowered Balliol's guard. In November Balliol acknowledged Edward III as his overlord and promised him Berwick and lands worth £2,000 a year, which cost him most of the Scottish support the crown had bought.
On 16 December 1332 Douglas came down on Annan in Dumfriesshire, where Balliol was wintering with a small household, having sent most of his army home. With him rode John Randolph, Earl of Moray, Robert Stewart - the future Robert II - and Simon Fraser. The attack went in before dawn against a court that thought itself safe behind a truce.
Balliol got out through a hole in the wall and rode for Carlisle without boots or saddle, in his shirt by the accounts that reached both kingdoms; his younger brother and designated heir, Henry Balliol, died of wounds taken in the fighting. It was the most complete Scottish success of the war so far and it was won by a few hundred men in the dark. It also guaranteed the invasion that followed: Balliol had nothing left to offer Edward III except his claim, and Edward took it up in person.
Edward III came north in the spring of 1333 and laid siege to Berwick-upon-Tweed in May, with Balliol in his company. The town was strong and well garrisoned, and it did what strong garrisons did: it bought time with a written agreement. Berwick would surrender on a fixed day unless relieved, and hostages were handed over against the bargain, with the threat that they would be hanged if it was broken. On 12 July Sir William Keith got two hundred horse into the town, and the Scots argued that Berwick had been relieved; Edward ruled that it had not, and reset the deadline at sunset on 19 July.
Douglas spent the campaign doing what Scottish commanders had done successfully for twenty years: avoiding a pitched battle, raiding deep into Northumberland, trying to draw the English king south after his own country. Edward did not move. The terms had converted a siege into a summons, and on 19 July the Guardian brought his army up to Berwick to meet it.