Edward I's lieutenant in Scotland who scattered Robert the Bruce's army at Methven and lost to him at Loudoun Hill, then spent Edward II's reign as an Ordainer, a king's man, and the most consistent mediator in English politics.
Aymer de Valence was a first cousin of Edward I of England and one of the few men who survived the whole of Edward II's reign near the centre of power without being destroyed by it. In Scotland he made his name twice over: on 19 June 1306 he fell on Robert the Bruce's camp at the Battle of Methven and turned a crowned king into a fugitive, and on 10 May 1307, at the Battle of Loudoun Hill, the same opponent picked the ground, hedged it with bog and ditches, and broke his cavalry on a line of spears.
His English career was a long exercise in trying to hold a collapsing court together. He was one of the Ordainers who forced reform on Edward II in 1311; the seizure and killing of Piers Gaveston in 1312, out of Valence's own custody and against his sworn word, drove him back to the king for good. He led Edward off the field at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, negotiated the Treaty of Leake between the king and Thomas of Lancaster in 1318, and died on embassy in France in 1324, childless, leaving a tomb in Westminster Abbey that set the pattern for a century of English monuments.
He was born about 1270 to 1275 - the year is nowhere recorded - the third son of William de Valence and Joan de Munchensi. His father was Henry III of England's Poitevin half-brother, one of the foreign kinsmen whose grip on royal patronage helped provoke the reform crisis of 1258 and the war that followed; his mother carried a share of the enormous Marshal inheritance, including the lordship of Pembroke. Aymer was therefore a cousin of Edward I, a marcher lord in Wales, and a landholder in Poitou at the same time.
His elder brothers died before their father, so the inheritance came to him: his father's lands in 1296, and the earldom of Pembroke itself in 1307, when his mother died. By then he had already spent a decade in Edward I's service on the Scottish border, in Flanders and on embassies to France, which is the ordinary apprenticeship of an English earl of that generation and the reason he was available in 1306 when the king needed a lieutenant in Scotland in a hurry.
The most revealing thing recorded about him is that he cared about his word and that other men knew it. In June 1312 he took Piers Gaveston's surrender under a personal guarantee of safety and lodged him at Deddington; the Earl of Warwick seized the prisoner from that custody and had him killed. Contemporaries understood the act as an insult aimed at Valence as much as at Gaveston, and every subsequent move he made - his steady attachment to Edward II, his refusal to join Lancaster - follows from it. The chroniclers do not say he was outraged; the record of his choices says it for him.
Older historians made him the leader of a "middle party" holding the ring between a bad king and a worse opposition, a reading built on his part in the Treaty of Leake of 1318. J. R. S. Phillips's modern study dismantled the party but kept the man: what looks like a centrist faction was one magnate's consistent, conservative loyalty to the crown as an institution, expressed through negotiation because he preferred negotiation and because he had watched what the alternative did to Gaveston. He is the only great figure of the reign who was never attainted, never exiled, and never executed.
As a soldier he is harder to admire and harder to dismiss. Methven was a night attack on an unsuspecting camp, which is competence rather than brilliance, and at Loudoun Hill he attacked prepared ground because there was no other way forward and lost heavily for it. Barbour, writing for Bruce's grandson seventy years later, needed him as the perfidious Englishman who broke a promise of battle in the morning, and the portrait stuck. English record knows nothing of that promise, and a commander ordered to raise the dragon banner - to give no quarter and hang everyone taken in arms - was not operating under the etiquette of the tournament to begin with.
Robert the Bruce killed John Comyn in the Greyfriars at Dumfries in February 1306 and was crowned at Scone twelve weeks later. Edward I's answer was not the methodical reconquest of 1296: he appointed Valence his special lieutenant in Scotland, ordered the dragon banner raised - the signal that the usual conventions were suspended, that no quarter would be given and that men taken in arms would be put to death without trial - and sent him north. Valence, bound by marriage to the Comyn family and so with a private grievance of his own, took Perth in June and held it.
Bruce brought his small army to the walls and challenged him to come out and fight. Valence answered that the hour was late and that there would be battle in the morning. The Scots drew off some six miles to the wooded country near Methven and the River Almond, unsaddled, put down their weapons and scattered to forage, and as darkness came on Valence brought his force out of Perth and struck the camp. Whether a formal undertaking had been given is exactly the point on which Scottish and English accounts divide.
The result was not a battle so much as a dispersal, and it was very nearly decisive. Bruce escaped with a handful of men; his standard-bearer and much of his following were taken; over the following months his wife, his daughter and his sisters were seized and three of his brothers executed. For a year the king of Scots was a fugitive in the western seaboard and in Irish waters, which is where the later legend of the spider belongs.
Bruce came back to Carrick in February 1307 having learned the lesson Methven taught: never meet an English army on its own terms. On 10 May 1307 he chose a stretch of the old road below Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire, between two morasses, and narrowed it further with ditches dug outward from the bog so that cavalry could only reach him a few ranks at a time. Valence, whose command was the mounted strength of the occupation, came out of Bothwell Castle to finish the business and attacked up the road, because there was no other way to attack.
The leading squadrons compressed to pass the gaps and met the Scottish spears at a standstill with the men behind still closing up. The Scots came forward, the front ranks could not withdraw to reform, and the withdrawal became general; over a hundred English men-at-arms were reported killed, a heavy toll for a force of that kind, and Valence rode for Bothwell. He was replaced in the Scottish command soon afterwards. Edward I died at Burgh by Sands eight weeks later, and the war entered the phase that ended at Bannockburn.
Edward II inherited his father's wars and none of his authority, and by 1310 the magnates had forced him to accept twenty-one Lords Ordainer to reform the household and the realm. Valence was one of them, and the Ordinances published in 1311 carry his assent: restrictions on the king's gifts, on his choice of officers, and on making war without the consent of the baronage in parliament. The specific target was Piers Gaveston, the king's favourite, exiled and recalled three times.
In 1312 Gaveston surrendered to Valence and the Earl of Surrey on terms that guaranteed his safety pending a parliament. Valence lodged him at Deddington in Oxfordshire and went to visit his wife; the Earl of Warwick came for the prisoner in his absence and had him put to death. It broke the Ordainers as a coalition. Valence, whose sworn word had been used and discarded, went over to the king and stayed there, and the men who had killed Gaveston - Warwick, and above all Thomas of Lancaster - became his opponents for the rest of his life.