Edward Balliol, son of King John, was crowned king of Scots in 1332 after the Battle of Dupplin Moor, expelled within three months, restored by English arms after the Battle of Halidon Hill, expelled again and again, and finally sold his claim to Edward III in 1356 for a pension.
Edward Balliol was the son of the king Edward I had stripped of his royal arms in 1296, and he spent his life trying to collect on that inheritance. In August 1332 he landed in Fife with about fifteen hundred men, destroyed a Scottish army perhaps ten times the size at the Battle of Dupplin Moor, and was crowned king of Scots at Scone seven weeks later.
He was driven over the border before Christmas. The pattern held for the next four years: English arms put him back, Scottish resistance took him out again, and each restoration was paid for with Scottish land signed over to Edward III — the county of Berwick, then the eight sheriffdoms of the south-east, then homage for what remained. By 1336 he was finished as a ruler, and in 1356 he sold the claim outright.
He was born about 1283, the eldest son of John Balliol and Isabella de Warenne, and he was a boy when his father's kingship was destroyed. John was deposed in July 1296 and Edward went south as a prisoner, held in the Tower of London until 1299 and afterwards brought up by his mother's father, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey. When his father was released to papal custody and then to the family estates in Picardy, Edward eventually joined him there.
John Balliol died at Hélicourt in 1314, the year of the Battle of Bannockburn, and the claim passed to a man with no kingdom, no following in Scotland and no obvious way of pressing it. For nearly twenty years nothing happened. Edward lived between his French inheritance and England, and at some point about 1331 he may have married Margaret of Taranto — a match reported as childless and annulled before he sailed for Scotland. He had no legitimate children at any point in his life, which mattered enormously at the end of it.
What changed was not Balliol but the political weather. Robert the Bruce died in 1329 leaving a five-year-old heir; the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton of 1328 had recognised Scottish independence without restoring the English and Scottish lords whose Scottish estates Bruce had forfeited; and in 1330 Edward III threw off Mortimer and began looking for ways to undo his mother's peace without breaking it himself. A claimant with a hereditary title and a grievance was suddenly useful.
Almost nothing survives of Edward Balliol as a person, and what does survive was written by people with a stake in the answer. Scottish chronicle tradition, composed under the Bruces and their Stewart heirs, had no reason to allow him any quality at all: he is the English king's creature, the son of the empty coat, a man crowned on a hill by an army of foreigners. English accounts are warmer but not much more informative, treating him as an instrument of policy whose personal qualities were beside the point.
The documented behaviour supports a good deal of the hostile reading and complicates it in one place. He gave away Scotland in instalments, and he did it knowingly: a man who signs over the eight richest sheriffdoms of his kingdom in exchange for the troops needed to hold the rest has made a calculation about what the crown is for. He was also, repeatedly, unable to keep what English armies won for him, and the most famous single image of him is the flight from Annan in December 1332, out of a burning house and over the border half-dressed on an unsaddled horse. That is not a picture anyone invented to flatter him, and it is not one he could live down.
Against all of that stands August 1332. Balliol sailed with a private army of about fifteen hundred because Edward III would not let him cross the border by land, landed in a hostile kingdom, and inside five days destroyed its government in the field. Whether the credit belongs to him or to Henry de Beaumont, the veteran who actually deployed the army, is not recoverable from the sources — but he was there, he had gathered the expedition, and he took the consequences of it for the next twenty-four years. The verdict that he was simply a puppet is the majority view among modern historians and it fits most of the evidence; it fits 1332 least well, and the honest position is that he was a man of real nerve and no base, which in fourteenth-century Scotland was a fatal combination.
The men who made Balliol king were not primarily his supporters. They were the Disinherited: lords, mostly English but some Scottish, whose Scottish estates Robert the Bruce had forfeited after the Battle of Bannockburn and whom the 1328 peace had pointedly failed to restore. Henry de Beaumont, who claimed the earldom of Buchan and had fought at Bannockburn, was their soldier; David of Strathbogie claimed Atholl. They needed a claimant to make their invasion a war of right rather than a raid, and Balliol needed an army. Edward III gave the enterprise his covert blessing and his public refusal, forbidding them to cross the border by land — so they went by sea.
They sailed from the Yorkshire ports at the end of July 1332 and landed in Fife on 6 August with about fifteen hundred men. On the night of 10 August they forded the River Earn at an unguarded point, and at dawn on 11 August they met the army of the Guardian of Scotland, Domhnall, Earl of Mar, on the moor above Dupplin. The Battle of Dupplin Moor was the most one-sided action of the Anglo-Scottish wars: dismounted men-at-arms held a narrow front with archers shooting into both flanks, the Scottish schiltroms attacked uphill into a closing funnel, and much of the Scottish nobility died in the press, many of them crushed rather than cut down. Mar was killed, and so was a natural son of Robert the Bruce.
Perth fell at once. A second Scottish army came up, failed to retake the town and dispersed, and on 24 September 1332 Edward Balliol was crowned king of Scots at Scone, on the hill where Scottish kings had always been made, seven weeks after landing with the strength of a large raiding party.
Payment began immediately. At or about the coronation Balliol granted Edward III Scottish estates worth £2,000 a year, including the town, castle and county of Berwick — the richest burgh in Scotland and the gate to the eastern march — and acknowledged the English king as his lord. He had been king for weeks and had already alienated the kingdom's most valuable single possession.
It bought him very little time. On 16 December 1332, with most of his army sent home, Balliol was surprised at Annan by a force under Bruce loyalists; his brother was killed, and he escaped over the border to England in the state the chroniclers gleefully recorded, half-dressed and riding bareback. The claim was three months old and already in exile.
The second restoration was bought at a far higher price and it is the cession that matters. Edward III abandoned the pretence of neutrality, besieged Berwick in person in 1333, and destroyed the relieving Scottish army at the Battle of Halidon Hill on 19 July; Berwick surrendered the next day and stayed English. In February 1334 Balliol ceded outright to Edward III the eight sheriffdoms of south-eastern Scotland — Berwick, Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Haddington and Linlithgow — which is to say Lothian, the eastern march and the wealthiest, most governable part of the kingdom. In June 1334, at Newcastle, he did homage to Edward III for the remainder, holding what was left of Scotland as a fief of the English crown. The ten-year-old David II had already been shipped to France for safety.
It is worth stating the arithmetic plainly, because it is the strongest single fact about his kingship. To be king of Scotland he had given away the parts of Scotland worth governing and agreed to hold the rest from someone else. What remained was a title, an English garrison network and a war.
Balliol was driven out of Scotland repeatedly and the dates run together because the pattern never varied. Sir Andrew Murray and the Bruce party forced him out in 1334; English intervention restored him in 1335; he was ousted again at the end of that year and deposed once more in 1336. By early 1335 his authority in the whole kingdom rested on five fortifications. His own side was as much of a problem as his enemies: the Disinherited had joined him to recover specific estates, and once those were recovered or lost their interest in his kingship evaporated, while several changed sides outright.
The effective end came on 30 November 1335, when Andrew Murray caught and destroyed a pro-Balliol force under David of Strathbogie at Culblean in Aberdeenshire; Strathbogie was killed, and with him the most energetic of Balliol's remaining lieutenants. From then on he held nothing that English troops were not holding for him, and Edward III's attention was moving to France, where the Hundred Years' War opened in 1337 and offered a far better return on an army.
He did not quite stop. After David II was captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346, Balliol tried again in the south-west, and he maintained a shrinking authority in Galloway — his family's old lordship through his grandmother Dervorguilla — into the mid-1350s. It was the last piece of Scotland where the Balliol name meant anything, and it was not a kingdom.