1 ottob 1433 anni - Peace between King James and Henry VI

Descrizione:

In October 1433, a general council in the Scottish Kingdom debated over foreign policy in relation to peace proposals by King Henry of England. The issue pertained to the conflicting relationship between Scotland and France, who England was consistently in conflict with.

In 1480, Bower writes:
"About the same time a certain knight called [ ] Scrope arrives from England, sent with instructions and a commission from the king and council of England to our lord king. Thereupon the king was moved [ by him] to call a general council at Perth in October, where the topic of concluding peace with the English was raised. In particular, they for their part would make a de facto restoration of Roxburgh and Berwick and everything else which they had wrongly taken from the kingdom of Scotland within a stated period of time, and by this act of restoration they would hope for a lasting peace. In the presence of the king, who sat in front of the high altar in the choir of the friars preachers of Perth, a clear reply was given by the prelates of the greater churches and by the magnates of the real to the effect that they were united in aspiring after peace with liberty. Then the abbots of Scone and Incholm were given the task of seeking and eliciting everyone’s views on this matter under discussion, and the agreed reply was that the king of Scotland was not free to negotiate on the subject of peace with the king of England on account of his alliance with the king of France, which they asserted had been scrutinised by the University of Paris and confirmed by the supreme pontiff. ( The same king of Scotland had recently sworn a solemn oath to maintain this alliance) Various other suggestions were made on all sides which tended to support this negative conclusion. Because they could not on that day agree on one and the same opinion, and since the day was ending with the coming of night, the question of a peace was taken up again the next day; and while the lord of the council debated both sides of the question as before and tended towards accepting peace with liberty, the matter remained undecided. But the venerable father in Christ sir John Fogo, master of theology and most worthy abbot of Melrose, argued against those who supported a negative conclusion. He claimed to be advancing the basic well-spring and foundation [ of the thinking] of all for whom he was speaking, namely that fufillment of the divine intention cannot properly, and ought not, depend on the wishes and consent of any created being other than the person responsible. From this he drew the inference that no king could properly bind himself by an oath to some other king never to make peace with a third except with the agreement of the king to whom he had thus bound himself. Then he enunciated the proposition that the king of France could not properly bind himself by an oath to the king of Scotland never to make peace with the king of England without the agreement of the king of Scotland, and vice versa…. Following his brief speech along these lines there was such a wrangle that support for breaking the treaty dwindled away ; instead, it was finally agreed that the English were trying in this matter to stir up division in our kingdom, since it was very clear that they were not really proposing to restore to us what belonged to us.”
(A History Book for Sots: Selections from Schotichronicon by Walter Bower, Edited by D. E. R. Watt)

Editor D E R Watt comments on this extract that " Bower is recounting a political discussion in which he was with his fellow Augustinian abbot of Scone personally involved. "

What does this tell us about peace?
Peace between the English and the Scots relied on more than just their attitudes toward each other. The relationship each had with other countries, especially France, constrained the alliances that they hoped to make.

This extract also is an illustrative example of the genuine debated held by Scottish councils in relation to peace and foreign relations.

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