Difficulties arose almost from the first.  Not only had Balliol to contend against the implacable hostility of the Scottish patriots; the disinherited split up into rival factions after their triumph, and their divisions played the game of the partisans of the Bruces.  The Earls of Athol and Buchan quarrelled with Balliol.  Buchan, besieged by the partisans of David Bruce in a remote castle, was forced to surrender and quit Scotland for good.  Athol was distinguished by the violence and suddenness of his tergiversations.  After deserting Balliol for the patriots, he once more declared for the two Edwards, and persuaded many of the Scottish magnates to submit themselves to them.  So long as the English king remained in Scotland, Athol was safe.  On Edward’s retirement to his kingdom in November, 1335, the nationalist leaders took the earl prisoner and put him to death.  The war dragged on from year to year, with startling vicissitudes of fortune, but at no time was Balliol really established on the Scottish throne, and at no time did Edward III. really govern all the ceded districts.

Scottish business detained the English king and court mainly in the north.  Edward was in Scotland for most of the winter of 1334-5, keeping his Christmas court at Roxburgh.  In the summer of 1335 he led an army into Scotland and penetrated as far as Perth.  Again in 1336, he marched from Perth along the east coast, as far as Elgin and Inverness.  The Scots refused to give him battle, and their tactics of evasion and guerilla warfare soon exhausted his resources and demoralised his armies.  This was Edward’s last personal intervention in the business.  He had long been irritated by the persistent interference of the French king in Scottish affairs, and his anger was not lessened by his hard plight forcing him, on more than one occasion, to grant short truces to the Scottish insurgents at Philip’s intervention.  His relations with France were becoming so strained that he preferred to spend 1337 in the south and entrust Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, with the conduct of the fruitless campaign of that year.  Early in 1338, Edward made his way once more to Berwick, but his intention of invading Scotland was suddenly abandoned on the news of a threatened French expedition to England recalling him to the south.  This was the decisive moment of the long struggle.  Henceforth the English king could only devote a small share of his resources to an undertaking which he had not been able to compass when his whole energies were absorbed in it.  The patriots, who had always dominated the open country, now attacked the castles and fortified towns, which were the bulwarks of the Edwardian power.  Within three years all the more important of these fell into their hands.  In 1339 Edward Balliol’s capital of Perth was beset by Robert, the Steward of Scotland, who had recently undertaken the regency for his uncle David.  On the approach of danger, Balliol was ordered to England, and Sir Thomas Ughtred,