When Edward returned to England the following year to deal with the after-effects of the defeat of his northern army by the Scots at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, he was accompanied by Beaumont.

Beaumont obtained large grants of manors and lands, including Folkingham, Barton-upon-Humber, and Heckington, Lincolnshire, from King Edward II.

On the second day, Beaumont was amongst those who accompanied Edward II in his flight from the field and was subsequently deprived of his Scottish Earldom of Buchan by King Robert.

In the November after Bannockburn, Beaumont was one of those affected by the sentence of forfeiture passed by the Scottish parliament against all those with land and title in Scotland who continued to fight with the English.

Although this also included men of greater standing like David III Strathbogie, titular Earl of Atholl, Beaumont was to prove by far the most determined in the pursuit of his lost honours.

However, when Edward II entered into truce negotiations with the Scots in May 1323, Beaumont, hitherto a close associate of the king, argued against any agreement which disregarded the claims of the disinherited, for whom he had become the leading spokesman.

Beaumont was briefly imprisoned for contempt and disobedience at the Privy Council (of which he was a member), after which he retired from Court to continue his intrigues in exile, eventually joining forces with Edward's estranged wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March.

Anxious to break the deadlock in the north Isabella and Mortimer persuaded Parliament to accept the terms of the Treaty of Northampton, which ignored, once again, the claims of the disinherited.

In Scotland, Robert's infant son, David II was king, bringing the inevitable tensions that follow from a royal minority.

It was he who formed the 'party' of the disinherited in the period after the peace of Northampton: he who encouraged Balliol, with Edward III's approval, to leave his French estates and come to England.

But Edward embraced the cause of the disinherited for reasons more subtle than simple gratitude: for Beaumont's tireless plotting eventually provided the occasion to set aside the peace of 1328.

Before the end of 1330 Edward started to make strong diplomatic representations on behalf of Beaumont and Thomas Wake, the claimant to the Lordship of Liddesdale, the only two noblemen to be officially recognised as disinherited by the English and Scottish governments.

It would make little sense to hand over important lands in the west march and the north-east of Scotland to men whose personal and political loyalties lay with a potential enemy, and who were widely known to be vehement opponents of the Treaty of Northampton.

The Brut Chronicle contains a colourful story, not repeated in any other source, that Balliol had incurred the displeasure of the King of France, and had to be rescued from imprisonment by Beaumont's special pleadings.

Beaumont then visited King Edward and obtained an important concession: he would not allow the disinherited to cross the border in open breach of the Treaty of Northampton, but he would not stop them sailing from English ports.

By the summer of 1332, all was ready and a small army of archers and men-at-arms sailed from various ports in Yorkshire, landing on the coast of Fife in August.

Soon after landing the army, under the skilful command of Beaumont, confronted and defeated a much larger Scottish force at the Battle of Dupplin Moor in August 1332, using an effective, and murderous, combination of infantry and archers.

In July a fresh Scots army was cut to pieces at Halidon Hill, just outside Berwick-upon-Tweed, using the same battle tactics as Dupplin Moor.

In a dispute over the estates of Alexander de Mowbray, killed at Annan in 1332, Balliol was unwise enough to quarrel with Beaumont who, in the fashion of Achilles, withdrew from Court in a fit of pique, to Dundarg.

Beaumont was an active participant in Edward's invasion of Scotland in 1335, the largest he ever mounted on behalf of his hapless protege; but the results were no more lasting than before.

The rescue of Kathrine Beaumont was to allow Edward III to drape a cloak of high chivalry over one of his most destructive military adventures.

English action took the form of a large-scale punitive raid, intended to knock out Scots resistance and, at the same time, forestall a possible French landing in the north-east.

It was in this season that Henry Beaumont embarked on his last actions in Scotland, by seeking vengeance against those whom he held responsible for the death of his son-in-law.

In 1337 Edward III, in beginning the opening rounds of what was to become the Hundred Years' War, virtually lost all interest in the future well-being of Balliol and his hopeless cause.

Rather than return to Scotland with Balliol, the old warrior accompanied King Edward to the Low Countries, from whence he had come with his royal grandfather in 1298, where he died in March 1340, his long struggle incomplete.

When Beaumont's wife, Alice, died in 1349 the Comyn line of Buchan, which stretched back to the early thirteenth century, finally came to an end.