Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, page 1
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Preface
Chronology
Part One: 1285–1306
Part Two: 1306–1314
Part Three: 1314–1329
Epilogue
Bibliography
References
Notes
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Scottish Highlands
Northern England and Southern Scotland
The Scottish Royal Succession and Claimants to the Throne
The House of Bruce
Sunday, 23 June 1314
Monday, 24 June 1314
The Bruces in Ireland
PREFACE
The life of Robert Bruce coincides with the wars of Scottish independence when a small kingdom struggled for its existence against an overbearing neighbour. In this struggle Bruce played an increasingly prominent part and eventually became the deliverer of his country. His name therefore appears constantly in the state papers of the time and the thirteenth-and fourteenth-century chronicles. The fascination for the historian is that, in addition to these sources, there is another so full of vivid descriptions of the events and characters of the period that a bare recital of facts can be transmitted into a biography of great human interest.
In 1375, less that fifty years after Bruce’s death, John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, produced his epic life of Robert Bruce, The Brus. In his opening canto he declares his intention to tell nothing but the truth, ‘to put in wryt a suthfast story’. Wherever it has been possible to check his account against contemporary documents scholars have confirmed his reliability. Occasionally the order of events is transposed but the accuracy of his detail has been accepted by every subsequent historian.
Barbour was born some seven years before Bruce died. Over the years preceding the completion of his work, when he was gaining position in the Church and at the Scottish court, he had the opportunity to meet many of those who had taken part with Bruce in the extraordinary adventures which seem to belong to the realm of fiction rather than of fact. No doubt, when old men tell their tales, they sometimes heighten and embellish the dramatic incidents of their past, but the essential truth is there. The liveliness of Barbour’s descriptions bears the stamp of eyewitness accounts. The reader is justified in a willing suspension of disbelief.
The encouragement and criticism I have received, in the writing of this book, from my family, friends and correspondents have been invaluable: in particular I would like to thank, first, General Sir Philip Christison Bt, G.B.E., C.B., D.S.O., M.C., D.L., who put at my disposal the research notes he accumulated over the decade before he wrote his account of the Battle of Bannockburn for the Scottish National Trust; second, Major General The Earl of Cathcart, D.S.O., M.C., who made available to me the manuscript history of his family, written by his grandfather. His ancestor, Sir Alan Cathcart, was among the young men who joined Bruce in his bid for the throne and is the only person whom John Barbour mentions by name as one of his informants. Lastly, no writer on the period can fail to mention his debt to Professor G. W. S. Barrow’s monumental work on Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm.
CHRONOLOGY
1274 Birth of Robert Bruce on 11 July.
1286 Death of Alexander III. Election of guardians. The Turnberry Bond.
1289 Treaty of Salisbury.
1290 Treaty of Birgham. Death of Maid of Norway. Edward I invited to arbitrate.
1291 Edward I accepted as superior lord of Scotland.
1292 Balliol crowned and renders homage. Edward I repudiates Treaty of Birgham.
1293 King John (Balliol) summoned before English Parliament and convicted of contumacy.
1294 War between Edward I and Philip IV of France. Welsh revolt.
1295 King John replaced by Council of Twelve. Treaty between France and Scotland. Bruce’s grandfather dies.
1296 Outbreak of war between England and Scotland. Sack of Berwick. King John abdicates. The Ragman Roll. Freeholders pay homage to Edward I.
1297 Insurrection. Andrew Moray, William Wallace. Capitulation of Irvine. Battle of Stirling Bridge. Andrew Moray dies of wounds.
1298 Wallace knighted and appointed guardian. Edward I invades Scotland. Battle of Falkirk. Bruce and Comyn appointed guardians.
1299 Lambert on third guardian. Scots take Stirling Castle.
1300 Bruce resigns guardianship. Replaced by de Umfraville. English invasion. Truce.
1301 Soulis appointed sole guardian. English invasion.
1302 Truce. Bruce submits to Edward I. Marries Elizabeth de Burgh.
1303 Battle of Roslin. Peace treaty between France and England, excluding Scots.
1304 Bruce’s father dies. Comyn surrenders. Bond between Bruce and Lamberton. Stirling captured by Edward I.
1305 Wallace captured and executed. New ordinance for government of Scotland.
1306 Death of Comyn. Douglas joins Bruce. Bruce crowned at Scone: defeated at battles of Methven and Dalry: escapes to Dunaverty and then Rathlin. His brother Nigel captured at Kildrummy Castle and executed. His wife, sisters and daughter captured at Tain.
1307 Bruce lands at Turnberry. Guerrilla war in southwest Scotland. His brothers Alexander and Thomas captured in Galloway and executed. Bruce defeats English at Glen Trool and Loudon Hill. Rising in Moray. Edward I dies. Bruce moves north, falls ill.
1308 Battle of Inverurie. ‘Herschip’ of Buchan. Battle of Brander. Earl of Ross submits to Bruce.
1309 St Andrew’s parliament. Scotland north of the Tay under Bruce’s control.
1310 Edward II invades Scotland.
1311 Bruce raids northern England.
1312 Bruce again raids northern England. Treaty of Inverness between Scotland and Norway.
1313 Bruce captures Perth. Reconquers southwest Scotland and Isle of Man.
1314 Douglas captures Roxburgh. Randolph captures Edinburgh. Battle of Bannockburn.
1315 Act of Succession. Marriage of Princess Marjorie. Edward Bruce invades Ireland.
1316 Edward Bruce crowned King of Ireland. Death of Princess Marjorie.
1316–17 Bruce in Ireland.
1318 Berwick taken by Scots. Edward Bruce slain in Ireland. Succession to Scottish throne settled on Princess Marjorie’s son Robert Stewart.
1319 Edward II besieges Berwick. Douglas and Randolph invade England. ‘The Chapter of Myton’. Two-year truce.
1320 The Declaration of Arbroath. Soulis’s onspiracy.
1322 Edward II’s last invasion of Scotland. Bruce raids England. Defeats Edward II at Old Byland, Yorkshire.
1323 Harclay attempts peace treaty. Executed by Edward II. Official negotiations lead to thirteen-year truce.
1324 Pope recognizes Bruce as King of Scotland. Queen Elizabeth gives birth to male heir.
1326 Treaty of Corbeil between France and Scotland. Succession to Scottish throne settled on David Bruce, remainder to Robert Stewart.
1327 Deposition of Edward II. Truce broken. Edward III advances on Scotland. Outwitted by Douglas and Randolph at Stanhope Park, Durham. Bruce invades Northumberland.
1328 Treaty of Edinburgh. Marriage of David Bruce to Edward III’s sister Joan.
1329 Death of Bruce, 7 June.
1330 Death of Douglas.
1332 Death of Randolph.
PART ONE
1285–1306
Our nation lived in freedom and quietness until Edward, King of England, under colour of friendship and alliance, attacked us, all unsuspecting, when we had neither King nor Head and our people were unacquainted with wars and invasions.
Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, 1320
1
On 14 October 1285 Alexander III, King of Scotland, married as his second wife Yolande of Dreux, descended from Count Robert I of Dreux, a son of Louis VI of France.1 It was a marriage welcomed by his subjects. His first wife Margaret, daughter of Henry III of England, had died in 1275 having borne for her husband a daughter and two sons, Margaret, Alexander and David. But within the space of three years all were dead: the younger son in 1281 unmarried, the elder in 1284 without issue and in 1283 the daughter, who was married to Erik II, King of Norway, died in childbirth leaving as heir to the Scottish and Norwegian thrones a sickly infant Margaret, the Maid of Norway.2 The succession stood in jeopardy.
Alexander III was of a sanguine temperament and during his ten years as a widower, as the Lanercost Chronicle sourly reports, ‘he used never to forbear on account of season or storm, nor for perils of flood or rocky cliffs but would visit none too creditably matrons and nuns, virgins and widows by day or by night as the fancy seized him, sometimes in disguise, often accompanied by a single follower.’3
His marriage to the young Frenchwoman, it might be expected, would concentrate his attentions and give promise of a male heir to the throne.
For over two hundred years, since Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane and the forces of Malcolm III had defeated and slain Macbeth, the House of Canmore had been the rulers of Scotland. During the reigns of eight succeeding kings of that blood, by conquest or by treaty, the realm had been enlarged so that when Alexander wed Yolande she became the queen of a kingdom which differed little in extent from the Scotland of the present day.
But the population was much smaller. The inhabitants numbered fewer than 500,000. The majority were Celts, mainly north of the Forth and Clyde and in the southwest. There were Norsemen in Caithness, Sutherland and the Western Isles, Angl
The country too was infinitely wilder. Vast forests of the native Scottish pine abounded, dark and impenetrable, in which wolves and the wild boar still roamed and wide wastes of moor and bog, mountain and water covered much of the land. Apart from the king’s highway, the via regis, few roads were capable of carrying wheeled traffic except in a dry summer. Transport was mostly by pack horse along tracks which might become impassable in winter. Bridges were few and far between. Within little more than a decade the great forests and deep ravines, the mist-hung hillsides and rugged tracks were to become the salvation and refuge of desperate men.
But in the year of Alexander III’s wedding Scotland was still at peace: a prosperous and settled kingdom. For nearly a hundred years her English neighbours, torn by internal feuds and continental wars, had little leisure to turn a predatory eye northwards and Norway, having launched a formidable armada against the west coast in 1263, had seen her ships tossed and scattered by a violent storm and the stragglers who landed in Ayrshire easily defeated at the battle of Largs. In 1266 by the Treaty of Perth the Norwegians ceded the Isle of Man and the Western Isles, except the Orkneys and Shetlands, to Scotland in return for a monetary tribute and a growing collaboration between the two countries was cemented by the marriage of Alexander’s daughter to the Norwegian King.5
Thus for the thirty-six years that he had reigned Alexander III and his people had enjoyed a period of tranquillity unparalleled by any other western kingdom at that time. In this fostering climate of peace, agriculture and trade made steady progress. Under the lead of the Scottish Church, which had been strengthened and enlarged by many royal grants of land, improvements had been made in the art of tillage and the management of livestock. New clearings and new grazings had been brought into production by the joint efforts of landlord, thane and peasant. An expanding export trade in wool, hides, timber and fish with England, the Low Countries, the Hanseatic towns and Scandinavia had brought an increased flow of riches to the merchants and landowners which percolated throughout the whole society. The eastern ports hummed with activity. Berwick, at one extremity, was described by a contemporary English writer as ‘a city so populous and of such trade that it might justly be called another Alexandria, whose riches were the sea and the water its walls.’6 At the other extremity Inverness was a shipyard for mighty vessels.7
But affluence without security is a cause more for anxiety than for comfort. It is because the turbulent elements among the Scottish people had, by the reign of Alexander III, been brought under control by the network of a feudal organization that trade flourished, the traveller could ride unharmed, the peasant could reap his crops and the craftsmen and purveyors clustered in the royal burghs could pursue their avocations without one hand upon their swords.
The feudal system was based on the concept that all land belonged to the king and that he leased large provinces to his leading noblemen as tenants-in-chief in return for their oath of fealty and their pledge to bring to his aid, in time of war, a stipulated number of armed knights. In like manner, in a descending gradation of sub-tenure, these vassals of the Crown divided the land which the king had granted to them into smaller estates which they leased to knights and gentlemen in return for their service in war and attendance in peace. They, in turn, leased their land to lesser men who cultivated it with or without husbandmen and serfs and would present themselves to their masters at the call to arms, with shield and spear.
It had a profound economic base. War, in the Middle Ages, was the central factor of political life and the dominating element in war was the mailed warrior mounted on his horse. The ruler who aspired to enlarge or protect his possessions required a force of armed cavalry: a force which by its combination of shock and mobility was as irresistible against men fighting on foot as tanks against savages.
To mount and arm such a warrior required a long purse. Horses bred for carrying and staying power, suits of chain link mail beaten out by the armourer for individual fitting, helmets, shields, lances, swords, battle axes and maces, squires for arming, grooms for the horses: all these were costly. To manage the horses, to wield the weapons required continuous training. The knight was a fighting specialist. He had no time to earn his living so he was allotted land for his service from which he could draw rents in money or in kind to defray his expenses. He was both the mailed fist of the king and the shield of his subjects.8
The system originated among the Franks. It was perfected in England under William the Conqueror and his sons and was introduced into the Celtic kingdom of Scotland by David I on his assuming the throne in 1124.
David had been brought up in the English court where his sister was married to Henry I of England. He had been greatly favoured by his royal brother-in-law. In Scotland, with English support, he had established himself in Lothian and Strathclyde as a virtually independent ruler within the kingdom of his brother, King Alexander I.
In England, by marriage and kingly sanction, he had acquired the huge ‘Honour of Huntingdon’ with broad lands spreading across the counties of Huntingdon and Northamptonshire. There, among his tenants-in-chief, were a clutch of Anglo-Normans deriving from the same region on the borders of Normandy and Brittany, the Morevil-les, the Soulises, the FitzAlans, the Bruces. When David I took over the governance of an unruly kingdom, it was to these he looked to set up military fiefs in sensitive areas each with its castle and Norman lord.
Other Anglo-Normans followed in their train: Comyns and Bal-liols, Sinclairs and Frasers, Mowbrays and Hays, and were granted charters for land in Scotland. Contemporaneously the great Celtic landowners, who had hitherto held their land by tribal custom, had their possessions and privileges confirmed by charters from the Crown. On the whole this proceeded smoothly. There was no dispossession of existing landowners. The lands granted were from estates which had been forfeited to the Crown or where native families had died out or from the royal demesnes.
Gradually, the kingdom became dotted with castles, some great stone edifices built on upthrusts of rock such as Edinburgh or Stirling, some on precipitous sea cliffs such as Turnberry or Dunaverty. But the majority were simple mottes, huge earthen mounds surrounded by wooden stockades and deep ditches with a central tower skirted by wooden living quarters, each forming a sentinel for the security of the area and a focus for the local community.
Such central government as existed was provided by the king and the officers of his household: the constable, the king’s chief military officer, flanked by the marischal in special charge of the cavalry element; the chamberlain who provided for the costs of administration from the royal rents, feudal dues and other imposts; the chancellor, the keeper of the royal seal and Crown records who besides presiding over the king’s chapel was virtually a secretary of state for all departments. He was invariably a cleric and was assisted by numerous chaplains and clerks to undertake the necessary written documents for the ordering of the kingdom. The fourth great officer was the steward responsible for the management of the royal household. David I had granted this office to Walter FitzAlan in 1136. William I, David’s grandson, made it hereditary in the family. Thereafter, the FitzAlans were known as Stewarts, the ancestors of the royal house of that name.
Outside the household were the chief administrative and judicial officers of the Crown: the justiciar of Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde, the justiciar of Lothian and the justiciar of Galloway. Below them were the sheriffs, some thirty in all, who acted as royal agents in the local districts into which the kingdom was divided. They were the sinews of the administration, presiding over courts for free men to use, collecting and accounting for royal revenues, supervising the royal castles in their sheriffdoms. All these were appointed by the king and were usually drawn from the earls and barons who were already prominent landowners in their areas.
