BISHOP MAKES KING
‘Put not your trust in kings and princes. Three of a kind will take them both.’
General Robert C. Schenck
Duplicity - double-dealing, along with cunning and cruelty - these more than honesty, courage and honour, it seems, are the defining characteristics of kings and princes … and of men who would be kings.
General Schenck commanded Union armies in the American Civil War. He was at both battles of Bull Run and fought ‘Stonewall’ Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. He was also a card player - draw poker mostly. His book of rules is at the root of the game’s popularity on this side of the Atlantic. Having survived that war, Schenck understood as well as anybody how a civil war tears apart families and friendships: brother turns against brother; father makes war on son. As a poker player of some prowess he also knew that while a face card might look impressive, it was next to useless on its own. In poker, as in war, it was about strength in numbers.
So it was with Scotland’s kings and Scotland’s wars.
After Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk he was replaced as Guardian of the Realm by two major noblemen. Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick and John Comyn, son of the Lord of Badenoch, were two of a kind. Both were young - in their twenties - both ambitious in the extreme. Each was the representative of his family, and their families were the most powerful in the land.
The Comyns - lords of Badenoch and earls of Buchan - supported the royal claim of John Balliol, Badenoch’s uncle. The Bruces of Annandale - bitter rivals of Balliols and Comyns alike - backed themselves.
John Comyn and young Robert Bruce also had a dilemma in common. Both families held lands not just in Scotland but in England as well - vast tracts of territory in the case of the Comyns. They held these lands directly from the English king and paid him homage for them as a result. Were either of them to give up territories and break their ties to Edward they would at once cut themselves off from the wider world of feudal society. Such a move might make it easier for a Comyn to support a Balliol; it would simplify things for a Bruce in pursuit of the crown. But by limiting their ambitions to Scotland they would make of themselves big fish in a very small pond.
It was complications like these that made the rivalries between the Scottish dynasties in the fourteenth century so unforgiving, so cruel and so relentless. It certainly explains the bitter spat between Bruce and Comyn when they clashed at a council of war in Peebles in 1299.
With Wallace out of the country on his diplomatic mission, Sir David Graham, a Comyn supporter, had laid claim to the absentee knight’s lands and possessions. Graham claimed Wallace had failed to give any warning to the Guardians of his planned absence in a time of war - and that his belongings were for the taking as a result. Wallace, however, was a supporter of the Bruces and young Robert decided to take the slight personally. Strong words between Bruce and Comyn descended into outright violence, with Comyn finally grabbing his rival by the throat.
The constant scheming and strategising - what to do for the best, for the future - also caused violent splits within families. Son might disagree with father over whom to support, what line to take; brother might fight with brother for the same reason. The eldest and therefore the heir might favour the status quo; the younger, with less to lose, might choose a more reckless path in pursuit of power and riches. One English chronicler wrote: ‘in all this fighting the Scots were so divided that often a father was with the Scots and his son with the English, or one brother was with the Scots and another with the English, or even one individual was first on one side and then on the other’.
As the summer of 1305 gave way to the gloom of autumn and then the darkness of winter it might have seemed as if the sun would never return to Scotland. Edward of England could certainly have been forgiven for thinking he had snuffed out the last lights of the northern kingdom.
Edward was a game player too - not cards, but chess. Invented by the Persians long before, the game had been brought to north and west Europe by the Vikings at the end of the first millenium. All about long-term strategy mixed with subtle feints, misdirection and lightning-fast attacks, it was the perfect training for a military strategist like the King of England. The end game was the death of the king - Shah mat in Persian, literally ‘the king is dead’, hence ‘check mate’ in English - but leaving him with nowhere to go, no moves left to make, worked just as well.
King John of Scotland was out of the game. Broken and defeated, he had been boxed into a corner by Edward’s bishops, pawns and rukhs - his war chariots. Even more gratifying for Edward, at least in the short term, had been the outmanoeuvring and total destruction of King John’s troublesome knight, William Wallace. Edward the chess master - he had won because he was the better player. Scotland was a conquered province and would be governed like any other. Her nobles were left in peace, more or less. Edward let them keep their homes and their titles, as long as they first bowed down to him as king. The iron fist of war was covered with the velvet glove.
The game was not over: at least, not the long game. There were still pieces on the board and, unbeknown to Edward, some of them were still moving. Some of them, in fact, had moved in overlooked corners of the board while Edward was too engrossed in his torment of the king and the knight to notice what the Scots bishops were up to. For practical purposes, he had lumped Scotland’s senior churchmen in with her nobles, leaving them alone in their great houses and estates just as long as they acknowledged him as the dominant power. But behind the English king’s back, two bishops were involved in a long-term strategy so convoluted - of such Byzantine cunning - even he would have had to offer grudging admiration.
By 1305 Robert Wishart of Glasgow, a stubborn bulldog of a man, had been fighting for Scottish independence for the best part of twenty years. He had made some of his moves in full view of the English king - even standing up to him during the Great Cause - but he was just as likely to favour underhand conniving. William Lamberton, Bishop of St Andrews was another double-dealer, a strategist on a par with the English king himself.
If Edward had known them better he would have strung them both up alongside Wallace. Aside from the individual personalities of Wishart and Lamberton, they held by far the richest of Scotland’s eleven dioceses. Argyll, Caithness, Galloway, Moray, Ross and the rest … they varied enormously in terms of population, size and wealth; but these nine together did not add up to the clout, military and financial, of St Andrews and Glasgow. As Bishop of St Andrews, William Lamberton had his principal palace as well as another nine or ten manor houses besides; these were not just churchmen, they were magnates.
In the Borders, the Cistercian houses of Coldingham, Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose had grown enormously rich through the lucrative trade of sheep farming. Wool production was a thirteenth-and fourteenth-century goldmine for the Church and with wealth had come vast lands.
As rich and powerful landowners, existing in a world apart from other men and women, the bishops had always attracted the attentions of the kings of Scots. Keen to be involved with them - for spiritual and for practical reasons - the monarchs did their best to keep a hand in the appointment of new bishops. For the most part, this interference was tolerated. It was a symbiotic relationship that mattered, more than any other, to both parties. The powerful influence of the Church in general - and of the dioceses of St Andrews and Glasgow in particular - was demonstrated by the selection of those bishops as two of the six Guardians of Scotland following the death of Alexander III in 1286.
The Scottish bishops were also working from an older rulebook than that of the English king, one that enabled them to see the game through different eyes. Central to every move and argument they would make was the independence of the Scottish Church - specifically, its independence from England.
Some of their confidence stemmed from the Quitclaim of Canterbury, the document signed by Richard the Lionheart in 1189. It had made null and void the humiliating Treaty of Falaise of 1174, by which William the Lion had accepted the English king Henry II as his overlord. But finding himself short of funds for crusading in 1189, Richard I had willingly sold back Scotland’s independence for 10,000 merks. Implicit in the Quitclaim was Scotland’s spiritual as well as temporal freedom - the King of Scotland was free of England’s domination and so was the Church.
As far as Scotland’s bishops at the time were concerned this merely underlined a judgment they had received the year before, from the Pope. In 1188, a delegation of Scottish churchmen had visited the Vatican in search of a clarification. The question they had asked, in light of the Treaty of Falaise, was: Who is in charge of the Scottish Church - the Pope in Rome or the King of England? Pope Clement III had been in no doubt and issued a Bull stating that the Scottish Church answered directly to the Apostolic See - in other words, to the Pope himself. From that moment, Scotland’s bishops saw Scotland, and Scotland’s Church, as ‘Rome’s special daughter’. While bishops in England were subject to their archbishops in Canterbury or York, their Scots counterparts had no one standing between themselves and the Pope.
By the turn of the fourteenth century, however, there was a glaring problem. The independence of the Scottish Church depended upon the existence of a Scottish kingdom, of a Scottish king. If there were no king - if Scotland were to become no more than a province of England - then the bishops’ privileged position would cease to exist. No more the hotline to their holy father. Soon they would be bending the knee and paying the tithes in York or Canterbury. The notion of Rome’s special daughter would disappear like a dream upon the moment of waking. Men like Wishart and Lamberton, another two of a kind, understood perfectly well that they and their colleagues now faced that rude awakening. Balliol was in exile in Europe, in the custody of Pope Boniface VIII, and Scotland’s fate was blowing in the breeze like a toom tabard.
As recently as 1299 the Pope had restated his direct authority over the Scottish Church. But King Edward - leaving no stone unturned in his bid to prove English overlordship - wrote a carefully worded letter to the Pope the following year. As part of his argument he quoted the origin myth of the English, as recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. The English, he said, were descended from Brutus, a Roman consul who had conquered the island of Britain in ancient times; in fact the very name ‘Britain’ was derived from Brutus. Since the English were there first, went the logic, they must have precedence over the Scots. It was a bold and colourful argument and it inspired a reply in kind from the Scottish bishops.
In the summer of 1301 a small party of Scottish priests travelled to Italy to make their case in person. The Pope was in his summer residence in the hill town of Anagni, his birthplace, 50 kilometres south-east of Rome. It was there that the Scottish bishops made their first subtle moves in the defence of their homeland. The delegation was led by a wily churchman named Baldred Bissett. Hailing originally from Stirlingshire, he was an expert in Church Law; and with the very future of Scotland and her Church at stake he would need every ounce of his experience and guile.
He made his case. If the English had a version of ancient history, so did the Scots: they were descended from Noah and had started out in Israel. When Israel had fallen to the Assyrians, his descendants fled the land among the ‘Ten Lost Tribes of Israel’. After much wandering they reached Scythia, near the Black Sea. One of their number, a prince of Scythia, married an exiled Egyptian princess named Scota. It was from Scota that the Scots had acquired their name, said Bisset, and the upshot of all this was obvious: the Scots were something very old, something other. How could they be subject to England, when England was foreign to them?
Next he reminded the Pope of Scotland’s status as Rome’s special daughter. Given the behaviour and intent of Edward I of England, said Bissett, that daughter was in urgent need of her father’s protection. Then he turned to the recent past: the English king had wickedly mistreated Scotland’s legitimate king. Edward had exploited Balliol’s forced absence - and Scotland’s resultant weakness - by committing boundless atrocities against Scots both clerical and lay, noble and peasant, male and female. Bissett called upon the Pope to free Balliol and let him return to Scotland as the rightful king.
It worked. Pope Boniface ordered Balliol’s release and let it be known that in his eyes Balliol was the ‘illustrious King of Scots’. Back in Scotland, the Guardians began to issue edicts in the name of King John Balliol once more. The success of Bissett and his team, however, was short-lived. Despite the studious efforts of so many - to clear him a path all the way back to his birthright - Balliol did not have the stomach for the job. He was ensconced in his family estate in Picardy and in no mood to return from there into Edward’s firing line.
There would be further setbacks. In 1302 Boniface would push too hard against the wrong man by issuing his most famous judgment, the Bull Unam Sanctum. The Pope was the supreme power on earth, it said, and therefore greater than any king. Among those who took extreme exception to the claim was Philippe IV of France, who went so far as to make war on the Pope - even taking him prisoner, in 1303. (He was later released, but died within a month; his views on the independence of Scotland and her king died with him. It was after this grievous affront that the papacy moved to Avignon.)
All the hard work of the Scots bishops was undone. They had staked everything on winning the backing of Boniface VIII and while they held his full attention they had been able to count on his support. But once he found himself fighting for his own survival, his concern for the well-being of his special daughter slipped his mind. And while the Vicar of Christ tried to fend off the King of France, Scotland found herself alone in the world. Edward, meanwhile, was contemplating the necessity of reinvading Scotland. But before the war machine could be got into motion, another redoubtable Scots churchman made his move.
Sometime in the autumn of 1302 William Lamberton, Bishop of St Andrews since 1297, travelled to Paris on Church business. He was part of a delegation of priests and other worthies, but perhaps he made sure to be alone when he met with a fellow Scot, resident in the city at that time. John Duns Scotus was just thirty-seven when he received his visit from Lamberton, but was already seen by some as the greatest theologian of his day. Little is known about his early life but it is thought he was born in Duns, in Berwickshire. He became a Franciscan, was ordained at St Andrews Church in Northampton in 1291, and during his short life of just forty-three years taught theology and philosophy at Oxford and Cologne, as well as in Paris. Central to his thinking was the importance - the primacy - of the individual and it was this tenet that had moved Lamberton to seek the counsel of Duns Scotus on the matter of the King of Scotland and the individuals of the Community of the Realm.
Every bit as much as the world of the twenty-first century, that of the fourteenth was governed by a rule of law. Emperors, kings and even popes might make fast and loose with its strictures as and when it suited, but all of them would have at least paid lip service to the fact. It was undoubtedly in the interest of the first two groups to assert the rights - indeed the inviolable, God-given rights - of kings.
Lamberton’s problem - Scotland’s problem - was that King John was a lame duck. What the bishop wanted to do was have him sacked and put another man in his place. Historian Dr William Russell has done more than consider the possibility of a meeting between Lamberton and Duns Scotus. He believes that it was from Duns Scotus that Lamberton gained the argument, and the confidence, for a move to overthrow the legitimate King of Scots and to replace him with another. According to Dr Russell, when Lamberton sought a legal case for backing the Bruce over Balliol, Duns Scotus did not disappoint him. The real root of royal authority, said the theologian, had nothing to do with inheritance. A king whose power was legitimate was king because his people granted him their consent, and if that consent were to be withdrawn for any reason then the man was king no more. By his refusal to return to his throne even when it was offered to him without conditions, John Balliol had committed the medieval equivalent of gross professional misconduct. The ‘people’ - effectively his employers - were within their rights to sack him and choose someone else.
This way of thinking had echoes and resonances of the time of the ancient kings. In the distant past, among the Gaels and the Picts, had been the question of febas - a Gaelic word meaning ‘worth’. Even in those days, descent from some dynasty was a prerequisite, but it was not the only or even the most important qualification of a candidate for the kingship. The surviving followers of the royal household cared at least as much that the new king would be worthy of the position; if in their eyes the dead king’s eldest son was not, they would choose some other man as their ruler.
Scotland, indeed the land before Scotland, bequeathed to the modern world one of the foundation stones of lawful government - the people’s right to choose who they will be governed by. The problem was, of course, that until very recent times ‘the people’ meant a relative handful of the richest and most powerful men in the land.
Soon after his meeting with Lamberton, Duns Scotus would write at length about rulers having a moral obligation to those they sought to rule. He said a king was chosen not by God, nor did he have supreme power just by dint of owning more land than anyone else. According to Duns Scotus a rightful king was selected by the community around him. As long as he satisfied that community he was entitled to rule, but as soon as he failed them he could be deposed and replaced. In fourteenth-century Europe, these were truly radical ideas. It is tempting to think, like Dr Russell, that they crystallised into a definite form for Duns Scotus after the conversations he had with Lamberton in Paris in 1302.
The Bishop of St Andrews returned to Scotland a happier man, secure in the knowledge that he had the justification for removing the king from his throne. But time was running out. While Lamberton set about the task of persuading others of the rightness of his cause, Edward was preparing for the final conquest of his restless northern neighbour.
Stirling Castle was the last stronghold to fall to Edward during the spring and summer of 1304. He had saved it to the end as a showpiece finale - revenge for Stirling Bridge seven years before. Between the last week of April and the last week of July the Scots garrison under the command of Sir William Oliphant put up a dogged resistance. Edward flung everything he had at the walls, even providing the ladies of his court with a grandstand view of the bombardment by his siege engines.
The greatest of these was a monstrous catapult, a trebuchet he called ‘Warwolf’. It had taken twenty-seven wagons to carry its component parts to Stirling and the town’s defenders had had to watch while it was constructed beneath their castle walls. Once it was completed, Edward used it to launch huge stone balls as well as earthenware jars of ‘Greek fire’ onto the terrified inhabitants. Here was a medieval weapon of shock and awe. In spite of the battering by Warwolf and the rest of the English king’s armaments, the garrison held out. Only when they finally ran out of food did they open the doors to the enemy.
While Edward was distracted by the pounding of Stirling Castle, two of his sworn vassals slipped quietly away. Robert Bruce had been at the English king’s side, obediently watching his master at work. Lamberton, too, his travels completed, was in attendance at the pleasure of the king. Within sight of the castle - close enough to hear the relentless bombardment - the Bishop of St Andrews met with the future King of Scotland, on 11 June 1304. The venue for their secret assignation was Cambuskenneth Abbey, beside the River Forth and less than half a mile from Stirling.
It was a turning point in the history of a nation. When Balliol had been chosen as king, there were two other families with strong claims upon the throne. The Comyns were related to the Balliols by both blood and marriage, and had honoured family ties in surrendering their own rights. Lamberton knew that John Comyn was a scrupulous man, a doer-by-the-book. It would be difficult to persuade such a man to wrap himself up in business that looked and smelled like - in fact was - the usurpation of the throne. But there was of course another family and another claim. The 6th Earl of Annandale, son of the Competitor, had died just two months before. Now his son had assumed the mantle and, along with the lands and the name of his grandfather, he had inherited the ambition. The seventh Robert Bruce was, like Lamberton, a vassal of King Edward. But his loyalty to the family claim upon the throne of Scotland was greater by far.
In spite of his unshakeable conviction as to the rightness of his claim, however, this Bruce had as yet no idea how to go about acting upon it. But Lamberton did. There at Cambuskenneth they put their names to a bond, ‘of mutual friendship and alliance against all men’. Given the importance, the treacherous intent of the document, its wording is wonderfully vague: ‘They have agreed faithfully to be of one another’s counsel in all their business affairs at all times and against whichever individuals … and that neither of them should undertake any important business without the other of them. They will mutually warn each other against any impending danger and do the best to avert the same from the other.’ Nowhere is there any mention of what the contract was really about: that Lamberton and the Scottish Church would work with the Bruce to make him King of Scotland. Of course, committing any such plan to paper would have been a suicidal move. Secrecy was vital. With this in mind, the penalty for the failure of either party to observe the terms of the bond was set at the fantastically high sum of £10,000.
The deal struck, silence agreed, both men departed the shadows of the abbey and returned to the pressing business of being Edward’s loyal servants. All the while the English king’s ‘Ordnance for the Governance of the land of Scotland’ was being prepared, while a price was being put on the head of William Wallace, both Lamberton and the Bruce continued to kneel before their liege lord. For the Bruce, the continued quiet subservience was a tall order. Lamberton had pressed upon him the need for patience, the need to behave obediently and normally until the moment was right to move towards the throne. Clearly, Lamberton intended that he would be the man to make that decision. The Bruce, however - already twenty-nine and not known for his patience - had other ideas.
He managed to put up a front and hold things together for around eighteen months. It is supposed by some that during that time he may have entered into some kind of quiet discussions with his rival John ‘the Red’ Comyn about who should be king. Both men would have understood that the Bruce’s claim was legally the stronger, by far. But to win agreement from the most powerful family in the land he sought to govern, he must have suggested there was something in it for the Comyns as well. It is possible the Bruce offered up his own lands in exchange for a promise of Comyn backing, but in the event any such details were about to be swept away.
On Thursday, 10 February 1306 the Sheriff Court was in session at Dumfries Castle. This was about Edward’s justice of course, but the king was ill and lying on his sick-bed in an English monastery. Everyone else of any importance for miles around, though, was in attendance.
Under such circumstances it would have been quite natural for both Robert Bruce and the Red Comyn to be there. Their seats were local and it would have made sense for the two noblemen to get together for a conversation about future plans. It is even possible that Lamberton and the other bishops had given their sanction to the Bruce quietly raising the matter of their support for him as the new king of Scotland. Whatever was on the official agenda is unknown, but the two met in a Franciscan priory near the River Nith, a building known to history as Greyfriars Church. Both men were accompanied by their followers and there may have been some tension in the air. Meetings between the pair were not always cordial, after all.
Despite any understandable nervousness, it was quite appropriate for the Bruce to get together with his rival and try to persuade him of the newly assured legality of replacing one king with another. It did not make sense, however, for the Bruce to kill him. But kill him he did. Perhaps at the vital moment it was a final declaration from John Comyn of his continued and defiant support of Balliol that pushed his opponent over the edge. The Bruce made at least one - probably the first - of the wounds with his own blade. As Comyn buckled, his men stepped in with swords drawn. Bursting from the church, Bruce shouted to one of his followers, Sir Roger de Kirkpatrick, that he thought he had killed Comyn. ‘I’ll make sure,’ replied Kirkpatrick, rushing inside to finish the job. The words ‘I mak siccar’ are the Kirkpatrick family motto to this day. (Whether this happened or not matters less than the way in which it has become fixed in folklore. At the very least it is a literary device that shows the Red Comyn’s murder was a drama in two acts.)
In a further blatant act of rebellion, the Bruce and his followers broke up the Sheriff Court, sending everyone away. This was bad enough - a barefaced challenge to Edward’s authority - but killing a fellow nobleman was infinitely worse. The sin itself was deadly, but the place in which he had committed the crime - God’s house - placed it beyond redemption. The man who would be king had stepped into the abyss. By letting his anger and frustration get the better of him, he had made an executive decision that compromised for ever the pact with Lamberton. In that moment he had moved from being the likely heir to the throne to a man facing ruin, both temporal and spiritual. He faced perdition, the destruction of his immortal soul.
There was no time for grief or regrets. Whether or not he was beset by fears about eternity, Bruce at once set about the business of claiming his kingdom with a will. By his own hand he took control of the castles of Ayr, Dalswinton, Tibbers and Dumfries. Rothesay Castle on Bute was taken on his behalf by his ally Robert Boyd of Cunningham; other fortresses within reach of his own lands were either taken or made over to him.
Within weeks of the murder Bruce was in Glasgow. Wishart, Lamberton’s co-conspirator in the bid to replace Balliol, understood that success had depended upon waiting for the death of Edward. The English king was old and increasingly frail; it might only have been a matter of months or at most a few more years. Now the Bruce had made all of that irrelevant. By his one sacrilegious act he had imperilled everything - even the very hope of ever again making Scotland an independent kingdom. But Wishart was sage enough to see that none of that mattered any more. If anything were to be salvaged from the wreckage of Greyfriars Church, they would have to move at once, maintain the unwanted and yet undeniably powerful momentum created by a fusillade of blows in a distant priory.
He absolved the Bruce of all guilt for his crime and wrung from the penitent a pledge that he would remain obedient to the wishes of the Scottish Church. It was a reminder of his pact with Lamberton; a shameful reminder of his crime. It was a tug on a leash, worn now and for ever. The fiery cross - the ancient call to arms - was sent across the land. Wishart, the old war horse, climbed into the pulpit and preached as though his own immortal soul depended upon the veracity of his words. He told the faithful that this Robert Bruce was to be King Robert I of Scotland. They must give battle for him now, give up their lives for him if required to do so, because this was to be nothing less than a crusade. He is your king, the bishop thundered, fight for him!
Just six weeks after felling his rival in Dumfries, Bruce was at Scone to don his crown. When word of the event reached Edward, he may have taken some comfort from knowing the Scots lacked even the tools with which to make a king: he had the Stone of Destiny, the Black Rood of St Margaret and all the regalia of sword, sceptre and crown - he even had in his custody the sixteen-year-old Earl of Fife, whose ancient privilege it was to inaugurate the King of Scotland.
The bishops, however, had the man, and they made him king just the same. Wishart produced a set of royal robes, carefully hidden away for just such an occasion, so the Bruce will have looked the part. His second wife, Queen Elizabeth, was at his side. In the absence of the Earl of Fife the crown was placed upon Robert’s head by Isabella of Fife, Countess of Buchan. Her husband, the Earl, was a cousin of the murdered Red Comyn. He was not a little put out by Isabella’s betrayal and it was a move that in time would cost her dearly. The available records show that among others present were four earls and three bishops: Lamberton, Wishart and David Murray, Bishop of Moray (three of a kind - the better to shape a winning hand). It was Friday, 25 March 1306. King Robert I was thirty-one years old.
Lamberton was certainly in attendance two days later when he celebrated a High Mass. If the new king took the opportunity to pray for help and protection from the Almighty, then he had more than his own hide to worry about. There were his followers and anyone else who had acted or spoken up in his support. He was the eldest of ten children: four brothers - Edward, Alexander, Thomas and Neil - and five sisters - Mary, Christian, Matilda, Margaret and Isabella. There was also his eleven-year-old daughter Marjorie, by his first wife, Isabella, who had died giving birth to her. Bruce’s actions imperilled them all and their fates in the months and years ahead would hang around his neck like a servant’s yoke.
So much for crowns and ceremonies and brave words: King Robert faced not just the prospect of defending his realm against Edward of England, but also the more pressing necessity of taking ownership of his realm in the first place. The Comyns, too, were the descendants of kings, mightier by far than Bruce and his traditional supporters, and he had murdered their son and heir. Also rising to seek vengeance were the Balliols and all their followers. Robert could call himself king if he wanted, but proving it in the hearts and minds of the people of Scotland - from the lowliest, to the Community of the Realm - was something else entirely.
King Robert returned first of all to the ancestral Comyn lands in the south-west, and set about making them secure. Bishop Wishart put aside the trappings of his office and captured Cupar Castle for him, ‘like a man of war’. But there was a storm coming. Edward I had appointed his own man in Scotland: Red Comyn’s brother-in-law, the able and experienced troubleshooter Aymer de Valence, next Earl of Pembroke. This wet-work by forces loyal to the English king would be like nothing yet endured by the Bruce, or by anyone else. On Edward’s orders, Pembroke had ‘raised dragon’ - the dragon banner telling all who saw it that the men riding beneath had suspended all customs of chivalry. There would be no quarter for any that stood in the face of them. Only their positions as senior churchmen saved the necks of Lamberton and Wishart. Both were captured and imprisoned.
The English had recaptured Cupar; they had swiftly taken Perth as well. In an attempt to seize the initiative, King Robert offered pitched battle there in June. With a recklessness bordering on the stupid, he set no sentries around his makeshift camp among trees near Methven as he and his men settled down for the night. With chivalry set aside, Pembroke and his force - bolstered by Comyn supporters - thought nothing of launching a surprise night attack against the king. Less a battle than a rout, Bruce and a few hundred of his followers were lucky to escape the carnage with their lives.
For most of those taken prisoner by the English, only the grisly deaths allotted to traitors awaited them. King Robert I of Scotland was a fugitive on the run. After Methven he headed towards the north-west, and suffered a further defeat at Dalry, near Tyndrum. With nothing left to do but keep running, he sent Elizabeth, their daughter Marjorie and the rest of the womenfolk towards the far north. The hope was that they would make it all the way to Orkney, from where they could take ship to Norway. Robert’s sister Isabella was the widow of King Erik of Norway (she had become his second wife after the death of Queen Margaret, while giving birth to the Maid of Norway) and the promise of a sanctuary with family beckoned. It was not to be. The women were captured at Tain and handed over to Edward.
King Robert was luckier, being able to draw upon all his powers of endurance. With every other avenue blocked to him, he turned towards the south-west. Eventually, though, he simply ran out of road. Having reached the sea, he turned around and looked back at his kingdom. He had been king for mere months and now he was poised to leave his realm in the hands of his bitterest foes. Left behind too were his wife and daughter, his brothers and sisters, his bishops and all those who had stepped up to the fight alongside him. Discretion is said to be the better part of valour, however, and for now the king’s only real course was to disappear. And so he put to ship and vanished into thin air.
Back on the mainland, Edward indulged himself in a spectacular orgy of cruelty and slaughter. Dozens, scores of Robert’s supporters were executed, and in all manner of ways. His own brother Neil was butchered like William Wallace. Many more were dispatched the same way. John of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl had been captured while trying to lead Robert’s womenfolk to safety. He was sentenced to hang. When it was pointed out to Edward that Atholl was his kin, the king ordered that his gallows be raised so that he might hang higher.
It was in his treatment of two of Robert’s women that Edward revealed the true temperature of his vengeful wrath. He had two cages built, one each in Roxburgh and Berwick castles. Robert’s twenty-four-year-old sister Mary was imprisoned in the first and Isabella, Countess of Buchan - who had placed the gold circlet on the king’s head - in the second. The cages were hung from turrets, in public view, and may have been open to the elements. Both remained in those conditions until at least 1310, when it seems they may have been moved into convents. Edward initially sentenced little Marjorie, just eleven or twelve years old, to the same fate. Just in time he relented and sent her to a convent instead. Queen Elizabeth was placed under house arrest in Holderness. She would not see her husband again for eight years. Her sister-in-law Christian Bruce was sent to a convent.
Apart from any other privations he suffered during his six-month vanishing act, surely none would have bitten more deeply than hearing one by one of the fates of his family and friends. King Robert - King Hobbe, as the English now dismissively called him - was a religious man. He had been excommunicated by the Pope after his murder of the Red Comyn and now the news of every agonising death must have intensified any feelings of doubt about the rightness of his quest: misfortunes such as these might be signs of God’s displeasure - perhaps God did not want him to be king.
Precisely where he spent those most painful months of his life is not known. Dozens of caves up and down the western coast of Scotland and even northern England are supposed to have given shelter to the King of Scots at some point during that winter of 1306-7. Perhaps he was in the Hebrides, or in Ireland. Ardnamurchan is a current favourite, but the truth of it may never be known. Maybe King Robert himself thought the details of his humiliating forced absence best forgotten. It was Sir Walter Scott who pulled together all the strands of myth and hearsay about the travails of the Bruce in 1828, in Tales of a Grandfather. It was also Scott who gave him a spider for company:
Bruce was looking upward at the roof of the cabin in which he lay; and his eye was attracted by a spider, which, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was endeavouring, as is the fashion of that creature, to swing itself one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which it meant to stretch its web. The insect made the attempt again and again without success; and at length the Bruce counted that it had tried to carry its point six times. It came into his head that he had himself fought just six battles with the English and their allies and that the poor persevering spider was exactly in the same situation with himself …
The parable of the spider was not invented by Scott. There is a much older storytelling tradition, spanning many cultures, about their industry and perseverance. Spiders and caves come up again and again, often in tales to comfort children. One old fable has the holy family fleeing Herod’s men soon after Christ’s birth. They take shelter in a cave and a spider, understanding the importance of the child, spins a web across the cave mouth to make it look as if no one has entered in a long time. Overnight the strands are covered by glittering frost and by the time the soldiers arrive, the illusion is complete. Tinsel is hung on Christmas trees in memory of the crucial role played by another spider and another web.
The message of Scott’s spider was factual enough. During the winter of 1306-7 King Robert faced a stark choice: whether to give up or fight on. Giving up could hardly have been attractive: he could flee all the way to Norway and move in with his sister, make a life for himself, but that would leave the rest of his family and all of his supporters at terrible risk. It would leave his brother’s death - and so many more besides - unavenged.
Wherever he drew his inspiration and determination from, it must have been a deep well. For when he returned to the fray in the spring of 1307 all that greeted him at first was more death, more grief and more frustration. His plan of attack had been two-pronged: he sent two of his brothers, Alexander and Thomas, to Galloway with a small force. Captured almost at once, their men were either killed or taken prisoner. Alexander and Thomas were summarily executed.
King Robert landed on the Ayrshire coast, near Turnberry Castle, where he had been born thirty-two years before, with a few score Irishmen and Hebrideans. The English were everywhere and once again he was forced to hide in the wilds of his own kingdom. In spite of it all - the deaths of two more brothers included - he dug deep into his store of self-belief. He had no intention of following Wallace to an early grave and so set about making the most of what physical resources he had. Denied force of numbers, he formed his handful of knights and his few hundred spearmen and foot soldiers into a tight guerrilla unit, as described in the Scotichronicon:
Let Scotland’s warcraft be this: footsoldiers, mountains and marshy ground; and let her woods, her bow and spear serve for barricades. Let menace lurk in all her narrow places among her warrior bands, and let her plains so burn with fire that her enemies flee away. Crying out in the night, let her men be on their guard, and her enemies in confusion will flee from hunger’s sword. Surely it will be so, as we’re guided by Robert, our lord.
Just when he and his men needed a result in their favour, they came up trumps, in March 1307, by surprising and driving off a much larger English force, at Glen Trool, in Galloway. The enemy had been commanded by Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, and in May, desperate to crush the troublesome ‘King Hobbe’, he offered pitched battle in Ayrshire. Contrary to all the precepts of guerrilla warfare, the offer was accepted. But what Pembroke could not know was that his opponent planned to mould the scene of any encounter to suit his tools. While the English knights looked forward to galloping across some level field - and they were all around them in the gently rolling landscape of Ayrshire - the guerrilla leader selected the one location for miles around that would fight for him. He chose Loudoun Hill, a volcanic plug of rock marking the eastern end of the Irvine Valley. A decade before, William Wallace had attacked and overpowered an English baggage train in its shadow, but the ill omens of the place passed Pembroke by.
The Scots got there first and, while they waited for the English, they set to work. They would be uphill from the enemy, with their backs to the crags but, even so, there were crucial modifications to be made to the ground. King Robert ordered the digging of three great trenches on the slopes below them. These were filled with sharpened stakes and then carefully camouflaged so as to be invisible to approaching horsemen.
All was ready by the time the 3,000-strong English force came into view - knights, mounted men-at-arms and infantry. If Pembroke had imagined having no more to do than unleash his heavy horse and have them run down the 600 or so Scots ranged against him in neat but comparatively flimsy lines, he was shortly to receive a crash course in the art of war. The knights duly charged, making the ground shake in the traditional manner, and clattered straight onto the traps.
Horses and men, hundreds of them, were skewered on the stakes. Scots spearmen advanced sharply downhill and put the bleating mass of them out of their misery. Then they advanced again, stepping over the corpses into the confused tangle of men and horses trapped between fallen comrades and foot soldiers to the rear. They speared them as well. Now at last had come a chance for the Scots to snatch some revenge, to remind themselves of the metallic stink of enemy blood. So shaken were those English forces not yet engaged, they simply made a run for it. John Barbour described it all in his epic poem The Bruce:
The king’s men met them at the dyke
So stoutly that the most warlike
And strongest of them fell to the ground.
Then could be heard a dreadful sound
As spears on armour rudely shattered,
And cries and groans the wounded uttered.
For those that first engaged in fight
Battled and fought with all their might.
Their shouts and cries rose loud and clear;
A grevious noise it was to hear.
With hindsight, the Battle of Loudoun Hill was the moment when King Robert revealed himself for what he truly was - a brilliant tactician and a winner.
Five days later a Scottish noble on the English side sent a letter south, reporting on the effects of Loudoun Hill upon morale north of the Border: ‘Bruce never had the good will of … the people so much … as now. It seems that God is with him, for he has destroyed King Edward’s power’. As far as the English were concerned, King Hobbe had become a bad dream, largely through his refusal to die. A prophecy was circulating too, an old prophecy of Merlin’s that had risen from the depths of the past to live again. It said that when ‘The Covetous King’ was dead, the Scots and Welsh would unite and assume the full lordship of the whole of Britain. Before his death, Edward would have the heads of two English churchmen who said the advent of King Robert was the second coming of Arthur - to unite all the Celtic peoples of Britain. But who was to blame for all this doom-mongering? Who was sowing the seeds of doubt among the English, while at the same time giving the people of Scotland a hero to believe in? Who else but the bishops of the Scottish Church. They had chosen him in the first place and now they were keeping the faith, as bishops are paid to do.
Edward I - Longshanks the Lawgiver, slaughterer of Scots - was old and weakened now, weakened by time and ceaseless warring. But he was ready to stab at Robert Bruce and his Scots from hell’s very heart. Frustrated beyond words by the failure of his generals to get the job done, he struggled northwards himself at the head of yet another army. Ill-health made it a journey of many months and by July 1307 he was still south of the Border, at Burgh-on-Sands on the English side of the Solway Firth. Scotland could be clearly seen across the silt brown waters but it was, and in some fundamental sense always had been, beyond his reach. The Covetous King died on 7 July.
His son, Edward of Caernarvon, replaced him on the throne. Time would tell that he had all of the old man’s aspiration to be seen as Scotland’s overlord, but almost none of the military abilities or appetites required to make it a reality. History has been notoriously unkind to the ‘weak and foolish’ Edward II - ‘chicken-hearted and luckless in war’. In his defence it must be said that he inherited enormous debts accrued during his father’s endless wars in Scotland and France. His people were heartily sick of the expense - and the taxes - and the last thing they really wanted was to see the new king carry on where the old one had left off.
Longshanks had been so desperate to be in at the finish that he left his son explicit instructions. His heart was to be embalmed and sent on crusade, but his bones were to be placed in a sack and carried on campaign in Scotland until the work there was done. Young Edward had other ideas. He joined up with the army and crossed the Border with them, but did little more than tour the south-west receiving the homage of some of the local worthies. Content that he had done enough in the short term just by showing up, he turned the force around and headed south. He would leave the Scots in peace, by and large, for the next three years.
Thankful for the breathing space, the reinvigorated King of Scots turned then to matters domestic. He had proven his point with the English - shown that he was to be taken seriously on the field of battle if nowhere else. But his own realm was full of doubters - aggressive, embittered doubters at that. The Comyn family and their supporters, loyal still to Balliol, were too numerous to be ignored. King Robert turned upon them with a vengeance that would have brought a smile to Longshanks’ old face.
The task was made easier by the military incompetence of the Comyns. They were rich and commanded the loyalty of many - of that there was no doubt - but as leaders of men they lacked the warrior’s mentality. But King Robert did have it. The Comyn heartlands lay in the north and for the rest of 1307 he ground relentlessly towards them, his reputation riding many leagues before him. One by one his enemies’ strongholds fell to him: Inverlochy Castle near modern Fort William; Urquhart Castle on the shore of Loch Ness; Inverness Castle.
He had formulated his strategy in advance: his was an army on the move, travelling light. He had no use for castles and so those he took, he took apart. Defenders slain, defences smashed, wells filled in. They were no use to him and he would make sure they were no use to the Comyns, the English or anyone else. He razed Nairn to the ground. By November he had stamped his authority right up the Great Glen and across the north-east, where he was joined by Murray, Bishop of Moray - another man of God with a job on the side as a man of war.
It was while he was riding high - and roughshod over his opponents - that he was laid low for the first time by the mysterious illness that would blight the rest of his life. It was nameless to those around him but it left him desperately weak, hardly able to move. Since it had no name, it had no cure. The campaign stalled in Buchan, in Comyn territory, leaving the king no alternative but to order a withdrawal into the wilds. John Comyn, Earl of Buchan and cousin of the murdered Red Comyn, was close by with a sizeable force. Yet it seemed that, sick or not, some kind of luck stayed with the king. No Comyn attack ever came and King Robert was taken to recover at a nearby castle.
Some had thought he might die, consumed by grief and guilt perhaps, as well as by his malady. But with the spring of 1308 came signs of recovery. He was still weak, but sheer bloody-mindedness got him back on the road. Buchan had dug himself in on top of Barra Hill, between Inverurie and Old Meldrum. There was, and is, an old Iron Age hill fort up there and perhaps the earl and his men felt secure behind its ruined ramparts. If they did, they were sorely mistaken. In the end it was fear that did the trick - the Buchan men’s fear of the Bruce reputation. In short order they fled the fort and fled the field. John Comyn, last of his family with any hope of defying a king, fled too - all the way to England. He was dead within the year.
There was no one left to protect the Comyn lands now, but that was not enough for Good King Robert. There was still a debt to be paid it seemed, and only he would say when the books were straight once more. He marched to Duffus Castle, a Comyn stronghold near Elgin, and utterly destroyed it. He visited upon Buchan a devastation that might be described as apocalyptic. Every village, every settlement was burned. Such was the mayhem wrought upon the territory in 1308 that the land was left barren for a generation or more. But it was not the farmland the Bruce damaged: burning the crops would just have improved fertility. Rather it was the people he punished, and the animals they tended. Every man, woman and child that came the Bruce’s way was put to the sword. Buchan was barren because there was no one left alive.
And after all that, while the Bruce’s hands were still slick with the blood and brains of his people and their children, the Pope lifted the ban of excommunication and welcomed King Robert back into the fold. It was therefore with the reassurance that even sacrilegious murder and the wholesale slaughter of infants would not close the door to heaven for a king that he started 1309 determined to get on with the business of governing his kingdom.
He summoned a parliament, his first, at St Andrews. The cathedral there was nearing completion after 150 years and King Robert chose the brand new venue to air some brand new ideas. They were contained within what was essentially an open letter. It is not a famous document, but it should be. Known as ‘The Declaration of the Clergy’, it enshrined for the first time the bishops’ take on what had been gleaned from Lamberton’s conversations with John Duns Scotus in 1302. It declared nothing less than that ‘the people’ had chosen their king: ‘And by the knowledge and consent of the same people he was received as king so he might restore the defects of the kingdom and correct things needing to be corrected, and might steer those that lacked guidance. And by their authority the aforesaid king of Scots was solemnly endowed with the kingdom, with whom the faithful people of the kingdom wish to live and die.’
It certainly had a ring to it, and to twenty-first-century eyes it has the look of a revolutionary manifesto. But in 1309 ‘the people’ were the important people like the nobility and the senior clergy - the Community of the Realm - rather than the drinkers down at the Drover’s Arms. In truth ‘The Declaration of the Clergy’ was written for the common people, not by them, because those ‘people’ were meant to listen to it. As well as being sent to the Pope, it was preached in churches the length and breadth of the land. It was copied, shown around, repeated endlessly. It was the party line and it came direct from King Robert’s ever-faithful supporters: the Scottish Church.
Bluff and bluster notwithstanding - even well-written bluff and bluster - the sheer scale of the task of establishing him as the undisputed monarch was becoming clear. By military skill and cold-hearted violence he had crushed the most visible opposition. By the Declaration he had made clear the legitimacy of his position. But in the eyes of many he was a soi-disant roi, a so-called king.
In order to make his position unassailable, both for himself and for a male heir, he would have to complete three tasks. First he had to secure the loyalty of all of Scotland’s nobility, while at the same time ejecting the English; second, he had to force or persuade the King of England to recognise the independent status of his throne; third, he would have to set about the business of fathering a male heir. With his wife still in captivity in England, job number three would simply have to wait. Before all of that, he began the expulsion of the English and the retaking of the great fortresses of Scotland. He raided south of the Border as well, using the north of England as a bank from which he could withdraw funds for his campaigns.
The work forged his warriors into an ever-tighter unit. His senior commanders - men like James ‘the Black’ Douglas - had remained at his side throughout, inspiring yet more confidence among the men they led. And King Robert never seemed to put a foot wrong. Always he had denied himself the vainglory of pitched battle, remembering to use stealth, guile and surprise as his principal weapons. His resultant success at ousting English garrisons from Scots strongholds was astonishing. In January 1313 he took Perth, in February Dumfries, between May and June the Isle of Man.
King Robert felt strong enough by the end of year to issue an ultimatum to those nobles still denying him their outspoken support: they had twelve months to make up their minds or face the consequences. All the while, his persecution of the English in Scotland continued. Sir Thomas Randolph, the king’s nephew, captured Roxburgh Castle in February 1314 and then completed a truly memorable double the following month by taking mighty Edinburgh Castle as well.
When it came, the biggest gamble was made not by King Robert, but by his brother Edward. In the same month that Robert had retaken Man, Edward was put in control of the siege of Stirling Castle. With the king out of the way, the English constable of the castle, Sir Philip Mowbray, offered Edward a deal: if an English force had not arrived to lift the Scots siege by Midsummer’s Day - 24 June 1314 - he would hand over the keys. Edward agreed at once … and Robert was furious. This was counter to every strategy that had brought King Robert so far. He had always used the element of surprise to gain the upper hand over superior numbers. Now his brother had forced him into a situation where Edward II could work towards a specific date! On 24 June 1314 the King of England would know where the King of Scots would be - at Stirling Castle readying his forces to try to drive off the massed might of the English war machine. There was no way King Robert could allow the English to retain their grip on Stirling.
His un-asked-for predicament also presented an opportunity to deliver another kind of surprise, a surprise of a different order of magnitude. Here he had been, working away for years, grimly retaking his kingdom stone by stone. Despite his success, none of it had served to proclaim him as unquestionable, beyond the reach of any challenger. A victory over the English in the shadow of Stirling Castle, however, might do that for him at a single stroke … might make of him a legend.
Still he hedged his bets, kept his head. He had his men on site well ahead of the English, training and training again in the arts of the schiltron. They were in ‘the park’, acres of open woodland stretching south from the castle. It was ideal territory for men on foot. The trees offered one kind of natural protection, especially from cavalry, while the nearby ‘carse’ - the boggy floodplain of the River Forth, off to the east - presented another. Since time immemorial, the few miles of solid ground beside the castle rock had offered the only guarantee of dry feet for men and animals travelling north or south. It was this that made the rock so important: whoever held it controlled the coming and going. The Romans had appreciated the fact, and had built a road leading straight to it. It was along this same, already ancient thoroughfare that King Robert expected his foe to advance.
With this in mind, he had had his men dig hundreds of metre-deep pits either side of the road. Camouflaged out of sight with turf and grasses, they presented a lethal hazard to men and horses at full tilt. Above all else he was allowing himself to remain undecided about how deeply to commit to the fight. On paper, a pitched battle with the English was beyond him and regardless of what his brother had agreed he was keeping open as many options as possible. Were the enemy to advance in formation up the line of the road, they would see the Scots ahead of them and loose their heavy horse. The pits would gall the advance and enable the Scots spearmen to get in among them. It might not add up to a total victory, but it would serve to bloody King Edward’s nose at least.
When the English army finally came into view, on 23 June, it was a sight to behold. No doubt King Robert felt vindicated for having mixed such a measure of caution into his thinking. It was a force as large as anything sent north since the glory days of Longshanks himself. Thousands upon thousands of them: knights, mounted men-at-arms, longbow-men, foot soldiers. There were fabled names too - like Sir Giles d’Argentan, third best knight in all of Christendom. Accurate reckonings are non-existent but best guesses suggest 15,000 men on foot and up to 3,000 horse. They certainly outnumbered the Scots, perhaps by as much as two to one. But while Edward II had been able to summon impressive numbers, they had been assembled at the last minute. His men had finally come together as a single unit only days before - quite a handicap in the face of an enemy that had at its core a hard-bitten team of men who had been learning and growing together for long years.
The fighting that first day, the last before Midsummer, was mostly an untidy affair. None of it worked out as King Robert had planned. Instead of galloping headlong into the leg-snapping pits, the English knights circled around the body of the Scots forces, looking for openings that did not exist, losing tempers and lances in the process. But one event, up near the road, will be remembered as long as there is a Scotsman left alive.
An English knight named Sir Henry de Bohun, nephew of the hereditary Constable of England, Sir Humphrey de Bohun, was trotting in line with his fellows when he spied an unexpected target: a mounted knight wearing a golden crown. Here was immortality in the making, a chance to defeat the King of Scots in single combat. Lowering visor and lance, he spurred his war horse out of the formation and galloped forwards. It is hard to imagine that poor deluded de Bohun ever stood a chance. King Robert was alone right enough, and mounted on a pony rather than a war horse. But he had been fighting and killing as king for seven relentless years; fighting and killing to protect his lands and name and title for a lifetime before that. He had lost brothers and friends to the English butcher’s slab and hangman’s noose. His wife, daughter and sister were imprisoned, along with the bishops who had offered him his throne. He had fought his way all the way back from a cave to a kingdom.
As de Bohun bore down on him, King Robert judged the moment and moved aside. He stood up in his stirrups, holding his favourite battleaxe with both hands. It was with the weight of all he had suffered at English hands that he brought the mill-sharpened weapon down upon his young adversary’s helmeted head. The axe shaft snapped in two and de Bohun’s head was cleft from crown to chin. When King Robert trotted back to rejoin his nobles they scolded him for taking such a risk. He replied only that he was sorry about his axe.
The long summer evening drew to a close and both sides withdrew, the Scots into the cover of the trees and the English onto the sogginess of the carse. During the night that followed, a Scots knight who had been fighting for Edward changed sides. He trotted into the Scots camp and said English morale was dangerously low. A swift attack at first light might just carry the day for the Scots.
24 June was a Sunday and the Scots celebrated Mass in the half-light of dawn. The English were still half-asleep when word spread that the enemy was on the move. This was a disappointment. The English had hoped the Scots might have taken the opportunity to drift away to their homes during the night, content to have settled at least some scores. Instead they looked up towards the trees and saw Scots spearmen stepping out of the shadows by the thousand, dropping to their knees. Edward joked that the enemy had come to ask his forgiveness. A traitor Scot, Sir Ingraham de Umfraville, corrected him: ‘They want forgiveness - not from you, but from God, for what they are about to do.’
Just as it had for Wallace at Stirling Bridge all those years before, the land fought for King Robert as well. Down on the floodplain, within loops of a Forth tributary stream called the Bannock Burn, the English cavalry could not deploy. Rather than achieve any kind of order, they just got in each other’s way. Archers too - some of the same who had been so effective at Falkirk - were hemmed in by stumbling horses and foot soldiers. The English strength in numbers proved meaningless. Only a narrow front of cavalry and infantry had their faces towards the Scots - and those Scots were advancing towards them at a trot, armed with long spears. It was a bloodbath that turned the Bannock Burn dark red.
Those English that could extricate themselves from marsh, stream, river and Scottish spearmen took the only sensible option and made a run for it. King Edward ran too, all the way to the castle. Turning up at the gates, he found them barred against him. With more sense than his king, Mowbray had seen what way the wind was blowing. From the battlements he told Edward he had no forces to protect him, and urged him to head for home. Humiliated, Edward did as he was told. The Battle of Bannockburn, 23-4 June 1314. King Robert I had his legend.
Back on the battlefield, the Scots busied themselves rounding up prisoners - and a valuable haul it proved too. King Robert was able to exchange some of them for those he had lost in 1307. Robert Wishart, seventy-four by then, and blind; his daughter Marjorie and his sister Christian; best of all, he had his queen returned to him as well. Like the rest of them, Elizabeth had been eight years in captivity. The empty years had left their mark, adding yet more to the sum of the king’s grief.
The legend of Robert the Bruce and Bannockburn, though, would never grow old. The passing years have only burnished the glory of it. But it was and is a glory that blinds us to bleaker facts. It had been a luminous victory, but when all was said and done it was just another battle, another bloody Sunday. The English were all but evicted from their squats north of the Border, but the English king was not one inch closer to acknowledging an independent Scotland.
For the next four years, the Scots raided northern England again and again. It became almost an obsession for King Robert, an obsession born of desperation to secure English recognition of his kingdom before it was too late. Robert Bruce was in his late forties, his health damaged by long hard years of tough living and ceaseless fighting. He had no heir as yet and for a while it must have seemed to Edward that he had only to wait for the inevitable.
King Robert turned his attentions further afield, invading Ireland and raising his surviving brother Edward to the kingship in 1316. Still the raiding of the north of England continued. They blackmailed, they raped, they burned. After several attempts, Berwick was reclaimed from English hands in 1318. Any satisfaction at the gain was tempered by the loss of Edward Bruce in battle in Ireland in the same year. It was all in vain - Edward II took no notice because he did not have to.
What the English king lacked as a warrior, he made up for with his skills as a politician. In a move that must have been galling for King Robert, a king made by bishops, Edward had turned to the Church for help.
Pope John XXII, newly ascended to the Holy See, wanted all the major crowned heads of Europe to join in a new crusade against Islam. With such grand plans at the forefront of his thinking, he was ill-disposed towards any monarch who might be accused of causing trouble for his neighbours, of disrupting Christian unity. In 1318, word reached the Scots that King Edward had managed to paint them black in the eyes of the Pope. The Holy Father had been persuaded that the Scots were to blame for all their years of war with England. King Robert, his lieutenants and his bishops were all excommunicated. Furthermore, every English priest was ordered to hold a service, three times each day, during which the very name of the King of Scots was cursed. Once again the fate of the Scottish crown was in the hands of churchmen. And once again the Scots bishops rose to the challenge.
In April 1320 a Scottish knight set off for the papal court. He was, in a sense, a postman. He carried with him three letters. One was from King Robert, one from the bishops and the last from the nobles of Scotland. Only the nobles’ letter survives. It is likely it was composed in the chancellery at Arbroath Abbey, founded by William the Lion. In 1320 the Declaration of Arbroath, as it has come to be known, was a hard-nosed reply to all of King Edward’s spin. It was signed by the nobles and magnates of the realm, fifty-one of them, but it was not written by them. It is more likely to have come from the hand of Abbot Bernard, Chancellor of Scotland and based at Arbroath.
Popes were required to sit for hours listening to one petition after another from disaffected souls scattered the length and breadth of Christendom. Abbot Bernard clearly had in mind the need to jolt his boss from his daydreaming and so used every literary gun in his arsenal.
The Declaration begins with a rehash of Baldred Bisset’s origin myth of the Scots. They are an ancient people; Scotland is Rome’s special daughter. So far, so familiar. Next it follows the line of the Declaration of the Clergy of 1309 - that Robert the Bruce ‘by due consent and assent of us all’ had freed the Scots from the weight of the English yoke.
By now, Abbot Bernard’s blood was up: if this King Robert were to submit in any way to English rule, then the Scots would drive him out (a bald statement guaranteed to rouse any sleeping pontiff ). They would drive him out: ‘and make some other man who was well able to defend us our king; for as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man surrenders but with life itself.’
Abbot Bernard then asks the Pope, begs him indeed, to look with fatherly eyes upon the plight of Rome’s special daughter. Even the words of Tacitus’ Calgacus are there in the echoes, when the Holy Father is asked to intercede on the Scots’ behalf and command Edward II ‘to leave in peace us Scots, who live in this poor little Scotland beyond which there is no dwelling at all’.
As a final thought, the Pope is asked to see things from the Scottish perspective: it was the English, not the Scots, who were making excuses to avoid going on crusade; the Scots were just fighting for recognition as an independent kingdom. And for as long as the English made it impossible for either king to lead warriors against the forces of Islam, innocent Christians would continue to die. If the Pope failed to act, then he would be responsible for the consequences, said the Scots. The loss of lives and perdition of souls would lie at the Pope’s feet.
Viewed with modern eyes, the Declaration of Arbroath is a stunning document. As an elegant declaration of independence, it is without equal. It was not, however, an overnight sensation in 1320. At the very most, all it achieved at the time was a turn of the screw, nudging the Pope in the right direction without actually changing his mind.
King Robert was not even completely secure at home. He had recently weathered the ‘Soules Conspiracy’, a dangerously potent attempt to knock him from his throne. The plot took its name from the involvement of the hereditary butler Sir William Soules, but was in reality a symptom of a deep-seated infection. Edward Balliol, son of the exiled king, had turned up at the English court. For Balliol and Comyn supporters slumbering in the north, this was a supply of oxygen over glowing embers. Even after fourteen years on the throne, after all he had endured and achieved, there were plenty of Scots ready to try to bring King Robert down. That he survived the crisis - just as he survived everything else - was a testament to his stubbornness, and his luck.
In 1321, Edward II offered to seek terms for peace with the Scots. The French king had applied pressure; so too had Pope John, moved in part perhaps by the Declaration. Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast was nominated as the location for the talks and the envoys from both sides gathered there in March.
It was a farce. Once again the English repeated their claims of overlordship. The Scots replied by rereading their own, dog-eared origin myth. Now they could stir in a generous helping of the Declaration - and just for good measure they said Edward and his Plantagenet dynasty were illegitimate. The family line stemmed from the ‘foreign usurpation’ of 1066, by a soi-disant roi the Scots called ‘William the Bastard’. The legitimate claim on the English crown was that of the House of Wessex, they said, whose sole living representative happened to be King Robert I of Scotland.
A few spiteful jibes aside, it was the same argument on a different day: nothing achieved, nothing settled. For King Robert it was Groundhog Day - to be endured for the next six years. Every time his bishops came close to securing concessions from the papal court, Edward’s men would make last-minute moves to ensure they were slapped down. In 1323, in a bid to bring an end to the raiding, the English king signed a thirteen-year truce with Scotland; but it contained no cessation of the age-old claims of overlordship.
5 March 1324 was different, a break from the norm. The thirty-five-year-old Queen of Scotland gave birth to a healthy baby boy, David. King Robert was nearly fifty and by the standards of the day it was close to miraculous. Scotland had her male heir but her king was no closer to having an acknowledged independent kingdom to pass on to him. The breakthrough, when it came, was one King Robert could hardly have hoped for in his wildest dreams. On 20 January 1327, King Edward II of England was deposed by his long-suffering wife, Isabella of France. Their fourteen-year-old son was crowned Edward III the following month but it was Roger Mortimer, Isabella’s lover, who was the de facto ruler of the country.
Fate had removed one King Edward from King Robert’s path in 1307. Now it had removed another and he was determined to take advantage. Though stricken yet again by his nameless illness, he laid siege to Norham Castle in August, while Moray and the Black Douglas attacked the fortifications at Alnwick and Warkworth.
King Robert was at Berwick, on 18 October 1327, when he let it be known what it would take for him to bring an end to the violence: the English king must acknowledge the independence of the Scottish crown in perpetuity and there must be a marriage between David and Edward’s younger sister, the Princess Joan. Finally the force of King Robert’s will was too much to be resisted - particularly by a regency government. In March 1328 Edward III duly announced that:
we will and concede for us and all our heirs and successors … that the kingdom of Scotland shall remain forever separate in all respects from the kingdom of England, in its entirety, free and in peace, without any kind of subjection, servitude, claim or demand, with its rightful boundaries as they were held and preserved in the times of Alexander of good memory king of Scotland last deceased, to the magnificent prince, the lord Robert, by God’s grace illustrious king of Scots, our ally and very dear friend, and to his heirs and successors.
There it was: freedom and peace from England.
King Robert had won, but he had also lost. Queen Elizabeth lived long enough to know success was on its way, but she did not live to see it. She died just days before English envoys arrived at Holyrood Abbey, in Edinburgh, for the formal ratification of the Treaty of Northampton-Edinburgh.
The King of Scots was on his sick-bed too, tortured still by his chronic illness. But, for all that, he was well enough to hear the terms that meant his life’s work was nearing completion. The treaty echoed all of the sentiments of King Edward’s announcement the month before. It was almost beyond belief. Time had been rolled back to the days and the world of Alexander III: the same and not the same. The world had changed, been made different by three decades of war.
King Robert’s earls were in attendance, his bishops too. William Lamberton was there, old and frail. Without him, it is unlikely such a day would ever have come. As he watched the signing his mind would have gone back to marks made upon a different document, twenty-four years before in the conspiratorial silence of Cambuskenneth Abbey on the banks of the River Forth. Within two months of the signing of the Treaty of Northampton-Edinburgh he too was dead, his job done.
On 12 July the Princess Joan, who was six, and David, who was only four, were married in Berwick. It was a union of children but it symbolised peace. Peace at last: after thirty-two years of struggle and bloodshed. The Pope let it be known that he too recognised the Scottish throne and that the ban of excommunication had been lifted from King Robert.
With so much optimism and good will, a request was made on the king’s behalf for something that every European monarchy of status already possessed: an ampulla of oil blessed by the Pope himself. Oil from such bottles was used to anoint kings during their coronation ceremonies. Any attempt to conquer or in any way interfere with the lands of a king who, by virtue of this oil, had been anointed by God, was a mortal sin. The kings of England had an ampulla; the kings of France as well. The Scottish kings never had, and they wanted one. An ampulla was no mere status symbol either - rather it was a bottle-full of independence from the King of England.
With so much accomplished - all of it against the odds - the ailing king might have been forgiven for granting himself a little peace. But it was beyond him. If peace were to be enjoyed, it would have to come from somewhere else, somewhere beyond his own reach. Like an indelible stain, his illness marked him out, in his own mind at least, as unclean. He lacked God’s grace or he would be freed from his physical suffering.
How was he to square the books and pay the price demanded by his crown? So far it had been paid by others - wife, family, friends, bishops. They had bled for him and that blood was on his hands. But how was he to settle his own account? He paid a chaplain in Buchan to recite daily Masses for the soul of his brother Neil, the first to die. Elizabeth had been buried in Dunfermline Abbey, the last resting place of St Margaret, and money and favours were sent there too.
This is the truth of King Robert the Bruce and yet it slipped from plain view long ago. Instead his name is a fixed point, the nation’s True North. If ever ‘Scotland’ lost her way she had only to take a bearing from ‘the Bruce’ and then the path ahead would be obvious once more. Yet the man himself spent his final years in a desperate search for proof that he had done right.
In the last months of his life his illness took permanent hold. He was dying, they said, and this time they were right. The shrine of St Ninian, at Whithorn in Galloway, was already an ancient place of pilgrimage - famed for its powers to cure the sick - and now King Robert turned to it for help. If the saint could not fix his body, perhaps he could ease the pain in his soul. Much too ill to ride, he travelled on a litter. The journey took several weeks but when he arrived he embarked at once upon five days of fasting and penance.
The return journey was easier and at last he was taken to Cardross, on the north shore of the Firth of Clyde, and to the house he had had built there three years before. Knowing that he had only days or weeks to live, he sent out letters requesting the presence of his earls and magnates. They duly gathered at his side and swore that, when the time came, they would do no less for his son and heir. ‘Sirs, my day is far gone,’ he told them. ‘And there remains but one thing, to meet Death without fear, as every man must do. I thank God he has given me the space to repent in this life, for through me and my wars, there has been a great spilling of blood and many an innocent man has been slain. Therefore I take this sickness and this pain as a penance for my sins.’ He asked that his embalmed heart be taken on crusade and James the Black Douglas, ever his most faithful lieutenant, was given the task.
King Robert I of Scotland was fifty-five when he died on 7 June 1329, in his house at Cardross. His heart was removed, as he had requested, and his body taken to Dunfermline Abbey where it was interred beneath a tomb in the middle of the choir.
The following year, the Black Douglas joined the crusade of the Spanish King Alfonso XI. He may have been in command of the body of Scottish and English knights that found itself outmanoeuvred by an overwhelming force of Moors at Tebas de Ardales on 25 August 1330. In any case, every man of them was slain. King Robert’s heart was recovered from the field and returned to Scotland along with the bones of the Black Douglas. It was buried in Melrose Abbey.
David and Joan were enthroned as King and Queen of Scotland on 24 November 1331. There was no Stone of Destiny. Despite Edward III’s promises to return it along with the Black Rood of St Margaret, both remained in Westminster. There was, however, an ampulla of blessed oil. For the first time, a King of Scotland was anointed by the grace of God and in the manner respected by other monarchies. King Robert had won his last battle.
Robert the Bruce is a statue now - many statues in fact, scattered across the land and the world. He gazes south from the esplanade in front of Stirling Castle, ever watchful in case the English approach over old ground. The most familiar is the one by Pilkington Jackson that sits on high ground at the Bannockburn Heritage Centre. Here is the Bruce at his most warlike, twice life size and astride a giant horse (an exact replica of it sits outside the Jubilee Auditorium in Alberta, Canada). But it is almost as if the fossilising began while he was still alive. In his last days he was paralysed by his illness. One observer noted, ‘for he can scarcely move anything but his tongue’. He was being made fixed and unreal even as he died.
While he lived, his words revealed his humanity, his humility and his grief, ‘through me and my wars, there has been a great spilling of blood and many an innocent man has been slain’. He understood his debt and was in no doubt about how much remained to be paid. Once he fell silent, the transformation to effigy was complete and for ever. There would never again be any mention of his consuming guilt, of the bishops who chose him and guided his every move across the checkerboard of nights and days; no words for the loss of brothers, friends, family. The legend of Robert the Bruce blurred the medievalness of all that had been done by him, and in his name.
Scotland was, at last, free and independent of English dominion - but the king who made it happen had been turned to stone. A fairy-tale curse for a king made myth. The rock of Scotland had claimed him for its own.
For most Scots living their lives in the fourteenth century, there were more telling developments than the triumphs and disasters of Bruces, Balliols and Plantagenets.
There is no denying that the ever-present threat of raids became a fact of life for people in the Borderlands - whether Scots or English - in the first four or five decades of the 1300s. And if it was not raids it was the depredations of full-scale war. With this in mind, society in that belt of territory either side of the Border certainly did evolve with a strongly militaristic feel. Powerful families in the debatable lands kept themselves on a war footing as a matter of course and their tenants readied themselves to defend hearth, home and livestock as best they could.
There were also those who had had as much to fear from their own king as from any foreign army. King Robert’s crushing of his Comyn rivals in Buchan had caused devastation that was still being felt in the territory half a century later.
But away from the Border, and away from centres like Edinburgh and Stirling, war was much less of a concern, the power games of the mighty less distracting. For most Scots there were other matters to occupy mind and hands. For one thing, the climate was deteriorating, becoming colder and wetter. Better weather in preceding centuries had made existing farmland more productive. The resultant population growth inevitably meant many people had had no option but to move on to tougher land. Climate change, however, had begun to bring about a contraction of the population - which led in turn to an abandonment of the least attractive farmland.
As the fourteenth century wore on, the population was further reduced by outbreaks of plague, which first made landfall in Scotland late in 1349. It was this decline in numbers that brought about a change in many people’s lives more profound than anything wrought by royal dynastic tussles. While Scotland had been more densely populated, land was at a premium. Those who owned the land controlled the wealth and the power; the landless, by contrast, lived only by the strength of their backs.
While population was high, labour was cheap and plentiful, keeping them poor and dependent. During the second half of the century, however, a correction took place that fundamentally altered the relationship between landless and landowner. For the first time in living memory, property values fell alarmingly. Those unhappy with their rent or other conditions had options that had never existed before. They could go elsewhere. Their labour was an increasingly valuable commodity and, for the more industrious among them, things were looking up.
The decades of uncertainty and then outright war that followed the death of Alexander III in 1286 had given Scotland’s Guardians - and then her kings - a renewed obsession with the view to the south. The borderlands, and England beyond, took up most of their time, and this preoccupation had unexpected consequences for those parts of the realm outside the beam of the spotlight.
By the time Alexander III died, the Western Isles had been part of Scotland for just twenty years. If the king had managed to stay on his horse and lived, he might have had more time to concentrate on bringing the new territory properly into the fold. His successors, freed from the burden of a war to keep a mighty enemy at arm’s length, may have ensured that ‘Scottish’ ways reached and permeated the society of the Isles men.
Of course, that is not what happened. Instead the Western Isles were left to take care of themselves. While the Scottish kingdom on the mainland fought for its very survival from 1296 onwards, the Isles were increasingly open and receptive to ideas and mores imported from Ireland. The cult of the warrior was the dominant influence and, as the thirteenth century gave way to the fourteenth, it was the axes of the ‘galloglasses’ that came to dominate lives in the islands and on the north-western seaboard. And as the fourteenth century wore on, the dominant family of the Isles - the MacDonalds - began to look at more and more of the northern mainland of Scotland with hungry eyes. This, then, was the other side of Scotland - out of sight and often out of mind, making its own way. By the time Good King Robert was approaching the end of his battles - his enemies crushed and only his conscience left to trouble him - the far west was a land apart.
David II inherited a world made by war. Bannockburn and the Declaration of Arbroath had made a legend of his father. While Robert I lived, Scotland’s future as an independent kingdom was assured. Even today many Scots hear the word ‘Bannockburn’ and their minds fill with grand thoughts of the ultimate Scots victory, proud Edward’s army sent home to think again. Somewhere in their heads, a book snaps shut: end of story. The problem is that Edward and his army did think again, and so did the kings and armies that followed them. And what they thought about was coming back and carrying on where they had left off.
Little David might have fared better if his principal Guardian had lived longer. But by 1332, Sir Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, great ally and nephew of Robert the Bruce, was dead. At the same time, the English King Edward III reached adulthood and almost immediately began planning how he would right the wrongs and humiliations he had endured at Scots hands during his minority. The Treaty of Northampton-Edinburgh of 1328 stung most painfully of all, but he had also had to describe the King of Scots as ‘our dear friend and ally’ while promising to respect the boundaries that existed between the two countries in the days of Alexander III. Now the time had come to show Robert’s heir just how much room there was to manoeuvre within the text of grand treaties.
Edward Balliol, the heir of King John, was still floating around the English court like a ship that had slipped its mooring. King Edward gave fresh impetus to his namesake by sending him north to rekindle the anti-Bruce feeling innate in the Comyns and their never-say-die supporters. Balliol also rounded up the so-called ‘Disinherited’ - those Scots who had lost lands thanks to the Bruce - and put them all aboard a fleet provided by the English king.
They landed in Fife in August 1332 and immediately marched towards Perth. A hastily assembled force they may have been, but they were driven by grudges that had been festering darkly for half a lifetime. On 8 August they were met on Dupplin Moor by a royalist force led by the Earl of Mar, the new Guardian of Scotland. The battle was a bloody disaster for King David’s men. Geography and poor leadership conspired to leave his spearmen completely exposed to Balliol’s archers. Thousands of them fell dead, Mar among them, and the resultant rout was total.
Scone had been witness to the coronation of King David and Queen Joan just months before, but Edward Balliol was able to step out onto Moot Hill and reclaim his father’s throne. Scotland had two kings now, and who was the usurper was largely a matter of opinion. David had the throne from his father Robert, but Robert had claimed it from John Balliol, the rightful king. Ownership of the kingdom of Scotland had almost become a matter for lawyers or philosophers to decide.
In the end, right was less of an issue than ownership of a backbone and Edward Balliol was found wanting. No sooner had he donned the crown than he was on his knees swearing subservience to English Edward as his own and Scotland’s overlord. Just for good measure, he handed over the whole of southern Scotland as a gift. Even more pertinently, he promised his master the return of Berwick - reclaimed by King Robert in 1318 - but added that the English king would have to come and take the place himself.
With the Earl of Mar dead, the Guardianship of Scotland had passed initially to Sir Andrew Murray, son of the Andrew Murray who had fought at the side of William Wallace at Stirling Bridge in 1297. But Murray was captured and stewing in an English prison when English Edward arrived near Berwick to claim his gift.
Archibald Douglas, brother of the Black Douglas, was Scotland’s acting Guardian and leader of the Scots forces when they clashed with Edward’s army at Halidon Hill on 19 July 1333. Like Dupplin Moor it was a disaster for King David’s men. Douglas fell dead, along with three earls, hundreds of knights and barons, and thousands of foot soldiers. King David and Queen Joan were immediately sent to France for their own safety. English Edward was master not just of Balliol, but of Scotland too.
This Scotland, however, was different from any that had existed before. Every Scot knew and understood that Edward Balliol was a puppet, and they had suffered and learned too much in their wars of independence even to contemplate tolerating English dominion again. Guardian Murray was soon free and back in Scotland and under his leadership the Scots fought on. It was a war of attrition but the toll it took upon the people and the land only increased their determination to be rid of Balliol.
By 1337 Edward of England had become embroiled in war across the Channel, a big war that would preoccupy him and his successors for a hundred years. With too much to do in France, Edward lost interest in Scotland and Balliol, to such an extent that by 1341 it was safe enough for King David to return from exile with his queen. Always one to turn an opportunity into a problem, he managed to remain at large in his kingdom for five years before his still-youthful enthusiasm got the better of him. In August 1346, Edward scored his victory at Crécy - the work of archers who had probably perfected their skills against Scots at some point. When the French king, Philippe VI, called on his old ally Scotland to help him by invading England, David was only too happy to oblige. In the disastrous encounter that followed, he was taken prisoner and sent to the Tower of London. He would be a guest of his brother-in-law for the next eleven years.
The English spilled northwards; southern Scotland was theirs after all, the gift of Balliol. As for Balliol himself, he soon understood that his time as king had passed. Having quietly made his excuses, he left. He died in 1364.
When David was finally allowed home in 1357, he came back with a huge annual ransom to pay. His need for cash made him lean more heavily on the burghs in search of funds - and enabled them to increase their influence on the affairs of state as a quid pro quo. It was in the reign of David II, therefore, that the burghs secured their rights to send representatives to parliament, becoming the ‘Third Estate’.
Of more significance - in the long term, certainly - was the enhanced status of the man who had assumed control of the country in David’s absence. Robert Stewart was the son of King Robert I’s daughter Marjorie, and therefore King David’s nephew. His father had been Walter the Steward - holder of the hereditary title created by King David I - but by now ‘Steward’ had become Stewart. In 1318, years before David had even been born, Stewart had been designated as heir presumptive to the throne, on account of his mother. All these years later, it was the position he still held.
While his uncle languished in captivity, Stewart had busied himself building alliances with other powerful men of the realm, including the Douglases. He secured the marriage of his daughter to Good John MacDonald, of the Isles, making friends in the west. He twice obstructed his uncle’s return to Scotland and by the time King David finally came home there was no love lost between the two men. David’s queen, Joan of England, died without providing him with an heir and, despite his best efforts with subsequent partners, he never had a son. When he died suddenly, in Edinburgh Castle, on 23 February 1371, his nephew’s moment had arrived. Robert Stewart was duly crowned King Robert II, at Scone, on 26 March the same year.
This first of the Stewart kings had arrived upon the throne late in life. He was fifty-five and he dedicated his remaining years to securing the future of his line. Sons and heirs duly poured forth. His eldest son, by his first wife, was John, Earl of Carrick, but there were to be plenty more. From two marriages he produced a total of five legitimate sons and eight legitimate daughters. There were at least eight bastard sons as well.
His approach to kingship was much like a boardroom takeover. The whole strategy was based on placing his own people - usually his own sons or sons-in-law - in as many of the top jobs as possible. His second son, Robert, was Earl of Fife; his third, Alexander, was the Lord, rather ‘the Wolf’ of Badenoch; his fourth was David, Earl of Strathearn and his fifth was Walter, Earl of Caithness.
While his fecund abilities to reproduce himself solved some problems, they created others to take their place. The Wolf of Badenoch earned his nickname from his own management style. Alexander, Lord of Badenoch, was the king’s favourite. But he was the third son and therefore unlikely ever to succeed him. Off in his own wild domain he went native, acquiring the warrior sensibilities of the powerful local warlords. They kept their private armies of wild Highland men and so did Alexander. He indulged himself in private vendettas against other magnates and annoyed the Bishop of Moray so much he was preached against in Elgin Cathedral. The Wolf of Badenoch did not take kindly to hearing judgments laid against himself and burned the building to the ground.
Robert II’s inability to control his son had brought about a palace coup. Forced from the throne in late 1384, he was replaced by his heir, John, Earl of Carrick, who was made Guardian of Scotland.
A bout of the old trouble - trouble with England - flared up again in 1385. Richard II was on the throne by then, and the hostilities were the customary raids back and forth. Finally the English pushed all the way to Edinburgh and razed the city before turning for home.
Robert II was seventy-four when he died in 1390. He could never have expected to become king and yet the crown came to him just the same. Unfortunately it was snatched away abruptly by his own son.
In 1388, two years before his father died, John, Earl of Carrick, had been kicked and nearly killed by a horse. He never fully recovered and was disabled for the rest of his life. Bad luck begets bad luck, they say, and it was decided John should shed his name, the better to avoid associations with John I - John Balliol, Toom Tabard. It was therefore as King Robert III that he was crowned at Scone on 14 August 1390. His infirmity undermined his reign from the start and nine years later his personal rule was brought bloodlessly to an end. He remained king but in the eyes of the magnates and nobles he was replaced as effective ruler by his son, Prince David, and younger brother Robert, Earl of Fife.
After a friendly start, relations between the two men turned sour. The Earl of Fife - who had been created Duke of Albany by his brother in 1398 - eventually took his nephew prisoner. Having gone so far, and realising that ‘King’ David III would likely want revenge at some point in the future, Albany decided he could never be let go. Prince David died in his uncle’s castle at Falkland in March 1402, of starvation some said.
Broken-hearted and desperate, David’s father moved to protect his last surviving son, James. Political manouevrings came to nought and finally the boy was put aboard a ship bound for the Continent. Friendly exile was his only hope of survival, but bad luck struck again and his vessel was boarded by opportunist English pirates off the Norfolk coast. The twelve-year-old prince was found cowering beneath a pile of stinking animal hides. Identified as a prize beyond price, he was handed over to King Henry IV of England. Once again, the future of the King of Scots was in English hands.