CONTENTS
Illustrations
Preface
Chronology
Part One: 1285–1306
Part Two: 1306–1314
Part Three: 1314–1329
Epilogue
Bibliography
References
Notes
Index
The Scottish Highlands
Northern England and Southern Scotland
The Scottish Royal Succession and Claimants to the Throne
The House of Bruce
Sunday, 23 June 1314
Monday, 24 June 1314
The Bruces in Ireland
The life of Robert Bruce coincides with the wars of Scottish independence when a small kingdom struggled for its existence against an overbearing neighbour. In this struggle Bruce played an increasingly prominent part and eventually became the deliverer of his country. His name therefore appears constantly in the state papers of the time and the thirteenth-and fourteenth-century chronicles. The fascination for the historian is that, in addition to these sources, there is another so full of vivid descriptions of the events and characters of the period that a bare recital of facts can be transmitted into a biography of great human interest.
In 1375, less that fifty years after Bruce’s death, John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, produced his epic life of Robert Bruce, The Brus. In his opening canto he declares his intention to tell nothing but the truth, ‘to put in wryt a suthfast story’. Wherever it has been possible to check his account against contemporary documents scholars have confirmed his reliability. Occasionally the order of events is transposed but the accuracy of his detail has been accepted by every subsequent historian.
Barbour was born some seven years before Bruce died. Over the years preceding the completion of his work, when he was gaining position in the Church and at the Scottish court, he had the opportunity to meet many of those who had taken part with Bruce in the extraordinary adventures which seem to belong to the realm of fiction rather than of fact. No doubt, when old men tell their tales, they sometimes heighten and embellish the dramatic incidents of their past, but the essential truth is there. The liveliness of Barbour’s descriptions bears the stamp of eyewitness accounts. The reader is justified in a willing suspension of disbelief.
The encouragement and criticism I have received, in the writing of this book, from my family, friends and correspondents have been invaluable: in particular I would like to thank, first, General Sir Philip Christison Bt, G.B.E., C.B., D.S.O., M.C., D.L., who put at my disposal the research notes he accumulated over the decade before he wrote his account of the Battle of Bannockburn for the Scottish National Trust; second, Major General The Earl of Cathcart, D.S.O., M.C., who made available to me the manuscript history of his family, written by his grandfather. His ancestor, Sir Alan Cathcart, was among the young men who joined Bruce in his bid for the throne and is the only person whom John Barbour mentions by name as one of his informants. Lastly, no writer on the period can fail to mention his debt to Professor G. W. S. Barrow’s monumental work on Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm.
Our nation lived in freedom and quietness until Edward, King of England, under colour of friendship and alliance, attacked us, all unsuspecting, when we had neither King nor Head and our people were unacquainted with wars and invasions.
Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, 1320
1
On 14 October 1285 Alexander III, King of Scotland, married as his second wife Yolande of Dreux, descended from Count Robert I of Dreux, a son of Louis VI of France.1 It was a marriage welcomed by his subjects. His first wife Margaret, daughter of Henry III of England, had died in 1275 having borne for her husband a daughter and two sons, Margaret, Alexander and David. But within the space of three years all were dead: the younger son in 1281 unmarried, the elder in 1284 without issue and in 1283 the daughter, who was married to Erik II, King of Norway, died in childbirth leaving as heir to the Scottish and Norwegian thrones a sickly infant Margaret, the Maid of Norway.2 The succession stood in jeopardy.
Alexander III was of a sanguine temperament and during his ten years as a widower, as the Lanercost Chronicle sourly reports, ‘he used never to forbear on account of season or storm, nor for perils of flood or rocky cliffs but would visit none too creditably matrons and nuns, virgins and widows by day or by night as the fancy seized him, sometimes in disguise, often accompanied by a single follower.’3
His marriage to the young Frenchwoman, it might be expected, would concentrate his attentions and give promise of a male heir to the throne.
For over two hundred years, since Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane and the forces of Malcolm III had defeated and slain Macbeth, the House of Canmore had been the rulers of Scotland. During the reigns of eight succeeding kings of that blood, by conquest or by treaty, the realm had been enlarged so that when Alexander wed Yolande she became the queen of a kingdom which differed little in extent from the Scotland of the present day.
But the population was much smaller. The inhabitants numbered fewer than 500,000. The majority were Celts, mainly north of the Forth and Clyde and in the southwest. There were Norsemen in Caithness, Sutherland and the Western Isles, Anglo-Saxons in Lothian; and along the east coast in ports that sound like a drum roll– Inverness, Elgin, Aberdeen, Perth, Montrose, Dundee, Edinburgh, Berwick – were colonies of foreign merchants: Germans from the Hanseatic towns, Scandinavians from the kingdom of Norway, Frenchmen from Gascony and,
