of Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow.
Nobody was more opposed to the domination of England than the Scottish Church, and this opposition had been intensified since the parliament of Berwick by King Edward’s repeated presentations of English priests to Scottish benefices. Nobody had a better network of communication to direct and coordinate subversive activities.
Both these aspects were personified in the frail body of the bishop. He had pledged his fealty to King Edward at Berwick, but for him the Church came first and he regarded his recurrent pledges as no more than pawns in the struggle, given under duress, discarded without compunction whenever the defence of his country required it. For he remembered only too well the blatant manner in which the English King had repudiated his most solemn promises. As news of the spreading revolt reached him on the ecclesiastical grapevine, he turned his attention to his fellow guardian in the days of the interregnum, James Stewart.
This cautious man with his vast possessions in Bute, Kyle Stewart and Renfrew, Teviotdale, Lauderdale and Lothian, his hereditary position as royal steward, his freedom from any distracting landhold-ings in England, his overlordship of William Wallace, had for weeks been hovering on the edge of a decision. The example of his neighbour and relative, Sir William Douglas, the return of Wallace to the west where he chased the cocksure Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, from the episcopal palace in Glasgow and trapped and burned an English garrison in Ayr, together with the urgings of Bishop Wishart, proved decisive. Early in June 1297, at the same time as Macduff of Fife, a son of an Earl of Fife, and his two sons raised their standard of revolt in the east, he summoned his knights to take the field against the English and join him at the town of Irvine in the west.8
When news of Sir William Douglas’s defection reached King Edward, he was deeply involved in English problems. Knowing of old the contrariness of this opinionated knight, he did not take the matter seriously enough to alert the English forces but sent orders to the Governor of Carlisle, the elder Bruce, to instruct his son to muster the men of Annandale and with them proceed to the Douglas lands and seize the Douglas castle.
So Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick, rode from Carlisle to Annan and Lochmaben to summon his father’s vassals, and when he had gathered a sufficient force together drew up to the Douglas stronghold. During his journey there he had much on which to ponder. His father had always been a follower of King Edward, more at home with the civilities of the English court and the blander climate of his English estates than with the roughter life of the north. But Robert Bruce was Scottish born and Scottish bred. With his brothers and sisters he had roamed the Carrick lands of his Celtic mother or ridden beside his tough old grandfather through the hills and valleys of Annandale. He had played his part indeed on the English side and in return had been granted a postponement of his debt repayments to the English exchequer:9 but that was when he was ranged against the Comyns for whom John Balliol had confiscated the Bruce estates in Scotland. Now the Comyns and John Balliol were captives and the leaders who had taken the field against the English in Ayrshire were the very men who had supported his grandfather’s claim to the Scottish throne.
That claim Bruce had never forgotten. Brought up in the knowledge that in his veins ran the royal blood of the House of Canmore, convinced of the injustice of the court decision which had denied his family their regal inheritance, his abiding ambition was to retrieve the crown his grandfather had struggled for and lost. That purpose dominated his actions. Hitherto it had been served by Edward I’s promise to Bruce’s father that the Scottish throne would be his when Balliol was deposed. But Edward had reneged. The Scottish throne had been incorporated in that of England. The single devil of Balliol had been swept away only to be replaced by the sevenfold devil of the Plan-taganet king. By assuming the sovereignty of Scotland, Edward I had become the chief obstacle to Bruce’s objective and the catalyst to fuse the two elements in Bruce’s nature, his love of his native land and his determination to rule it.
So, as he rode up the long valley of Annandale, this young man of twenty-two, already admired by men for his skill at arms and by women for his courtesy, took the crucial decision of his life.
When he reached the castle, which was held by Sir William’s wife, he called his followers around him. ‘No man,’ he said, ‘holds his flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception. I must join my own people and the nation in which I was born. Choose then whether you go with me or return to your homes.’10
Many of the knights who accompanied him were vassals of his father, who was still pledged to King Edward, and decided that they must abide by their overlord’s allegiance and so departed. But with those who were left and with the men of Douglas and Lady Douglas, who had been advised of his decision, he moved northeastward through his domain of Carrick, gathering recruits as he went, and joined the steward and the bishop at Irvine.
Meanwhile the humiliated Antony Bek had alerted King Edward to the strength of the insurrection. On 4 June the King empowered Henry Percy and Robert Clifford, the two foremost barons in the border shires, to raise levies from Lancaster, Westmorland and Cumberland ‘to arrest, imprison and try all disturbers of the peace in Scotland’, and instructed all sheriffs and castle governors to give them every aid.11
With commendable speed the two commanders collected a powerful body of armed knights and, moving fast along the Annandale and Nithsdale route, reached towards the end of June the English-held castle of Ayr, a few miles south of Irvine where the Scottish forces were encamped.
No battle ensued. Almost as soon as Percy and Clifford had dismounted, envoys arrived under a flag of truce to ask if they had authority to treat with the Scottish leaders.
Dissension had broken out in the Irvine camp between those who supported Balliol and those who supported Bruce. Andrew Moray and William Wallace were fighting in the name of John Balliol whom they still regarded as king, and may well have been sceptical of young Bruce’s sudden conversion to the Scottish cause. Bishop Wishart, James Stewart, his brother John and Alexander Lindsay considered that, by his abdication, John Balliol had renounced his rights and that Robert Bruce’s father was the natural successor to the Scottish Crown and the true focus for the upsurge for independence. Sir William Douglas agreed with nobody.
Moray and Wallace preferred to fight on their own terms and in their own centres of resistance and departed forthwith. Without their support the forces of Stewart and Bruce were in no position to make headway against the English invasion. Their men were mainly foot soldiers: those of the English were armed knights. The contest would be glaringly unequal and a defeat damaging to the growing confidence of the Scottish people.
News had reached Scotland of a clash between King Edward, his Church and his barons. The Archbishop of Canterbury had instructed his clergy to pay no taxes on pain of excommunication, and the two great magnates in England, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the Earl Marshall, and Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, the Constable, had refused to serve overseas, retiring to their fiefs and calling up their vassals. Many other of the barons had followed their example. There was the possibility of civil war in England. The forces of Percy and Clifford were the only English armed troops in the field. It was a time to keep them engaged in negotiations so that Moray and Wallace could pursue their activities undisturbed by attack. Such must have been the reasoning which led the subtle bishop and canny steward to ask for parley.
Percy and Clifford, in their turn, were aware of the uncertain situation in England and had no desire unnecessarily to hazard forces, reluctantly conscripted, which they might desire at home. So talks began.
After days of discussion the English made certain promises, and on 9 July 1297 the Scottish leaders agreed to surrender to King Edward’s
