for royal revenues, supervising the royal castles in their sheriffdoms. All these were appointed by the king and were usually drawn from the earls and barons who were already prominent landowners in their areas.
By the closing years of Alexander III’s reign intermarriage between the Anglo-Norman and Celtic magnates was far advanced. Already a third of the ancient Celtic earldoms were held by men of Anglo-Norman descent, and although many of the leading men held estates in both English and Scottish kingdoms, the cordial relations between Alexander III and his brother-in-law Edward I posed no threat of divided loyalties. The administration had never been more stable, the country more prosperous, the throne more secure.
Not for another five hundred years were such conditions again to obtain and it is no surprise that succeeding generations were to look back on Alexander III’s reign as a golden age hauntingly evoked in the words of the first of Scotland’s poets Andrew Wyntoun:
Quhen Alysandre our King was dede
That Scotland led in lure and le*
Awaye was sons of ale and brede
Of wyne and wax, of gamyn and glé†
Our gold was changed into lede
Cryst born into virgynté
Succour Scotland and remede
Into that age Robert Bruce was born with a mind and temper, courage and magnetism to meet and match the horrors which the future was soon to let loose upon his country.
NOTES - CHAPTER 1
1 Dunbar, 98
2 ibid., 99
3 Lanercost, 40
4 Guisborough, 275
5 Fordun, 295
6 Lanercost, 156
7 Mathew Paris, 93
8 Howard, 2–4
9 Wyntoun, 266
*tranquillity
†abundance
‡placed
2
Robert Bruce was born on 11 July 1274 at Turnberry Castle, of which the remains can still be seen perched on the cliffs which plunge steeply into the waters of the Firth of Clyde.1 He was the eldest child of a fruitful and happy marriage which had begun in romantic circumstances.
His father, the sixth Robert of that name, at the age of twenty-four had enrolled in a crusade to the Holy Land under the banner of Prince Edward, soon to become King Edward I of England. Among his knightly companions was Adam de Kilconquahar, great-grandson of Duncan, Earl of Fife. Adam was killed in the Palestine defence of Acre leaving as widow his young bride, already with child, Marjorie, Countess of Carrick in her own right.
Powerful as may have been the forces which called Adam de Kilconquahar to arms, there must have remained in the mind of the countess a residue of resentment that he had so soon exchanged his marriage bed for the wars and when the sixth Robert, after his safe return in 1272, called on her with news of her husband’s death it is understandable that in her most vulnerable period of widowhood she should have welcomed the supporting presence of the young crusader in her house.
Legend has it that her attendants were instructed by one means or another to delay his departure, with the happy result that she shortly became his wife and over the years bore him a large family of five sons and five daughters.2
It was a marriage that, from the worldly point of view, had everything to commend it. The Countess Marjorie was the last of her line. Her father Neil, Earl of Carrick, was the only direct descendant of Fergus Lord of Galloway, a Celtic prince who, in the reign of King David I, exercised an almost independent power over the southwest of Scotland. In 1256 when Marjorie was still a baby, her father died leaving her sole possessor of the great Celtic kingdom of Carrick. Her new husband who, on his marriage, became by right of his wife Earl of Carrick, was already the heir to the vast estates of his father, Robert the Competitor, whose principal Scottish possession of Annandale marched with Carrick.
The Bruces were members of that Anglo-Norman elite through whom the kings of England and Scotland maintained their sovereign rule. Reputedly descended from Lodver, the Norse Earl of Orkney in the tenth century, the Bruces first made their impact on the British Isles when Adam de Brus, whose grandfather had migrated to Normandy, accompanied William the Conqueror to England. He was given the task of reducing Anglo-Saxon resistance in Yorkshire and as a reward for his services was granted numerous manors in and around that county. His eldest son, the first Robert, became one of the great magnates of northern England, Lord of Cleveland and a royal justice for Henry I. In 1124 his possessions were notably increased. In that year King David I, who was his feudal overlord in England, succeeded to the Scottish throne and one of his first acts was to grant to his most important tenant-in-chief the lordship of Annandale and 200,000 acres. Straddling the western route, the lordship of Annandale was a key to one of the gateways of Scotland. From that date the Bruces became the virtual Wardens of the Western Marches.
The first Robert combined the shrewdness of a Norman and a Yorkshireman. Having advised King David I in vain against a Scottish invasion of England in 1138, he resolved the problem of his dual loyalty by divesting himself, in the nick of time, of his Scottish possessions in favour of his younger son, the second Robert, and fought stoutly on behalf of his English sovereign at the Battle of the Standard. The second Robert for his part, although only fourteen, donned his armour and ranged himself in the ranks of the Scottish king. Tradition has it that father and son met on the eve of the battle and in a moving scene each tried to persuade the other to refrain from risking his life on the following day but without avail. Fortunately neither suffered injury in the fray.
The second Robert lived to a ripe old age. He had two sons, the third Robert of that name and William, who both predeceased him so that on his death in 1196 his inheritance passed to William’s eldest son, the fourth Robert. There is a certain monotony in the Bruces’ choice of Christian names.
In 1209 the fourth Robert
