Scotland: The Story of a Nation

1314.

‘I Mak Siccar’

The words ‘I mak siccar’ (I make certain) are said to have been spoken not by Bruce but by one of his companions, Sir Roger de Kirkpatrick. The story goes that Bruce, after the stabbing, had rushed from the church, saying that he thought he had killed Comyn. Kirkpatrick was appalled that he had not finished the job, and ran into the church where he delivered the coup de grâce to the stricken Comyn.

Ironically, that was the one way in which Bruce would not ‘mak siccar’ his attempt on the throne. Some commentators have claimed that the killing of Comyn was premeditated, in order to get him out of the way of Bruce’s ambitions; but Bruce knew that he had to have Comyn support for his bid for the throne – and nothing could have been more disastrous for his chances than to antagonise the most powerful family in the land, not just by murder, but by sacrilegious murder at that.

But the deed was done, and the die was now cast – much sooner than Bruce could have wanted, and in much worse circumstances than he could have envisaged. If he was to have any chance of success he had to act, and act fast. Whatever contingency plans he might have discussed with Bishop Lamberton and others had to be brought forward in a hurry.

There was no time to lose. The Comyn castles in the south-west were seized, while Bruce went to Glasgow to try to make peace with the Church. He made his confession to Bishop George Wishart and received absolution for his sin; in exchange he swore an oath that, as king, he would be obedient to the clergy of Scotland. Then he rode off to be proclaimed king.

Six weeks after the murder, on 25 March 1306, Robert Bruce was inaugurated as King of Scots at Scone. It was a symbolic, simple and obviously makeshift ceremony. There was no Stone of Destiny on which to be enthroned – that had been removed by Edward I as part of his subjugation of Scotland in 1298. There were no royal robes, no sceptre, no royal sword and no bishops (although Bishop William Lamberton arrived two days later to celebrate High Mass for Bruce).

The traditional role of leading the new king to the throne should have been taken by the Earl of Fife, but he was only sixteen years old and still a ward of King Edward; in his place his aunt, Isabella of Fife, the Countess of Buchan, claimed her familial right to enthrone the king. She led Bruce to the throne and set a simple gold circlet on his head. The Earl of Buchan, who was in England at the time, was a cousin of the murdered Comyn, and Isabella’s defection to the Bruce cause was a terrible blow to him. It was to cost her dear: when she was captured by the English later that year she was imprisoned for four years in an open wooden cage which was suspended from the battlements of Berwick Castle.

The hurried coronation at Scone was the signal for the outbreak of civil war in Scotland. Bruce did not enjoy much support; he did not represent the Community of the Realm in Scotland and, above all, the rightful king, John Balliol, was still alive, albeit in exile in France. Almost immediately after Bruce’s inauguration the Comyns started to gather their strength. Edward I appointed the Red Comyn’s able brother-in-law, Aymer de Valence (soon to be Earl of Pembroke), as his special lieutenant in Scotland with wide-ranging powers against Bruce – he was commanded to ‘burn and slay and raise dragon’, which meant unfurling the dragon standard which proclaimed that the normal conventions of war were in abeyance: captured knights would be treated as outlaws and executed. In addition, King Edward persuaded Pope Clement V to authorise the excommunication of the new King of Scots; this was pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury on 5 June 1306.

Bruce moved quickly to consolidate his power-base in the south-west of Scotland. From there he moved north, through Glasgow and via Perth to Aberdeen to raise support in the north – traditionally the chief power-base of the Comyns. He had some initial successes, taking the town of Dundee and the castles of Brechin and Cupar, but soon he came under formidable military pressure. An English army, led by Pembroke and supported by Comyn adherents, recaptured Cupar and the city of Perth. Bruce moved south to meet Pembroke. He had no siege engines with which to invest the city, so instead he issued a challenge to Pembroke to come out and fight, or else surrender. Pembroke apparently accepted the challenge to do battle the following day, while his Comyn allies (according to Barbour) were treacherously planning a surprise attack on the Scots that very night.

Bruce drew off his forces and encamped six miles away in Methven Wood; suspecting no treachery, they laid aside their weapons and set no watch. At dusk their enemies fell upon them, determined to take Bruce dead or alive. After a savage battle the Scots were routed, and many of Bruce’s lieutenants were taken prisoner. Bruce himself escaped, however, with some of his light cavalry, and took refuge in the wild hills of Atholl. He had been king for only four months, but was now a fugitive.

Before moving south, Bruce had left his second wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, and his ten-year-old daughter Marjory by his first wife, along with the other ladies of his court, in the care of the Earl of Atholl in Kildrummy Castle on Donside, which was held by his brother Neil. Early in September the castle fell to Pembroke (through treachery, it is said), and Neil Bruce was taken prisoner. The royal ladies, including Isabella, Countess of Buchan, had escaped, however, and were already on their way north with the Earl of Atholl to seek refuge in Orkney; from there they planned to make their way to Norway and the protection of Bruce’s sister Isabella, who had married Erik II after the death of his first wife and was now Dowager Queen of Norway. But before they could reach the relative safety of Orkney their party was intercepted at Tain, on the southern shore of the Dornoch Firth, by the Earl of Ross, a Comyn supporter, and they were all were handed over to the English.

The English revenge on the Bruces and their supporters was swift and terrible. Robert’s brother Neil was hanged, drawn and quartered at Berwick. His loyal lieutenants the Earl of Atholl and Simon Fraser were taken to London for execution: Atholl was hanged on a specially high gallows before being decapitated and burned, while Fraser had his head impaled on a spike beside that of William Wallace. Bruce’s sister Mary was suspended in a cage (like Isabella, Countess of Buchan) from the battlements of Roxburgh Castle where she, too, was to remain for four years. His daughter Marjory was sent to a Yorkshire nunnery. Another of his sisters, Christian, who was married to Christopher Seton (one of those who had been present at the death of the Red Comyn), was sent to a nunnery in Lincolnshire; Christopher himself was hanged, drawn and quartered in Dumfries, and his brother John was put to death in the same barbaric manner at Newcastle. Only Bruce’s wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, was treated with anything like leniency; because her father was the Earl of Ulster, who had always been loyal to Edward I, she was imprisoned (albeit in harsh conditions) in a royal manor at Burstwick-in-Holderness.

Robert Bruce’s position was now desperate. An English chronicler reported that his queen had prophesied to Bruce that he would only be king for the summer – ‘King of Winter you will not be’. That was certainly the way it looked now. In late July he was ambushed in a narrow defile known as Dalrigh (Field of the King), just south of Tyndrum, by John Macdougall of Argyll – son-in-law of the murdered Comyn and owner of Dunstaffnage Castle; he suffered heavy casualties, and only escaped with his life after a heroic rearguard action. With that he disappeared as far as his enemies were concerned, and disappeared, too, from the historical record for the winter.

Bruce and the spider

… 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 from 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 Bruce counted that it had tried to carry its point six times, and been as often unable to do so. It came into his head that he had himself fought just six battles against the English and their allies, and that the poor persevering spider was exactly in the same situation with himself, having made as many trials, and been as often disappointed in what it aimed at. ‘Now,’ thought Bruce, ‘as I have no means of knowing what is best to be done, I will be guided by the luck which shall attend this spider. If the insect shall make another effort to fix its thread, and shall be successful, I will venture a seventh time to try my fortune in Scotland …’

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VIII

The story of the spider which refused to give up is the one thing which everyone knows about Robert the Bruce. Children are taught it at school; tourist guides tell it in every ‘Bruce’s Cave’ on their itinerary – all thanks to Sir Walter Scott. The ‘King’s Caves’ on Arran are a favourite spot for visitors. Another is the small island of Rathlin, a few miles off the coast of Antrim in Ireland, where Bruce seems to have spent at least part of the winter of 1306–7. But any cave will do – because the spider story simply is not, and cannot be, true. Sir Walter Scott did not invent it; but he certainly was the first person to father it on Robert Bruce.

The story had first appeared two hundred years earlier in a history of the Douglas family written by Hume of Godscroft. According to him it was James Douglas, the ‘Black Douglas’, Bruce’s greatest captain and the secondary hero of Barbour’s The Brus, who saw a spider – not Bruce. Douglas watched this spider trying to climb a tree (not the roof of a cave) with its web, and falling to the ground twelve times. When it tried for the thirteenth time it succeeded. Douglas then told the story to Bruce while he was a fugitive in the Hebrides, to encourage him to try, try and try again, even though he had already suffered twelve reverses in battle: ‘My advise [sic] is to follow the example of the spider, to poush forward your Majestie’s fortune once more, and hazard yet our persones the 13 tyme.’ It was a homily, a parable of leadership – and Scott lifted it and made Bruce, not Douglas, the central figure.

(#litres_trial_promo)

No one now knows where Bruce spent the desperate weeks and months on the run in the winter of 1306/7. Some say the Western Isles. Some say the Northern Isles. Some say Ireland. Some even say Norway. When spring came, however, he burst into history again, apparently annealed and tempered by his ordeals, with his determination to succeed renewed. Perhaps Douglas’s story of the plucky spider, if not the spider itself, had revitalised his resolve.

When Robert Bruce emerged from hiding early in 1307, it was as a reinvigorated guerrilla leader; but his renewed campaign started disastrously. His first objective was to try to regain control in the south-west of Scotland. He mounted a seaborne expedition from Ireland, splitting his forces in two. One division, led by two of his brothers, Alexander and Thomas, headed for Galloway in eighteen galleys; but no sooner had they landed at Loch Ryan than they were overwhelmed by a local force commanded by Dougal MacDougall, a Comyn supporter. Bruce’s brothers were captured and dragged off to Carlisle, where they were hanged and beheaded.

Meanwhile Bruce himself, with his other brother Edward and James Douglas, landed on the Ayrshire coast near his birthplace, the castle at Turnberry. He found the countryside terrorised by the English occupation, and went to ground in the wild hinterland of Carrick. Bruce’s position was now worse, if anything, than it had been the previous autumn. Once again he was a fugitive king, a king whom no one apparently wanted, and his kingdom seemed more out of reach than ever.

Glen Trool

On a rocky eminence at the head of Loch Trool, in front of the rocky Fell of Eschoncan in Dumfries and Galloway, a great granite boulder shaped like a clenched fist stands square and squat on a plinth of rough stones: ‘Bruce’s Stone’, it is called. It is an impressive memorial, relatively easy of access by public road off the A714 between Girvan and Newton Stewart at the village of Bargennan; the carpark provided by Forest Enterprise is much used by hill-walkers heading for the highest hill in the Southern Uplands, the Merrick (844 metres).

The memorial was unveiled in June 1929, on the six hundredth anniversary of Bruce’s death; on it is inscribed, in triumphant capital letters:

IN LOYAL REMEMBRANCE

OF

ROBERT THE BRUCE

KING OF SCOTS

WHOSE VICTORY IN THIS

GLEN OVER AN ENGLISH

FORCE IN MARCH, 1307

OPENED THE CAMPAIGN OF

INDEPENDENCE WHICH HE

BROUGHT TO A DECISIVE

CLOSE AT BANNOCKBURN

ON 24TH JUNE, 1314

The stone commemorates a brief skirmish which took place on the opposite side of the loch, and which hindsight has endowed with a pivotal but exaggerated significance.

(#litres_trial_promo) Bruce and his small band of followers, hiding out in the wild mountainous terrain of Glen Trool, were being hunted by an English force of two thousand men based at Carlisle commanded by the Earl of Pembroke. According to Barbour, Pembroke heard of Bruce’s whereabouts and decided to send a raiding party to attack him. He despatched a woman dressed in rags to Bruce’s camp to beg for food and come back with information about the size and disposition of his forces. Bruce saw the woman wandering about in the camp and soon suspected her of being a spy; when challenged, she quickly told him that Pembroke and ‘the flower of Northumberland’ were planning to attack him.

Bruce at once prepared an ambush on the narrow track which ran alongside the loch. The English rode straight into the trap and were easily repulsed. There were few casualties on either side. It was not a major battle, nor a significant victory for Bruce; but its propaganda value was considerable. The mere fact of his escape – and many other escapes which Barbour chronicles – began to lend romance and credibility to the king without, as yet, a proper kingdom.

Much more important was another battle, on 10 May 1307, which was the direct outcome of Glen Trool – Loudon Hill, near Galston in Ayrshire, a few kilometres east of Kilmarnock. The Earl of Pembroke had been stung by his reverse at Glen Trool, and by threatening letters from King Edward I accusing him of being dilatory in his efforts to crush the rebellion. Now Pembroke, according to Barbour, issued a challenge to Bruce to come out of hiding and engage in formal battle. Bruce, rather surprisingly for a guerrilla leader, accepted. He chose his ground with care, placing his men on the slope of a hill under the sharp crag of Loudon Hill. In front of them he dug three lines of trenches lined with sharpened stakes, expertly camouflaged, to await the onslaught of the English knights.

Barbour, doubtless exaggerating the figures, claimed that Pembroke brought three thousand men to the field; Bruce’s army of fugitives numbered only six hundred. The English knights, magnificently accoutred, came thundering across the level ground. Suddenly – chaos. The galloping ranks of horsemen went crashing down into the trenches, helpless against the Scottish spearmen. The rearguard saw what had happened and promptly took flight, leaving Pembroke to limp back to Bothwell Castle. The humiliation of Methven Wood had been avenged.

It would be misleading to speak of Loudon Hill, or any other engagement, as a specific ‘turning-point’ in Bruce’s fortunes; but it is clear that the tide was beginning to turn. On 15 May 1307 an official at Forfar Castle sent a report to England:

I hear that Bruce never had the good will of his own followers or the people generally so much with him as now. It appears that God is with him, for he has destroyed King Edward’s power both among English and Scots. The people believe that Bruce will carry all before him …

Clearly, Bruce’s apparently charmed life was having an effect on English morale and on Scottish confidence. He certainly had not ‘destroyed King Edward’s power’; but he had shown himself capable of defying it – and surviving.

For King Edward himself, this was mortifying news. Bruce’s usurpation of the Scottish throne – his treachery, as Edward saw it – had been the last straw. He was more determined than ever to crush the Scots once and for all. Captured rebels were summarily executed, whatever their rank. Despite unrest at home, where the cost of his Scottish campaigns escalated every year, Edward had sent an army into Scotland under his best commanders, led by his son Edward, Earl of Caernarvon. English rule in Scotland had become a reign of terror. What more could Edward do? In the summer of 1306 he himself started moving north: he was not going to be balked of a personal victory over Bruce. By late September he had reached Lanercost Priory, not far short of the border.

Edward was now in his late sixties and his health was deteriorating. He was forced to pause at Lanercost to rest – a rest which would last for nearly six months. Even from his sickbed, however, he tried to direct operations in Scotland, despatching innumerable testy letters to his commanders.

It must have been obvious to everyone that the king had not long to live. Perhaps that was one of the factors which affected the mood in Scotland: if Edward’s iron will and implacable hostility were removed, Scotland would surely have a much better chance of freeing itself from English oppression. But early in July the old king rallied. He hoisted himself into the saddle and set off for Scotland once again at the head of a feudal army. He was, however, so frail that his army could move only ten kilometres over the next three days. On 6 July they camped at Burgh-on-Sands, within sight of the Solway Firth and Scotland beyond it. Next morning, 7 July 1307, King Edward I died. Fiona Watson says:

Edward I has come down in history as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ – and that, without any doubt, is what he was. Yet he died a bitter and, ultimately, defeated man on his way back to Scotland yet again, when he must have felt that he had solved the ‘Scottish problem’ with the submission in 1304.