Brushing off the cobwebs
On Wednesday 10 February 1306 a group of perhaps half a dozen men stood about in Greyfriars Churchyard at Dumfries, cloaks wrapped about them, stamping their feet against the bitter wind. Out of the winter gloom two horsemen rode up. Formal greetings were exchanged as the horses clattered across the cobbles and the riders dismounted, the forced friendliness betraying a hint of tension. All present bore ‘casual’ weaponry. To break the ice the leader of the waiting group strode towards the newcomers, hand outstretched, and greeted the younger of them with handshake and kiss on the cheek. Setting an example for his men, Robert Bruce, the 32-year-old earl of Carrick and lord of Annandale, put an arm round John Comyn and together they led the way into the kirk, stooping to enter the low doorway and crossing themselves. Comyn had ridden the six miles from his castle at Dalswinton escorted by his uncle Sir Robert Comyn. Robert Bruce was accompanied by his brother-in-law Christopher Seton and others unnamed. But the principals maintained their distance from their associates by walking up the aisle to the altar. In the confidential darkness of the chapel, Bruce’s chat switched to earnest solicitation. The old king was dying … together they had the resources … it was now or never. Comyn had heard it all before and was weary of listening to Bruce’s scheme: Bruce knew that he could never assent to enthronement of anyone else as King of Scots while his uncle by marriage, King John Balliol, lived in exile. Carelessly Comyn let slip some banter, some coarse flippancy – and instantly regretted it. By the candlelight he registered Bruce’s face, suddenly incandescent with rage. Comyn excused himself, apologised even, but too late. Bruce began shouting that Comyn had damaged his standing at court, that he had betrayed him to the English king. Comyn countered with bitter accusations of his own, but Bruce roared that Comyn was a liar and suddenly lashed out with a kick that brought him to the ground. Sir Robert Comyn rushed to his nephew’s assistance but found his way blocked by Seton, who unsheathed his sword and struck him on the head. Such a rage had stoked up in him that Bruce entirely forgot himself and drew his own sword, heedless of the sanctity of his surroundings. He brought a clumsy blow down on the prostrate Comyn. Turning his back on the wounded man, as though in disgust, Bruce walked out into the fading daylight, leaving his men to finish off the Comyns. His men followed him out, and stood about for several minutes, respecting their chief’s silence. Bruce struggled to take in the drastic implications of what had just happened, and wished he could relive those last few minutes. But, realising that there could be no going back, no explanations for what had happened, no excuses, he announced to his men his intention to seize the kingship of Scotland.
With this impulsive act of murder, treachery and sacrilege Robert Bruce launched his bid for the throne of Scotland, a course fraught with danger, that would cost him dear in the lives of loved ones, and personal injury, yet would safeguard the Scottish identity, then in danger of extinction, and carry him into legend as Robert I of Scotland, a hero-king unsurpassed in the history of these islands. Few have lived as fully, adventurously and heroically; indeed, Bruce’s rollercoaster career prompts searching questions. How true are the tales told of Robert Bruce? How much can one man cram into a life? How many times, and in how many ways can a man be a hero? For Robert Bruce was at once a valiant knight and a great lord, a clever politician, a murderer, or at least an accomplice to murder, a fugitive, an inspirational charismatic guerrilla chief, a military genius, a wise statesman, a self-declared hero and finally, in the eyes of Scots through the ages, the saviour of a nation. Tricks, ruses and hair-raising escapes; high politics, grim sieges and bloody battles; assassination plots; single combat to the death, Bruce lived it all. Hollywood could not begin to produce such a script! Even debilitating illness at the end of his life – was it leprosy? – did not prevent Bruce waging war in Ireland and England simultaneously, while being carried about on a litter. He was a colossus among men, and even now Scotland lives deep in his shadow.
Seven hundred years ago Robert Bruce seized the kingship of Scotland as his birthright and, defeated in battle, fled overseas, preserving in his own person the kingship of Scotland from extirpation by Edward I of England’s precocious united kingdom of the Middle Ages. He may have saved the ‘idea of Scotland’ for future generations. Unusually for someone who lived in the Middle Ages, we know a great deal about this Robert Bruce, and whatever else may be unclear about this still-controversial figure, he was a remarkable man. The antithesis of an armchair general who sends others into dangers which he does not himself share, Bruce led from the front, risking everything in pursuit of his goal. His skull, exhumed five hundred years after his death, still bears marks of the serious head injuries he sustained. Undoubtedly he did terrible things: he presided over the butchering of at least one garrison; he inflicted a decade of cruel war on a virtually defenceless civilian population in northern England; and he was personally involved in the murder of John Comyn, as we have seen. He endured deprivation and lost heavily along the way: his four brothers lost their lives in his cause; his sister and his putative lover endured years of humiliation for their association with him. And at the end of it all Robert died in his bed, confident that he had succeeded in his ambitions for himself, his family and Scotland, and he passed into history as ‘the ultimate hero and defender of Scottish nationhood against English imperialism while other Scottish patriots were most unfairly vilified by historians’.
Robert’s life has always made compelling reading, and it is entirely appropriate that he is compared by medieval writers to Odysseus the fabled wanderer, Aenaeas the legendary founder of Rome and the biblical heroes Joshua the Israelite general and Judas Maccabeus, who led the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Empire. His adventures were a match for any of them. He revived the kingship of Scotland, and liberated her from English domination; forced northern England to pay tribute; and, aspiring to pan-Celtic leadership, sent his brother to conquer Ireland and threaten Wales. In the history of the British Isles, Robert I stands for more than just a brief Scottish hegemony: he represents one of history’s great ‘What ifs?’, an alternative path of development, an alternative to English domination not just for Scotland, but for Ireland and Wales as well.
Even as things turned out, history has been kind to Robert Bruce; too kind, perhaps, since the medieval propagandists for his dynasty have successfully airbrushed over his faults. Yet he has not always been a popular figure. Over the centuries his popularity has waxed and, in recent times, waned. In his lifetime Robert spared no efforts to have posterity regard him in the same way as he is portrayed by the image on his own royal seal: the very personification of divine order in the world and the impassive symbol of divine justice. In the later Middle Ages, the Bruce legend of miraculous survival from catastrophe to vindicate a just claim provided for Scotland a necessary mythology for resistance and survival during her life-or-death struggle with her powerful southern neighbour. Then the legend lost its importance as war with England abated; and after the union of English and Scottish crowns in 1707 it potentially had the power to inspire secession and treachery. In the late Georgian era the Bruce legend was ‘rediscovered’ in time to take advantage of the growth of tourism, and Bruce was packaged, along with tartan, kilts and Highland clans, for mass marketing. The exhumation of Bruce’s bones in 1819 and subsequently Sir Walter Scott’s rendition of his life in Tales of a Grandfather did much to remind the nation of the debt it owed to its hero-king; but that image was not refreshed, and in the twentieth century acquired a stuffy and shop-worn aspect, an image without mystery or humanity, that belonged to a distant and irrelevant past.
More recently, understanding of Robert Bruce has been undermined by both the Celtic revival (which spurned Bruce quite unjustly as foreign, Anglo-Norman and French-speaking) and by the release in 1995 of the Hollywood blockbuster Braveheart. The film’s unfavourable comparison of Robert Bruce, the untrustworthy noble, with the nationalist proletarian William Wallace is not based on fact. Bruce is portrayed in the film as sly and unreliable, dishonest and dishonourable, a traitor to the national cause. An action movie is of course inappropriate for serious explanation of Bruce’s behaviour. Robert Bruce changed sides repeatedly in the decade 1296 to 1306 for a variety of reasons too complex for expression in film: because he wished and was expected to defend the dynastic and legal interests of his family; because, insofar as there was a ‘national cause’, contemporaries perceived it only as equal to or exceeded in importance by sworn personal loyalties; because he was faced with a choice between a foreign king for whom he had no love, and a Scottish king (Robert saw him as a usurper) who would destroy him; and finally, because his peers and rivals were all acting in defence of their own family and dynastic interests. This past hundred years or so, Scotland has not embraced the memory of Robert Bruce with the same warmth as hitherto. Perhaps, true to her Celtic nature, Scotland prefers her heroes in the tragic mould, and Robert has been too successful for sympathy.
Despite centuries of popular myth and misunderstanding, and centuries of propaganda generated both by the Bruces themselves and by their enemies, recent historical endeavour has brushed away these cobwebs. By patient work in archives and libraries Professors Barron, Barrow and Duncan (and many others too numerous to mention here) have revised Robert’s whole career and shed new light upon the historical figure. Through their work, a dull and sombre oil painting is daringly restored to reveal hidden complexities and characteristics. Sources are crucial to accurate history, and it helps one’s understanding to know a little of the nature of the sources that underpin the accurate modern accounts. For Scotland in this period there are not the detailed household records that exist for the contemporary English kings, Edwards I, II and III. But we do have Archdeacon John Barbour’s superb ‘romance’ The Bruce.1 Completed in 1375 or the following year, it is a verse chronicle of Robert’s life – some thirteen thousand lines of rhyming couplets in the medieval Scots tongue – startlingly accurate in many details when checked against administrative sources and devoted to the chivalrous exploits of the hero-king. Barbour is not interested in dates, administrative matters or politics: he writes of war, concentrating on Bruce’s valour, his martial prowess and, occasionally, on his other chivalric virtues – magnanimity, generosity and wisdom. Prominent in the story (rather to the detriment of Bruce’s main lieutenant, Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray) are Bruce’s companions Sir James Douglas (‘Good Sir James’) and Walter, the hereditary Steward of Scotland, founder of the Stewart dynasty. Barbour concentrates on these individuals with good reason: Barbour was writing for Walter’s son, Robert II of Scotland, and he seems to have possessed a verse account of Douglas’s chivalric deeds. The Bruce is a unique record of a life in the Middle Ages; nothing quite comparable exists elsewhere.
Other narrative sources also throw light on the life of Robert Bruce: the Annals of John of Fordun, which existed in draft in 1363, and the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower, written in the mid fifteenth century, which drew upon materials collected by Fordun. These and other Scottish authors of the later Middle Ages were keen to present Bruce and his offspring as the legitimate and God-given kings of Scotland, and during their lifetimes the dynasty was locked in intermittent war with England. While their works contain a wealth of historical detail, these authors were also Bruce’s apologists and propagandists. For Fordun, Bruce was a saviour on a par with Christ himself:
The English nation lorded it in all parts of the kingdom of Scotland ruthlessly harrying the Scots in sundry and manifold ways … But God in His mercy, as is the wont of his fatherly goodness, had compassion …; so He raised up a saviour and champion unto them – one of their own fellows to wit, named Robert Bruce. The man … putting forth his hand unto force, underwent the countless and unbearable toils of the heat of the day … for the sake of freeing his brethren.
These are heavily partisan accounts, written by supporters of the Bruce monarchy. Here indeed is history written by the winners, not all of it inaccurate, but, as in this excerpt from Bower, heavily biased and effusive in praise of the hero-king:
whoever has learnt to recount [Bruce’s] individual conflicts and particular triumphs – the victories and battles in which with the help of the Lord, by his own strength and his energetic valour as a man, he forced his way through the ranks of the enemy without fear, now powerfully laying them low, now powerfully turning them aside as he avoided the penalty of death – he will find, I think, that he will judge none in the regions of the world to be his equals in his own times in the art of fighting and in physical strength.
Evidence offered by these propagandists in support of Bruce is balanced by that of the English narrative sources, heavily biased against him: the Scalachronica or ‘Ladder Chronicle’ written in the mid fourteenth century by a Northumberland knight, Sir Thomas Gray; the near-contemporary Lanercost chronicle, a more balanced and informative narrative of the period, and the other near-contemporary chronicle written by Walter of Guisborough, along with many other monastic writers who contribute from the English point of view. Manx, Irish and French contemporary authors also help illuminate aspects of Bruce’s remarkable career. All lend their particular slant to the story, and most have an axe to grind in the telling, but, along with quantities of misinformation, all bear aspects of that elusive quality, historical truth.
Administrative sources carry less propaganda. Not much survives from the Scottish government’s bureaucracy, except for invaluable Exchequer Rolls for the latter part of Robert’s reign. There are no records of royal or private estates in Scotland from this period; administrative evidence from Scotland mostly takes the form of charters or title-deeds to land, which tend to be retained in families. Enormous strides have been made in scholarship lately, and Professor Duncan has edited and assembled the extant deeds of King Robert I. We are unlikely ever to have the king’s complete acta – all his charters, deeds and letters – but we do have a much clearer picture than ever before. By contrast, the English government of the period produced a vast archive, which is still largely intact. Research in the Public Record Office continues to throw up documents illuminating events in those parts of Scotland subject to English rule and the English king’s war effort against the ‘patriot’ Scots. Rolls of parchment – the Rotuli Scotiae or Scotch Rolls, the Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, Pipe Rolls and Memoranda Rolls to name but a few – contain thousands of copies of individual documents with a bearing on the situation in Scotland and on the management of a war which stretched the impressive Edwardian administrative machine to the limit of its capacity. To avoid using the cumbersome Westminster-based exchequer, the ‘Three Edwards’ used a selected department of the royal household, the royal wardrobe, as a mobile war finance office, dedicated to the funding of their campaigns. Wardrobe Books, often beautiful in their calligraphy, provide annual records of payments from the English royal household for campaigns against the Scots – expenditure on castle garrisons, all manner of supply, payments to infantry and cavalry, royal gifts and messengers – in detail that provides valuable insight into what was happening in Scotland and other theatres of war. There are other sources too. Some records of the Irish colonial government have survived the catastrophic fire of 1922, and there is a wealth of material accumulated by monastic houses and other religious institutions in northern England: bishops’ registers, collections of charters and occasional estate records. A particularly well-preserved source is the monastic archive at Durham, which provides insights into Robert’s exaction of tribute from the north of England and how the monastery’s estates fared during his destructive radis.
The sources then are fuller than one might expect, yet they only take us so far on our journey to understand the character of Robert Bruce. With hindsight we may judge that Bruce made some appalling blunders: his murder of Comyn and certain of his interventions in Ireland may qualify in this respect. But we perceive the energy with which, in defiance of the greatest military power of the day, Bruce pursued his burning ambition; his frustration as he sides first with the patriots against the might of the foreign occupying power, then submits to protect vital interests, and then alienates both sides in his lunge for the throne. We can sense his despair at defeat and his humiliation at being hounded out of a realm to whose kingship he aspired. There are also indications of the personal grief he suffered at the brutal executions of his brothers and the public humiliation of those dear to him.
The most telling illustration of Robert’s character however may lie not in true history, but in anecdote, misattributed to him long after his death. The strength of character required to claw back from three crushing defeats is aptly represented by the tired image of Robert Bruce and the spider. Destitute, the would-be king sits alone and dejected on Rathlin Island (or Jura, or Arran, or at Kirkpatrick, or at Uamh-an-Righ, or a host of other places for which claims are staked in the tourist brochures), idly watching a spider trying to spin a web. Time and again the spider fails, yet eventually through blind determination it succeeds, inspiring Bruce to try once more to regain the throne of Scotland. As most people know, the spider story is a late fabrication. It was related by Sir Walter Scott in the Tales of a Grandfather, but originally invented by David Hume of Godscroft in his Historie of the House of Douglas (1633), where it is Sir James Douglas who witnesses the spider’s doings and relates them to Bruce. The tale may not be history, but the point is well made: that Bruce, though long dead, compels our admiration through his determination and tenacity, through his heroic effort to rebuild from catastrophe his own dynastic fortunes and those of Scotland herself. Through the work of scholars the figure of Robert Bruce has emerged from the dark cave of legend and myth into the half-light of history, and it is time to reassess this crucially important figure and accord him his due place in popular culture.