FIVE
Scotland’s Wars of Independence
On the night of 24 February 1303 the first castle at Rosslyn, which certainly dated from the eleventh century and probably stood on the site of today’s chapel (see Chapter 6), found itself at the very heart of the struggle for Scottish independence. In the space of the following twenty-four hours, a Scottish force of 8,000 men overwhelmed and defeated an English army of 30,000 in three bloody encounters. The first confrontation took place in the parkland immediately south-west of where the castle then stood; the second, in the Kilburn area of the neighbouring Dryden estate to the north. With the third attack, it was an English wipe-out. For Scotland it was payback time.
After his defeat and capture at the first Battle of Dunbar seven years earlier, Henry St Clair, 7th Baron – along with his brother William, his son William, as well as his kinsmen John St Clair of Herdmanston, and a Gregory St Clair – was among the 2,000 Scottish landowners, churchmen and burgesses who swore allegiance to Edward I of England at Berwick.1 They had had little option but to sign. Not without reason did Edward I become known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’. A brilliant soldier and military strategist, he was unquestionably also a psychopath. The fate that he later decreed for Sir William Wallace, who was courageous enough to defy him, was totally repugnant. Wallace was hanged until almost dead, drawn (in other words disembowelled) and quartered (cut in four). His body parts were placed on public display thereafter. This was the penalty for treason in England, first introduced by Edward himself. Wallace’s contemporary, Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the Welsh freedom fighter, brother of Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, suffered a similar fate. What makes it so particularly unforgivable in these cases is that Wallace was a Scot, and Gruffydd, Welsh. They were therefore prisoners-of-war, not traitors.
Following the Battle of Dunbar, the tyrant Edward’s army swarmed across Scotland like a plague of wasps, as far north as the Moray Firth, capturing castles and confiscating the Stone of Destiny and Holy Rude, the paramount symbols of Scotland’s divinity. His soldiers even seized all of the National Archives of Scotland, an act tantamount to mediaeval genocide. In the tradition of revisionist politicians throughout time, the English king was intent on rubbing out the past. For the majority of Scotland’s nobility, however, there were too many vested interests at stake to stand up to him: many of them, including Robert the Bruce’s family, had extensive land interests in England. They could, and did, bide their time.
Meanwhile, having fortified the coastal town of Berwick, King Edward returned to London leaving Sir John de Segrave behind as his Governor of Scotland and Commander of Edinburgh Castle. While Edward became increasingly preoccupied with France, and in subjugating the Welsh, Sir John, basing himself in Carlisle, set about systematically subduing the various pockets of defiance north of the Scottish border.
Lechery and innocence sell a story, and creative minds would have us believe that the English offensive against Roslin was of a distinctly personal nature; in other words, that a woman was involved. Certainly it makes for a good yarn, although no contemporary evidence exists to substantiate it. We are told, however, that Sir John, incidentally a married man, had become enamoured of Lady Margaret Ramsay, sister of Sir William Ramsay of Dalhousie, an estate that lies less than 5 miles from Roslin, at Bonnyrigg. Lady Margaret, for her part, apparently had her eye on the son of Sir Henry St Clair, 7th Lord of Rosslyn, and when news of their impending marriage reached Sir John, he reacted with vigour, determined to put an end to the nuptials.
Whether there is any truth in this story or not, he certainly did arrive in the town of Melrose, and divided his men into three equal divisions. His deputy, Sir Robert Neville, was sent to attack Borthwick Castle, near Fushiebridge, which was being held by Sir Gilbert Hay. A force under Sir Ralph Confrey was sent to secure Dalhousie Castle, while the remaining army, under Sir John, assisted by Ralph de Manton, the English paymaster, marched on Rosslyn Castle.2 Their timing could not have been worse. First, Sir John’s men were surrounded by the advancing Scots, who charged into them in the darkness. On the far side of the castle promontory, the Scots then formed a battle line and the English division approaching from the north was met with a volley of arrows forcing it to swerve towards a steep ravine with the river below. The conclusion that followed was fast and violent. The Scots, who knew their territory well, took up a position at the top of the ravine and pushed the English into the gorge where their ranks were rapidly decimated.
In 1994, a commemorative cairn was erected by Roslin Heritage Society on the spot now known as Mountmarle. The story goes that as the English were fleeing, one of their number called out to one of their leaders, a member of the Anglo-Norman de Marle family, ‘Mount, Marle and ride!’3 Another legend tells of a phantom hound, whose eerie baying can still be heard in the woods on stormy nights. During the fighting a large war dog, owned by an English knight, viciously attacked the Scottish soldier who had killed his master and was struck to the ground. Later that night, the beast was seen prowling in the castle guardroom. Over the following weeks, the ‘Mauthe Doog’, ‘dog of darkness’ as it became known, haunted the soldier to death.4
In command of the Scottish army were Henry St Clair, Sir Symon Fraser of Neidpath Castle, near Peebles, and John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, generally known as the ‘Red Comyn’, the same Red Comyn who, three years later, almost to the day, would die during a violent confrontation at Dumfries with his kinsman, Robert the Bruce. Also present on the battlefield were Sir Simon of the Lee, Somerfield of Carnwath, and Fleming of Cumbernauld.
Sir William Wallace, appointed Guardian of Scotland in the name of the deposed king, John Balliol, had been expected to lead the attack, but had declined, still raw from his defeat at the Battle of Falkirk five years earlier. Most of what we know of Wallace comes from the words of Henry the Minstrel, or Blind Harry as he is more commonly known, who composed his Scottish propaganda epic The Life and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, General and Governor of Scotland a century and a half after the guerrilla leader was betrayed, captured and then brutally dismembered in the streets of London. It is, nevertheless, generally accepted among academic circles that Blind Harry’s epic polemic was fuelled rather more by the poet’s personal anti-English prejudices than by fact. The narrative is therefore much exaggerated, and, similarly, the Australian actor Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart, while fuelling the fires of Scottish nationalism, does historical accuracy no favours.
As regards the Battle of Roslin, all the available evidence suggests that William Wallace was in France at the time, although a cave in the cliffs of Hawthornden, where he is alleged to have taken shelter at some stage during his adventures, carries his name, as we have already seen. Scotland’s future king, the 29-year-old Robert the Bruce, was certainly in Ireland at the time and was not, at this stage, committed in the developing conflict. The glory for the Scots’ victory on this occasion must unquestionably go to Comyn, Fraser and St Clair.
And to yet another, lesser-known, individual. It is on record that the Scottish army was alerted to the approaching danger by Prior Abernethy of a Cistercian priory located close to Roslin. Unfortunately, this poses yet another historical conundrum since the nearest Cistercian priory to Roslin was at Newbattle, south of Dalkeith – the nearest Cistercian abbey being at Melrose. Prior Abernethy, it transpires, had previously been a Knight Templar, thus giving the lie to the assertion that religious orders did not take sides.5
With both orders dating from the eleventh century, the Cistercians and Knights Templar, despite the former retaining a vow of silence, were so closely linked through ties of blood, patronage and shared objectives that many scholars consider them to be one and the same. Added to this, it is highly improbable that the Templar preceptory at Balantrodoch would have remained untouched by the invasion. And it is equally unlikely, despite the Templars’ professed code of impartiality, that they would have turned their backs on the plight of the St Clair family with whom they had been so closely aligned since their beginning.
With the absence of primary historical leaders, the Battle of Roslin is not nearly as well known as Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge six years earlier or Bruce’s triumph at Bannockburn eleven years later. It was nevertheless equally as bloody as both, if not more so, as names around the village testify: Shinbones Field, where bones of the dead continue to be unearthed; the Hewan, where a burial mound remains; and the Stinking Rig, where the smell of decomposing corpses lingered on for decades. Tradition has it that the Kilburn, a rivulet which runs off the North Esk, ran red with blood for three days following the carnage. In the aftermath of the battle, therefore, in gratitude for their victory, each survivor carried a stone to the summit of the hill where a cairn was formed to serve as an altar. Appropriately, this hill was already known as the Carnethy, the ‘hill of the cairn’. Although superseded by more momentous and headline-grabbing events, it could certainly be argued that without the confidence-boost that their triumph at the Battle of Roslin brought to Scotland’s freedom fighters, Scotland’s Wars of Independence might not have continued. Now, the die was cast.
In the aftermath of the conflict, Sir John de Segrave and Ralph de Manton were taken prisoner and richly ransomed. William St Clair married Lady Margaret Ramsay, and over the following twenty-five years, before Scotland’s independence was finally accepted by the English with the signing of the Treaty of Northampton in 1328, England’s overlordship was severely tested. Moreover, between 25 and 26 March 1306, in a supreme act of defiance, Robert the Bruce was inaugurated as Sovereign of Scotland at Scone Abbey. In the absence of the Stone of Destiny, the ritual coronation seat of Scotland, such ceremonial as there was followed an even more ancient tradition. The High Sennachie of Scotland, the official royal genealogist, a position today occupied by the Lord Lyon King of Arms, would have read out the Bruce royal pedigree reaching far back into the mists of time through the marriage of his great-grandfather to the great-granddaughter of David I, and the citation would have culminated with a resounding cheer from his supporters. Despite the fact that it had become common practice among European monarchs, however, there was no anointment with holy oil to bring him into line with the king of England, as an anointed sovereign. In mediaeval Europe, the anointment of a ruler with holy oil transferred divine right to its recipient, and those anointed became Dei Gratia, ‘by the grace of God’. Only the Pope in Rome was in a position to sanction such an entitlement, and, along with the lifting of his second excommunication, it was finally granted to King Robert by Pope John XXII literally months before his death, and then only on the receipt of a substantial sum of money. Nor was a countess of Buchan, as is widely claimed, on hand on the first day to crown him. This is a fiction created at a later stage to add romance to the occasion.
In the ancient hierarchy of Scotland, the earls of Fife were traditionally given the responsibility for placing the crown of Scotland on the heads of Scottish kings. The story goes that since Bruce was implicated in the murder of his kinsman and friend John Comyn, Duncan, Earl of Fife, refused to have anything to do with him. Duncan’s sister Isabella, Countess of Buchan, however, not an admirer of Comyn, is said to have volunteered to step into the breach instead and allegedly crowned Bruce on the second day of the inauguration ceremonies, more as a theatrical gesture than as part of the official ritual. The 11th Earl of Elgin, from whose family King Robert descended, agrees that the actual ceremony, surrounded by uncertainty and in the absence of the Stone of Destiny, would have been a modest occasion with a minimum of fuss. However, as punishment for the countess’s action, King Edward I of England is reputed to have taken her hostage and imprisoned her in a cage hung from the walls of Berwick Castle.
In the absence of Scotland’s reliquaries of the Roman religion, notably the Holy Rude, the artefacts of Dalriada’s old Celtic religion were reinstated: the Pastoral Staff of St Moluag, a sixth-century Irish Pictish monk; and the Monymusk Reliquary, a bejewelled casket covered in bronze and silver plates, and said to contain the bones of St Columba of Iona, the Irish missionary who had reintroduced Christianity to Scotland during the Dark Ages. The latter was to be paraded before the Scottish army immediately before the Battle of Bannockburn.6 Today, custody of the Pastoral Staff is entrusted to the Livingstone family, who became almoners to Lismore Cathedral and barons of Bachuil on the island of Lismore, off mainland Argyll. A Latin charter of 1544, still held by the family, confirms immemorial possession of their lands and such possessions as survive of St Moluag. The Lyon Court, being the ultimate authority on matters relating to the Scottish Crown, in 1950 declared that the staff ’s custodian is the co-arbiter of St Moluag and a baron in the Baronage of Argyll and the Isles, thus confirming the original Latin Charter. The Monymusk Reliquary can be seen in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
There is no accurate reportage of what took place at Scone on that day in March seven centuries ago, but since Sir Henry St Clair and his sons John and William were among Robert the Bruce’s most loyal supporters, it is only to be assumed that they were inattendance. Edward I of England died the following year and his dying wish was that the war be continued. And therefore Sir Henry and his sons certainly fought alongside Sir Henry’s brother, the Bishop of Dunkeld, and their kinsman, Sir William St Clair of Herdmanston, at the confrontation which took place eight years later on Midsummer’s Day beside the Bannock Burn, near Stirling. Sir Henry’s reward was the Barony of Pentland, which had last been held by his great-great-grandfather. In further gratitude, King Robert rewarded Herdmanston with a sword which he had inscribed ‘Le Roi me donne St Cler me porte’, ‘The King gave me, St Clair wields me.’
This sword is not to be confused with the four-handed, 5-foot long Great Sword of Bruce, which is in the possession of the 11th earl of Elgin. Another sword – a Claymore with four ‘quillons’, or cross-guards on the handle, and previously kept at Hawthornden, but now housed with the National Museum of Scotland – also makes a claim to be Bruce’s sword, but this is unlikely since its appearance is undoubtedly sixteenth century.
After Bannockburn there followed a temporary respite for the Scots, which to some extent enabled them to lead a more leisured existence. Like most of his contemporaries, King Robert’s favourite pastime was hunting, and on one royal excursion into the Pentland Hills, he challenged his nobles that their hounds would be unable to catch a particular white deer he had seen on a previous occasion. The rash William St Clair immediately wagered his head that his two hounds, Help and Hold, would kill the deer before it reached the March Burn, and the bet was on.7 Fortunately, Help and Hold caught the deer and William kept his head.
The war between Scotland and England dragged on with sporadic skirmishes for another fourteen years. In addition to an incursion on the Fife coast in 1317 – a landing successfully repelled by Sir Henry’s brother, Bishop William St Clair – Edward II of England persisted with a series of intermittent Border raids and, naturally, Rosslyn Castle was continually in the front line of defence. One of Sir Henry St Clair’s neighbours, Sir Alexander Ramsay, is an all but forgotten hero of this turbulent age.
Appointed Warden of the Middle Marches, he used the crags and caves of Gorton and Hawthornden as a base for his band of guerrilla fighters to intercept the convoys of the enemy, capture their provisions and seriously hinder their operations. Were Roslin Glen then a lochan, their hiding place in the cliffs would have been all but invisible. They were brave, resourceful men, these Norman-Scots, and defiant to the end. No Anglo-Norman was allowed to get the better of them. In 1319, exasperated at his inability to tame the Scots, Edward II, like his father before him, urged the pope, now John XXII, successor to Clement V, to once again excommunicate the Scottish king, which he duly did.
Enough was enough. Such blatant hypocrisy did the Church no favours. On 6 April 1320, Henry St Clair of Rosslyn and his cousins, including Magnus St Clair of Caithness and Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie, were among the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath, which collectively entreated the pope to legitimise Robert the Bruce as their rightful sovereign. In May 1328, both Pope John XXII and the English king, now the sixteen-year-old Edward III, finally relented. A treaty was signed at Northampton, but the following June King Robert died at Cardross, in Dunbartonshire.
A devout Christian, morally undermined by his two excommunications and haunted by the murder of his cousin, the Red Comyn, it had been his lifelong, but unspoken, ambition to make peace with his god by participating in a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He left instructions to that effect, but considered in retrospect, and even now, it seems an extraordinary and rather gruesome undertaking. The king’s body was interred in Dunfermline Abbey, and, soon afterwards, a group of Scottish knights, comprising some of his closest supporters during his lifetime, set sail from the Firth of Forth en route for Jerusalem carrying with them his embalmed heart encased in a conical casket. Sir Henry St Clair, by then too old to travel, sent his sons William and John in his place. Accompanying the St Clairs and Sir James ‘the Good’ Douglas, Bruce’s closest friend, and the group’s leader, were Simon Locard of the Lee, Robert and Walter Logan of Restalrig and William Keith of Calton.
Southern Spain was scheduled as a last port of call before crossing the Mediterranean. However, when the party of knights arrived in Seville, it was soon sidetracked and rapidly became embroiled in the on-going conflict between King Alfonso XI of Castile and Leon, and the Moors, the Muslim inhabitants of Al-Andalus, otherwise known as Andalusia.
In fairness, the Moors had occupied this territory for nearly half a millennium, but the small town of Teba de Ardales in Andalusia was now under siege by King Alfonso’s soldiers, and Douglas, imbued with Crusader zeal, and sparring for a fight, impetuously offered his support. Emotions ran high, and in the heat of the ensuing battle against the Infidel, Sir James Douglas recklessly charged into the fray with the casket containing King Robert’s heart strung around his neck. Finding himself surrounded, the old warrior, realising his time was up, impetuously hurled the container in front of him, crying out ‘Now pass on, as ever was thy wont in life, first in the fight, and Douglas will follow thee or die!’
Both of the St Clair brothers, and both Logan brothers, fell with their leader, but the casket was rescued by Keith and Locard, whose family at some later stage changed their surname to Lockhart.8 The Moors, impressed by the bravery of the Scots, allowed the survivors to go free and to retrieve the bodies of their compatriots. The casket containing Bruce’s heart was also returned to Scotland and sent to Melrose Abbey, where his son, David II, gave instructions for it to be buried in front of the altar.
No one had ever doubted that this interment took place, but it was still rather miraculous when, during archaeological investigations in 1996, a small conical casket about 10 inches high by 4 inches in diameter at its base, tapering to a flat lid at the top about 1½ inches across, was discovered. Although worn with age, the inscription was still legible: ‘The enclosed leaden casket containing a heart was found beneath Chapter House floor, March 1921, by His Majesty’s Office of Works.’ The casket containing the heart was not reopened on this occasion, but was buried again during a private ceremony at Melrose Abbey on 22 June 1998. A carved red sandstone marker had been commissioned by Historic Scotland and was unveiled a few days later by the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.
Following the Battle of Teba, the remains of William and John St Clair were taken to Rosslyn, but as the chapel did not then exist, it can only be assumed that they were interred in the old cemetery situated lower down the hill.