Robert the Bruce

Robert I, known as Robert the Bruce, was king of Scots from 1306 to 1329. He seized the throne after killing his chief rival, survived early defeat and years as a hunted outlaw, and then waged a successful war against English rule that culminated in his victory at Bannockburn in 1314. By the end of his life England had recognised the Kingdom of Scotland as independent, and he has been honoured ever since as one of Scotland's national heroes.

Robert was born on 11 July 1274, probably at Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire, the seat of his mother, Marjorie, countess of Carrick. His father's family, the Bruces, lords of Annandale, descended from a Norman knight who settled in Britain in the generations after William the Conqueror, and held land in both Scotland and England. Through a descent from King David I, they had a claim to the Scottish throne.

That claim became urgent when Alexander III died in 1286 and his only direct heir, his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died in 1290. Thirteen candidates came forward, and the Scots asked Edward I of England to judge between them. In 1292 Edward chose John Balliol over Robert's grandfather. Edward then treated Scotland as a dependent kingdom, and when the Scots made an alliance with France and resisted, he invaded in 1296, deposed Balliol and took direct control.

The young Robert, who became earl of Carrick in 1292, changed sides several times in the following years, as did many Scottish nobles. The Bruces at first supported Edward against Balliol, but in 1297 Robert joined the rising associated with William Wallace. After Wallace's defeat at Falkirk in 1298, Robert became one of the Guardians who governed Scotland in Balliol's name, alongside his great rival John Comyn of Badenoch, Balliol's nephew. The partnership was bitter, and Robert resigned in 1300. Fearing that a Balliol restoration would end his own hopes, he submitted to Edward in 1302. When Scotland's leaders surrendered in 1304, he was in the English king's peace, and Wallace was executed in London the following year.

On 10 February 1306 Robert met John Comyn in the church of the Greyfriars at Dumfries. What passed between them is unknown; later Scottish writers claimed that Comyn had betrayed a secret pact to Edward. The two men quarrelled, and Robert stabbed Comyn before the high altar, after which his companions finished him off. Whether the killing was planned or done in anger is still debated. It was both murder and sacrilege, and Robert was excommunicated, but he moved at once to claim the throne. With the support of Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow and other churchmen, he was crowned at Scone on 25 March 1306.

The new reign began in disaster. In June an English army surprised and routed his forces at Methven near Perth, and soon after he was defeated again by the MacDougalls, Comyn's kinsmen, at Dalry. His wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, his daughter Marjorie and his sisters were captured; two women of his party, his sister Mary and Isabella, countess of Buchan, were kept for years in cages. Three of his brothers were executed. Robert himself disappeared into the western isles, perhaps reaching Ireland or Norway, over the winter of 1306 to 1307.

He returned to Carrick early in 1307 and fought a guerrilla war, ambushing an English force at Glen Trool and defeating the earl of Pembroke at Loudoun Hill in May. In July 1307 Edward I died on his way north, and his son Edward II had neither his father's ability nor his determination. Robert turned first on his Scottish enemies, crushing the Comyns and laying waste their earldom of Buchan in 1308, then wore down the English garrisons one by one. Rather than face larger armies in open battle, he took castles by night attacks and surprise and then pulled down their walls so they could not be reoccupied. Perth fell in 1313, and Roxburgh and Edinburgh castles in early 1314.

By then the English garrison of Stirling Castle had agreed to surrender unless relieved, and in June 1314 Edward II came north with a large army. On 23 and 24 June Robert met it at Bannockburn, south of Stirling. On the first day he killed the English knight Henry de Bohun in single combat in front of both armies; on the second his spearmen, formed in dense schiltrons, drove the English cavalry back into the boggy ground by the burn, and the English army broke and fled. It was the greatest Scottish victory of the wars.

Bannockburn did not end the war. Robert's armies raided deep into northern England, and in 1315 his brother Edward Bruce invaded Ireland, hoping to open a second front and win a kingdom; Edward was proclaimed high king but was killed at Faughart in 1318. That year the Scots recaptured Berwick, the last English-held Scottish town. In 1320 the barons of Scotland sent a letter to Pope John XXII, now known as the Declaration of Arbroath, asking him to recognise Robert and asserting that they would never accept English rule; it also warned that they would replace even Robert if he ever submitted to England. The pope lifted the excommunication some years later.

After Edward II was deposed in 1327, the regime of his young son Edward III made peace. By the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton of 1328, England recognised Scotland's independence and Robert as its king, and Robert's four-year-old son David was married to Edward III's young sister Joan.

Robert spent his last years ill; contemporaries spoke of a skin disease, possibly leprosy, though this cannot be confirmed. He died at his manor near Cardross on 7 June 1329. His body was buried at Dunfermline Abbey, where a skeleton thought to be his was found in 1818. In keeping with his wish to go on crusade, his heart was carried by his companion James Douglas to fight the Moors in Spain, where Douglas was killed in 1330 in a battle against the emirate of Granada; the heart was brought back and buried at Melrose Abbey. His son became David II, and the son of his daughter Marjorie became Robert II, first of the Stewart kings.

Much of the popular image of Robert comes from The Brus, a long verse epic written by John Barbour around 1375, which turned him into a chivalric hero of freedom. The best-known story about him, in which he watches a spider try again and again to spin its web and takes heart to fight on, does not appear in Barbour or any medieval source; it was popularised by Walter Scott in the nineteenth century. Historians today see a ruthless and calculating aristocrat whose changes of side and violent seizure of power sit uneasily with the legend, but who proved an exceptionally able war leader and king, and who secured the independence of Scotland against a far stronger neighbour, the Kingdom of England. Scotland remained a separate kingdom until the union of the crowns in 1603 and the parliamentary union of 1707, the foundation of the later United Kingdom.