A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  With Wallace dead and many of the most prominent Scots fighting for, rather than against, his authority, Edward must have surveyed the results of his long war of repression with satisfaction. That was that. On with the next item on the imperial agenda. France perhaps. Except, it wasn’t. Just as he supposed the fires of resistance were dead, they burst back into flame, and they were set alight by someone whom Edward could never have tipped as a saboteur, much less a leader of a war of liberation: the young Earl of Carrick, Robert the Bruce.

  By some measure the most politically intelligent and militarily successful of all Scotland’s kings, Robert the Bruce must have seemed (mistakenly) to Edward his kind of Scotsman. He’d had a polished education, spoke French and was the holder of the Honour of Huntingdon and estates in Tottenham, and his brother, Edward, had been a student at Cambridge. Because he had done the sensible thing in 1302 and submitted to the king, he had seemed to be the sort of person bright enough not to waste his time and his life on a sentimental lost cause. This was a disastrous misjudgement. To understand the real Bruce, Edward might have done worse than look in the mirror. For sheer wily ruthlessness, this particular Scottish lion needed no tutorials from the leopard. In 1306 he did exactly what Edward had done – took care of his enemies at home before turning on the foreigner, and he did it in shocking Macbethian fashion, murdering his principal rival, John Comyn of Badenoch, at the very altar of Greyfriars Abbey in Dumfries. The murder is neither explained nor extenuated by its being a case of a patriot knocking off a quisling, for Comyn had been a lot more consistent in his opposition to the English than Bruce. But the Comyns had long fought with the Bruces for mastery of southwest Scotland, and they were allies by marriage with the Balliols. With King John Balliol still alive and actually boasting an heir – named, with doubtful taste, Edward – the Comyns refused to have anything to do with Bruce’s whispered proposal of an uprising led by himself as Scotland’s new king. What was more, Comyn was one of many of Scotland’s nobles who had been surprised by Edward’s leniency when, following his submission, the king had restored his ancestral estates and given undertakings that Scotland’s own laws and customs would be preserved.

  Barely six weeks after he had murdered Comyn, Bruce was inaugurated king at Scone by the inveterate old thorn in the side of the English, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, who not only absolved Robert of the killing but unblushingly demanded that the flock now rally to his cause! Instead of unifying the Scots behind a single leader, Bruce’s murder of Comyn only intensified what was already a Scottish civil war. The Lanercost chronicler in 1311–12 recalled that: ‘in all this fighting the Scots were so divided that often father was with the Scots and his son with the English or one brother was with the Scots and another with the English, or even one individual was first on one side and then on the other.’ And initially it was hard to see what Bruce had gained. The loser in a battle against the Comyns, he was forced to take flight, travelling north and west.

  In all likelihood he went to the Hebrides, and perhaps across the Irish Sea, but wherever he went, Bruce vanishes for a while from any kind of reliable historical record. This vacuum of knowledge was filled by heroic mythology: the fable of the cave and the spider, whose exemplary patience and industry gave Robert the resolution to persevere. But what happened to Bruce in the period he went missing was, in fact, much more remarkable – the transformation of the polished aristocrat and machiavellian conspirator into a guerrilla warrior. For it was Robert the Bruce not William Wallace, the battlefield enthusiast, who truly wrote the book on partisan warfare in Britain. Bruce used what have since become the classic tactics of hit-and-run: small groups of swiftly moving attack raiders, mounted on horses or ponies, unencumbered by not having to carry their own provisions or cooking pots and pans and subsisting instead, as Froissart described, on ‘the water of rivers, underdone meat cooked in cattle hides’ or, if ‘their stomachs feel weak and hollow, they lay stones of a fire and mix a little of their oatmeal with water, sprinkling the thin paste on the hot stone and make a small cake like a wafer’ – the military origin of the oatcake. Bruce’s lightning-strike forces struck fast and deep across the border to make their point: laying ambushes; using rope ladders and grappling hooks to force their way into enemy castles; wreaking havoc and disappearing again into the night. And the more damage he did, the more infuriatingly elusive he seemed to be. With every month that went by without his capture or defeat, he picked up allies.

  In the end Bruce out-foxed, out-fought and outlived his nemesis, Longshanks. In the preamble to an ordinance for the government of Scotland Edward had written that he had spent sleepless nights ‘tossed about by the waves of thought’, but now he wished to promote ‘pleasantness and ease and quiet for our subjects dwelling in our realm, for in their quiet we have rest and in their tranquillity we are inwardly cherished’. He died the following year, 1307, at Burgh-by-the-Sands near Carlisle, on his way to yet another grim campaign of siege and destruction. Before expiring, according to the chronicler Froissart, he ordered his son to boil his bones away from his body so that they might be carried with the English armies in Scotland. Without them he evidently feared for the military prospects of Edward II should he ever have to face Robert the Bruce on the field of battle.

  The father’s opinion of the son had long been notoriously low. Although he did not actually throw one of Edward’s boyfriends from the battlements, Edward I was sufficiently provoked by his son’s refusal to abandon companions he deemed deplorable to attack him physically, tearing out large chunks of the prince’s hair. But in 1306, he had nonetheless celebrated Edward’s knighthood in the New Temple (the site of his bank heist forty years before) with lavish festivities, featuring golden swans and the usual tournaments in which at least two knights were killed. So in 1307, when Edward of Caernarfon came to the throne, no one wrote him off as some limp-wristed playboy hopelessly unfit to fill his father’s shoes. In many ways they must have seemed quite alike – tall, blond-haired and sinewy – and Edward II’s temper was certainly hot enough to remind anyone of his paternity. His favoured choice of pastimes, it’s true, raised eyebrows, although they tended more to the Boy Scout than the lounge lizard: rowing, ditch-digging and thatching. In the end, however, it was not Edward’s rustic pastimes, his fancy clothes, his racehorses, his creepy boyfriends or even his extreme fondness for amateur theatricals that got him into big trouble. It was rather that somehow he personified neither of the models for leadership of the English nation. He was neither the second Caesar of Britain nor the princely embodiment of the community of the realm.

  Robert the Bruce, on the other hand, was just that. Although the Comyn murder showed that he was capable of striking out with unscrupulous independence, Bruce drew on the experience of his embattled country since the death of Alexander III by making the most of its tradition of collective leadership. He knew that he was in for a civil, as well as a national war and that there were some Scottish families who would never forgive what he had done to John Comyn. His task was to reconcile all but the most alienated and to do so by emphasizing that his enterprise was not for himself or his own family but for Scotland. In this way Bruce avoided de Montfort’s worst mistakes after Lewes, when even the best disposed of his supporters suspected him of personal, dynastic empire-building and resented his aloofness. Bruce, on the other hand, went out of his way to consult with his nobles and especially the bishops who had, from the beginning, been his fervent supporters. By 1309 he had succeeded in establishing his own legitimacy, as much as a guardian-protector as a prince, and was able to call his own Scottish parliament to raise money for an army of national defence. Over the next five years, Bruce went systematically from stronghold to stronghold, moving by water as well as land, until all of the north, west and southwest of Scotland were firmly under his control. But this still left the southeast and the crucial castles of Berwick and Stirling in English power. Finally, by the summer of 1314, the commander of Stirling was close to capitulation bu
t managed to foist Bruce off for a while in the hope that his plight might finally spur action from Edward II. The disgrace of losing Stirling was indeed enough to prompt an expedition from Edward II, who moved north with yet another Anglo-imperial army of thousands.

  It was the usual formidably equipped Plantagenet war machine that faced Bruce on the Forth plain outside Stirling on 23 June, but war machines don’t work well in wet ground, and, outnumbered as he was three to one, Robert had carefully chosen the site of the engagement to box the English army in between the river and the boggy ditch of the Bannockburn. For Bruce himself the battle was very nearly over before it had begun, when one of the English knights, Henry de Bohun, caught Bruce unawares on his little mount some way off from his soldiers and charged directly at him with his lance. Bruce turned matador, keeping absolutely still until the very last minute, when he swerved to the side, simultaneously bringing his axe down on de Bohun’s head with such force that it went cleft through helmet and skull, burying itself in his attacker’s brains. Bruce sat alone on his horse, holding the shaft end of the axe. The army that had been momentarily aghast was now euphoric with relief. Providence had obviously armoured their king against destruction. It was a good sign.

  The Scottish wars.

  The battle got serious on the second day with an unsparing, head-on collision between the schiltrons and the horsemen. According to his friend the Abbot Bernard, Bruce made an extraordinary speech to rally his men before the moment of truth. Shakespeare at his most ardent could not possibly have done better. Addressing both ‘my lords’ and ‘my people’ Bruce personalized the past trials in ways that perfectly captured the need to make himself, simultaneously, one of his brother Scots and their captain:

  For eight years or more I have struggled with much labour for my right to the kingdom and for honourable liberty. I have lost brothers, friends and kinsmen. Your own kinsmen have been made captive and bishops and priests are locked in prison. Our nobility’s blood has poured forth in war. Those barons you can see before you, clad in mail, are bent on destroying me and obliterating my kingdom, nay our whole nation. They do not believe we can survive. They glory in their war-horses and equipment. For us the name of the Lord must be our hope of victory in battle. This is a day of rejoicing: the birthday of John the Baptist. With our Lord Jesus as commander Saint Andrew and the martyr Saint Thomas shall fight today with the saints of Scotland for the honour of their country and their nation. If you heartily repent for your sins you will be victorious under God’s command.

  So as they emerged from the woods into the sight of the English, the Scots soldiers knelt to pray. Seeing this, amidst general merriment Edward asked his entourage: ‘What! Will those Scots fight?’ On being assured they would, the king assumed they were kneeling for mercy and was told by one of his Scots allies that they did, indeed, seek mercy, ‘not from the king but from God’.

  From the beginning it was apparent that this was to be no repeat of Falkirk. Under the impact of the first tremendous charge, led by the Earl of Gloucester, the schiltrons stood fast, inflicting enormous damage by aiming their spears first at horses, then at the fallen riders. They were impenetrable to the mounted knights, and only the archers might have been able to break the tight cohesiveness of the schiltrons, but they were kept in the rear of the English attack until the battle was well under way. Perhaps it was hard to believe that, sooner or later, the repeated charges of the knights would not take their toll, as they had at Falkirk. When it became evident that this was not going to happen, the archers were belatedly moved up into firing position, but their passage was blocked by the debris of fallen horses and men, giving time for the small, mobile troop of Scottish cavalry to attack them headlong. Scattering, the Welsh and Gascon bowmen were taken out of the battle, and the conflict turned into an elemental hacking between the spears and axes of the Scots and the swords and lances of the knights. ‘Many a mighty splendid blow was struck by both sides until blood burst out of the coats of mail and ran streaming down into the earth.’ Gradually, the English vanguard became unhorsed, lost its coherence and turned into a disorganized mass, trapped between the now slowly advancing schiltrons and the deep, muddy ditch of the burn. At some point in the afternoon an irregular crowd of Scottish peasants and yeomen, whom Bruce had kept in reserve sensing that the English were on the defensive, and who were armed with flails, hammers and pitchforks, charged down towards the fray. In the confusion the English commanders might well have imagined this to be a second and fresh Scots army. More to the point, they were certain that the king was now in personal peril and urged flight before he was captured or killed.

  Edward II, who had certainly not shrunk from combat and who had had horses killed under him, was finally persuaded to depart. He left behind on the battlefield his personal shield and seal (later gallantly returned by King Robert), his personal belongings and clothes, what was left of his reputation as a battle captain and 4000 dead – English, Welsh, Gascon and Scots enemies of the Bruces. The burn was ‘so choked that men could pass over it with dry feet on the bodies of horses and men’. ‘Maydens of Englonde, sore may ye morne,’ wrote the Scots author of Fabyan’s Chronicles. ‘For your lemans ye have loste at Bannockisborne.’ But what was also lost at Bannockburn was the Plantagenet dream of the Anglo-Roman empire.

  Understandably, Robert the Bruce wanted it to stay dead. So instead of resting on his laurels, in 1315, a year after the battle, he did something quite remarkable: he took the attack to the English across the North Channel to Ireland in the person of his younger brother, Edward. To smooth Edward’s way, he invited ‘our friends, the kings of Ireland, the clergy and the inhabitants’ to join a pan-Gaelic alliance. The Scots, he promised, would come not as invaders, but liberators. Together with the Irish, they would rid Caledonia and Hibernia of the detestable English, and the two Bruces, Robert in Scotland and Edward in Ireland, would rule the free peoples of nostra natio, our nation:

  Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together . . . by a common language and common custom, we have sent over to you our beloved kinsmen . . . to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you so that with God’s will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty.

  The rhetoric was stirring but the timing unfortunate. For 1315 also saw the worst famine in living memory. Very soon, Edward Bruce’s army became indistinguishable from any other disorderly gang of knights, using force to extract the provisions they desperately needed for their men and animals and not choosing to distinguish with any care between Gaelic friends and English foes. Famished and desperate, the Scots soldiers took what they needed from the Irish villagers and finally resorted (so it was said) to digging up fresh graves and eating the cadavers. Month by month the Bruces’ war of liberation turned into something remarkably like an occupation.

  Not all the Irish nobility and kings opened their arms to embrace their Scots liberators. A bitter civil war broke out between native Irish supporters of the Anglo-Normans on one side and the Scots on the other. In Dublin, many of the population tore down their own houses to use as walls against the Scots rather than surrender the city. A climactic battle took, according to contemporaries, no fewer than 10,000 lives. In 1318 Edward Bruce was himself killed, and before the end of the year the Scots had left. Perhaps the experiment in collaboration across the North Channel deserved to fail because, from the beginning, Robert the Bruce had his own, rather than his Irish brothers’, interests at heart, needing a second front which might divert critical English military resources from Scotland to Ireland. Not for the last time the Irish were being used in someone else’s quarrel. All the same, the Scots did leave something behind in Ireland other than widows and ballads. They had managed to complete what Bannockburn had begun and finish off the Plantagenet myth of invincibility. The proclamation of the Irish princes that they
were compelled to ‘face the dangers of warlike men in defence of our right rather than go on bearing outrages like women’ hit a note of righteous belligerence that would, for better or worse, echo down the centuries.

  The failure of the Irish expedition and Robert’s correct assumption that Bannockburn had by no means finished off English efforts to recover their power over Scotland prompted him to look abroad for support. In the end, it was Scottish self-reliance rather than dependence on the French that fended off Edward II’s repeated probes across the border. But an appeal to the pope to recognize the holiness of their cause did produce, if nothing else, the most eloquent statement to date of Scottish (or, for that matter, any nation’s) right to self-determination that had yet been uttered in medieval Europe. At Arbroath Abbey fifty lords and bishops of Scotland attached their seals to a ‘declaration’, which, although coming from an unknown hand, undoubtedly reflects both Robert’s and his peers’ passionately held convictions about their shared history, culture and liberty. The Declaration of Arbroath was, in the first instance, the product of the usual antiquarian digging amid unreliable chronicles and myths. Needing a myth of origins that did not depend on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of a Trojan settlement, an alternative fable was created in which the ur-Scots were traced back to Scythia in the Balkans where St Andrew had converted the locals in AD400, significantly before the Angles or the Saxons.