Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 61

Now, this Robert the Bruce was a remarkably brave and strong man: there was no man in Scotland that was thought a match for him except Sir William Wallace; and now that Wallace was dead, Bruce was held the best warrior in Scotland. He was very wise and prudent, and an excellent general … He was generous, too, and courteous by nature; but he had some faults, which perhaps belonged as much to the fierce period in which he lived as to his own character. He was rash and passionate, and in his passions, he was sometimes relentless and cruel.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VIII

On 24 June 1998, the 684th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, the heart of this ‘rash and passionate’ man, Robert Bruce, was buried in Melrose Abbey for the third time, 669 years after his death. Donald Dewar, the Secretary of State for Scotland at the time (and about to become the First Minister in the new devolved Scottish Parliament), unveiled a circular sandstone marker on the lawn outside the Chapter House of the abbey to mark the reburial of a small lead casket. The stone was inscribed with a legend taken from John Barbour’s great vernacular chivalric epic, The Brus: ‘A noble hart may have nane [no] ease … gif [if] freedom failye’ (Book I).

The casket had been unearthed two years earlier from under the Chapter House by archaeologists from Historic Scotland. Inside it was another, unmarked lead casket, and a note written by the archaeologists who had dug it up in 1921: ‘The enclosed leaden casket containing a heart was found beneath the Chapter House floor in March 1921…’. The casket had been examined, placed inside a larger lead casket and then reburied. Unfortunately there was no indication of where it had been reburied, and no one could remember the location. But at least the 1921 excavation had verified that it contained a human heart, and since no other heart is reported to have been buried at Melrose, it could be asserted, with some confidence, that the medieval casket which was found and unearthed again in 1998 did, indeed, contain Robert Bruce’s mummified heart. And with that, the last relic of Bruce’s earthly remains was laid to its final rest. As Donald Dewar said:

We cannot know for certain whether the casket buried here contains the heart of Robert the Bruce, but in a sense it does not matter. The casket and the heart are symbols of the man.

When Bruce died in 1329 he was buried in Dunfermline Abbey before the High Altar with exceptional reverence. A marble tomb was shipped over from Paris, and his body was wrapped in a shroud of cloth-of-gold and encased in a thin sheet of lead. The inscription on the tomb read:

Here lies the invincible Robert, Blessed King. Let him who reads his exploits repeat how many wars he carried on. He led the Kingdom of the Scots to Freedom by his Uprightness. Now let him live in the Citadel of Heaven.

Over the centuries the old abbey fell into ruin, and the location of the tomb was lost. In February 1818, however, workmen clearing the floor of the choir of the abbey church before rebuilding came upon the vault which contained the royal burial. News of the discovery and official confirmation of its authenticity unleashed an extraordinary wave of patriotism throughout Scotland. The plans for the new abbey were altered to accommodate, below the high pulpit, a railed enclosure for the ornate gilded grave-slab covering the reburied vault.

The skeleton was that of a man about six feet tall. What made identification certain was that the breastbone had been cut to allow the heart to be removed. On his deathbed, Bruce had asked that his heart should be taken from his body and carried to the Holy Land in order to fulfil a lifelong ambition even after death. Obedient to the late king’s wish, one of his most loyal supporters, James Douglas (the ‘Black Douglas’), had set off for the Crusades with Bruce’s embalmed heart. In Spain he was caught up in a campaign against the Moors of Granada, and was killed in battle in 1330. Eventually his body, and the king’s heart, were returned to Scotland, and the heart was buried in Melrose Abbey as Bruce had wished.

The ceremony at Melrose in June 1998 marked the end of a long and hazardous journey for the remains of one of Scotland’s favourite sons and hero-figures, the man who is credited with having achieved Scotland’s independence and nationhood at last. Donald Dewar said:

Bruce gave definition to the Scottish crown and the country he ruled. He was himself one of the great leaders of our history. More than that, he shaped the relationship between Scots and their leaders. He fought to protect his people, not to vanquish their enemies.

It was a judicious and refreshingly unbiased summation. The name of ‘Robert Bruce’ arouses mixed responses in Scotland, especially in recent years when the role of William Wallace as the Scottish Patriot has been more strongly emphasised at the expense of the part played by Bruce in the independence struggle. Bruce has been castigated for not being as ‘patriotic’ as Wallace, because he changed his allegiance more than once – yet the concept of ‘patriotism’ did not, and could not, exist in the Scotland of the time. He has been denigrated as a ‘Norman’ incomer, an alien in Scotland – despite the fact that he was the sixth Robert Bruce to be born in Scotland since the first Robert Bruce from Brix, created Lord of Cleveland by Henry I, was granted the lands of Annandale by King David I; and it should be remembered that Wallace, too, was of Anglo-Norman stock – his family seems to have followed the Stewarts to Scotland from Shropshire and perhaps even from Brittany. Bruce has also been blamed for the activities of what we would now call spin-doctors employed later by the Bruce dynasty – notably the poet John Barbour, who air-brushed Bruce’s image to the extent of trying to write William Wallace out of Scottish history altogether: there is no mention of him at all in The Brus.¹

The sixth Robert Bruce was born in Turnberry Castle in 1274, the eldest of ten children. He had four brothers – Edward, Thomas, Alexander and Neil – and five sisters – Mary, Christian, Matilda, Margaret and Isabella (who in 1293 married Erik II, the widower king of Norway and father of the ‘Maid of Norway’). In 1295 Robert Bruce married Isabella of Mar. The following year, Isabella died in childbirth; the baby, a daughter, was named Marjory (after Bruce’s mother), and she, through her marriage to Walter the Steward (Stewart) in 1315, would transmit the royal succession from the ‘Robert dynasty’ to the start of the Stewart dynasty through her son, Robert II (see Chapter 13).

The resistance movement led by William Wallace in 1297–98 placed Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick, in a real quandary. Wallace consistently fought in the name of the man he regarded as the rightful King of Scots, John Balliol, who had been deposed by Edward I; the Bruce family, on the other hand, felt that their own claim to the throne had been stronger than Balliol’s. Furthermore, King Edward’s grip on the south of Scotland was much tighter than on the north: young Robert Bruce was caught in the difficult dilemma of having to reconcile the conflicting demands of being a vassal of the kings of both Scotland and England.

After Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk in 1298 it behoved the nobility of Scotland, the ‘natural’ ruling class, to take up the resistance battle; and the vacuum caused by Wallace’s fall as the military and political leader of the nation was filled by the appointment of two Guardians. One was Robert Bruce; the other was John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, the ‘Red Comyn’. This unlikely partnership did not last; but it brought into high relief the simmering tension between two of the most significant noble families in the land.

In terms of political and landed clout the Comyns, loyal supporters of King John Balliol, were pre-eminent in Scotland. They were the government party, and had been throughout the thirteenth century. Their main power-base was well north of the Forth – Clyde axis, in Badenoch and Buchan, but a network of marriage alliances gave them strength and a string of castles all over the country.¹

By comparison the Bruces were rather marginal; apart from their lands in Annandale and Carrick they had an important marriage alliance with the Earl of Mar (husband of Bruce’s sister Christian) which gave them a foothold in the north-east. But that was all.

In 1302, when it looked as if John Balliol might be restored to the Scottish throne, Bruce defected to the English side (see Chapter 10). His submission to King Edward was rewarded by a marriage alliance with Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of the Earl of Ulster; this second marriage would bring him much-needed support in Ireland in later years. The immediate effect of his return to the English fold, however, was to marginalise him further as a force in Scotland; even his traditional supporters, like James the Steward (Stewart) and the Earl of Atholl, lost faith in him. No one could have expected him to make a political comeback.

The submission to Edward of John Comyn of Badenoch (nephew of King John Balliol) and the rest of the Scottish government in February 1304 was a very different matter: it was Comyn who had been the real ‘patriot’ in the struggle with England, not Bruce. The Scottish army, such as it was, had not been defeated in the field; the Scots had kept the mighty English war machine at bay for eight years, but there had been a haemorrhaging of support, especially in the south, among the leaders of the local communities who were tired of war, tired of harassment, tired of being hammered financially. Fiona Watson says:

Submission was surely the sensible, pragmatic thing to do. Scotland had been abandoned by France and was isolated internationally. People also realised that King Edward would not live for ever, and that his son Edward was probably not as implacably hostile to Scotland as his father was – so why not submit now and see what happened when Edward died? So they submitted, on reasonably lenient terms, and lived to fight another day.

The brutal execution of William Wallace must have sent a shiver of apprehension through the ranks of the Scottish aristocracy, as a dire warning of the penalty for crossing King Edward. There is no record of what Robert Bruce thought about it, but he was aware that he was out of favour with Edward. Edward did not know of Bruce’s secret pact with Bishop Lamberton in July 1304, but he was aware of Bruce’s ambition to be king, and Bruce had not been favoured with any important administrative post in the new constitution which Edward was preparing for Scotland. Bruce was evidently preparing for a political comeback, but he was playing a highly dangerous game.

Now in his early thirties, Bruce was probably planning ahead to such time as Edward was dead. There are conflicting indications that he made overtures of some kind to the Red Comyn. According to Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon and John Barbour in The Brus, he offered Comyn a choice: that Comyn himself should take the throne (even though the legitimate heir was John Balliol’s son, Edward Balliol) and grant to Bruce all his lands and possessions, or that Bruce should become king and Comyn should receive all Bruce’s lands. Comyn allegedly accepted the latter proposition, and the bargain was sealed.

The idea of any kind of written compact, however vaguely worded, seems unlikely, for such a document would have been dangerously incriminating if it had fallen into Edward’s hands. But there may well have been an understanding of some sort between the two men: Comyn knew that his own claim to the throne was very much weaker than that of Bruce, and Bruce knew that he could hardly hope to be king of a united nation without the wholehearted support of the powerful and patriotic Comyn faction.

But events were to take a dramatic and wholly unexpected turn on 10 February 1306, after Bruce and Comyn had arranged to hold a private discussion in the neutral sanctuary of the Church of the Grey Friars in Dumfries.