Robert the Bruce: the Outlaw King Who Won Bannockburn

Few medieval kings climbed from so low a point. In 1306 Bruce was a man who had killed his rival in a church, a king with almost no army, hunted while his relatives were taken and executed. Eight years later he had beaten an English royal army in the field, and by his death England had given up its claim to rule Scotland. For the wider story of the wars, see the military history of Scotland.²

Family and the Bruce claim

Robert Bruce was born on 11 July 1274, the son of Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, and of the Countess of Carrick, heiress in her own right of an earldom on the Ayrshire coast centered on Turnberry castle.³

Where he was born is not recorded. Tradition, and Fiona Watson in her early work, favor Turnberry in Carrick, a castle that Historic Environment Scotland describes as very probably his birthplace and certainly his childhood home.⁴

His claim to the throne came from his grandfather, Robert Bruce the Competitor. When Alexander III died in 1286 and his granddaughter and heir, Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died in 1290, more than a dozen claimants came forward, and Edward I of England, asked to judge between them, first insisted that the Scots recognize him as overlord.⁵

In November 1292 the court found for John Balliol, descended from the eldest daughter of Earl David of Huntingdon, against the Competitor, son of the second daughter. The English knight Sir Thomas Gray, writing in the next generation, tells that the old man refused to do homage to Balliol and passed the claim down the line, and that his grandson, then a young knight of Edward's household, did homage all the same.⁶

Edward treated Balliol as a vassal, and in 1296 he invaded, sacked Berwick and defeated the Scots at Dunbar. Balliol gave up his kingdom that summer. The Bruces had stood with the English king, hoping that he would now turn to their claim. Edward refused even to consider it.⁷

Changing sides, 1296 to 1304

In 1297 the young Earl of Carrick joined the rising led by Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow and the Steward, but the nobles' revolt ended in a negotiated surrender at Irvine on 7 July 1297, while William Wallace and Andrew Murray fought on and won at Stirling Bridge that September. English officials were still trying to bring Bruce into the king's peace that November. Read the story of those years in the life of William Wallace.⁸

Where Bruce stood at Falkirk in July 1298 is uncertain. Henry Gough, who edited the English campaign records in 1888, judged that the elder Robert Bruce, the future king's father, probably fought on the English side. The English chronicle that Gough printed says the younger Bruce burned his castle at Ayr and abandoned it as Edward's army came on.⁹

By December 1298 the younger Bruce had been made one of the Guardians of Scotland, jointly with John Comyn the younger of Badenoch. The partnership did not work: the two men quarreled from at least 1299, and Bruce gave up the guardianship in 1300.¹⁰

Early in 1302, with a French-backed restoration of Balliol looking possible, Bruce went back to Edward's peace. Watson shows that his submission came before 16 February 1302. Most of the Scottish nobility followed in 1303 and 1304, and Comyn himself submitted in February 1304. That year Bruce's father died, leaving him the family claim, and he made a secret alliance with Bishop Lamberton of St Andrews.¹¹

The killing of John Comyn and the crown, 1306

On 10 February 1306, according to the Lanercost chronicle, Bruce met John Comyn in the church of the Franciscan friars at Dumfries and killed him there. Comyn's uncle, Sir Robert Comyn, was cut down with him.¹²

Gray, writing from the English side, gives the scene as a dialogue before the high altar: Bruce offers Comyn a choice, help him to the crown or take Bruce's lands and claim it himself, Comyn refuses to break his oath to Edward, and Bruce accuses him of betraying him in letters to the English king before stabbing him. The Encyclopedia of World Biography calls the killing violent and probably unpremeditated. The Oxford Companion to British History notes that Bruce's moves afterward were so well planned that his decision to seize the throne must already have been taken.¹³

Either way the deed left him no road back. Within about six weeks he was made king at Scone: on 25 March 1306, the feast of the Annunciation, according to Lanercost and Gray, while the Scottish chronicler John of Fordun gives 27 March. Gray adds that the Countess of Buchan, of the house of the earls of Fife, who by custom set Scottish kings on the throne, performed the ceremony because the young earl was in English hands.¹⁴

The killing in a church brought excommunication, yet the bishops of Glasgow and St Andrews and the abbot of Scone stood by the new king, and all three ended up in English custody. Edward I, old and sick, treated him as a traitor and his rising as a rebellion to be crushed.¹⁵

Methven and the fugitive year

Edward sent Aymer de Valence north with an army. On 19 June 1306 Valence fell on Bruce's force at Methven, near Perth, and scattered it. Gray tells that John de Haliburton, a knight in Valence's force, caught Bruce's bridle and let him go when he saw who it was, because Bruce wore no coat of arms, only a white shirt.¹⁶

That summer the MacDougalls of Lorn, kinsmen of Comyn, beat what was left of his following at Dalry. Kildrummy castle fell later that year, and his relatives and supporters were hunted down and executed.¹⁷

Then came the worst months of his life. His wife, Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Ulster, and his daughter Marjorie were captured, his brother Neil, or Nigel, was hanged, at Berwick according to Gray and Fordun and at Newcastle according to Lanercost, and his brothers Thomas and Alexander, taken in Galloway early in 1307, were executed at Carlisle.¹⁸

Bruce himself went into hiding, probably on Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast or among the Western Isles.¹⁹

This is where the most famous Bruce story belongs, and it is a legend. John Barbour's poem The Bruce, written in the 1370s, has no spider. The tale of the king watching a spider try again and again to fix its thread first appears in Sir Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather in the late 1820s, and Scott himself said it rested only on family tradition. A similar story had been told of James Douglas in the seventeenth century.²⁰

Glen Trool, Loudoun Hill and the war against the Comyns, 1307 to 1309

Bruce came back to the mainland early in 1307 and changed his way of fighting, to a guerrilla war of ambush and surprise. He won a skirmish in Glen Trool in April and in May met Valence at Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire.²¹

Barbour dates Loudoun Hill to 10 May, a day and place that Valence himself had named. He gives Bruce about six hundred fighting men against nearly three thousand, drawn up behind ditches in a narrow gap so that the English could not use their numbers, and the English broke. In July 1307 Edward I died at Burgh by Sands on the Solway, on his way to invade Scotland again.²²

Edward II soon turned back to his quarrels with his barons, and Bruce used the time to fight his Scottish enemies. In 1308 he broke the Comyn earl of Buchan at Inverurie and turned west against the MacDougalls of Argyll, while his brother Edward wore down English power in the south-west.²³

After Inverurie Bruce had Buchan burned from end to end. Barbour says men still mourned the harrying of Buchan nearly fifty years later, and that the earl fled to England, where he died soon after.²⁴

In March 1309 Bruce held his first parliament, at St Andrews, where the nobles and the clergy issued declarations that he was the rightful successor of Alexander III and denounced Edward I's aggression, setting the terms of Scottish argument for centuries. Edward II came north in 1310 and 1311 and achieved nothing.²⁵

Bannockburn, 1314: Bruce's battle

Bruce took the English-held castles one by one and destroyed them so that they could not be held against him again. Early in 1314 his men took Roxburgh and Edinburgh.²⁶

Stirling was the last great prize. In 1313 his brother Edward Bruce agreed with its commander, Sir Philip Mowbray, that the castle would surrender unless relieved by midsummer 1314. Sir Herbert Maxwell, translating Gray in 1907, remarked that the bargain displeased the king, whose strategy was to avoid a pitched battle. It made one almost certain, because Edward II could not let Stirling go without trying.²⁷

Edward came north with what Historic Environment Scotland's inventory estimates as some 2,000 to 3,000 heavy cavalry and about 16,000 infantry, against perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 Scottish spearmen and 500 light horse. Barbour, writing sixty years later, gave the English army as a hundred thousand fighting men, a figure the inventory rejects. Bruce had gathered and trained his men at Torwood and dug pits beside the road through the New Park to break up any cavalry charge.²⁸

On 23 June, as the English vanguard came up, Sir Henry de Bohun saw the king riding in front of his lines on a small horse, known by the crown on his helmet, and charged him. Bruce turned his horse aside, rose in his stirrups and split de Bohun's head with his axe, breaking the shaft. Historic Environment Scotland accepts the story, since sources from both kingdoms tell it.²⁹

That evening Thomas Randolph's schiltron, on foot, routed some three hundred English horsemen under Robert Clifford and Henry de Beaumont who had tried to slip past toward the castle. Among the prisoners was Sir Thomas Gray, the chronicler's father.³⁰

The English spent the night on the low, wet ground of the Carse beyond the Bannock Burn, disheartened. Gray, who had the story from his captive father, says the Scots were thinking of withdrawing when Sir Alexander Seton, a Scot in English service, slipped across and told Bruce that the English were discouraged and could be beaten. Bruce chose to attack.³¹

At sunrise on 24 June the Scots came out of the woods in schiltrons and drove into the English columns. The Lanercost chronicler, who had his account from an eyewitness, describes the great horses running onto the Scottish pikes as into a dense forest. The English rear could not reach the fighting past its own vanguard, and the army broke and fell back on the burn. The Earl of Gloucester died in the first clash, a loss the Irish Annals of Connacht recorded too.³²

Barbour adds that when the English archers began to hurt the Scots, Bruce sent the marshal, Sir Robert Keith, with his horsemen to ride them down, and the archers took no further part.³³

Edward II was led off the field, fled to Dunbar and went on by sea to Berwick. The captured Earl of Hereford was later exchanged for Bruce's queen, his daughter Marjorie, his sister and the blind Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, held in England since 1306.³⁴

On 6 November 1314 a parliament at Cambuskenneth Abbey ruled that everyone who had died fighting against the king, or had not come into his peace, would lose his lands in Scotland forever.³⁵ › The Battle of Bannockburn, 1314

Ireland, raids into England and Berwick

Victory did not end the war, because England still would not recognize Bruce as king. He looked for a second front. In May 1315 his brother Edward Bruce landed near Larne in Ulster with a Scottish army. The Annals of Connacht record that the Ulstermen agreed to his being proclaimed King of Ireland, and the Louth heritage guide dates his inauguration near Faughart to 1 May 1316. In 1317 Robert himself crossed with many gallowglass soldiers to help him.³⁶

The campaign ended at Faughart, near Dundalk, on 14 October 1318, where an Anglo-Irish force defeated the Scots and killed Edward Bruce. The annalist of Connacht was merciless: Edward Bruce was "the common ruin of the Galls and Gaels of Ireland", and his three and a half years had brought famine and killing. Penman calls the Irish war a dangerous front too far.³⁷

In Scotland the succession had to be settled again. Edward had been heir presumptive, and in 1318 parliament named the king's grandson, Robert Stewart, son of his daughter Marjorie.³⁸

Bruce kept up the pressure on England with raids that took cattle, captives and ransom from the northern counties, and in 1318 he took back Berwick.³⁹

In 1319, while Edward II besieged Berwick, Randolph and James Douglas struck deep into Yorkshire. Near Myton-on-Swale they routed a scratch force led by the Archbishop of York, with so many clergy in it that the Scots called it the Chapter of Myton. Lanercost puts the English dead at about four thousand, Barbour at a thousand.⁴⁰

In 1322 Edward II's last invasion of Scotland failed, and on the Scots' counter-raid into Yorkshire he fled from Rievaulx Abbey, leaving his silver plate behind.⁴¹

The Declaration of Arbroath and the pope

The papacy was the other battlefield. In 1317 Bruce defied Pope John XXII’s efforts to impose a truce with England. Sentences of excommunication followed, which the National Records of Scotland date to 1318. By November 1319, the papal registers note, he had defied them for more than a year, and in June 1320, after he ignored a summons to Avignon, the pope excommunicated him again for contumacy, along with four Scottish bishops.⁴²

The Scots answered with letters to the pope, the most famous of them the letter of the barons dated 6 April 1320, now called the Declaration of Arbroath. Sealed by eight earls and about forty barons, and probably drafted by Bernard, abbot of Arbroath, it asked the pope to accept Bruce as lawful king and declared that as long as a hundred Scots remained alive they would never submit to English lordship.⁴³

The letter was also a document of the king's regime. Matthew Hammond's analysis of Robert's charters shows that the most central lay figures at his court, Robert Keith, Gilbert Hay, Walter Stewart, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, all lent their names to it. Three of the barons named in it, William Soules, Roger de Mowbray and David Brechin, were caught up later that year in a plot against Bruce's kingship.⁴⁴

In 1324 the pope at last gave Bruce the title of king.⁴⁵

Peace, death and the heart

In January 1327 Edward II was deposed, and the new government of the young Edward III made peace. By the treaty of Edinburgh, agreed in March 1328 and confirmed at Northampton, England gave up its claim to overlordship and recognized Scotland's liberty, and Bruce's son David, born in 1324, was to marry Edward III's sister.⁴⁶

Bruce had been ill for at least the last two years of his life. He died on 7 June 1329 at his manor near Cardross, aged 54.⁴⁷

English writers said bluntly that he died a leper. Lanercost calls him so. Martin MacGregor and Caroline Wilkinson, who reexamined the evidence in a series of articles from 2019, conclude that a diagnosis of the medieval disease called lepra can be neither confirmed nor ruled out without the original skull.⁴⁸

Less than a week after his death, Pope John XXII granted Scottish kings the right to be crowned and anointed, a privilege their predecessors had sought for over a century.⁴⁹

Barbour gives the king a deathbed speech: he had vowed to go on crusade, and since his body could not, he asked that his heart be carried against the enemies of God. James Douglas took it. Douglas was killed in Spain in 1330 fighting the Moors, and the heart was brought home and buried at Melrose Abbey.⁵⁰

The body was buried before the high altar in the choir of Dunfermline Abbey, the burial church of Scottish kings, which Bruce had helped to rebuild after English damage in 1303.⁵¹

In 1818, while a new parish church was being built on the site of the old choir, workmen found a vault holding the skeleton of a tall man in cloth of gold, its breastbone sawn through, as a heart burial would require. The remains were examined in November 1819 and reburied. MacGregor and Wilkinson weigh the case against Penman's suggestion that the tomb may be that of David I, and conclude that it most probably belonged to Robert Bruce.⁵²

How did Robert the Bruce make war?

Bruce's war was mostly not pitched battles. After Methven he fought from hills and woods, ambushed columns and took castles by surprise, then slighted them so the English could not use them again. He accepted battle on ground of his choosing, as at Loudoun Hill and Bannockburn, behind bogs, burns, ditches and pits.⁵³

His infantry were the key. Historic Environment Scotland's verdict is that Bannockburn showed that a disciplined schiltron could not only stand against heavy cavalry but advance against it as a mobile force. The lesson cut both ways: Henry de Beaumont, one of the English commanders that day, used it against the Scots in the 1330s, and the English later used it in France.⁵⁴

After 1314 Bruce turned the war outward, with raids on northern England and the Irish campaign, meant to force England to recognize him. Compare him with other commanders in our list of the greatest British commanders, a list that has to stretch its title to include a king who spent his life fighting England.⁵⁵

Legacy, legend and the historians

Barrow judged that after Bannockburn the adventurer became one of the best of medieval kings, "prudent, conscientious, vigorous and patriotic". Others have been less consistently generous, among them A. A. M. Duncan, Ranald Nicholson and Roland Tanner, who has written of coercion in Bruce's parliaments.⁵⁶

Penman's 2014 biography moves the focus from the war years to the reign after 1314. Michael Brown, reviewing it, praised the new evidence it brings while noting how little can be known of Bruce's character outside Barbour's poem.⁵⁷

Bruce's settlement did not last long: Edward III overturned it within five years, and a second war of independence began in the 1330s. Yet he has been the hero of the Wars of Independence ever since.⁵⁸

In polls of the greatest Scot he tends to come behind Wallace and Robert Burns, the men who died young, an outcome MacGregor and Wilkinson set against the career of a blue-blooded king who died having largely fulfilled his destiny. The 2018 Netflix film Outlaw King brought him to a new audience. In 2024, the 750th anniversary of his birth, Historic Environment Scotland marked it at Dunfermline, Melrose and other sites linked to him.⁵⁹

Read more in our articles on the Battle of Bannockburn, Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, the life of William Wallace, the military history of Britain, the greatest battles in British history and the greatest battles of the Middle Ages.