Bishop Robert Wishart

Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, was one of the most important figures in the struggle for Scottish independence, and one of the least remembered. While Wallace and Bruce became national heroes, the churchman who encouraged the first and absolved and crowned the second is little known outside the history books. Yet for some thirty years, as Guardian of the realm, diplomat, rebel and prisoner, Wishart was at the centre of events, and his tomb still lies in Glasgow Cathedral.

A churchman in politics

Wishart came from a landed family of Norman origin, the Wisharts of Pittarrow, and was related to William Wishart, Bishop of St Andrews and a former Chancellor of Scotland. He began his career as archdeacon of St Andrews and became Bishop of Glasgow in the 1270s. In medieval Scotland bishops were great lords as well as churchmen, and Wishart soon became a leading figure in the government of King Alexander III.

When Alexander died in 1286, leaving his infant granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, as heir, Wishart was chosen as one of the six Guardians appointed to govern Scotland in her name. The Guardians negotiated the Treaty of Birgham, under which Margaret was to marry the son of Edward I of England, while insisting that Scotland would remain a separate and independent kingdom.

The Great Cause

Margaret’s death in 1290 left Scotland without an obvious heir and threatened civil war between the two strongest claimants, Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, grandfather of the future king, and John Balliol. Edward I was invited to judge between them, and he demanded first to be recognised as overlord of Scotland. Wishart is recorded as replying that the kingdom of Scotland was held in tribute or homage to nobody but God. Edward overrode the objection, and the Scots, with no other way to settle the dispute, accepted his terms.

In the hearings that followed, known as the Great Cause, Wishart served as one of the auditors on the Bruce side, and he remained loyal to the Bruce family even after the judgement went to Balliol. In 1296, after Balliol’s rebellion and defeat, Edward conquered Scotland, and Wishart, like the other leading men of the kingdom, was forced to swear fealty to him.

Wallace’s ally

Wishart did not keep his oath for long. For him and many of his fellow churchmen, the freedom of Scotland and the freedom of the Scottish church were inseparable: English rule threatened to bring the Scottish church under the authority of York or Canterbury and to fill its offices with English clergy. In 1297 Wishart was among the leaders of a rising against English rule, and an English chronicle claimed that he and James Stewart, the High Steward, encouraged William Wallace into action. The rising collapsed when Wishart and other nobles surrendered at Irvine in July 1297, but Wallace fought on and won his great victory at Stirling Bridge that September.

Imprisoned for a time, Wishart swore fealty to Edward again and broke it again as soon as he was free. In 1301 Edward wrote to Pope Boniface VIII asking for him to be removed from his bishopric; the Pope refused, though he rebuked Wishart as the prime mover of the troubles between the two kingdoms. When the Scottish leaders submitted to Edward in 1304, Wishart was sentenced to a period of exile.

The Bishop and the Bruce

Wishart’s most important moment came in 1306. On 10 February Robert the Bruce, grandson of the claimant, killed his rival John Comyn in the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries, a crime of sacrilege as well as murder that left him facing excommunication. Bruce came to Glasgow, and Wishart, in whose diocese the killing had taken place, gave him absolution instead of condemning him, and called on his people to support him. Wishart then went with him to Scone, where, on 25 March 1306, Bruce was crowned King of Scots in the presence of the bishops of Glasgow, St Andrews and Moray.

The old bishop threw himself into the war. Timber that the English had given him to repair the bell tower of his cathedral was turned into siege engines, and he personally led the attack on Cupar Castle in Fife, behaving, as his enemies complained, like a man of war. After Bruce was defeated at Methven in June 1306, Wishart was captured at Cupar and taken to England in chains. Only his status as a churchman saved him from execution.

Prisoner and return

Wishart spent the next eight years in English prisons, and during his captivity he went blind. He was released only after Bruce’s great victory at Bannockburn in 1314, as part of an exchange of prisoners. He returned to Glasgow, an old and blind man who had lived to see the cause he had served for nearly thirty years succeed, and he died there in November 1316.

He was buried in the lower church of Glasgow Cathedral, where his tomb can still be seen. The effigy on it is uninscribed and its head has been defaced, probably during the Reformation. Historians have called him one of the great figures of the war of independence: the patron and friend of Wallace and Bruce, and an unheroic hero of the long struggle. His story is told alongside those of Wallace and Robert the Bruce on our Wars of Independence page.

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