In February 1306 Robert the Bruce stabbed John Comyn, his great rival for the Scottish claim, before the high altar of the Greyfriars in Dumfries. It was murder and sacrilege together — excommunication was automatic, damnation presumed — and in that moment Bruce’s cause should have died of horror. That it did not is substantially Glasgow’s doing.
Bruce rode from Dumfries to Glasgow, to Bishop Robert Wishart — and Wishart, rather than pronouncing anathema, absolved him, took his oath to govern by the counsel of the Scottish church, and preached his cause to the people as a crusade. From hiding the old bishop produced robes and vestments for a royal inauguration and a banner of the Scottish kings he had squirrelled away for the day — and sent Bruce to Scone, where within weeks of the murder he was crowned King of Scots. Contemporary Englishmen were clear about the sequence: the Bishop of Glasgow, they charged, was the mainspring of the whole treason.
The new king’s first years were catastrophe — defeat, flight, his women imprisoned, his brothers executed, Wishart himself captured and chained — before the long recovery that ended on the field of Bannockburn in June 1314. Among the victory’s ransoms Bruce prized one especially: the release of the blind old bishop of Glasgow, who had wagered everything on him when he was a killer without a crown.
King Robert’s gratitude to the see outlived Wishart, in protections and confirmations to the church of Glasgow; and tradition adds a personal coda — that in his final illness the king came west to the shrine of St Mungo among his devotions. He died in 1329 at Cardross, down the Clyde near Dumbarton, his body going to Dunfermline and his heart, famously, toward the Holy Land in James Douglas’s keeping.
Glasgow’s Bruce monuments are few — his war was fought elsewhere — but its claim is of a different kind: in the darkest week of his life, the future king’s first road led here, and the absolution spoken in Glasgow made the coronation possible. The cathedral’s lower church, where Wishart lies by Mungo’s tomb, is as close to a Bruce shrine as the city needs.