Robert the Bruce’s Connection to Glasgow

Robert the Bruce is the king who won Scotland’s freedom — the man who rose from a murder at a church altar and a hunted, all-but-hopeless exile to shatter an English army at Bannockburn and secure his country’s independence. He is remembered as a warrior-king and a national deliverer, the equal in Scottish memory of his forerunner William Wallace. And the improbable turning of his story — from sacrilege and ruin towards a crown — was, in large part, Glasgow’s doing, for it was to Glasgow’s bishop that Bruce came in the worst week of his life to be absolved and made a king.

This page tells his whole story, with the Glasgow chapters set in their place: the family claim to the throne, the murder that began his bid for it, the absolution at Glasgow that saved his cause, the catastrophe that nearly ended it, the long comeback, the victory at Bannockburn, and the hard-won freedom that crowned his reign.

A claim to the throne

Robert the Bruce was born on 11 July 1274, most likely at Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire, into one of the great families of the realm. The Bruces were of Anglo-Norman stock, long settled in Scotland and descended from King David I, and they held a genuine claim to the throne: Robert’s grandfather, known as ‘the Competitor’, had been one of the two chief candidates — the other being John Balliol — when the succession fell vacant in the 1290s. That rivalry, between the house of Bruce and the Balliol–Comyn party, would shape everything. Through his mother the young Robert was Earl of Carrick, a west-coast lord with lands not far from Glasgow; and in the turbulent first years of the Wars of Independence he was a waverer, shifting between Edward I of England and the Scottish cause as his family’s interest seemed to demand — though in 1297 he threw in his lot, alongside Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, with the rising led by William Wallace.

Murder at the altar

By 1306 Bruce had resolved to seize the crown himself, and only one great rival stood in his way: John Comyn, known as the Red Comyn, nephew of the deposed King John Balliol and the most powerful noble in Scotland. On 10 February 1306 the two men met in the Franciscan church of the Greyfriars at Dumfries, and there Bruce stabbed Comyn before the high altar; his companions rushed in to finish the deed. It was murder and sacrilege in a single stroke — the killing of a rival, and the profaning of a church — and the penalty was automatic and terrible: excommunication by the Pope, the closing of heaven against him. By every rule of the age, Bruce’s cause should have died then and there, damned before it began. That it did not is substantially Glasgow’s doing.

Glasgow & the crown

Bruce rode hard for Glasgow and for its bishop, Robert Wishart — and Wishart, instead of pronouncing the anathema the Church demanded, absolved him. The old bishop took Bruce’s oath to be guided by the counsel of the Scottish church, preached his cause to the people almost as a holy war, and from his hiding places produced the robes and vestments for a royal inauguration and a banner of the ancient Scottish kings that he had kept back against just such a day. Thus equipped and forgiven, Bruce was hurried to Scone, the ancient crowning-place of Scottish kings, and there, on 25 March 1306, only weeks after the murder, he was inaugurated as King Robert I by Isabella, Countess of Buchan, whose family held the hereditary right to enthrone the king. English observers were in no doubt where the blame lay: the Bishop of Glasgow, they charged, was the very mainspring of the treason.

Catastrophe

The new king’s reign began in something close to annihilation. Within months Bruce was twice crushed by English and rival Scottish forces — at Methven near Perth in June 1306, and at Dalrigh near Tyndrum that August — and became a fugitive in his own kingdom, hunted from the mainland into the western seas and, by tradition, to the lonely island of Rathlin off the Irish coast. The price his family paid was appalling: three of his brothers were captured and executed, his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, his daughter and his sisters were seized and imprisoned in England, and Bishop Wishart himself was taken and carried off in chains. It is to this darkest hour that tradition assigns the most famous of all Bruce stories — that, sheltering in a cave and close to despair, he watched a spider try and fail and try again to fix its web, and took from its persistence the resolve to fight on. The tale was made famous centuries later by Sir Walter Scott and cannot be proven, but it has fastened itself forever to the king’s legend.

The comeback

Against all likelihood, Bruce came back. Returning to the mainland in 1307, he waged a brilliant guerrilla war — striking, vanishing, refusing open battle on his enemy’s terms — and won a run of small victories, notably at Loudoun Hill in 1307, that began to turn the tide. Fortune helped him: in July 1307 the formidable Edward I, ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, died on his way north to crush the rising, leaving the crown to his far weaker son, Edward II. Freed of his greatest adversary, Bruce set about the systematic reconquest of his kingdom, crushing his Comyn and MacDougall enemies within Scotland and taking the great castles from their English garrisons one after another, often by daring night assaults. By the early months of 1314, of all the strongholds of Scotland only Stirling Castle still held out for England — and around Stirling the war would at last be decided.

Bannockburn

To relieve Stirling, Edward II led north one of the largest armies England had ever sent against the Scots, and on 23–24 June 1314 it met Bruce’s smaller force near the Bannock Burn. The battle opened with an act of theatre that passed into legend: an English knight, Henry de Bohun, spied the king in the open and charged him with levelled lance, and Bruce, wheeling his pony aside at the last instant, rose in his stirrups and split de Bohun’s helmet and skull with a single blow of his axe. Over two days, on ground Bruce had chosen to cramp and mire the heavy English cavalry, the Scottish spearmen advanced in their bristling schiltrons and drove the great army into bloody rout. Bannockburn was the most complete Scottish victory of the whole long war, and it made Bruce’s crown secure. Among the prisoners exchanged in its wake, the king prized one release above almost any other: that of the blind and aged Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, who had gambled everything on him when he was a killer without a kingdom.

Freedom & the heart

Bannockburn won the war in the field, but not yet the peace. For years more Bruce pressed England with raids across the border and into Ireland, where his brother Edward Bruce was for a time crowned high king, until she would come to terms; and in 1320 the Scottish nobles and churchmen set their seals to the Declaration of Arbroath, the ringing letter to Pope John XXII that asserted Scotland’s ancient freedom and declared that they fought not for glory or riches but for liberty alone. At last the tide of recognition turned: the Pope lifted the excommunication, and in 1328 the young English king Edward III, in the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, formally acknowledged Scotland as an independent kingdom and Robert as its rightful king. The old warrior did not long enjoy his victory. Worn out and ill, Bruce died on 7 June 1329 at his manor of Cardross, down the Clyde near Dumbarton, within sight almost of Glasgow, leaving his crown to his young son, David II; his body was laid in Dunfermline Abbey, and his heart, by his own dying wish, was carried by Sir James Douglas on crusade towards the Holy Land, to atone for the sins of his life. King Robert’s gratitude to Glasgow’s church outlived him; and in the lower church of the cathedral, where Bishop Wishart lies close by the tomb of St Mungo, the city keeps as near to a shrine of the Bruce as it needs.

A life in dates