When Edward I of England set out to swallow Scotland in 1296, Glasgow was a small bishop’s town of no military weight — but its bishop was another matter. Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow from 1271, had been a Guardian of Scotland during the succession crisis, and he became the independence cause’s most stubborn churchman: swearing fealty to Edward when required and breaking the oath the moment it was useful, on the working theory that promises extracted by conquest bound no one.
War touched the town directly. English garrisons held the Bishop’s Castle beside the cathedral, and tradition — from the patriotic epic of Blind Harry — tells of the Battle of the Bell o’ the Brae, William Wallace storming up the High Street around 1297 to throw them out. Historians treat the tale cautiously, as Wallace’s own page discusses; what is certain is that Wishart helped raise the 1297 rising that made Wallace famous, supplying blessing, counsel and cover.
Wishart’s masterpiece of holy insubordination came in 1306. When Robert the Bruce killed his rival John Comyn before an altar in Dumfries — sacrilege that should have finished him — Wishart absolved him, dug out robes and a banner he had hidden for the purpose, and helped hurry him to coronation at Scone. Then the old bishop went further: granted English timber to repair his cathedral’s bell tower, he used it instead to build siege engines against Edward’s castles.
The price was paid in full. Captured in armour in 1306, Wishart was spared execution only by his cloth and spent eight years in English prisons, emerging after Bannockburn in the great prisoner exchange of 1314 — old, and blind. He died two years later, and lies where he belongs: in the lower church of Glasgow Cathedral, beside the tomb of St Mungo, where a battered effigy said to be his can still be seen.
The wars ground on long after him, but Glasgow’s part in Scotland’s survival was already banked: no single Scot outside the warrior class did more for the cause than its bishop — the man Edward’s officials, with sincere exasperation, ranked among the most dangerous rebels in the land.