The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own death in 1329, aged 54. His extraordinary achievement was to fend off both rivals at home and formidable English enemies to firmly establish his country’s independence.
In 1292, John Balliol had been proclaimed King of Scots, with the full support of Edward I, to whom he formally paid homage. Four years later he was forced to resign his kingdom to Edward, and his own claim to it was doomed, though it survived for a few more years. Bruce, with his rare tactical skills, saw off the Balliols, father and son, and eventually by 1328, after 22 years of campaigning, regained full recognition of his crown — despite having been excommunicated by the Pope for the murder of his rival, the ‘Red Comyn’, in a church in Dumfries. After ‘slaughter, disasters, crimes, destruction of churches and evils innumerable’, the country once again became ‘whole, free and undisturbed in perpetuity’.
Edward II, who succeeded his father in 1307, pursued untiring and often successful warfare throughout the north of England until forced to abdicate in 1327 as a result of the war with France — his wife being the sister of the French king. Throughout that period, Bruce perfected a cunning system of guerrilla warfare: though Edward’s forces were generally more numerous, they were hindered by having much longer, vulnerable lines of supply. Time and again, Bruce and his men would retire into trackless bogs, forests and steep hills, leaving the English exposed to harassment.
The first few years of Bruce’s reign (he succeeded in 1306) consisted of countless raids and counter-raids, one campaign taking the Scots close to York in the east and far into Cumberland in the west.
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