Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
was still alive, albeit in exile in France. Almost immediately after Bruce’s inauguration the Comyns started to gather their strength. Edward I appointed the Red Comyn’s able brother-in-law, Aymer de Valence (soon to be Earl of Pembroke), as his special lieutenant in Scotland with wide-ranging powers against Bruce – he was commanded to ‘burn and slay and raise dragon’, which meant unfurling the dragon standard which proclaimed that the normal conventions of war were in abeyance: captured knights would be treated as outlaws and executed. In addition, King Edward persuaded Pope Clement V to authorise the excommunication of the new King of Scots; this was pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury on 5 June 1306.
Bruce moved quickly to consolidate his power-base in the south-west of Scotland. From there he moved north, through Glasgow and via Perth to Aberdeen to raise support in the north – traditionally the chief power-base of the Comyns. He had some initial successes, taking the town of Dundee and the castles of Brechin and Cupar, but soon he came under formidable military pressure. An English army, led by Pembroke and supported by Comyn adherents, recaptured Cupar and the city of Perth. Bruce moved south to meet Pembroke. He had no siege engines with which to invest the city, so instead he issued a challenge to Pembroke to come out and fight, or else surrender. Pembroke apparently accepted the challenge to do battle the following day, while his Comyn allies (according to Barbour) were treacherously planning a surprise attack on the Scots that very night.
Bruce drew off his forces and encamped six miles away in Methven Wood; suspecting no treachery, they laid aside their weapons and set no watch. At dusk their enemies fell upon them, determined to take Bruce dead or alive. After a savage battle the Scots were routed, and many of Bruce’s lieutenants were taken prisoner. Bruce himself escaped, however, with some of his light cavalry, and took refuge in the wild hills of Atholl. He had been king for only four months, but was now a fugitive.
Before moving south, Bruce had left his second wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, and his ten-year-old daughter Marjory by his first wife, along with the other ladies of his court, in the care of the Earl of Atholl in Kildrummy Castle on Donside, which was held by his brother Neil. Early in September the castle fell to Pembroke (through treachery, it is said), and Neil Bruce was taken prisoner. The royal ladies, including Isabella, Countess of Buchan, had escaped, however, and were already on their way north with the Earl of Atholl to seek refuge in Orkney; from there they planned to make their way to Norway and the protection of Bruce’s sister Isabella, who had married Erik II after the death of his first wife and was now Dowager Queen of Norway. But before they could reach the relative safety of Orkney their party was intercepted at Tain, on the southern shore of the Dornoch Firth, by the Earl of Ross, a Comyn supporter, and they were all were handed over to the English.
The English revenge on the Bruces and their supporters was swift and terrible. Robert’s brother Neil was hanged, drawn and quartered at Berwick. His loyal lieutenants the Earl of Atholl and Simon Fraser were taken to London for execution: Atholl was hanged on a specially high gallows before being decapitated and burned, while Fraser had his head impaled on a spike beside that of William Wallace. Bruce’s sister Mary was suspended in a cage (like Isabella, Countess of Buchan) from the battlements of Roxburgh Castle where she, too, was to remain for four years. His daughter Marjory was sent to a Yorkshire nunnery. Another of his sisters, Christian, who was married to Christopher Seton (one of those who had been present at the death of the Red Comyn), was sent to a nunnery in Lincolnshire; Christopher himself was hanged, drawn and quartered in Dumfries, and his brother John was put to death in the same barbaric manner at Newcastle. Only Bruce’s wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, was treated with anything like leniency; because her father was the Earl of Ulster, who had always been loyal to Edward I, she was imprisoned (albeit in harsh conditions) in a royal manor at Burstwick-in-Holderness.
Robert Bruce’s position was now desperate. An English chronicler reported that his queen had prophesied to Bruce that he would only be king for the summer – ‘King of Winter you will not be’. That was certainly the way it looked now. In late July he was ambushed in a narrow defile known as Dalrigh (Field of the King), just south of Tyndrum, by John Macdougall of Argyll – son-in-law of the murdered Comyn and owner of Dunstaffnage Castle; he suffered heavy casualties, and only escaped with his life after a heroic rearguard action. With that he disappeared as far as his enemies were concerned, and disappeared, too, from the historical record for the winter.
Bruce and the spider
… Bruce was looking upward at the roof of the cabin in which he lay; and his eye was attracted by a spider, which, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was endeavouring, as is the fashion of that creature, to swing itself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which it meant to stretch its web. The insect made the attempt again and again without success; and at length Bruce counted that it had tried to carry its point six times, and been as often unable to do so. It came into his head that he had himself fought just six battles against the English and their allies, and that the poor persevering spider was exactly in the same situation with himself, having made as many trials, and been as often disappointed in what it aimed at. ‘Now,’ thought Bruce, ‘as I have no means of knowing what is best to be done, I will be guided by the luck which shall attend this spider. If the insect shall make another effort to fix its thread, and shall be successful, I will venture a seventh time to try my fortune in Scotland …’
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VIII
The story of the spider which refused to give up is the one thing which everyone knows about Robert the Bruce. Children are taught it at school; tourist guides tell it in every ‘Bruce’s Cave’ on their itinerary – all thanks to Sir Walter Scott. The ‘King’s Caves’ on Arran are a favourite spot for visitors. Another is the small island of Rathlin, a few miles off the coast of Antrim in Ireland, where Bruce seems to have spent at least part of the winter of 1306–7. But any cave will do – because the spider story simply is not, and cannot be, true. Sir Walter Scott did not invent it; but he certainly was the first person to father it on Robert Bruce.
The story had first appeared two hundred years earlier in a history of the Douglas family written by Hume of Godscroft. According to him it was James Douglas, the ‘Black Douglas’, Bruce’s greatest captain and the secondary hero of Barbour’s The Brus, who saw a spider – not Bruce. Douglas watched this spider trying to climb a tree (not the roof of a cave) with its web, and falling to the ground twelve times. When it tried for the thirteenth time it succeeded. Douglas then told the story to Bruce while he was a fugitive in the Hebrides, to encourage him to try, try and try again, even though he had already suffered twelve reverses in battle: ‘My advise [sic] is to follow the example of the spider, to poush forward your Majestie’s fortune once more, and hazard yet our persones the 13 tyme.’ It was a homily, a parable of leadership – and Scott lifted it and made Bruce, not Douglas, the central figure.1
No one now knows where Bruce spent the desperate weeks and months on the run in the winter of 1306/7. Some say the Western Isles. Some say the Northern Isles. Some say Ireland. Some even say Norway. When spring came, however, he burst into history again, apparently annealed and tempered by his ordeals, with his determination to succeed renewed. Perhaps Douglas’s story of the plucky spider, if not the spider itself, had revitalised his resolve.
When Robert Bruce emerged from hiding early in 1307, it was as a reinvigorated guerrilla leader; but his renewed campaign started disastrously. His first objective was to try to regain control in the south-west of Scotland. He mounted a seaborne expedition from Ireland, splitting his forces in two. One division, led by two of his brothers, Alexander and Thomas, headed for Galloway in eighteen galleys; but no sooner had they landed at Loch Ryan than they were overwhelmed by a local force commanded by Dougal MacDougall, a Comyn supporter. Bruce’s brothers were captured and dragged off to Carlisle, where they were hanged and beheaded.
Meanwhile Bruce himself, with his other brother Edward and James Douglas, landed on the Ayrshire coast near his birthplace, the castle at Turnberry. He found the countryside terrorised by the English occupation, and went to ground in the wild hinterland of Carrick. Bruce’s position was