Traitor, Outlaw, King
My review of Traitor, Outlaw, King, the first part of an important new biography of Robert de Bruce by Dr Fiona Watson.
The story I would like to unfold for you on these pages is not a pretty one. Few come out of it with their honour intact and King Robert isn’t one of them, despite what his propaganda would have us believe. But perhaps he wouldn’t have lasted long in the predatory politics of medieval Britain if he had.’
In other words, you have been warned. Dr Watson’s new account of the early career of Bruce, Scotland’s great hero-king, pulls no punches and displays no favouritism. Bruce himself, though full of courage and bravado, comes across as a mediocrity in these early years, inept on the battlefield and unable to influence Scottish politics except via the most extreme methods. This is all a precursor to what came next, of course, and makes his eventual truimph all the more extraordinary. Yet anyone who wants to know the real Bruce, warts and all (and there are some pretty big warts) must read this book.
Watson’s account begins with a fascinating potted history of Bruce’s ancestors from the time of their first arrival in the British isles from Brix in Normandy. Like many noble families, they chose to give each male heir the same first name, which makes for a multiplicity of Roberts. To ease the confusion, Watson numbers them 1 to 7, with 7 being the future victor of Bannockburn. Many of the earlier Bruces were just as tough and charismatic as their famous descendent: Robert (1), for instance, an extremely successful Norman adventurer, was described in his later years as a man ‘scant of speech’ but possessed of ‘dignity and weight.’ From the very start, the Bruces were out for themselves. At the Battle of Northallerton in 1138, for instance, Bruce (1) fought on the side of England while his youngest son was among the Scots. The key to the game, as the canny old knight appreciated, was to hedge one’s bets and pray the dice rolled in your favour.
Watson ably traces the history of the Bruces over the next century, how they were gradually drawn north into the allegiance of the kings of Scotland, while retaining considerable estates in southern England. Even so Robert (2) held with the English when William the Lion invaded northern England in an effort to push the Scottish border further south. As a result the Bruces briefly lost their castles of Annan and Lochmaben, only saved from oblivion when William came to grief in a damn silly skirmish fought near Richmond in Yorkshire. ‘Now we will see who the knights are,’ William declared as he charged the English ranks. In Watson’s wonderfully dry prose, his ‘answer came almost immediately’ as he was knocked off his horse and taken prisoner.
William’s invasion drew the wrath of Henry II, who demanded an enormous ransom in land and money from the Scots to have their king back again. Most significantly, he extracted an oath of homage for Scotland from his captive, also meant to be binding on his successors. Richard I later quitclaimed this humiliating deal in return for cash, but future kings of England weren’t inclined to obey mere legalism. I was surprised to discover the issue of homage was resurrected, not by Edward I, but his father Henry III. Henry’s cack-handed effort to extract the oath from Alexander III, merely ten years old, drew an indignant response from the young Scottish king. Watching from the sidelines was the Lord Edward, Henry’s heir, who may have regarded the affair as just one more humiliation to avenge. Equally surprising was the revelation that Henry connived in the kidnapping of Alexander and his wife Margaret, the king’s daughter, by the Comyn faction in September 1255. Watson omits to mention another incident of Henry’s meddling in July of that year, when he visited Scotland to investigate rumours of Margaret’s ill-treatment at Edinburgh. This resulted in a purge of the Comyns, and it seems odd that Henry should have colluded with the kidnapping a few months later. Overall, it is pretty obvious where Edward Longshanks got his notion of English-Scottish relations from.
One of the highlights of the book is Watson’s analysis of the lead-up to and proceedings of the Great Cause, as it came to be known. Here the nobles of Scotland - and further afield - competed for the vacant Scottish crown after the tragic death of the Maid of Norway, Alexander III’s only surviving heir. The proceedings were a riot of dirty tricks, special pleading and backstairs politics, in which the oft-derided John Balliol emerges as the straightest man in town. Watson is far too good a historian to take sides, and is especially wry in her description of King Edward - lurking in the background ‘with avuncular attentiveness’ - and the tortuous antics of Bruce the Competitor, the hero’s grandfather. The Competitor’s arguments to secure the crown for himself and his heirs almost defy belief. He made use of forged documents, suggested that Scotland should be carved up between himself and the Count of Holland, even appealed to ‘imperial law’ to win his case. He called Edward his ‘sovereign lord and emperor’ and argued that the English king’s personal authority was higher than the common law of both England and Scotland. This was doubtless sweet music to Edward’s ears, but it was really just another ploy. To show they really meant business, the Bruces had earlier taken to arms and ravaged parts of Scotland, causing so much damage in Galloway the revenues were crippled for two years. The family came within a whisker of causing civil war in Scotland, all the worse since their labours were in vain. The crown went to Balliol, and Edward dismissed the Bruces with a flourish of contempt: ‘Have we nothing better to do than win kingdoms for the likes of you?’
Bruce himself, when the book gets to him, is a difficult and ambivalent figure. One thing that struck me is the peculiar symmetry between his career and that of Edward I. Both men were brutal, highly competent warrior-kings, determined to have their way at any price; both overcame early setbacks and humiliations to achieve crushing victories (for Bannockburn, see Evesham); both acquired early reputations for treachery and untrustworthiness. At times the similarity between their exprience is almost exact. Edward was just twelve when he witnessed his father’s embarassing effort to extract homage from Alexander III. Equally, Bruce was the same age when he witnessed his grandfather’s futile efforts to dominate the Scottish community in 1290. Twelve, as Watson says, is a ‘formative, impressionable age’; we may well speculate what impression these failures left on the minds of two exceptionally wilful youths, both of whom realised at an early age that nice guys finished last.
There is another, more sinister, similarity between them. Edward often benefited from a good press, especially after he became king, and the same applied to Bruce. It still does. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the historical treatment of John Comyn, whom Bruce murdered in a church in 1306. Watson is crystal-clear on this incident. Bruce invited his rival to meet him in a church. He and his friends came armed. Comyn came unarmed with just two companions. Bruce stabbed Comyn to death and then his friends butchered Comyn’s uncle. Later efforts by pro-Bruce historians to rationalise the affair - claiming, for instance, that Bruce only wounded Comyn before one of his friends finished off the victim - won’t wash. Not any more. It is simply something that Bruce’s admirers have to accept. His motives are perfectly understandable: he had been shunted out of the limelight by the Comyn faction, and had to act if he was ever to win the crown of Scotland. Yet to explain his conduct is not to excuse it, as so many have tried to do. On another tack, John Comyn deserves his place in the pantheon of Scottish heroes of independence. He consistently fought the English, in utterly desperate circumstances, while Bruce was still hanging onto King Edward’s coat-tails. Someone in Scotland should lobby for a statue of the man, preferably set up opposite the famous statue of his assassin at Bannockburn.
Bruce’s earlier conduct, and that of his father Robert (6), also make for uncomfortable reading. Robert senior was something of a nonentity, and at one point reduced to a glorified mercenary doing military service in Wales and Ireland for the English crown. His son was infinitely more forceful, though little more can be said in young Bruce’s favour. Father and son were firmly alongside Edward I in his first invasion of Scotland in 1296, and one near-contemporary source claims Bruce (6) used false banners to lure the Scottish garrison of Dunbar to their doom. Bruce (7) switched to the ‘patriotic’ cause afterwards, but hardly covered himself in glory. In 1297, when the Scots rose in arms against English occupation, he and other nobles submitted in abject fashion to King Edward’s captains. Soon afterwards, as if to show Bruce how it should be done, Wallace and Moray won their famous victory at Stirling Bridge.
Bruce’s chief concern in these years was to undermine the Comyn faction and prevent the exiled Balliol from returning to Scotland. To this end he submitted again to Edward at a time when both men had great need of each other. The involvement of the King of France and the Pope in Scottish affairs should not be forgotten, as their intervention drove Edward’s decision to forgive Bruce his past trespasses. As Watson says, Bruce was used by the king as a ‘spanner’ to throw in the works of any Franco-Scots alliance supported by the papacy. For his part, Bruce was happy to be used, so long as it enabled him to shaft his rivals in Scotland.
Watson gives entirely due space to the Battle of Courtrai in 1302, where a Flemish militia overthrew the chivalric might of France. This sometimes neglected battle heralded a sea-change in European military tactics - Bruce himself used similar methods to the Flemish at Bannockburn - and completely altered the political situation. Now under severe pressure, Philip IV of France handed the duchy of Gascony back to King Edward, which in turn meant the latter no longer had to fight the Scots with one hand tied behind his back. Edward marshalled all the resources of his kingdom for his final hammering of Scotland, a furious all-out effort that left him physically shattered and his enemies in pieces. The chief Guardian of Scotland, John Comyn, resisted with great skill and valour, but it was all up once Edward crossed the Forth and ravaged the Scottish heartlands. Bruce’s contribution to this campaign was to join an armed posse that very nearly captured William Wallace and Simon Fraser at Happrew, and to repair Edward’s artillery at the siege of Stirling, the last Scottish garrison in arms.
At the same time Bruce was playing a double game. Even as Edward’s trebuchets pounded the walls of Stirling, Bruce met with Bishop Lamberton of St Andrews at Cambuskenneth. Here they quietly hammered out the terms of a deal whereby they agreed to support each other against all other men. The implication of this bargain is obvious: Bruce was still aiming for the kingship, and would do Edward’s bidding until the Plantagenet finally dropped off his perch. This in turn meant that Bruce was prepared to kill fellow Scotsmen - Wallace himself might have easily died on his blade at Happrew - for the sake of ambition. Or the greater good, as Bruce might have termed it. This was sly, ruthless stuff, but Bruce only cared about winning. Nothing else mattered. His behaviour was entirely in keeping with that of his ancestors and should be interpreted in that light. Even after his revolt in 1306, Bruce did not entirely break ties with Edward. In a letter to English officials at Berwick, Bruce warned he would continue to defy the crown ‘with the longest stick he had’ unless Edward agreed to his demand. This can only have been a return to the situation pre-1296, whereby a Scottish king (Bruce, of course) ruled Scotland with Edward as his overlord. The ailing and thoroughly fed-up Longshanks would have no truck with any such arrangement, especially after the Comyn scandal, and so Bruce went into outright revolt. The book ends with him in his cave on the island of Rathlin, contemplating that famous spider.
I have just three bones to pick, two minor, one modest. Watson gives full credence to the story that Edward privately informed his council in 1290 that he had decided to subjugate Scotland, just as he had done to Wales. This stems from the Annals of Waverley and was long ago dismissed by Sir Maurice Powicke as ‘misplaced’, though he didn’t explain why. It seems difficult to believe that a monk based at Waverley Abbey at Farnham, Surrey, could have possibly known what King Edward said in private to his councillors. It looks like convenient hindsight after the fact, since Edward’s actions after 1290 speak for themselves. More striking is that his attitude towards the Scots changed in the immediate aftermath of the death of Eleanor of Castile. Attempting to psycho-analyse a medieval king is slightly pointless, but there may be something in the notion that Edward’s mind was affected by the death of his beloved consort.
My second bone is Watson’s quotation of the tale found in Matthew Paris, who describes the young Edward mutilating a defenceless peasant for a laugh. This nasty little anecdote tends to crop up in most accounts of Edward I, and should be treated as a figment of Paris’s gossipy imagination. Nobody else mentioned it, and this is the same Paris who claimed that King John was in the habit of strangling his wife’s lovers on her bed with a length of rope. If the heir to the throne really did cut off the ears of random peasants and pull their eyes out, you might have expected it to cause a greater stir in English chronicles.
The third bone is somewhat meatier. Watson states that Edward was much more tolerant of Scottish pride than he was ever was towards the Welsh, since he allowed the Scots to keep some of their laws. In fact Edward’s treatment of Welsh and Scottish law was remarkably similar: his Statute of Wales (1284) abolished much of Welsh criminal law but retained the civil aspect, much as he abolished certain native laws in Scotland yet allowed others to continue. It is true Edward was slightly more accomodating to the Scots in terms of granting offices. Many Scots were appointed to shrievalties in 1304, while only a handful of trusted Welshmen were permitted to serve as sheriffs in Wales during Edward’s reign. Below the level of sheriff, however, local offices in Wales tended to be filled by Welshmen. In both cases Edward’s policy was driven by necessity, rather than a desire to treat the two peoples in a different manner.
Despite my niggles this is a superb history of an endlessly debatable figure, one of the titans of medieval British history. As such it should be read and discussed by any thinking person with an interest in the subject. Some of the content may provoke, even annoy, and the more fervent patriotic element will find little to love here. Watson’s Robert Bruce is no lifeless sculpture, forever gazing blankly across the scene of his most famous victory, but a flawed and relatable human being seeking to carve his way through an unimaginably brutal era: sometimes admirable, sometimes repellent. Bruce himself, a realist if ever there was one, would be happy with that.