Robert the Bruce and the struggle for Scottish independence/Introduction
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| Silver Penny of John de Balliol. Obv: The King's head crowned, and sceptre. IOHANNES: DEI: GRA✠ Rev: A cross between four mullets of six points: REX: SCOTORVM✠ |
Silver Penny of Robert I. Obv: The King's head crowned, and sceptre. ROBERTVS: DEI: GRA✠ Rev: A cross between four mullets of five points: SCOTORVM: REX✠ |
INTRODUCTION.
IF anyone were to attempt, five hundred years hence, to write the life, say, of Prince Bismarck, and a history of the war between Germany and France in 1870-71, and should be forced to rely exclusively on the newspapers circulating at that time in the two countries, supplemented by a few German and French poems and songs composed about the middle of the twentieth century, and the chronicles of intensely partisan writers, reviewing the causes and events of the war at a distance of sixty or seventy years, he would be far better equipped for his task than one who should have undertaken, comparatively few years ago, to compile a history of Robert I. of Scotland and the winning of Scottish independence.
He would, of course, have to discount freely the statements of journalists on either side, respecting the causes which brought the war about, and the motives and conduct of those engaged in it; but he would, at least, be able to trace the movements of armies, the identity of commanders, and the conduct of troops on both sides in the field, by means of the graphic descriptions supplied by war-correspondents.
Now there were no war-correspondents in the campaigns of Robert the Bruce. On two occasions, indeed, the armies of England invading Scotland were accompanied by scribes specially commissioned to record the course of events. One of these, the anonymous author of the Siege of Caerlaverock, fulfilled his task with admirable minuteness, and, as the victory lay with his own side, with what may be assumed to be tolerable fidelity. Even he, however, lies open to the suspicion which attaches to all metrical composers, for nobody expects a poet to sacrifice the elegance of a stanza or the neatness of a rhyme to the inexorable limits of hard facts.
On the other occasion the result was not so satisfactory. Baston, a Carmelite friar, rode with the mighty host with which Edward II. intended finally to crush the Scottish nation in 1314. But, unluckily for his patrons, honest Baston was made prisoner at Bannockburn, and paid for his ransom by submitting his long poem, of which he had probably composed the greater part before the battle, to such alterations as made it a celebration of the Scottish triumph.
There were, it is true, many contemporary chroniclers busily at work; but not only were they all, with the exception of the French priest Froissart, writing from an English point of view, but, except Sir Thomas de la More, they were monks, compiling their histories in the seclusion of some cloister, often far from the seat of war, and always unversed in military operations. The dominant motive in such a history as Pierre Langtoft's was clearly, however unconsciously to the writer, to justify the policy of Edward I. towards Scotland. There is, unhappily, no counter-pleading, written by a contemporary, to set forth the case of Wallace and Robert de Brus.
Nevertheless, the writings of Thomas of Walsingham, Walter of Hemingburgh,[1] Nicholas Trivet, and other English scribes are of inestimable worth so far as they go, especially as means have lately been provided of checking some of their statements, and confirming others, by comparison with documents preserved among the public records of Great Britain and other countries. These, thanks to the patient labours of Mr. Joseph Bain, Sir Francis Palgrave, Dr. John Stuart, Mr. George Burnett, and others, have now been arranged, edited, and placed within easy reach of every student in the Calendars and other publications sanctioned by the Lords of the Treasury. Besides these, Sir T. D. Hardy and the Rev. J. Raine have edited in full the papers and correspondence of the northern cathedrals of England, in which the course of the long war is very faithfully reflected. But among the English chronicles of the fourteenth century, there are two which must be mentioned as of special service to the study of the war between England and Scotland.
The first of these is what has come to be known, erroneously, as there is good reason to believe, as the Chronicle of Lanercost. It contains a general history of the affairs of England and Scotland, with occasional references to events on the continent of Europe, from 1201 to 1346. In the only manuscript thereof known to exist, this chronicle is appended without any break to the annals of Roger de Hoveden, and appears to have been compiled, not, as was once supposed, in the Priory of Lanercost, but in a place much more favourable for observation of the course of the Scottish war, namely, in the Monastery of Minorite Friars at Carlisle. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the evidence of this, which will be found fully set forth by Mr. Joseph Stevenson in the introduction to his edition of this chronicle, printed for the Maitland Club in 1839. But his view enhances very much the value of the chronicle as an authority on the Scottish war, of which a brother of the Franciscan order, while able to testify as an eyewitness to events in that oft-beleaguered city, Carlisle, would also receive direct and constant accounts from his brethren in the monasteries of Berwick, Dumfries, and Dundee. Hence the value of this history in dealing with the War of Independence, though allowance must be made sometimes for the bitter resentment which the English friar must have had good reason for cherishing against the Scots.
The other work referred to as deserving special attention, though not exactly contemporary, has the peculiar merit of having been written by a layman and a soldier. Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, besides taking part in the public affairs of the reign of Edward III., was the son of that Sir Thomas Gray who served with great distinction in the Scottish wars under all three Edwards, and was taken prisoner by the Earl of Moray in the skirmish on the day before the battle of Bannockburn. In 1355, Sir Thomas Gray, the younger, was himself taken prisoner, and, while confined in Edinburgh Castle, set himself to compose his Scalacronica in Norman French. He knew the ground well on which the various sieges and battles had taken place; he was thoroughly versed in all chivalrous and knightly lore, and in the art of war as it stood before the introduction of gunpowder. He had become personally acquainted with many of the actors in the scenes he described; and, of those which had taken place before he reached manhood, he had received accounts from the lips of his father, than whom there could be no more capable authority.
Turning now to the Scottish side of the account, the most important work dealing with this period is the well-known poem entitled The Brus, by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen. This writer was born a few years after the battle of Bannockburn, and therefore, though not able to describe as a contemporary the early history of his hero, must have conversed with many persons who took part in the events described. It is consequently of the utmost importance to ascertain what degree of reliance may be placed on his veracity.
Unhappily, Barbour's poem, which is of the deepest interest to the philologer as the very earliest extant specimen of Scottish vernacular literature, has been almost irretrievably discredited as a chronicle by a monstrous liberty which the author takes in rolling three real personages into one ideal hero. In this way he has treated father, son, and grandson—all of whom bore the name of Robert de Brus—and gravely presented them as one and the same individual. Barbour was at work on his poem, as he himself informs us, in 1375, forty-six years after the death of Robert I., and it is impossible to doubt that he deliberately and consciously perpetrated the fabrication whereby he made Robert de Brus, the "Competitor," the same as his grandson, Robert de Brus, Earl of Carrick, crowned King of Scots in 1306, and threw into the same personality the intermediate Robert de Brus, Lord of Annandale, who was King Edward's governor of Carlisle during John Balliol's brief war. Such a glaring figment placed in the fore-front of an historical work, might render, and in the eyes of some people has rendered, all that follows it of no historical importance. This great national epic has been denounced as of no more value to history than the romances of Walter Scott or Alexandre Dumas. As the late Mr. Cosmo Innes observed, in editing The Brus for the Spalding Club in 1859:
"It suited Harbour's purpose to place Bruce altogether right, Edward outrageously wrong, in the first discussion of the disputed succession. It suited his views of poetical justice that Bruce, who had been so unjustly dealt with, should be the Bruce who took vengeance for that injustice at Bannockburn; though the former was the grandfather, the other the grandson. His hero is not to be degraded by announcing that he had once sworn fealty to Edward, and once done homage to Balliol, or ever joined any party but that of his country and freedom." It must be confessed that, at first sight, little of value could be looked for from such a dubious source. But closer examination reveals that the cardinal falsehood is all disposed of in the first few cantos. The first ten of these may be rejected as irrelevant to any honest purpose. After that, in the description of the coronation of the Bruce, his flight, the detailed account of his adventures, and his subsequent campaigns, the poet shows praiseworthy respect for
"the suthfastnes
That schawis the thing richt as it was,"
which he declares in his exordium to constitute the superiority of "story" over "fabill." The more closely this part of the narrative is examined, the more fully it will be found borne out by such State papers and other documents as are available for comparison; to which, of course, Barbour had no access. This was enough to convince the critical intellect of Lord Hailes, who, practised as he was in testing evidence, did not scruple to found largely on Barbour's statements.
It is necessary, however, to add a further caution in regard to the witness borne by Barbour on highly controversial matters. Not only was he actuated by the laudable desire to win the applause of his countrymen by showing the leaders of the patriotic movement in the most favourable light, but it was also his interest to pass lightly over anything that might detract from the lustre of the royal house of Scotland. Otherwise the royal bounty might have been checked at its source. On the completion of his work in 1377, Barbour, as shown by the Exchequer Rolls, received £10 by command of the King. Next year a pension of 20s. annually for ever, with power to assign, was awarded him for the compilation of the book of the "gestis" of Robert de Brus. In 1381 he had a gift from the Crown of the ward of a minor, a curious parallel to a similar gift made by the King of England to Chaucer in 1376. Again, in 1388, King Robert II. granted to the Archdeacon a pension of £10 yearly for life, though this probably was made in recognition of another poem, dealing with the House of Stuart, which has been lost. These substantial rewards might have been jeopardised by inconvenient candour on the part of the volunteer laureate.
The verdict, therefore, on the value of Barbour's poem, as a contribution to history, must be that it is worthless as a record of events which led to the War of Independence, but of great merit as a narrative of the events of that war and of the conduct and acts of those who took part in it, and that it vividly reflects the social state of Scotland in the fourteenth century.
The most important original writer, dealing with Scottish affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was undoubtedly John of Fordun, who compiled his Chronica Gentis Scotorum, commonly known as the Scotichronicon, in Latin, between the years 1384 and 1387—from fifty-five to sixty years after the death of Robert I. With his own hand he is believed to have completed his chronicle down to the death of David I. in 1153. Of subsequent years, down to his own death in 1387, he had collected very copious notes, which he left in the hands of Walter Bower or Bowmaker, Abbot of Inchcolm, intending him to bring the history to a conclusion. Other continuators took the work in hand during the fifteenth century; but of course neither their work nor Bower's is of equal value to Fordun's original notes. Of the compilation known as the Scotichronicon, the first five books out of sixteen may be safely regarded as the writing of John of Fordun, and the Gesta Annalia as the notes which he left with Bower. These were carefully edited by the late Mr. W. F. Skene, and form volumes i. and iv. of the Historians of Scotland series.[2]
In volumes ii., iii., and ix. of the same series is contained the metrical chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, a canon regular of the Priory of St. Andrews, who wrote simultaneously with Fordun, but quite independently, inasmuch as neither was aware of the other's labours.
Just as Dante departed from the usual practice of writers in his day, and, instead of Latin, the only recognised literary medium, used his native Tuscan, so Wyntoun, following the excellent example of Barbour, ventured to compose his poem in the vernacular. Unfortunately, in the same exasperating way in which Barbour excuses himself for not telling the manner in which Sir Andrew de Harcla was captured by Sir John de Soulis, so Wyntoun refrains from dwelling on the "gestis" of Wallace and Bruce, because they had been recounted by Barbour and others, and were in everybody's mouth in those days; but, alas! except through Barbour, they have not come down to ours.
Thus of Wallace he says:
"Off his gud dedis and manhad
Great gestis, I hard say. ar made;
Bot sa mony, I trow noucht,
As he in till hys dayis wroucht.
Quha all his dedis off prys[3] wald dyte[4]
Hym worthyd[5] a gret buk to wryte;
And all thai to wryte in here
I want baith wyt and gud laysere."[6]
And of Bruce, Wyntoun writes:
"Quhat that efftyr this Brws Robert
In all hys tyme dyde effterwart,
The Archedene of Abbyrdene[7]
In Brwys hys Buk has gert[8] be sene,
Mare wysly tretyde in to wryt,
Than I can thynk with all my wyt:
Tharefore I will now thus lychtly
Oure at this tyme (passe) the story."[9]
Though sharing Wyntoun's appreciation of Barbour's poem of The Brus, one would gladly have excused the later writer from the labour of giving the history of the world from the Creation, had he only entered into fuller details regarding public events in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. However, one cannot be sufficiently grateful to Wyntoun for the prolixity and minuteness with which he has described persons and social conditions of an age so different from our own. He has, moreover, this great merit in common with Barbour, that, unlike some of the English chroniclers, he does full justice to the courage and honest purpose of the enemy, and, though writing as a patriotic Scot, never stoops to vulgar and prejudiced abuse of the other side.
But, most important of all, Barbour, Fordun, and Wyntoun, subject to allowance being made for comparatively trifling discrepancies, for occasional errors in, or transpositions of, dates, and for a few mistakes in names, sustain a tolerably searching application of the cardinal test to which all chroniclers must, sooner or later, be submitted, namely, comparison with official records and documents, of which so many have recently been brought to light.
It is this last circumstance, combined with the production of good and carefully collated editions of the early chronicles, that justifies a fresh attempt to record the "gestis" of Robert the Bruce, to analyse his character and motives, and to weigh the character of his life-work to the Scottish nation. For, besides such allowance as must be made for the simplicity of the three Scottish historians above referred to, who thought it warrant enough for almost any statement that it had been written down by someone else before them, there are the execrable and wilful preversion and suppression of truth by such later writers as Hector Boece and George Buchanan to be got rid of. Truly did David Laing, in observing that these two only, of all the Latin historians of Scotland, had been translated previously to 1870, remark in addition that "they are the very two who ought to have been consigned to the deepest obscurity."
The fact is, that between Wyntoun in the fourteenth century, and Lord Hailes in the eighteenth, all the history written in Scotland was worse than worthless. Lord Hailes made a splendid redemption, which only required the materials, now at the disposal of everybody, to be complete.
It now remains to be explained what are these materials. Previous to the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, all State papers were jealously guarded, and withheld from public scrutiny. Even historians were not permitted to consult the archives in order to verify their statements. But during the said war, the leaders on either side being anxious to obtain intelligent popular support, fell into the habit of appealing to the people by the publication of correspondence, addresses, and minutes of negotiations. Between the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688, all public treaties entered into by Great Britain were printed by authority. About the same time, various collections of treaties began to be published in France, Germany, and Austria, which were eagerly bought up as fast as they could be produced. Great Britain followed in 1692, when Thomas Rymer, having been appointed Historiographer Royal in succession to Shadwell, was commissioned to edit the leagues, treaties, alliances, capitulations, and confederacies of the kingdom. The outcome of this was the celebrated collection known as Rymer's Fœdera Anglicana, of which the first volume was published in 1704, the twentieth and last in 1736.
This invaluable fund of authentic information was open to, and greatly made use of by, Lord Hailes in preparing his Annals. No Scotsman—no one, indeed, who prizes the dignity of history—can do too great honour to that writer for having dragged the story of his country out of the mire in which it had been suffered to sink, and, for the first time, moulded it into a trustworthy and lucid record. Sir Walter Scott paid him no exaggerated encomium, when, in the introduction to The Lord of the Isles, he said, "Lord Hailes was as well entitled to be called the restorer of Scottish history, as Bruce the restorer of Scottish monarchy."
The work begun by Rymer has not slumbered. Parliament has voted money freely to secure the services of the men best fitted to edit those papers which the permanent officials in the various public departments have been indefatigable in repairing, deciphering, aud arranging. Hence it has come to pass than an immense amount of fresh material has been placed at the disposal of those who care to make use of it. Much has been brought to light to which Lord Hailes had no access, and, though his work remains unshaken, it has been possible to elucidate certain points on which he was uncertain or misinformed.
In the following narrative it has not been thought desirable to load the pages with references in footnotes, except, generally, where the authority of such references is cited to refute accepted statements, or confirm doubtful ones in the early historians.[10] But great care has been taken to avoid the assertion of circumstances of which, even though they may have found their way into history books, there is no means of verifying. Some of these are notoriously suspect. Take, for example, the well-worn myth of Bruce and the spider. Probably it is the incident in Bruce's career most widely circulated and most popularly believed. The critic who expresses doubts of its veracity will be exposed to the charge of irreverence; if he professes disbelief, to that of rank blasphemy. Yet where is evidence to be found in support of it? Not in the writings of Barbour, Fordun, or Wyntoun, those most nearly contemporary with the Bruce and least likely to suppress a circumstance so picturesque, and illustrating so aptly the perseverance and patience of the national hero under desperate difficulties. No; nothing is heard of this adventure till long after Bruce and his comrades have passed away, and then it makes its appearance, in company with such trash as the miraculous appearance of the arm-bone of St. Fillan on the eve of Bannockburn, and worthy of just about as much consideration.
"But then," it may be argued by persons unwilling to surrender a bit of favourite lore, "how comes it that spiders are treated with peculiar respect in Scotland, and, especially, that no one who claims consanguinity with Bruce will kill, or suffer one to be killed in his presence?"
The answer to that is found in the folk-lore of many other countries. The Jews have a kindly regard for spiders, because it is reported that when David was flying from Saul in the wilderness of Kish, and, closely pressed, took refuge in a cave, a kindly spider straightway spun a web across the mouth, so that when the pursuers came up to it, they judged that no man had entered the cave that day, and they passed on their way. A story, precisely similar, is told of the flight of Mahomet from Mecca. Coming nearer home, we recognise the same venerable fable in Cornwall, where spiders are held sacred because it is believed that one of them wove its web over the infant Saviour, thus concealing him from the search commanded by Herod. Everywhere spiders seemed to have been regarded as "uncanny" in pre-scientific days; and, according to universal human custom, an explanation was devised by connecting the insect with the most prominent national hero. With whose career could it more naturally be connected in Scotland than with that of Bruce, to whom Scotland owed her existence as a nation? There is, in sooth, in his life, plenty of spirit-stirring exploit and heroic confidence amid seemingly hopeless conditions, without borrowing more from the domain of myth. It may be noticed, by the by, that Hume of Godscroft, composing his history of the Douglases in the sixteenth century, appropriated the spider incident on behalf of Sir James Douglas, the companion of Bruce. He makes Douglas watch the insect's repeated failures and ultimate success, which he reports to the King with the appropriate moral.
- ↑ Usually, but erroneously, referred to as Hemingford. A canon regular of the Austin Priory of Guisborough, in Yorkshire, he is named de Hemingburgh in a document of that house, and also in one copy of his own chronicle.
- ↑ Edinburgh, 1871-80.
- ↑ Deeds of merit.
- ↑ Indite.
- ↑ He would need to.
- ↑ Leisure.
- ↑ Barbour.
- ↑ Caused.
- ↑ Wyntoun, bk. viii., ch. xviii., 1, 2923.
- ↑ In reference to Rymer's Fœdera it will be seen that I have not mentioned the volume or page. The reason is that as there are three or four editions of that great work, each with different pagination, it is easier to turn to quoted passages under the year of the event.