ROBERT THE BRUCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 12

ROBERT THE BRUCE

OF YORKSHIRE DESCENT,

Robert the Bruce was a member of a family of Yorkshire landowners. , His ancestors, who arrived in England with the Conqueror, appear to have taken their name from the estates of Breaux or Bruis near Cherbourg; the first Robert de Brus (the name is spelt in 24 different ways) obtained a grant of 94 manors, amounting to 40,000 acres, in Yorkshire. The maker of Scotland is the eighth in descent from this personage (says ‘John o’ London’s Weekly’). Robert the Bruce, born in 1274, liad every advantage which wealth and position cou]d bring. His grandfather’ had claimed the crown of Scotland on the death of Alexander HI. and his infant granddaughter, the Maid of Norway; he himself was to renew the claim with more success. When his mother died, young Robert Bruce, aged 18, became Earl of Carrick, the holder of great estates .in Ayrshire and one of the first men in the kingdom. He grew up broad-shouldered and athletic, over 6ft. in height; “he had the yellow hair of the northern race, with blue and sparkling eyes. His intellect was quick.” To see the Robert Bruce of this time we have to picture a smart young soldier and “man about court”; accomplished in the fashionable pastimes and the modish French romances; seen oftener in London than on his Scottish estates, speaking Norman French, for choice, and perhaps Gaelic and a smattering of the Lowland English dialect. It did not seem to matter to him very much that his country was in the grip of an alien oppressor, that the puppet-king whom Edward I. had set in the seat of her ancient mon-, archs was humiliated and finally deposed, that foreign garrisons occupied her castles and bore off to England her most precious relics. After all. he himself belonged to a cosmopolitan class of feudal nobles who felt themselves not so much Scotsmen or Englishmen as gentlemen.

HIS VEILED MOTIVES.

But 'two factors modified this attitude of indifference : Bruce had a claim to the defunct Scottish throne, and from his mother he had acquired a Celtic strain of blood which bound him to the people of his country. These things help to light up the tortuous path which led Bruce to so superb a goal. For of few men in history are the actions so well known and the motives so veiled. During the early years of the Scottish War of Independence Bruce played a curious and hardly brilliant role. Twice he took arms against Edward, three times he submitted to him and was received into his grace. For the final campaign against the heroic Wallace he furnished siege engines and a thousand men. His conduct is puzzling ; we can only explain it by assuming a tug between his Celtic and his Norman blood, between his ambitions to be king and his pleasant life at the English Court. At last came a decisive step from which there could be no turning back. He went to Scotland, where a new plot was being hatched by the Churchmen who were Edward’s * most implacable enemies, and in the chapel of the Minorite Friars at Dumfries murdered his rival, Sir John Cornyn. The next six weeks of his life were crowded. The Bishop of Glasgow set his own tailors to furnish coronation robes from vestments in his own wardrobe (all the time writing letters to Edward deploring this “riot among the Scots”). A little party rode to Scone’s haunted churchyard, where the Countess of Buchan placed a circlet of gold on 'the head of him whom Edward sneeringly styled “King Hobbe.” There "followed years in which lie was hunted like a pheasant on the hillsides and through the friendly Scottish woods. Not the English only, but the relatives of the murdered Cornyn, a noble as powerful as himself, were against him. THE HERO IN HIDING. His Mife and daughter were imprisoned, his brother hanged, he himself took refuge in the Island of RathJin, or, as some believe, in Orkney. Bloodhounds had been set on his trial; from enemies in Lorn lie had only saved himself by looseing the brooch that held his clpak; he was excommunicated, exiled —but he still had heart to recite a French romance to his followers when the chase was at its height. Bruce, the supple adventurer, was growing to the stature of a king. With t'he death of Edward I. the tide turned. Bruce revealed himself a master of guerrilla, war, whose swift-ly-moving, elusive little force of lightarmed, hard-bitted men whittled down the castles with English garrisons until the whole of Scotland north of the Forth, was in his hands. And, all the time, the Church acted as his propagandist agency. Bannockburn, the climax of the war, , revealed Bruce as one of the great captains of the world. _ It was not-the end of the war, however ; that went on. But in 1328 Ed- ■ ward 111. recognised Robert Bruce as . King of Scotland ; the 'Pope had done ; so four years earlier. What of the character of Bruce?

If he was the, maker—or saviour—of Scotland, it is equally true that the war was the making of Bruce. The hot-headed, unstable man who murdered Cornyn became the cool and wary genera]; the leader who could fire a whole people to resist where they had only resented. His morals —as his illegitimate children indicate —might not be of the austerity of Edward I.’s, but he had magnanimity and a high kingly courage. He halted his whole army during his late Irish campaign while a poor washerwoman was delivered of her child. j Dying of leprosy at tire age of 55 (1329),°he asked his tried lieutenant, Sir James Douglas, to carry his heart “to the holy sepulchre where our Lord lay, and present it there, seeing my body cannot go thither,” for, he said, “I shall die in greater ease of mind seeing I know that the most worthy and sufficient knight in my realm shall achieve for me that which I could not myself perform.” . . Douglas, killed in Spam m battle with the Saracens, hurled the heart into the ranks of the enemy, shouting as he did so: “Now pass where thou wert ever wont to be in the field. Or so, at least, the story goes, with the heart on the Douglas shield to prove it I