Bruce Almighty: the man, the myth and the legend of King Robert

Here lies the invincible blessed King Robert

Whoever reads about his feats will repeat the many battles he fought

By his integrity he guided to liberty the Kingdom of the Scots.

May he now live in Heaven

Tomb epitaph recorded in Bower’s Scotichronicon (1440)

THE trailer for Netflix’s Outlaw King bodes well. Plenty of action, dirt and blood and the kind of edgy ambivalence about motives for a fight which so many of their productions do so well (Daredevil anyone?). Chris Pine’s Robert Bruce incites his men to fight for family, home, country, unity or peace, rather than for a king fuelled at first by revenge and the recovery of his loyal and loving wife.

Pine sounds great and looks the part. He appears pained yet reminiscent of the determined visage (plus war-beard) of Pilkington Jackson’s great equestrian statue of Bruce erected at the Bannockburn battlefield centre in 1964. But before daggers are drawn to dissect the historical accuracy of the film, just what were Bruce’s achievements in his own lifetime and what has he come to mean to successive generations of Scots?

READ MORE: Netflix epic Outlaw King sparks launch of Robert Bruce tourist trail

Will this new incarnation have a political, cultural and tourism impact comparable to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), in which Bruce was depicted as a man torn between ambition and the greater good, inspired to fight by the sacrifice of William Wallace? Or will this Bruce, too, struggle to shake off the taint of the self-serving aristocrat?

History inevitably dwells upon Bruce’s military prowess. He learned much from early defeats after his seizure of the throne following his murder of a leading rival, John Comyn (how will that much-spun incident be handled in the film?).

‘King Robert’ then returned from exile to deploy the kind of ruthless guerrilla tactics which popular imagination associates more readily with Wallace. The years 1306-13 were marked by Bruce’s leadership of stealth attacks on castles which were destroyed when taken, and raids against supply lines and across the Anglo-Scottish border to exact tribute and terror. These strategies so weakened both his Scottish opponents and Edward II of England’s position that Bruce felt ready to risk the gamble of a pitched battle against superior forces at Bannockburn in 1314.

Both Scottish and English chronicles record Bruce’s victorious axe-wielding combat against Henry de Bohun on the first day of battle, an event which will surely feature prominently in Outlaw King.

Bruce had guts as well as instinct for terrain and tactics to defeat seasoned massed archers, infantry and mounted knights.

Yet that dramatic midsummer triumph before Stirling Castle has long overshadowed the harsh reality that it would require a further decade of border raids and battles avoided, a disastrous Scottish campaign in Ireland (1315-18) during which Robert nearly died and his last brother was killed, and then political collapse for Edward II in 1326-7, before the Scots were able to wrest their independence from England.

By the same token, we should not dismiss the achievements of Bruce’s later reign. His rule consolidated the emergence of parliament as an annual consultative feature of Scottish politics. His assemblies saw Bruce both coerce and compromise, with discussion of such knotty issues as past treasons, royal succession, taxation, law codification and foreign relations. Bruce managed this forum in part through patronage, rewarding key supporters and a wider network of noble families, churches and towns. This fostered support against crisis – including a plot to kill Bruce exposed in 1320 – and a future generation of Scottish leaders, headed by the Randolphs, Douglases and Stewarts, were motivated to fight on when war soon resumed against England after Bruce’s death (aged 55 in 1329, leaving a five-year-old son, David II).

Chris Pine looks the part in the new series. Photograph: Netflix

THIS collective resistance spoke, too, to shared identity. Considerable modern debate surrounds such official Bruce regime statements of community will as the nobility’s ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ (1320), sent to the Papacy in face of excommunication. This asserted the Scots’ right to oust even a king who would admit English control.

Was this just stirring propaganda or did it reflect a swelling communal belief in the Scottish kingdom’s sovereign lands, institutions and customs and thus a singular people, embracing Scots beyond Bruce’s closest support and the anti-English clergy who authored such texts?

Here, once more, history would do well to remember that, yes, Bruce did seek to close his reign with renewed peace and marriage alliance with England, making possible a return to the blurred political identity of the 13th century and land-holding across both realms.

Yet at the same time Bruce had imprinted on the crown and estates devotion to a national pantheon of saints – from Kentigern of Glasgow, Ninian of Whithorn and Columba of Iona to St Andrew, with Robert consecrating the completed cathedral at St Andrews in 1318 as part of a ‘national’ ceremony. Crucially, such venerations made Bruce as much a son and king of the Gaelic west as it did of Scotland’s eastern Anglo-Norman lowlands. So, too, did his residence in later years in a manor house at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, looking west down the Clyde to the Isles and Ireland. Such behaviour was not merely political posturing, it spoke to Bruce’s genuine beliefs.

It was this hybrid lord who secured, as his last act, equal sacral status for Scotland’s monarchy alongside England, France and other realms by soliciting Papal permission for the full rite of unction at coronation. But it was the same lord who at the death dropped all plans to restore any ‘disinherited’ enemies to their pre-war lands as he knew it would not be tolerated by those he had rewarded. Arguably no king knew his (changing) realm so well and in deciding to go it alone Bruce oversaw the undoing of centuries of entwined Anglo-Scottish elite interests.

Little wonder, then, that Robert became a hallowed benchmark for Scottish leadership. That iconicity was famously enshrined as early as the 1370s, in the reign of Bruce’s grandson, the first Stewart king, Robert II, for whom Archdeacon of Aberdeen, John Barbour, produced a huge verse in Scots, The Bruce.

This epic was part history, part romance, part political tract. It enlarged upon the wartime roles of Douglas and Stewart forebears to please contemporary lords. But it also urged the realm’s elite to cease feuding and unite against England, as under Bruce.

It was a courtly work which wrote the Bruces’ rivals – the Balliols and Comyns – out of history, and so made no mention of Wallace. It served to inspire the noble generation victorious over the English at Otterburn (1388) and in subsequent campaigns, including a Scottish expedition to France of 1419-24. The Bruce would also be amongst the first Scottish texts to enter print by the early 16th century, having provided a model for the deeply-flawed rule of James III, who charged into battle in a doomed civil war at Sauchieburn in 1488, just two miles from Bannockburn, wielding the relic of Bruce’s sword; and of his son, the far more popular James IV, whose regime sought to live down the slaughter of his father by holding his coronation at Scone on June 24, the anniversary of Bruce’s great triumph.

However, by the late 15th century a challenge to Bruce’s reputation had emerged. Blind Hary’s companion epic in Scots of the 1470s, The Wallace, drawing on local legends, recast Sir William as the pivotal figure of the Wars and as reproachful counsel to the younger Bruce.

Hary elaborated on an incident first recorded in text by Latin chronicler Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchcolm, in the 1440s, reporting an exchange between Wallace and Bruce after the Battle of Falkirk, at Carronshore. This was a fanciful yet defining moment in Scotland’s evolving identity which would be sustained by the popularity of Hary in print especially in short penny-literature form (‘chapbooks’) well into the 19th century. For at Carron, the lesser subject Wallace openly harangues his vacillating superior, Bruce, to do the right thing – assume the kingship and fight for the realm. An allegorical attack on James III’s pro-English policies, Hary’s work was thus the first chink of distrust in Bruce’s image.

Such collective hesitancy about Bruce grew through Scotland’s Protestant Reformation (1560) and the subsequent Stewart union of the crowns (1603). Within the increasingly complex politics of the British Isles the anti-Englishness of the heroes of the Wars of Independence (who had all been Catholics) was played down over several generations.

WALLACE retained a louder following as a figure more useful for critiquing royal policy and rule from the south. Bruce still had his champions, particularly with revival of anti-English sentiment during the Covenanting Wars and Cromwellian occupation of Scotland in the later 17th century. Yet his name was only really

invoked in print in muted, often turgid literary works, for example royalist Patrick Gordon’s Famous Historie of the Renown’d and Valiant Prince Robert sirnamed the Bruce (1613). Such tomes were pale shadows of Barbour and Hary. They remained marginal within Scottish resistance movements through the Restoration (1660) and Hanoverian Revolution (1688).

Thus the historical currency of Wallace and Bruce would revive in the modern period thanks not to lingering Jacobite sympathies for the exiled Stewarts but rather growing disquiet about Scotland’s fortunes following the parliamentary union of 1707 – with calls for political reform and a nascent Home Rule movement.

In the age of Revolution in America and France a poet like Robert Burns found in both Wallace and Bruce figures to invoke in decrying Scotland’s impoverishment and in honouring Republican heroes such as George Washington, ‘‘the Wallace of America’’.

In 1793 Burns wrote “Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled” (Robert Bruce’s address to his troops at Bannockburn). This song became Scotland’s unofficial national anthem until the early 20th century. But Burns, who went on pilgrimage to Bannockburn in 1787, also penned haunting verse about Bruce’s ghost walking the battlefield lamenting the state of the realm.

Unsurprisingly, when Bruce’s bones were discovered in the ruins of Dunfermline Abbey in 1818, the authorities became increasingly nervous of any association with Scotland’s heroes by those pushing for reform at a time of post-Napoleonic slump. And with good cause. Agitation across the industrial central belt included unrest in the weaving and mining communities which had developed around Bannockburn. When a Stirling Castle militia force routed a small band of revolutionaries marching on the gun foundry at, of all places, Carron Shore in early April 1820 this hid the likelihood that the rebels had intended to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Bruce’s ‘Declaration of Arbroath’. That famous tract had recently been published in Glasgow and surely served as a model for this failed Radical War’s own public call to arms.

Yet as Scotland prospered economically and culturally within the context of the British Empire it became easier for the establishment to defuse any present danger from the icons of past wars. Sir Walter Scott became the chief proponent instead of a romanticisation of Scotland’s history, resisting pressure to novelise Bruce but, tellingly, in his historical Tales of a Grandfather (1827) replacing the Carronshore Wallace-Bruce exchange with Robert reacting guiltily to his countrymen’s blood on his hands.

Thus, for the majority of 19th and 20th century Scots a Unionist-Nationalist perspective accepted as historical fact the idea that Wallace and Bruce had kept Scotland and England independent until they were ready for a union of equals.

Histories, novels, dramas and paintings of the period also presented the two heroes as kindred spirits and even friends, including Jane Porter’s famous Scottish Chiefs (1809). Such works naturally found Wallace the more winning everyman, a fact reflected in a fashion for pamphlets defending Bruce from charges of self-interest and submission to England before 1302.

It was shaped by this tone that a good many of the early statues and markers of Bruce and his struggle were erected across Scotland and the wider Empire. He still lingered in Wallace’s shadow. The National Wallace Monument was begun on Bannockburn Day 1861 before massive crowds while Bruce’s grave at Dunfermline had to wait until a private donation in 1889 before it was fittingly solemnised. It would require the intervention of the National Trust for Scotland after 1943 for Bannockburn and Bruce to be marked and explained to modern heritage standards.

However, it was at Bannockburn – and not Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge – that the Home Rule movement and then the post-war SNP established a potent tradition of annual rallies in support of political independence each midsummer. At first, the authorities were predictably wary of such activity, with Stirling Council sending along the town band to drown out any radical speeches in the years running up to the 600th anniversary celebrations. But tolerance of such romantic protest soon became the norm and in that sense Bruce’s ultimate success, rather than Wallace’s romantic failure, has long been a strong undercurrent of the modern political scene.

Bruce was deployed and contested around 2014’s independence referendum: Alex Salmond’s ‘Declaration of Opportunity’ launched from Arbroath was matched by the Conservative government’s hosting of British Armed Services Day at Stirling in midsummer, at the same time as Bannockburn Live! commemorated the 700th anniversary of the Bruce’s victory alongside a newly represented battlefield heritage centre. Given such continuing resonance, Outlaw King and Robert Bruce may very well have a contribution to make to the current political dynamic, and not just for the politicians.