Discover how Robert the Bruce transformed his victory at Bannockburn into lasting dominance over Scotland. Learn how strategic alliances, land redistribution, and continued warfare helped him secure the Scottish throne and solidify his dynasty’s future.
By James Turner
In June 1314, during the two-day-long Battle of Bannockburn, fought within sight of the walls of the besieged Stirling Castle, Robert the Bruce utterly crushed the army of King Edward II of England. Edward was forced into an ignominious defeat; many of his best commanders and warriors were killed, and the garrison of the strategically vital Stirling Castle was forced to surrender. Worse still, the defeat almost completely exhausted Edward’s credibility in the eyes of the English aristocracy, greatly undermining any future attempts to wage war in Scotland.
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In contrast, when Robert Bruce was first crowned King of Scotland in 1306, his claim was supported by only a minority of the Scottish aristocracy. Over the following eight years, Robert and his allies slowly expanded their fragile power base, waging war against both the English garrisons scattered throughout Scotland and their numerous Scottish rivals. Victory at Bannockburn decisively signalled the ascendancy of the Bruce faction in Scotland, vindicating Robert’s previously contested claim to the Scottish throne. However, winning a kingdom was one thing; keeping it was another matter entirely.
The Importance of Bannockburn
One of the key reasons why the Battle of Bannockburn proved so decisive in securing Robert’s position on the Scottish throne, beyond the obvious thwarting of Edward’s attempts to relieve Stirling Castle, was the large number of prisoners taken by Bruce’s army. This included several of his remaining Scottish rivals, such as Ingram de Umfraville, a relative of the deposed King John Balliol and a former Guardian of Scotland. Even those who initially avoided capture, such as William de Soules and Earl Patrick of Dunbar, hurried to submit to Bruce in the immediate aftermath of the battle.
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The triumphant King Robert the Bruce was further able to use the large number of captured English nobles, such as Humphrey de Bohun, John Seagrave, and Ralph de Monthermer, to negotiate the withdrawal of the remaining English garrisons from Scotland. Just as his propagandists had boasted five years earlier at the St Andrews Parliament, Robert the Bruce had successfully reconstructed the authority of the Scottish monarchy through force of arms and dismantled the English occupation of his new kingdom.
Strengthening Bruce’s Rule
Scant months later, at a parliament convened on the site of the battle, Bruce declared the lands of those Scottish aristocrats who still refused to submit to his rule forfeit. This meant that Galloway, Badenoch, the earldoms of Buchan, Angus, and Atholl, the large swath of land formerly controlled by the MacDougalls in and around Argyll, and a plethora of smaller lordships and estates now fell under direct Bruce control.
Bruce’s propaganda sought to legitimize his claim to the kingship and sidestep the difficulties created by the practically defunct but theoretically still extant Balliol kingship. This strategy continued even as the Bruce party gained effective control of more and more of the kingdom, transitioning from a military alliance of aristocratic families to a royal government. More than fifty of the acts passed by Robert during his reign made explicit reference to his status as the direct successor of Alexander III.
Despite the rhetorical emphasis on continuity with the former Scottish political establishment, the ascendancy of the Bruce party and the mass confiscation of lands that followed its victory at Bannockburn radically reshaped the face of Scottish politics. Robert Bruce and his allies, in eight years of warfare, decisively overthrew the dominant political faction in Scotland and drove them into exile. In place of the Comyns and their network of relatives, Bruce’s war-hardened coterie of long-term allies shouldered their way into the forefront of the Scottish political establishment. This transformation was cemented by the gradual distribution of confiscated landed resources amongst Bruce’s supporters, most notably the Douglas, Stewart, MacDonald, and Campbell families.
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Such gifts not only drew upon resources taken from Bruce’s vanquished enemies but also stretched to include lands and incomes derived from the royal demesne and even lands traditionally held by the Bruce family. Thomas Randolph’s Earldom of Moray was enhanced with grants of royal land in Elgin and Nairn. In addition, Thomas, who had rapidly emerged as one of Bruce’s most able and dedicated military commanders, was granted the lordship of the Bruce family’s ancestral lands in Annandale. In a similar vein, James Douglas, another of Robert’s inner circle of trusted lieutenants, was granted Selkirk and Jedburgh.
Edward Bruce, the king’s remaining brother, was granted the Earldom of Carrick. Robert had previously held the earldom himself, which he had inherited from their mother, Marjorie of Carrick. The grant placed Edward in a position of primacy within the southwest of Scotland, allowing him to exercise royal authority in the region and effectively police the ever-troublesome Galloway on his brother’s behalf. In total, Robert made grants of lands from thirty of the royal thanages, which represented the crown’s principal source of income.
From the Seton Armorial in the Nation Library of Scotland: Robert the Bruce and Elizabeth de Burgh.
Managing Loyalties
Robert also granted the hereditary sheriffdoms of Dumbarton and Cromarty to the Earls of Lennox and Ross, respectively. Both earls had oscillated in their loyalties to Robert. Earl Malcolm of Lennox’s father had been a Bruce supporter, but Malcolm himself had sworn allegiance to Edward II to prevent the English king from creating a rival Earl of Lennox. Once the threats to the security of his earldom dissipated with successive Bruce victories in the late 1300s and early 1310s, Malcolm willingly and eagerly defected to Robert’s party. Earl William of Ross initially opposed Bruce before being forced to submit to the would-be king. However, even after this submission, the earl continued to equivocate and was among those Scottish nobles who wrote to Edward II encouraging him to intervene more forcefully in Scotland. Such men, always searching for their own advantage but too powerful and influential to remove easily, required incentives for their future loyalty.
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Prior to Bannockburn, Edward Bruce, Thomas Randolph, and James Douglas had established themselves as Robert’s most trusted and able lieutenants through their ferocity and success in the struggle against both the English occupiers and their numerous Scottish rivals. As more and more of the kingdom fell under effective Bruce control and Robert’s position on the throne of Scotland became increasingly secure, this group of trusted commanders transitioned easily into their new roles within royal government.
Bruce’s Trusted Commanders
Edward and Thomas Randolph were both provided with substantial ready-made power bases in the southwest and north of Scotland, respectively. Both were granted a high degree of independence and latitude, trusted to secure their respective areas of influence for the Bruce monarchy. Alongside James Douglas, who held a similar position of pre-eminence in the Borders, they were freed from oversight by the administrative organs of the royal centre. The continued prominence of Bruce’s commanders within the royal administration was crucial because, as spectacular and effective as it was, Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn did not bring an end to the war.
Victory at Bannockburn allowed Robert to remove or force the submission of his remaining opponents in Scotland, evict English garrisons from Scottish royal castles, and secure the release of his wife and daughter, who had been imprisoned and kept in harsh conditions by the English since their capture in 1306. Rather than attempt to parlay his victory at Bannockburn into a peace treaty or a renunciation of overlordship by Edward II and the pack of English aristocrats who now controlled him, Robert preferred the continuation of hostilities. Perhaps Robert, who derived much of his authority and legitimacy as king from his successful prosecution of the war against the English, was concerned about the effect of a sudden peace on his still fledgling government. Maybe Robert was attempting to head off the possibility of future invasions of Scotland by the resurgent English.
While it is probable that all these concerns and more occurred to Robert and his allies, the simplest and most crucial factor behind the decision to continue the war was that they were winning. Having, after much effort and tribulation, succeeded in driving their enemies from Scotland, the victorious Bruce forces were unwilling to cede the initiative and began to raid deep into northern England.
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The Profitability of War
If properly executed, warfare could be highly profitable, presenting numerous opportunities to gather loot, ransom noble captors, and gain new estates and territories. In the aftermath of the Comyn family’s defeat in Buchan, the earldom was deliberately ravaged by the victorious Bruce army to permanently break Comyn power, siphoning off or destroying the region’s wealth and resources. In Lothian, Bruce loyalists used the threat of violence to extort considerable sums of money from unaffiliated or English-aligned communities and noble families. The north of England now found itself subject to these same policies and practices.
Much of this fighting and periodic raiding was carried out by Bruce’s allies based on the Scottish Borders, such as James Douglas. The king also made forays into this warzone at the head of a royal army, often launched with specific objectives in mind, such as in 1315, when he made a concerted effort to capture the English stronghold of Carlisle. Bruce was, of course, intimately familiar with the town and its defences, having successfully held it for the English in 1306 against a Balliol-led Scottish army. With the English aristocracy in disarray and the nobility of northern England largely left to their own defences, the primary limitation on the success of the campaign in England was a lack of consistent royal Scottish oversight and fresh injections of manpower. The main reason for these shortages was the parallel war being fought across the sea in Ireland.
The Bruce Brothers and Ireland
The Bruce brothers had a long, if somewhat obscure, familial association with Ireland. Through their paternal grandmother, Isabel de Clare, they were descended from Richard de Clare and Aoife MacMurrough. Richard, often known as ‘Strongbow,’ was the Earl of Pembroke and a leading figure in the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Aoife, his wife, was the daughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster and Dublin. An ancestor, Diarmait mac Máel na mBó, who had died in 1072, had held the coveted position of High King of Ireland, providing Edward Bruce with a circuitous claim to the throne.
In 1314, King Donnell O’Neill of Tyrone wrote to Robert the Bruce asking for his support against his increasingly aggressive English and English-aligned Anglo-Irish neighbours. Donnell had previously been overthrown and driven into exile more than once by members of his own family, who had aligned themselves with the English, led by Robert Bruce’s father-in-law, Earl Richard Óg de Burgh of Ulster. By 1314, Donnell was firmly back on his ancestral throne and headed a coalition of other Irish aristocratic families. However, Donnell and his allies found themselves increasingly beset by the Earl of Ulster’s incursions into their territory, leading them to seek help from Scotland and the Bruces, who were proving so successful in their own resistance to English invasion and occupation.
The Irish Campaign
There were, of course, several factors that led Robert Bruce to affirmatively answer the King of Tyrone’s call for aid and expand his war against the English into Ireland. Firstly, taking the fight to Ireland prevented the bitterly divided and disorganised English leadership from using their considerable martial and financial resources in Ireland to support further hostilities in Scotland.
Norman lords, such as the Bruces’ ancestor Strongbow, had been carving out their own lordships in Ireland since the mid-twelfth century. Many of these lords married into native aristocratic dynasties, inheriting not only their lands but also networks of pre-existing rivalries, claims, and allies. English royal authority over these Anglo-Irish lords was variable, and many of the English kings’ campaigns and expeditions to Ireland were intended as much to secure their authority over their existing vassals as they were to expand territory.
Robert and his advisers knew that English reinforcements from Ireland were unlikely to materialise if the Anglo-Irish aristocracy or those members of the English aristocracy with substantial land in Ireland felt their estates were under imminent threat. This consideration became even more pressing in January 1315, as the Isle of Man, which had changed hands several times during the war, fell to the forces of the English-aligned John of Lorn and the MacDougalls, leaving western Scotland vulnerable to invasion from Ireland.
Of course, the most important factor in the decision by the Bruces and their partisans to intervene in Ireland was intimately connected to the condition they attached as the price of their support. Bruce forces would come to Donnell O’Neill’s aid if he agreed to recognise Robert’s brother, Edward Bruce, as High King of Ireland. Donnell’s father had previously held the title, yet Donnell accepted Edward’s highly dubious claim without any apparent equivocation or further negotiation. That he did so is probably a testament to the pressure the Earl of Ulster and his allies had placed Donnell under.
Ambitions in Ireland
The Bruce brothers’ decision to try to claim a second kingdom for their family meant that their campaign in Ireland would inevitably be one of conquest and subjugation as well as liberation. The Bruces would have been all too aware that while their actions against the English would win them some measure of support among the Irish aristocracy, others would resist the imposition of a foreign high king. While the Bruce legal and hereditary case for holding the kingship of Scotland was far more substantive than Edward’s phantasmal claim to Ireland, the brothers had already secured one kingdom primarily through force of arms and evidently felt capable of repeating the feat.
During a parliament held in the early summer of 1315, Robert officially recognised Edward as his heir. This articulated the brothers’ commitment to one another and the unity of their dynastic course, both within Scotland and Ireland. Of course, it sidelined the claims of Robert’s now-teenage daughter, Marjorie, leading to her husband, Walter Stewart, developing something of a rivalry with Edward. The other major purpose of holding the Parliament in Ayr, a royal burgh and port town located just north of Edward’s earldom, was to organise and make provisions for the army that would shortly embark there for Ireland.
Initially, the Scottish campaign in Ireland was wildly successful. The two brothers and their Irish allies won a string of battles in 1315 and decisively broke the power of Richard Óg de Burgh in Ulster. These early successes and the stunning reversal of the English position in Ireland encouraged a small but significant portion of Ireland’s kings and princes to acknowledge Edward’s High Kingship. Unfortunately for the Bruces, their attempts to exercise royal authority in Ireland and win the support of the broader Irish political community were hampered by several issues. While Edward continued to recruit heavily from his own earldom and the Scottish Isles, much of Scotland’s manpower was needed elsewhere, principally in the ongoing war for control of northern England.
Then, from late 1315 to 1317, Europe was caught in the grip of an extended and devastating famine caused by a spate of bad weather and the subsequent outbreak of disease among malnourished livestock. The famine robbed the Scottish campaign of much of its momentum and significantly complicated further military activity. All these factors combined meant that by the beginning of 1318, Edward’s authority in Ireland was largely limited to the northeast.
The Fall of Edward Bruce
This extended period of relative inactivity also allowed many of Edward’s Anglo-Irish enemies time to reorganise. In mid-October 1318, Edward’s diminished forces were confronted by a small alliance of Anglo-Irish aristocrats led by John de Bermingham and Edmund Butler. Bermingham was the son-in-law of the Earl of Ulster, while Edmund Butler was Edward II’s Justiciar of Ireland. Earlier that year, Butler, despite his previously poor military record, had been granted the Irish Earldom of Carrick. Somewhat amusingly, this meant there was an Earl of Carrick on both sides of the Battle of Faughart. While the scale of the battle is hard to ascertain, Edward Bruce’s death during the battle meant it was a major strategic defeat for the Scots. In addition to the no doubt acute personal loss, the death of King Robert’s remaining brother heralded the immediate collapse of the Scottish position in Ireland and dashed Bruce’s hopes of controlling the High Kingship of Ireland.
The severity of this setback to the Bruce party’s ambitions, and the potential danger it posed, can be seen in the parliament Robert called at Scone upon receiving confirmation of his brother’s death. There, Robert announced a raft of statutes designed to enable the effective recruitment and provisioning of a royal army. With the personal military resources of the Bruces and their allies drained by the ongoing war in northern England and their defeat in Ireland, Robert now sought to reform the Scottish military and pass some of that burden onto his less committed subjects.
Grave of Edward Bruce, High King of Ireland, in Faughart Cemetery, County Louth. Photo by Davidmc5585 / Wikimedia Commons
Getting back into his Holiness’ Grace
Another important step taken by Robert and his allies during this time to further strengthen their hold on Scotland was reconciliation with the Papacy. While now commonly interpreted as a political manifesto in which the Scottish political community asserted its independence, the original purpose of the Declaration of Arbroath was to demonstrate to the Papacy that both the Church and political community of Scotland overwhelmingly supported a Bruce kingship. The aim of this carefully orchestrated demonstration of solidarity was to persuade the Papacy that it would have to accept Robert as king and revoke his excommunication to effectively manage Church affairs and fulfil its pastoral obligations in Scotland.
While the Declaration did not persuade Pope John XXII to revoke Robert’s excommunication, it did lead to a softening of attitudes within the Curia and a greater awareness that a compromise would eventually have to be reached regarding Scotland. Building upon this moderate success, in 1324, Robert dispatched his nephew and close ally, Earl Thomas Randolph of Moray, to meet the Pope at his court in Avignon. Upon his arrival, Thomas, one of Robert’s most trusted and talented envoys, finally persuaded John to lift Robert’s excommunication and formally recognise him as King of Scotland. This was a diplomatic triumph, greatly bolstering Robert’s legitimacy both within and outside Scotland.
Securing the Bruce Dynasty
Perhaps the most crucial of all Robert’s achievements during the latter half of his reign, in regard to his contributions to the potential perpetuation of the Bruce family as a royal dynasty, was the successful birth of a male heir. This was particularly important, given that the Bruce line, having forcefully wrested power from their rivals, now looked perilously fragile. All four of Robert’s brothers had died in the struggle to secure the family’s royal claims. In March 1324, Robert’s wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, long removed from the effects of her harsh captivity, gave birth to the couple’s first son. Significantly, Robert chose to break with his family’s long tradition of naming their eldest sons Robert.
Rather than drawing from traditional Bruce naming stock, the family’s royal heritage and place on the throne of Scotland was emphasized by naming his son David, after the Scottish king whose reforms had introduced continental aristocratic culture and administrative structures into Scotland. It is probably not a coincidence that David was the king who first granted the Bruce family land in Scotland. Robert and Elizabeth’s marriage had previously produced two daughters, Matilda and Margaret. Prior to David’s birth, the king’s heir had first been his brother Edward, who had died fighting an army partially commanded by Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, and then Marjorie Bruce, the product of Robert’s first marriage to Isabella of Mar. Marjorie, who was married to Walter Stewart, died in a hunting accident sometime around early 1317, leaving her infant son, Robert, second in line to the throne.
King Robert, who was around fifty at the time of his son’s birth and had begun to suffer from bouts of ill health, sensibly made provisions for a potential minority. Should Robert die before David came of age, guardianship of the king and kingdom would fall to his nephew Thomas Randolph, and if Thomas died, then pass on to his other great friend and companion, James Douglas. In this manner, Robert entrusted the future of his dynasty to the close friends and allies whose cooperation and support had helped him win the throne. Another important consideration for the future of the realm was the peace agreement with England and the marriage of the infant David to Joan, the sister of King Edward III of England, in 1328. While Robert had been in no hurry to make peace with England in the late 1310s, the looming prospect of a long minority convinced him that his family’s interests would be best served by peace.
The terms on which he held Scotland, the ongoing attempts to annex northern England, and the effort to win Edward Bruce the High Kingship of Ireland all emphasized that Robert’s ambitions and political horizons were fundamentally dynastic and personal. Intelligent, energetic, and judicious, Robert Bruce was an exemplar of everything an early fourteenth-century European aristocrat aspired to be. He ably negotiated the transition of his supporters from an alliance of warlords cooperating in a campaign against their regional and hereditary enemies to members of a royal government. He generously rewarded his followers, incentivizing them to cooperate further with his nascent government, but was also careful to allow other members of the Scottish political community, including a number of his former enemies, to benefit from reaching accommodations with the throne.
Robert’s position as King of Scotland was therefore won and secured through the exercise of personal, rather than systematized, authority. Incentivizing the distribution of lands and rewards, as well as coercion, were both natural and expected elements in the establishment and maintenance of this authority. Notions of national or cultural unity had little bearing on the individual, highly personal relationships that bonded Robert’s polity together. This situation was hardly unique to Scotland. Indeed, at the same time Bruce was consolidating his position after the loss of his brother in Ireland, England was being wracked by a series of political convulsions. The root cause of this discord was that Edward II’s ability to exercise effective authority and establish productive relationships with the English aristocracy fell short of historical expectations.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
Discover how Robert the Bruce transformed his victory at Bannockburn into lasting dominance over Scotland. Learn how strategic alliances, land redistribution, and continued warfare helped him secure the Scottish throne and solidify his dynasty’s future.
By James Turner
In June 1314, during the two-day-long Battle of Bannockburn, fought within sight of the walls of the besieged Stirling Castle, Robert the Bruce utterly crushed the army of King Edward II of England. Edward was forced into an ignominious defeat; many of his best commanders and warriors were killed, and the garrison of the strategically vital Stirling Castle was forced to surrender. Worse still, the defeat almost completely exhausted Edward’s credibility in the eyes of the English aristocracy, greatly undermining any future attempts to wage war in Scotland.
In contrast, when Robert Bruce was first crowned King of Scotland in 1306, his claim was supported by only a minority of the Scottish aristocracy. Over the following eight years, Robert and his allies slowly expanded their fragile power base, waging war against both the English garrisons scattered throughout Scotland and their numerous Scottish rivals. Victory at Bannockburn decisively signalled the ascendancy of the Bruce faction in Scotland, vindicating Robert’s previously contested claim to the Scottish throne. However, winning a kingdom was one thing; keeping it was another matter entirely.
The Importance of Bannockburn
One of the key reasons why the Battle of Bannockburn proved so decisive in securing Robert’s position on the Scottish throne, beyond the obvious thwarting of Edward’s attempts to relieve Stirling Castle, was the large number of prisoners taken by Bruce’s army. This included several of his remaining Scottish rivals, such as Ingram de Umfraville, a relative of the deposed King John Balliol and a former Guardian of Scotland. Even those who initially avoided capture, such as William de Soules and Earl Patrick of Dunbar, hurried to submit to Bruce in the immediate aftermath of the battle.
The triumphant King Robert the Bruce was further able to use the large number of captured English nobles, such as Humphrey de Bohun, John Seagrave, and Ralph de Monthermer, to negotiate the withdrawal of the remaining English garrisons from Scotland. Just as his propagandists had boasted five years earlier at the St Andrews Parliament, Robert the Bruce had successfully reconstructed the authority of the Scottish monarchy through force of arms and dismantled the English occupation of his new kingdom.
Strengthening Bruce’s Rule
Scant months later, at a parliament convened on the site of the battle, Bruce declared the lands of those Scottish aristocrats who still refused to submit to his rule forfeit. This meant that Galloway, Badenoch, the earldoms of Buchan, Angus, and Atholl, the large swath of land formerly controlled by the MacDougalls in and around Argyll, and a plethora of smaller lordships and estates now fell under direct Bruce control.
Bruce’s propaganda sought to legitimize his claim to the kingship and sidestep the difficulties created by the practically defunct but theoretically still extant Balliol kingship. This strategy continued even as the Bruce party gained effective control of more and more of the kingdom, transitioning from a military alliance of aristocratic families to a royal government. More than fifty of the acts passed by Robert during his reign made explicit reference to his status as the direct successor of Alexander III.
Despite the rhetorical emphasis on continuity with the former Scottish political establishment, the ascendancy of the Bruce party and the mass confiscation of lands that followed its victory at Bannockburn radically reshaped the face of Scottish politics. Robert Bruce and his allies, in eight years of warfare, decisively overthrew the dominant political faction in Scotland and drove them into exile. In place of the Comyns and their network of relatives, Bruce’s war-hardened coterie of long-term allies shouldered their way into the forefront of the Scottish political establishment. This transformation was cemented by the gradual distribution of confiscated landed resources amongst Bruce’s supporters, most notably the Douglas, Stewart, MacDonald, and Campbell families.
Such gifts not only drew upon resources taken from Bruce’s vanquished enemies but also stretched to include lands and incomes derived from the royal demesne and even lands traditionally held by the Bruce family. Thomas Randolph’s Earldom of Moray was enhanced with grants of royal land in Elgin and Nairn. In addition, Thomas, who had rapidly emerged as one of Bruce’s most able and dedicated military commanders, was granted the lordship of the Bruce family’s ancestral lands in Annandale. In a similar vein, James Douglas, another of Robert’s inner circle of trusted lieutenants, was granted Selkirk and Jedburgh.
Edward Bruce, the king’s remaining brother, was granted the Earldom of Carrick. Robert had previously held the earldom himself, which he had inherited from their mother, Marjorie of Carrick. The grant placed Edward in a position of primacy within the southwest of Scotland, allowing him to exercise royal authority in the region and effectively police the ever-troublesome Galloway on his brother’s behalf. In total, Robert made grants of lands from thirty of the royal thanages, which represented the crown’s principal source of income.
Managing Loyalties
Robert also granted the hereditary sheriffdoms of Dumbarton and Cromarty to the Earls of Lennox and Ross, respectively. Both earls had oscillated in their loyalties to Robert. Earl Malcolm of Lennox’s father had been a Bruce supporter, but Malcolm himself had sworn allegiance to Edward II to prevent the English king from creating a rival Earl of Lennox. Once the threats to the security of his earldom dissipated with successive Bruce victories in the late 1300s and early 1310s, Malcolm willingly and eagerly defected to Robert’s party. Earl William of Ross initially opposed Bruce before being forced to submit to the would-be king. However, even after this submission, the earl continued to equivocate and was among those Scottish nobles who wrote to Edward II encouraging him to intervene more forcefully in Scotland. Such men, always searching for their own advantage but too powerful and influential to remove easily, required incentives for their future loyalty.
Prior to Bannockburn, Edward Bruce, Thomas Randolph, and James Douglas had established themselves as Robert’s most trusted and able lieutenants through their ferocity and success in the struggle against both the English occupiers and their numerous Scottish rivals. As more and more of the kingdom fell under effective Bruce control and Robert’s position on the throne of Scotland became increasingly secure, this group of trusted commanders transitioned easily into their new roles within royal government.
Bruce’s Trusted Commanders
Edward and Thomas Randolph were both provided with substantial ready-made power bases in the southwest and north of Scotland, respectively. Both were granted a high degree of independence and latitude, trusted to secure their respective areas of influence for the Bruce monarchy. Alongside James Douglas, who held a similar position of pre-eminence in the Borders, they were freed from oversight by the administrative organs of the royal centre. The continued prominence of Bruce’s commanders within the royal administration was crucial because, as spectacular and effective as it was, Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn did not bring an end to the war.
Victory at Bannockburn allowed Robert to remove or force the submission of his remaining opponents in Scotland, evict English garrisons from Scottish royal castles, and secure the release of his wife and daughter, who had been imprisoned and kept in harsh conditions by the English since their capture in 1306. Rather than attempt to parlay his victory at Bannockburn into a peace treaty or a renunciation of overlordship by Edward II and the pack of English aristocrats who now controlled him, Robert preferred the continuation of hostilities. Perhaps Robert, who derived much of his authority and legitimacy as king from his successful prosecution of the war against the English, was concerned about the effect of a sudden peace on his still fledgling government. Maybe Robert was attempting to head off the possibility of future invasions of Scotland by the resurgent English.
While it is probable that all these concerns and more occurred to Robert and his allies, the simplest and most crucial factor behind the decision to continue the war was that they were winning. Having, after much effort and tribulation, succeeded in driving their enemies from Scotland, the victorious Bruce forces were unwilling to cede the initiative and began to raid deep into northern England.
The Profitability of War
If properly executed, warfare could be highly profitable, presenting numerous opportunities to gather loot, ransom noble captors, and gain new estates and territories. In the aftermath of the Comyn family’s defeat in Buchan, the earldom was deliberately ravaged by the victorious Bruce army to permanently break Comyn power, siphoning off or destroying the region’s wealth and resources. In Lothian, Bruce loyalists used the threat of violence to extort considerable sums of money from unaffiliated or English-aligned communities and noble families. The north of England now found itself subject to these same policies and practices.
Much of this fighting and periodic raiding was carried out by Bruce’s allies based on the Scottish Borders, such as James Douglas. The king also made forays into this warzone at the head of a royal army, often launched with specific objectives in mind, such as in 1315, when he made a concerted effort to capture the English stronghold of Carlisle. Bruce was, of course, intimately familiar with the town and its defences, having successfully held it for the English in 1306 against a Balliol-led Scottish army. With the English aristocracy in disarray and the nobility of northern England largely left to their own defences, the primary limitation on the success of the campaign in England was a lack of consistent royal Scottish oversight and fresh injections of manpower. The main reason for these shortages was the parallel war being fought across the sea in Ireland.
The Bruce Brothers and Ireland
The Bruce brothers had a long, if somewhat obscure, familial association with Ireland. Through their paternal grandmother, Isabel de Clare, they were descended from Richard de Clare and Aoife MacMurrough. Richard, often known as ‘Strongbow,’ was the Earl of Pembroke and a leading figure in the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Aoife, his wife, was the daughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster and Dublin. An ancestor, Diarmait mac Máel na mBó, who had died in 1072, had held the coveted position of High King of Ireland, providing Edward Bruce with a circuitous claim to the throne.
In 1314, King Donnell O’Neill of Tyrone wrote to Robert the Bruce asking for his support against his increasingly aggressive English and English-aligned Anglo-Irish neighbours. Donnell had previously been overthrown and driven into exile more than once by members of his own family, who had aligned themselves with the English, led by Robert Bruce’s father-in-law, Earl Richard Óg de Burgh of Ulster. By 1314, Donnell was firmly back on his ancestral throne and headed a coalition of other Irish aristocratic families. However, Donnell and his allies found themselves increasingly beset by the Earl of Ulster’s incursions into their territory, leading them to seek help from Scotland and the Bruces, who were proving so successful in their own resistance to English invasion and occupation.
The Irish Campaign
There were, of course, several factors that led Robert Bruce to affirmatively answer the King of Tyrone’s call for aid and expand his war against the English into Ireland. Firstly, taking the fight to Ireland prevented the bitterly divided and disorganised English leadership from using their considerable martial and financial resources in Ireland to support further hostilities in Scotland.
Norman lords, such as the Bruces’ ancestor Strongbow, had been carving out their own lordships in Ireland since the mid-twelfth century. Many of these lords married into native aristocratic dynasties, inheriting not only their lands but also networks of pre-existing rivalries, claims, and allies. English royal authority over these Anglo-Irish lords was variable, and many of the English kings’ campaigns and expeditions to Ireland were intended as much to secure their authority over their existing vassals as they were to expand territory.
Robert and his advisers knew that English reinforcements from Ireland were unlikely to materialise if the Anglo-Irish aristocracy or those members of the English aristocracy with substantial land in Ireland felt their estates were under imminent threat. This consideration became even more pressing in January 1315, as the Isle of Man, which had changed hands several times during the war, fell to the forces of the English-aligned John of Lorn and the MacDougalls, leaving western Scotland vulnerable to invasion from Ireland.
Of course, the most important factor in the decision by the Bruces and their partisans to intervene in Ireland was intimately connected to the condition they attached as the price of their support. Bruce forces would come to Donnell O’Neill’s aid if he agreed to recognise Robert’s brother, Edward Bruce, as High King of Ireland. Donnell’s father had previously held the title, yet Donnell accepted Edward’s highly dubious claim without any apparent equivocation or further negotiation. That he did so is probably a testament to the pressure the Earl of Ulster and his allies had placed Donnell under.
Ambitions in Ireland
The Bruce brothers’ decision to try to claim a second kingdom for their family meant that their campaign in Ireland would inevitably be one of conquest and subjugation as well as liberation. The Bruces would have been all too aware that while their actions against the English would win them some measure of support among the Irish aristocracy, others would resist the imposition of a foreign high king. While the Bruce legal and hereditary case for holding the kingship of Scotland was far more substantive than Edward’s phantasmal claim to Ireland, the brothers had already secured one kingdom primarily through force of arms and evidently felt capable of repeating the feat.
During a parliament held in the early summer of 1315, Robert officially recognised Edward as his heir. This articulated the brothers’ commitment to one another and the unity of their dynastic course, both within Scotland and Ireland. Of course, it sidelined the claims of Robert’s now-teenage daughter, Marjorie, leading to her husband, Walter Stewart, developing something of a rivalry with Edward. The other major purpose of holding the Parliament in Ayr, a royal burgh and port town located just north of Edward’s earldom, was to organise and make provisions for the army that would shortly embark there for Ireland.
Initially, the Scottish campaign in Ireland was wildly successful. The two brothers and their Irish allies won a string of battles in 1315 and decisively broke the power of Richard Óg de Burgh in Ulster. These early successes and the stunning reversal of the English position in Ireland encouraged a small but significant portion of Ireland’s kings and princes to acknowledge Edward’s High Kingship. Unfortunately for the Bruces, their attempts to exercise royal authority in Ireland and win the support of the broader Irish political community were hampered by several issues. While Edward continued to recruit heavily from his own earldom and the Scottish Isles, much of Scotland’s manpower was needed elsewhere, principally in the ongoing war for control of northern England.
Then, from late 1315 to 1317, Europe was caught in the grip of an extended and devastating famine caused by a spate of bad weather and the subsequent outbreak of disease among malnourished livestock. The famine robbed the Scottish campaign of much of its momentum and significantly complicated further military activity. All these factors combined meant that by the beginning of 1318, Edward’s authority in Ireland was largely limited to the northeast.
The Fall of Edward Bruce
This extended period of relative inactivity also allowed many of Edward’s Anglo-Irish enemies time to reorganise. In mid-October 1318, Edward’s diminished forces were confronted by a small alliance of Anglo-Irish aristocrats led by John de Bermingham and Edmund Butler. Bermingham was the son-in-law of the Earl of Ulster, while Edmund Butler was Edward II’s Justiciar of Ireland. Earlier that year, Butler, despite his previously poor military record, had been granted the Irish Earldom of Carrick. Somewhat amusingly, this meant there was an Earl of Carrick on both sides of the Battle of Faughart. While the scale of the battle is hard to ascertain, Edward Bruce’s death during the battle meant it was a major strategic defeat for the Scots. In addition to the no doubt acute personal loss, the death of King Robert’s remaining brother heralded the immediate collapse of the Scottish position in Ireland and dashed Bruce’s hopes of controlling the High Kingship of Ireland.
The severity of this setback to the Bruce party’s ambitions, and the potential danger it posed, can be seen in the parliament Robert called at Scone upon receiving confirmation of his brother’s death. There, Robert announced a raft of statutes designed to enable the effective recruitment and provisioning of a royal army. With the personal military resources of the Bruces and their allies drained by the ongoing war in northern England and their defeat in Ireland, Robert now sought to reform the Scottish military and pass some of that burden onto his less committed subjects.
Getting back into his Holiness’ Grace
Another important step taken by Robert and his allies during this time to further strengthen their hold on Scotland was reconciliation with the Papacy. While now commonly interpreted as a political manifesto in which the Scottish political community asserted its independence, the original purpose of the Declaration of Arbroath was to demonstrate to the Papacy that both the Church and political community of Scotland overwhelmingly supported a Bruce kingship. The aim of this carefully orchestrated demonstration of solidarity was to persuade the Papacy that it would have to accept Robert as king and revoke his excommunication to effectively manage Church affairs and fulfil its pastoral obligations in Scotland.
While the Declaration did not persuade Pope John XXII to revoke Robert’s excommunication, it did lead to a softening of attitudes within the Curia and a greater awareness that a compromise would eventually have to be reached regarding Scotland. Building upon this moderate success, in 1324, Robert dispatched his nephew and close ally, Earl Thomas Randolph of Moray, to meet the Pope at his court in Avignon. Upon his arrival, Thomas, one of Robert’s most trusted and talented envoys, finally persuaded John to lift Robert’s excommunication and formally recognise him as King of Scotland. This was a diplomatic triumph, greatly bolstering Robert’s legitimacy both within and outside Scotland.
Securing the Bruce Dynasty
Perhaps the most crucial of all Robert’s achievements during the latter half of his reign, in regard to his contributions to the potential perpetuation of the Bruce family as a royal dynasty, was the successful birth of a male heir. This was particularly important, given that the Bruce line, having forcefully wrested power from their rivals, now looked perilously fragile. All four of Robert’s brothers had died in the struggle to secure the family’s royal claims. In March 1324, Robert’s wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, long removed from the effects of her harsh captivity, gave birth to the couple’s first son. Significantly, Robert chose to break with his family’s long tradition of naming their eldest sons Robert.
Rather than drawing from traditional Bruce naming stock, the family’s royal heritage and place on the throne of Scotland was emphasized by naming his son David, after the Scottish king whose reforms had introduced continental aristocratic culture and administrative structures into Scotland. It is probably not a coincidence that David was the king who first granted the Bruce family land in Scotland. Robert and Elizabeth’s marriage had previously produced two daughters, Matilda and Margaret. Prior to David’s birth, the king’s heir had first been his brother Edward, who had died fighting an army partially commanded by Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, and then Marjorie Bruce, the product of Robert’s first marriage to Isabella of Mar. Marjorie, who was married to Walter Stewart, died in a hunting accident sometime around early 1317, leaving her infant son, Robert, second in line to the throne.
King Robert, who was around fifty at the time of his son’s birth and had begun to suffer from bouts of ill health, sensibly made provisions for a potential minority. Should Robert die before David came of age, guardianship of the king and kingdom would fall to his nephew Thomas Randolph, and if Thomas died, then pass on to his other great friend and companion, James Douglas. In this manner, Robert entrusted the future of his dynasty to the close friends and allies whose cooperation and support had helped him win the throne. Another important consideration for the future of the realm was the peace agreement with England and the marriage of the infant David to Joan, the sister of King Edward III of England, in 1328. While Robert had been in no hurry to make peace with England in the late 1310s, the looming prospect of a long minority convinced him that his family’s interests would be best served by peace.
The terms on which he held Scotland, the ongoing attempts to annex northern England, and the effort to win Edward Bruce the High Kingship of Ireland all emphasized that Robert’s ambitions and political horizons were fundamentally dynastic and personal. Intelligent, energetic, and judicious, Robert Bruce was an exemplar of everything an early fourteenth-century European aristocrat aspired to be. He ably negotiated the transition of his supporters from an alliance of warlords cooperating in a campaign against their regional and hereditary enemies to members of a royal government. He generously rewarded his followers, incentivizing them to cooperate further with his nascent government, but was also careful to allow other members of the Scottish political community, including a number of his former enemies, to benefit from reaching accommodations with the throne.
Robert’s position as King of Scotland was therefore won and secured through the exercise of personal, rather than systematized, authority. Incentivizing the distribution of lands and rewards, as well as coercion, were both natural and expected elements in the establishment and maintenance of this authority. Notions of national or cultural unity had little bearing on the individual, highly personal relationships that bonded Robert’s polity together. This situation was hardly unique to Scotland. Indeed, at the same time Bruce was consolidating his position after the loss of his brother in Ireland, England was being wracked by a series of political convulsions. The root cause of this discord was that Edward II’s ability to exercise effective authority and establish productive relationships with the English aristocracy fell short of historical expectations.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
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Top Image: Robert the Bruce Statue, Stirling Castle. Photo by dun_deagh / Wikimedia Commons
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