Robert Bruce (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we're donning our kilts and daubing our faces blue to learn all about medieval Scottish king Robert Bruce.

Robert the Bruce to some, but Robert Bruce Bruce to us.

And to help us, we have two very special comrades in arms.

In History Corner, he's a senior lecturer in the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

He's an expert on medieval Scottish political and military history and the author of Scotland's Second War of Independence, 1332-1357.

It's Dr.

Ian McInnis.

Welcome, Ian.

Thanks, Greg.

Thanks for having me.

Great to be here.

And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actor, and storyteller.

She was a finalist at the BBC New Comedy Awards.

You might have seen her at Edinburgh with their sell-out shows or caught her on Breaking the News or Rosie Jones' Disability comedy extravaganza.

It's Mary Elaine Robertson.

Welcome to the show, Mary Elaine.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to learn.

I have to ask, do you like history?

Yes.

Well, and no.

I suppose I have some beef of history.

I studied archaeology, so I'm like, well, we have evidence.

You have written lies.

Oh, my word.

Ian, just let's keep it, you know, let's keep it calm.

What do you know about Robert Bruce?

Better known to many probably as Robert the Bruce.

Yes, I'm a Shetlander, so Shetland was very, very busy at this point in time fighting with Norway, and we really weren't so clued up with what you were doing down in Scotland and England.

So I know you were having a lot of trouble between the two of you, but we were already very busy up north.

Yes, so we became Scotland in part of Scotland in 1469, officially signed over in 1471 in lieu of a payment of a dowry.

We were quite bitter about it because the dowry was meant to be 30,000 florins worth.

So Denmark and Norway suggested the dowry would be Orkney and Scotland reckoned that Orkney was worth 22,000 florins.

So they're like, can you bump it up by 8,000 florins?

And they threw in the whole of Shetland.

Like we're a third of their cost.

So what do you know?

Okay, this is the, so what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

If you are from Scotland, then Robert Bruce is a household name, national hero for winning medieval Scotland's independence from the English.

Now, outside of Scotland, he's not quite as famous as William Wallace.

But how did an outlaw manage to become King of Scots?

And did Robbie Bruce really get tactical advice from the animal kingdom?

Let's find out.

Normally we'd start with his childhood, Ian, but for some important reasons, we're going to start with his grandfather, who was Robert Bruce number five.

So, yeah, so if we start in the 13th century, the Bruces hold lands in Scotland and in England.

But Robert V

also has a distant claim to the throne of Scotland, as his mother was the great-granddaughter of King David I.

And according to the Bruces, Robert V was promised the throne around 1238 by the then childless King Alexander II.

And so, in part because of this, Robert V is known as Robert the Competitor.

However, even if he was promised it, and it seems unlikely, Alexander II does produce a son who reigns successfully until he falls off his horse and dies in 1286.

And unfortunately, Alexander III is pre-deceased by all of his children and is succeeded then by a young three-year-old granddaughter, Margaret.

She dies in Orkney on her way to Scotland.

With Margaret's death, there is no clear successor to the Scottish throne, and in that context, the 70-year-old Robert V resurrects his claim to the Scottish throne.

Does he get the throne, Ian?

Because it sounds like no one else is around.

Because of the fact that there is no obvious successor, everyone in their auntie throws their hat into the ring.

And so, to avoid Scotland slipping into civil war, the Scottish Guardians, who are controlling Scotland in lieu of having a king, look outside for help and they look to Edward I of England.

So, Edward does think about pursuing his own claim to the Scottish throne, but instead he says, Well, okay, I'll make the decision for you.

But all the candidates have to acknowledge me as the superior king over Scotland.

And so what follows is what's called the Great Cause, which is a legal process.

And in that process, Robert V is unsuccessful.

Instead.

Oh, no.

Yes, indeed.

Instead, the throne goes to his rival, John Balliol.

Let's now pivot to our Robert Bruce.

He's number seven.

What do you think he's into?

Back in the late 1200s, early 1300s?

Just avoiding plagues and poxies.

I don't know, and just trying really hard to stay alive.

What level of status do you think he's got?

I don't know what it's like doing in Scotland, but in Shetland, if you get too big for your boots, you soon get ripped to pieces.

And modesty reigns supreme.

Like, if you were a prince, you wouldn't really speak about it.

You know, people call you prince, but sure up, no, no.

Ian, what's the family history?

So he's certainly part of the Scottish elite.

His father is an earl, the Earl of Carrick.

The Bruce family are originally from Normandy and and came to England in the 12th century.

And so, yes, Robert would be raised to be a lord, to be a future earl.

There is the possibility, too, that Robert spent time within the household of King Edward I of England.

But we haven't mentioned his dad.

Robert Bruce, number six.

Doesn't he want to be king?

While Robert V passes his claim to the Scottish throne onto his son, Robert VI, Robert VI passes his claim onto his eldom onto his son, Robert VII.

So Robert VI retains the claim to be king of Scots, but can live off his estates in England and not have to give homage to the new law, the new king, sorry, who is his enemy, John Bailey.

Robert VII does.

He has to go and give homage, and he will ultimately retain that claim to the Scottish throne.

Right now, Robert the Bruce doesn't win any favour from me.

He sounds like they're just a family who are like, we will be friends with whoever in power will let us keep our land.

When's he going to redeem himself?

Oh, well, this is the question, Marilyn.

When is he going to become the hero?

It's a

fair question.

I also have to ask, why are we not calling him Robert the Bruce?

Where has the gone?

It's probably just a corruption of the the Bruce name that they brought from France.

It is an anachronism, it is just Robert Bruce, ultimately.

Right, Robbie VII has reached adulthood in the early 1290s, but this point presumably is where Scotland gets some peace and stability because the great cause is over, the decision's been made, John Bailey will rule.

So, all happy now, Ian?

In part for a little bit.

So yes, King John is on the throne.

He has an heir to succeed him.

Things look reasonably straightforward for Scotland.

But the bargain that Edward I struck during the Great Cause when he extracted that oath from the competitors, he calls that in.

And so Scotland faces a range of demands that Scottish kings never faced before.

So there's demands for taxation, demands to appear at English parliaments, orders for military service in France, which the Scots don't want to do.

So John is rather undermined at every turn by Edward I.

But the Scots ultimately make a deal with the King of France, who Edward I has been at war with recently.

So, Edward I doesn't take this well.

He starts to gather an army to invade Scotland.

The Scots get their revenge on First by raiding northern England, but Edward I then takes the opportunity to use that as an excuse to invade.

He sacks Berwick, he wins a battle at Dunbar, and he then proceeds to take the submissions of all Scots who come to him, including King John himself, who is stripped of his crown and led off into captivity.

And Edward I also takes away every sign of Scottish royalty, including documents, including the Scottish crown and the stone of Schoon on which Scottish kings are inaugurated.

The Bruces are not part of the Scottish Army, which loses in Dunbar.

Robert VII may actually have been part of Edward I's forces.

And when Robert VI asks Edward I for the crown, Edward is meant to have said, Have we nothing better to do than wing kingdoms for you?

The Bruces were fighting on Edward's side.

Yes,

it's practical for them to do so.

For us to now hold Robert the Bruce as a hero, they must have had one amazing PR company.

What is this shift?

This is hidden from us.

If you'd asked at the start, what I didn't say about Robert the Bruce, because I thought it was too obvious.

It was like, oh yeah, he's a hero for Scotland and our freedom, isn't he?

Is he?

Is he?

But now, Ian, I can hear the braveheart music.

I can see the face paint.

Here comes William Wallace.

Here comes Robert the Bruce.

Freedom, right?

Yes, although no blue paint and no Australian accents.

But yes, Robert VII does join in a series of rebellions which break out across Scotland in 1297.

So in the north, you have Andrew Murray rising in rebellion, purging influence from the Highlands.

In the south, you've got William Wallace undertaking similar activity.

Bruce Bruce does come out in rebellion himself, but may have submitted relatively quickly.

So it's quite confusing so far, because our fearless freedom fighter has sort of fought for the English, fought against the English, and then he's sort of back with the English again.

Is that right?

He submits to Edward I about 1301, 1302.

Yes, he does surrender and basically looks to try and protect himself.

I'm trying to work out if he knows where he's from at this point.

Because does he know which side he's meant to be on on yet?

Maybe he's just very confused.

I suppose that the point is that they don't necessarily feel Scottish or English or any of those things at this point because they have a kind of cross-border mentality.

Marilyn, how do you think King Edward of England tries to woo Robert over to stay permanently on his team?

What do you think he does?

Oh, he gaslights him.

I don't know how one would be wooed.

He did the classic medieval thing of offering Robert a young wife to marry.

And unfortunately, because it's medieval history, I have to honk my problematic marriage plaques.

And this young wife is way too young.

She is 13.

Who is the young wife that...

Because he's already had a wife, Robert Bruce.

We haven't mentioned this.

He's already...

He's had a wife already, right?

I hate him more and more.

No, no,

it's not that bad.

So yes,

Robert has had a wife, Isabelle of Mar.

Where did she go?

She she dies in childbirth.

She she dies giving birth to his daughter, Marjorie.

So, yeah, that's one of the other things he has to think about, that he is a widow.

He doesn't have a son.

He, again, has to think about his future.

So, when he's making these decisions about which side to support, he has to think about that too, because who's going to inherit his lands if he dies?

Not his daughter, apparently.

Well, possibly, but perhaps not preferably.

I'm so surprised she's not called Roberta.

Yeah, yeah,

sure, actually.

Yeah.

The very young child that he marries, offered by the King of England, is Elizabeth.

Is that right?

Yeah, so Elizabeth de Berg is the daughter of the powerful Earl of Ulster, who is also one of Edward I's chief supporters in Ireland.

And yes, she's 13 at the time of the marriage.

Robert is 28.

Can you imagine how disgusted Robert's daughter is?

They're probably the same age as their bride.

Okay, so Robert now marries his second wife, who's not even an adult, Elizabeth de Berg,

and now becomes Scotland's king?

No, not yet, because

Edward doesn't want there to be another Scottish king.

Robert, having surrendered a couple of years before, thinks he should have been rewarded by Edward by now.

And so he perhaps starts thinking again, well, actually, maybe I should be king.

There are two possibilities ultimately.

It's either going to be Robert Bruce or it's going to be John Coleman of Badnock.

And it's kind of between the two of them potentially as to who might be the Scottish king in the future.

And these two rivals meet in a church.

It's called the Church of the Grey Friars in Dumfries.

And it's in February, 1306.

God is watching.

What do you think Robert does in this meeting?

Do they know their rivals?

They do know their rivals.

In a kirk?

Yeah.

The house of God.

It is.

What do they do?

What does Robert do?

Oh, no.

So, yes, I think.

Can he get any lower?

What does he do in the church?

So, yes, John Covin ends up dead.

Bruce kills him.

And

he wounds him and his attendants then come and finish him off.

In a church.

Unsurprisingly, the English make a lot of this and say that yes, it's premeditated Bruce slew Common.

Scottish propaganda would suggest otherwise and the idea that it's an argument that there are accusations of betrayal.

In fact, that Common had actually betrayed Robert's planning to Edward I and so he kills him in a fit of anger.

I'm sorry, but it's a bit rich for Robert the Bruce to be like, hey,

you're on Edward's side.

How dare you?

That's my thing.

But also, Robert is married to the goddaughter of Edward.

So he's by marriage, he's linked to the English king, and yet he's now

wants to be king again.

So

is he breaking the marriage?

Is that a betrayal of sorts?

It's certainly a betrayal of Edward I, yes, and Edward takes it very personally.

Edward then summons an army to go to Scotland.

Bruce challenges it when it's based at Perth, but he doesn't go about things well, and the English essentially turn it into an ambush and defeat him.

And one of his brothers is captured and is summarily executed.

His wife, his daughter, his sisters are captured and are imprisoned.

Two of the Bruce women, including one of his sisters, is put in a cage which is suspended from the walls of a Scottish castle.

He takes Bruce's rebellion and Bruce's betrayal very personally.

I guess we've skipped a really important point here.

Robert the Bruce is the king of Scotland.

Like, he

sort of, I don't know quite how he's managed it, because he's just murdered John Common.

Has he apologised?

Has he.

How does he, you know, how does he end up king?

After the murder, Bruce acts very quickly.

So he sends out messages trying to control the narrative, obviously trying to put across the case that he wasn't the instigator that he was betrayed, and so it was justified.

He also goes to the Bishop of Glasgow to seek absolution from the Bishop for the murder.

And Bishop Wishart gives him that absolution.

He actually forgives him.

Although the Pope, when he hears about this, does not and

excommunicates Robert altogether.

So in the aftermath of that, though, he goes to Schoon, he is inaugurated, and he leaves that as King Robert of Scotland.

He makes himself king, he gets excommunicated, he loses a major battle against Edward.

His sisters and his wife are put in cages.

His brother is killed.

What do you think he does next, Marylane?

Sides of Edward again?

If I was Robert the Bruce, which I'm thankful I'm not, and I don't think we're that alike,

but I think he just goes on a total revenge mission against Edward with all its might.

He does the opposite.

He runs away.

No!

Do you want to sort of walk us through his escape plan?

He flees into the West, possibly to the western highlands and islands, and or to Ireland.

We don't know for definite.

And Marie Lane, there's a very famous story.

I don't know if you've heard, but that at one point Robert is sort of, you know, hiding in a cave and then finds some inspiration from an animal.

Do you know what animal it is?

I do know this story.

This was based off the true story of Charlotte's web.

Yeah, a lot more violent, but yeah.

Yeah.

He was sitting in a cave and he's ready to give up and he sees a spider.

And a spider is making its web in the cave, and the spider's web fails.

And he's like, There, see, we're the same.

But then the spider attempts again, and he's like, Oh, and then the web fails again, but then the spider goes again and again.

And he watches this determination of the spider.

And he's like, If the spider can go again, so can I.

But is that true?

Did that actually happen?

Did he sit in a cave and watch a spider?

Probably not.

No.

That's not true.

It's a nice story, but no, it's probably

one of these things that enters into the kind of myth around Robert.

He's ready to come back.

So, what does that mean, Ian?

What is the comeback, the Hollywood comeback?

He plans to come back to Scotland.

He sends two of his brothers, Thomas and Alexander, as an advance party to Scotland.

But they are captured by his enemies and executed.

So, he only has one brother left.

But despite that, he still sails for Scotland, makes landfall, and is able to raise rebellion in the southwest of Scotland.

And he wins a couple of victories relatively early on at Glentruel and at Loudoun Hill.

We've got a new enemy to introduce the story, Marielle.

Edward I comes up to face Robert again, you know, for the 19th time, and he dies, right?

Ian, and so in comes his son, Edward II.

He dies just shy of the border, and he orders his son to continue his campaign into Scotland.

But Edward II only spends about two weeks in Scotland and then swans off home to start planning for his coronation.

From around 1310 onwards, Robert starts raiding into northern England to put pressure on Edward II.

But as time goes on and the Scots repeat this over a longer period of time, they actually start to extract protection money and blackmail out of these communities.

That's a lovely sheep you've got there.

It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

I mean, Robert's also taking castles.

He's taking English castles.

And he's doing it in quite an interesting way.

He's swimming across the moats.

They're using fold-up ladders, which is quite good.

There's also one very fun technique they use, Marie Lane.

It's involving the cows that they've stolen.

What do you think that is?

I feel like this is a play on what they did in Troy.

But you can't hide an army in a cow, but you could hide in explosives.

Did they send in exploding cows?

I love the idea of exploding cows.

It's very Monty Python.

You're kind of right with the Trojan thing a little bit.

They basically disguise themselves as cows.

Which I think we have to call camouflage, right?

You're basically

sneaking into the castle as a herd of cows, just going, nothing to see here, moo, and then yeah, they're really milking it.

In fairness to the English, though, that they do do it at dusk, so it's it's relatively dark, and the English aren't expecting

no one's expecting the army to be dressed as cows.

Well, no, it's not really as cows, they just throw a cloak over themselves and just kind of like shimmy forward.

But um, yeah, but I mean, come on, they're doing the moo sound, of course they are, you have to, you'd have to commit to it, wouldn't you?

Okay, so we're now 1314, and I think a lot of listeners will probably

know that year because of the Battle of Bannockburn.

It's a sort of very iconic famous military victory for Bruce.

And Ian, why is Bannockburn a big win for him?

What does he do that's so impressive?

It is a the first real large-scale Scottish battlefield victory over an English army and it'll probably the last one for a while as well.

It's also a victory against an English king in the field, which doesn't happen very often.

It is a massive victory.

You can perhaps say that it's overstated in terms of what it achieves in the long term, because the war continues.

Edward II doesn't give up.

But what the battle does do is give the Scots, give Bruce a lot of English prisoners, and he's able to use them to exchange for various Scottish captives, including his wife, including his daughter, his sisters.

And he's finally able to welcome them back to Scotland.

And with the return of his wife, of course, he is able to then look to the future and start trying to produce sons, which, of course, he has yet to do.

Meanwhile, Robert Bruce has been excommunicated by the Pope a second time.

Hooray!

Why?

What did he do this time?

I think the expansion of the war doesn't go down well.

The papacy, let's face it, is all about trying to foment peace in Europe.

And so Robert gets excommunicated again, yes, for extending the war into Ireland.

Okay, but then in 1320, we have the Declaration of Our Browth, which is a big deal.

Yeah, so but by 1320, not only has Bruce himself been excommunicated, but yes, Scotland as a whole is put under a papal interdict.

So, no religious ceremonies can take place, services can take place at all, no baptisms, no burials.

That's what that censure ensures.

That's a big deal, right?

It is.

And what the papacy allows is for Scots to break their oath to Robert I

and so to reject him.

And the idea there would be perhaps that he would be overthrown and replaced.

But none of this effectively works, in large part because the Scottish clergy on the whole is supportive of Bruce and supportive of keeping Scotland independent and keeping the Scottish Scottish Church independent from the English Church.

Three letters are constructed to be sent to the Papacy,

only one of which survives today, and that is the famous Declaration of Our Brothers.

And it emphasises that the Scots are the victims, it emphasises that the English are the ones who started the war and that they invaded peace-loving Scotland, and it emphasises very clearly that the Scots support Bruce as the sole and legitimate king.

He's got his legitimate heir.

In fact, he's got two.

He's got John and David, who are twins.

So he's got twin boys, an heir and a spare, and he's got three daughters, Margaret, Matilda, and Elizabeth.

So five kids.

He's doing well in that regard.

By the sort of mid-1320s or so, Robert's not in good health, which I think is important to know.

There's a sort of quote saying that he can't move apart from his tongue.

But things are also going bad in England because Edward II gets chucked off the throne and then murdered by his wife.

Anton Lovell.

And her lover.

So Isabella, Queen of England, sort of basically does in

and puts Edward III on the throne.

Does Robert do a deal with the new English king, Edward III, or Isabella even, the mum?

Yes, with Isabella.

So Edward III is not yet of age to rule in his own right, and so Isabella is essentially regent for our son.

So yes,

a series of agreements are made that are known collectively as the Treaties of Edinburgh and Northampton.

And this arranges for a final peace between Scotland and England in 1328.

Scotland and England reform a mutual alliance.

This is it.

This is peace.

This is Robert, King of Scotland.

That's a big, big win.

How do you think he celebrated Mary Elaine?

I feel like if we're going to go by a pattern of Robert's behaviour, which is always the opposite of what you should do, I think he thinks when everything's laid on a plate and good,

he's like, hey, Edward the Three is so young, he's just a baby.

Let's invade England.

Is that what he does?

On this occasion, occasion, he doesn't.

He does the classic thing of a child wedding, which Ian has already alluded to.

So he marries off the four-year-old son, David, to the seven-year-old sister of King Edward III.

Not John, that's clever.

No.

So he doesn't marry off the eldest.

He's dead by this point, so Bob is the only one left.

Okay.

Okay.

Sorry, right.

Yes, sir.

It's not funny.

It's not funny, but it is funny.

Robert, we've already said, was in poor health.

When did he die, Ian?

So he dies eventually on the 7th of June, 1329, aged 54.

We don't really know what killed him.

His Italian doctor apparently complained of him eating too many eels, but I don't think that killed him.

That's only going to make you stronger eating eels.

You never get told to do that when you're a child.

Finish your eels.

Okay, so we don't know what killed him, but we think.

Well, I think he died of an unknown illness.

There you go.

Classic pun.

Sorry.

Right, moving on.

The nuance window!

So it's time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Marian Lane and I relax with a cup of tea and a scon, or should that be schoon, for two minutes while Ian tells us something we need to know about Robert Bruce.

My stopwatch is ready.

Take it away, Ian.

Robert is an impressive figure.

His is a Hollywood story, rising from the depths of defeat in 1306 to make himself king, molding a country from the war-torn state in which it has sunk into an organised and functioning medieval kingdom again.

No one would argue that.

However, the popular imagination has grown around the belief that everything ended with the peace of 1328 and with Robert's death in 1329.

And this isn't the case, unfortunately.

While the king does all he can, he nonetheless ends up leaving Scotland to his five-year-old heir David.

A long minority is likely to follow, and minorities are insecure periods at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

There are those, as the Sewells conspiracy showed, who continue to not support Robert.

They're biding their time and waiting to see what happens next.

In England, there's Edward III, who hates the peace treaties agreed in his name and is itching to exert his power over his mother and his kingdom.

And there are individuals and families who are forced into exile and to abandon their claims to lands in Scotland because they refuse to support Robert.

And they are also out there waiting for their chance.

And these disinherited lords have a figurehead in Edward Balliel, son of King John of Scotland, and an alternative alternative claimant to the throne.

And so all of this is looming over the horizon as we look forward from Robert's death in 1329.

And ultimately, his death is not the end of things.

Balliol and the disinherited invade Scotland in 1332 and recommence the Bruce Balliol civil war that Robert I had arguably started himself when he murdered John Common in Dumfries.

This extends a year later as the English join the conflict and so the wars of independence recommence once more and continue for a further 25 years before the rights and independence that Robert I thought he'd won are arguably won for good.

And even then, Scotland is not what it was in 1329.

Parts of the borders are lost for decades.

Beric upon Tweed, some periods in the 15th century apart, is lost forever.

And while this is not all Robert's fault, he certainly contributed to the context in which these events ultimately occurred, and he set the scene for the years of conflict that followed.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We have the incredible Dr.

Ian McInnes from the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Thank you, Ian.

Thanks, Greg, and thank you, Mario Lynn.

It's been lots of fun.

It has been fun.

And in Comedy Corner, we had the magnificent Mary Elaine Robertson.

Thank you, Marie Elaine.

Thank you.

This is amazing.

I learnt a lot and had fun.

Thank you very much.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we do battle with another historical heavyweight.

But for now, I'm off to go and consult a spider for some career advice.

Bye!

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