Robert the Bruce

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert the Bruce, King of Scots from 1306 until 1329, is buried in three different places. His body lies in one abbey, his heart in another, and his internal organs in a third church. In Scotland he is regarded as a national hero, the king who led the country through the First War of Scottish Independence against England. Yet his road to that reputation was anything but straight. He belonged to a family with a royal bloodline, formidable rivals, and a record of changing sides when events demanded it. This documentary asks how such a man became the symbol of an independent Scotland. What had his family lost before he won? What happened in 1306 to put a crown within his reach, and what did it cost him? How did a kingdom that looked beaten rebuild itself? And why did part of his body travel abroad after his death?

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• 2. A Trilingual Boyhood

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  Robert the Bruce was born on the 11th of July 1274, though no one can say for certain where. Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire is the likeliest place. Claims have also been made for Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire and for Writtle in Essex. He was the eldest son among ten children of Robert de Brus, 6th Lord of Annandale, and Marjorie, Countess of Carrick. From his mother he inherited the earldom of Carrick. From his father came the lordship of Annandale and a royal bloodline, because he was a fourth-great-grandson of King David I. The first Bruce lord of Annandale had been granted the lordship in 1124. The family's holdings reached far beyond those districts. They owned land in Aberdeenshire and Dundee, large estates in English counties including Cumberland, County Durham and Yorkshire, and property in County Antrim in Ireland.

  Very little is recorded about his youth, but the cultures around him were layered. Annandale was thoroughly feudalised, and an early form of Scots was spoken there. Carrick, at the end of the thirteenth century, remained emphatically Celtic and Gaelic speaking. Robert would most probably have grown up trilingual, speaking Gaelic, Scots and Anglo-Norman. As the heir to a considerable estate and a pious layman, he would also have gained a working knowledge of Latin, the language of charters and prayer.

  Gaelic custom may have shaped him in a further way. Robert and his brother Edward were probably fostered with allied Gaelic kindreds, a tradition in Carrick, the Hebrides and Ireland. Barbour refers to a foster brother who shared Robert's precarious life as an outlaw in Carrick in 1307-1308. Some historians cite this upbringing to explain his later affinity for hobelar warfare, which meant raiding on small, sturdy ponies. They also cite it for his feel for sea power, from oared war-galleys called birlinns to ordinary boats.

  His grandfather, Robert de Brus, 5th Lord of Annandale, seems to have been an immense influence. Contemporaries knew him as Robert the Noble, and history calls him Bruce the Competitor. Masters from the family household would have taught the brothers horsemanship, swordsmanship, the joust and hunting. Robert's chief tutor was probably an experienced knight from his grandfather's crusade retinue.

  A taste for stories and history shows up at both ends of his career. According to Barbour, Robert recited from memory to his followers in 1306, drawing on Fierabras, a twelfth-century romance of Charlemagne. He also cited examples from history, such as Hannibal's defiance of Rome. A parliamentary briefing document of about 1364 claimed that he 'used continually to read, or have read in his presence, the histories of ancient kings and princes.' In his last years he paid Dominican friars to tutor his son David and bought books for the boy.

  Sir Thomas Grey wrote in his Scalacronica that around 1292, Robert, then aged eighteen, was a 'young bachelor of King Edward's Chamber.' Firm evidence of a stay at Edward's court is thin. Still, on the 8th of April 1296, merchants of Winchester pursued Robert and his father through the English Chancery over household debts of £60. That raises the possibility that Robert sometimes lived at a royal centre that Edward I visited often.

  Robert's first appearance in the written record is as a witness to a charter issued by Alexander Og MacDonald, Lord of Islay. His name stands beside the Bishop of Argyll, the vicar of Arran, a clerk from Kintyre, his father, and a crowd of Gaelic notaries from Carrick. He was sixteen when Margaret, Maid of Norway, died in 1290. Around then he would have been knighted, and he began to appear in politics in the Bruce family's dynastic interest.

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• 3. Shifting Allegiances

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  In November 1292, Edward I of England, acting for the Guardians of Scotland after the Great Cause, gave the vacant Scottish crown to John Balliol. Balliol was the first cousin once removed of Robert's grandfather, so the Bruce bid had failed. Almost at once, the elder Robert de Brus resigned Annandale and passed his claim to the throne to his son. That son, Robert's father, resigned the earldom of Carrick to young Robert. This protected the claim, since the father now held only English lands. The Balliol triumph pushed the eighteen-year-old Robert into politics in his own right.

  Relations between Edward and King John soon soured, and the Bruces sided with Edward. Father and son both considered John a usurper. The final straw was Edward's demand that Scottish magnates serve in England's war against France. The Scots refused and allied with France instead. When the Comyn-dominated council summoned the Scottish host to Caddonlee, the Bruces would not come. The Comyns seized Annandale and Carrick and granted them to John Comyn, Earl of Buchan. Edward gave the Bruces refuge, appointing the Lord of Annandale to command Carlisle Castle in October 1295.

  Early in 1296, Robert married his first wife, Isabella of Mar, daughter of Domhnall I, Earl of Mar. She died soon afterwards, either during or shortly after the birth of their only child, Marjorie Bruce.

  On the 26th of March 1296, Easter Monday, seven Scottish earls attacked Carlisle. It was less a blow against England than the Comyn faction striking at its Bruce enemies. Edward then invaded Scotland, took Berwick in a particularly bloody assault, and crushed Scottish resistance at the Battle of Dunbar. He deposed John and sent him to the Tower of London. In August 1296, Robert and his father were among more than 1,500 Scots at Berwick who swore fealty to Edward.

  When revolt broke out in July 1297, the twenty-two-year-old Robert joined a group led by James Stewart, 5th High Steward of Scotland. It included Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, and Macduff of Fife. Robert seems to have acted independently of his father, who took no part. The English chronicler Walter of Guisborough reports that Robert gathered the knights of Annandale and told them: 'No man holds his own flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception. I must join my own people and the nation in which I was born. I ask that you please come with me and you will be my councillors and close comrades.'

  Letters ordered Bruce to support Edward's commander John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey, to whom Bruce was related. Bruce did not comply. Instead he made terms through a treaty called the Capitulation of Irvine. The Scottish lords were pardoned for recent violence in return for swearing allegiance, and they would not have to serve overseas against their will. Several men stood surety for Bruce until he handed over his infant daughter Marjorie as a hostage. He never did.

  Bruce's role at the Battle of Falkirk is disputed. The chronicler Fordun has him fighting for Edward under Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham. But no Bruce appears on the roll of nobles in the English army. Two nineteenth-century antiquarians, Alexander Murison and George Chalmers, held that he stayed away. They say he laid waste to Annandale and burned Ayr Castle to keep the English from garrisoning it.

  After Falkirk, William Wallace resigned as Guardian of Scotland. Bruce and John Comyn succeeded him as joint Guardians, but they could not set aside their personal differences. Comyn was a nephew of King John and had a serious claim to the throne of his own. In 1299, William Lamberton, Bishop of St Andrews, joined as a neutral third Guardian to keep the peace. Bruce resigned in 1300. In May 1301, John de Soules, who belonged to neither camp, became sole Guardian.

  Edward launched his sixth campaign into Scotland in July 1301, capturing Bothwell and Turnberry castles. In January 1302 he agreed to a nine-month truce, and around then Bruce submitted to him. In March 1302, Bruce wrote to the monks of Melrose Abbey to apologise for calling their tenants to his army when there had been no national call-up. He promised he would 'never again' demand their service unless it was for 'the common army of the whole realm.'

  That year Bruce also married his second wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of Richard de Burgh, 2nd Earl of Ulster. The wedding took place at Writtle, near Chelmsford in Essex. Elizabeth was about 13 and Bruce was 28. Their children included David II, who would succeed his father, and daughters named Matilda and Margaret. A son named John died in childhood.

  Edward invaded again in 1303 and marched as far as Aberdeen. By February 1304, every leading Scot except William Wallace had surrendered. On the 11th of June 1304, Bruce and William Lamberton sealed a pact binding them in 'friendship and alliance against all men.' Whoever broke the secret agreement would forfeit ten thousand pounds to the other. Many read it as a sign of patriotism, even though both men had already surrendered. Wallace was captured near Glasgow and hanged, drawn, and quartered in London on the 23rd of August 1305.

  Edward's trust in Bruce was wearing thin. In September 1305 he ordered Bruce to put Kildrummy Castle in the keeping of a man Bruce would answer for. On the 10th of October 1305, he revoked his gift of Sir Gilbert de Umfraville's lands to Bruce, which he had made only six months before.

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• 4. Murder and Crown

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  John Comyn, a nephew of John Balliol, was related to holders of the earldoms of Buchan, Mar, Ross, Fife, Angus, Dunbar and Strathearn. He also held lordships and sheriffdoms across the country. He was the most powerful noble in Scotland, and his own claim to the throne ran through Donald III on his father's side and David I on his mother's. Bruce, like all his family, believed completely in his right to the crown, and Comyn stood in his way.

  According to Barbour and Fordun, Comyn and Bruce reached a secret agreement in the late summer of 1305, sworn, signed and sealed. Comyn would give up his claim in favour of Bruce, in return for Bruce's Scottish lands, if Bruce led an uprising. Whatever the truth of those details, Edward moved to arrest Bruce while he was still at the English court. Ralph de Monthermer learned of the plan and warned Bruce by sending him twelve pence and a pair of spurs. Bruce took the hint and fled the court at night with a squire, riding quickly to Scotland.

  Barbour says that Comyn betrayed the agreement to Edward I. Bruce then arranged a meeting with Comyn for the 10th of February 1306 in the Chapel of Greyfriars Monastery in Dumfries. There he accused Comyn of treachery, they came to blows, and Bruce stabbed him before the high altar. The Scotichronicon adds that Bruce's supporters Roger de Kirkpatrick and John Lindsay went back inside on hearing that Comyn still lived. Kirkpatrick is said to have uttered the words 'I mak siccar', meaning 'I make sure.' Barbour tells no such story. The Flores Historiarum, written around 1307, says Bruce struck Comyn on the head with his sword and his supporters then ran up and stabbed him.

  Bruce and his party went on to attack Dumfries Castle, where the English garrison surrendered. He hurried to Glasgow, where his friend Bishop Robert Wishart granted him absolution and urged the clergy of the land to rally to him. Even so, Pope Clement V excommunicated Bruce for the killing.

  Six weeks after Comyn died, Bishop William de Lamberton inaugurated Bruce as King of Scots at Scone, near Perth, on Palm Sunday, the 25th of March 1306. The royal robes and vestments that Wishart had hidden from the English were brought out and placed on the new king. The bishops of Moray and Glasgow attended, as did the earls of Atholl, Menteith, Lennox and Mar. The great banner of the kings of Scotland was planted behind his throne. The next day he agreed to be crowned a second time, by Isabella MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, because tradition required a representative of Clan MacDuff to perform the ceremony.

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• 5. Outlaw King

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  In June 1306, Bruce was defeated at the Battle of Methven. Edward I had marched north that spring, granting the Scottish estates of Bruce and his supporters to his own followers and publishing a bill of excommunication. In August, Bruce sent his wife, his daughters and other women of the party to Kildrummy, protected by his brother Neil Bruce and the Earl of Atholl. Bruce himself fled with a small band. It included Sir James Douglas, Gilbert Hay, his brothers Thomas, Alexander and Edward, Sir Neil Campbell and the Earl of Lennox.

  On the 13th of September 1306, a strong force under Edward, Prince of Wales, captured Kildrummy Castle. Among the prisoners was the king's youngest brother, Nigel de Bruce. He and Alexander Lindsay were executed at Berwick under King Edward's order to put to death all followers of Robert de Bruce. Sir Simon Fraser was taken to London to suffer the same fate. Shortly before the castle fell, the Earl of Atholl tried to take Queen Elizabeth, Bruce's daughter and his sisters to safety. They were betrayed days later. Atholl was executed in London, and the women were held in the harshest conditions.

  Where Bruce spent the winter of 1306-1307 is uncertain. The Hebrides are the most likely place, perhaps under the shelter of Christina of the Isles, who was married into the Mar kindred. Bruce was tied to that family by marriage. Ireland is a serious possibility. Orkney, then under Norwegian rule, and Norway itself, where his sister Isabel Bruce was queen dowager, are unlikely but not impossible.

  Legend fills the gap with a spider. The tale says Bruce hid in a cave after Methven and watched a spider try to join one part of the roof to another. It failed twice and succeeded on the third attempt. Inspired, Bruce went out to defeat the English, and the story illustrates the maxim 'If at first you don't succeed, try try try again.' It first appears in Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, published between 1828 and 1830, long after Bruce's time. It may originally have been told of his companion Sir James Douglas, who hid in caves on his manor of Lintalee. Similar stories are told of King David in Jewish sources, of Władysław I the Elbow-high in Polish accounts, and of Tamerlane and an ant in Persian folklore.

  In February 1307, Bruce and his followers returned to the mainland in two groups. Bruce and his brother Edward landed at Turnberry Castle and began a guerrilla war in southwest Scotland. Thomas and Alexander landed slightly further south at Loch Ryan, but were soon captured and executed. In April, Bruce won a small victory at Glen Trool and then defeated Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, at Loudoun Hill. Meanwhile Douglas made his first foray into the southwest, attacking and burning his own castle in Douglasdale. Bruce travelled north, capturing Inverlochy and Urquhart Castles and burning Inverness Castle and Nairn to the ground. On the 7th of July 1307, Edward I died, leaving Bruce to face the king's son, Edward II.

  In late 1307, Bruce moved to Aberdeenshire, threatened Banff and fell seriously ill, probably from the hardships of the long campaign. After he recovered, he took Balvenie and Duffus Castles and then Tarradale Castle on the Black Isle. In May 1308 he won his landmark victory over John Comyn, 3rd Earl of Buchan, at the Battle of Inverurie. The Harrying of Buchan followed. Buchan was the agricultural capital of northern Scotland, and much of its large population stayed loyal to the Comyns. Bruce ordered the destruction needed to extinguish that support. Most Comyn castles in Moray, Aberdeen and Buchan were destroyed and their inhabitants killed.

  In less than a year, Bruce had broken the power of a family that had held vice-regal authority in the north for nearly a hundred years. How he took northern castles so quickly is hard to understand. He lacked siege weapons, and his army was probably neither much larger nor better armed than his opponents'. The Comyns and their allies appear to have been inexplicably lacking in morale and leadership. Bruce then crossed to Argyll and defeated the MacDougalls, allies of the Comyns, at the Battle of Pass of Brander. He took Dunstaffnage Castle, the last major stronghold of the Comyns and their allies, and ordered harryings in Argyll and Kintyre.

  In March 1309, Bruce held his first parliament at St Andrews, and by August he controlled all of Scotland north of the River Tay. In 1310 the clergy of Scotland recognised him as king at a general council, despite his excommunication. That support from the church was of great political importance. On the 1st of October 1310, Bruce wrote to Edward II from Kildrum in Cumbernauld Parish, trying to make peace. The attempt failed.

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• 6. Bannockburn and Beyond

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  On the 21st of June 1313, Bruce captured Castle Rushen at Castletown on the Isle of Man, after landing at Ramsey. The conquest denied the English the island's strategic importance. English-held strongholds had been falling one after another: Linlithgow in 1310, Dumbarton in 1311, and Perth in January 1312, which Bruce took himself.

  By 1314 most castles in Scotland were back in Scottish hands, and raiding parties reached as far as Carlisle. Edward II answered by planning a major campaign with the support of Lancaster and the barons. He mustered an army of between 15,000 and 20,000 men. In the spring, Edward Bruce besieged Stirling Castle, whose governor, Philip de Mowbray, agreed to surrender if it was not relieved before the 24th of June 1314. In March, James Douglas captured Roxburgh, and Randolph captured Edinburgh Castle. Edward learned of the Stirling agreement in late May and hurried north from Berwick. Robert, with between 5,500 and 6,500 troops, mostly spearmen, prepared to block the road.

  The fighting began on the 23rd of June, as the English tried to force their way across the high ground of the Bannock Burn, which was ringed by marshland. In the skirmishing, Sir Henry de Bohun died, killed by Robert in personal combat. Legend gives the moment a flourish. Riding with the heavy cavalry, de Bohun saw Bruce armed only with a battle axe and lowered his lance to charge. Bruce is said to have dodged at the last instant, risen in his saddle, and split de Bohun's iron helmet and head with one swing. Afterwards, the king supposedly regretted only that he had broken the shaft of his favourite axe.

  The next day, Edward advanced and met the bulk of the Scottish army as it emerged from the woods of New Park. The English seem not to have expected a battle there. They kept their forces in marching order rather than battle order. Their archers, who would normally break up enemy spear formations, stood at the back instead of the front. The cavalry struggled in the cramped ground and was crushed by Robert's spearmen. The English leaders could not regain control.

  Edward II was dragged from the battlefield and only just escaped. The historian Roy Haines describes the defeat as a 'calamity of stunning proportions' for the English. Edward retreated to Dunbar, took ship to Berwick, and went on to York. In his absence, Stirling Castle quickly fell.

  With the English threat lifted, Scottish armies were free to raid Yorkshire and Lancashire. In 1315 Bruce led the attack on Carlisle, a city whose defences he knew from first-hand experience. That same year he sent his brother Edward to invade Ireland, hoping to secure a second crown and open a second front against England. Domhnall Ó Néill, king of Tír Eoghain, had replied to Bruce's offers of help. Edward was crowned High King of Ireland in 1316, and Robert later went there with another army to assist him.

  To support the invasion, Bruce promoted a vision of a 'Pan-Gaelic Greater Scotia' ruled by his lineage. He wrote to the Irish chiefs calling Scots and Irish together nostra nacio, 'our nation', and stressed their common language, customs and heritage. He hoped that 'with God's will our nation (nostra nacio) may be able to recover her ancient liberty.' His own descent helped the argument. On his mother's side he came from Gaelic royalty in both Scotland and Ireland, including Aoife of Leinster, who died in 1188 and whose ancestors included Brian Boru. A marriage alliance that might have helped had already collapsed. His father-in-law Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, had sided with Edward II after Comyn's murder.

  In Ulster the message found some support. Domhnall Ó Néill later justified backing the Scots to Pope John XXII by saying that 'the Kings of Lesser Scotia all trace their blood to our Greater Scotia and retain to some degree our language and customs.'

  At first the Scot-Irish army seemed unstoppable. It defeated the forces of Richard de Burgh, and Edward's men levelled his Hiberno-Norman towns. But the Scots won over few chiefs outside Ulster and made no significant gains in the south. There, people saw little difference between Hiberno-Norman and Scottish occupation. A famine had struck Ireland, and the army struggled to feed itself. It pillaged and razed whole settlements, whether Hiberno-Norman or Irish. Edward Bruce was finally killed at the Battle of Faughart by an army led by Richard de Burgh. The Irish Annals of the period called the Bruces' defeat one of the greatest things ever done for the Irish nation, because it ended the famine and the pillaging.

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• 7. Diplomacy and Decline

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  In 1318, Berwick, the final English stronghold in Scotland, fell to the Scots. Even so, Edward II refused to renounce his claim to overlordship of the country. That same year, Pope John XXII reaffirmed the excommunication that Pope Clement V had pronounced on Bruce. The fight now moved from the battlefield to the papal court.

  In 1320, the Scottish nobility submitted the Declaration of Arbroath to Pope John XXII. It declared Robert their rightful monarch and asserted Scotland's status as an independent kingdom. The declaration strengthened his position, particularly in relation to the papacy. In 1324 the Pope recognised Robert I as king of an independent Scotland, and in 1326 the Franco-Scottish alliance was renewed in the Treaty of Corbeil.

  In 1327 the English deposed Edward II in favour of his son, Edward III. In May 1328, Edward III signed the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton. It renounced all English claims to sovereignty over Scotland and recognised Bruce as its king. In October 1328, the Pope finally lifted the interdict on Scotland and the excommunication of Bruce.

  In 1325, Robert acquired lands at Cardross from Sir David Graham in exchange for those of Old Montros in Angus. There he built a manor house that became his favoured residence in his final years. The chamberlain's accounts for 1328 list king's and queen's chambers, glazed windows, a chapel, kitchens, a falcon aviary and a medicinal garden. The manor also had a gatehouse, a protective moat and a hunting park. A jetty served the king's coble for fishing and the 'king's great ship.' Most of mainland Scotland's major royal castles had stood razed since about 1313-1314. The manor was perhaps built modestly in sympathy with subjects worn down by war, repeated famines and livestock pandemics.

  Robert had been seriously ill since at least 1327. An eyewitness letter from Ulster, written when the king made a truce with Sir Henry Mandeville on the 12th of July 1327, said he was so feeble he would not live, 'for he can scarcely move anything but his tongue.' The Lanercost Chronicle and the Scalacronica say he had leprosy. Jean Le Bel called it 'la grosse maladie.' Fourteenth-century writers, however, used the word leprosy for almost any major skin disease. None of the Scottish accounts of his death hints at it, and none of the accounts by people who were with him mention a skin ailment.

  The historian Penman finds it very difficult to picture a king who fought wars, held parliament and court, travelled widely and fathered several children while showing the infectious symptoms of leprosy. Other suggestions include eczema, tuberculosis, syphilis, motor neurone disease, cancer and a series of strokes. A rich court diet has also been proposed. His Milanese physician, Maino De Maineri, did criticise the king's eating of eels as dangerous to his health in his advancing years. Barbour blamed a benumbing brought on by cold nights during the months of wandering. A team led by Professor Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario examined a casting of the skull and images of a foot bone. They found none of the signs of leprosy.

  Robert's last journey appears to have been a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Ninian at Whithorn. He may have sought a miraculous cure or a way to make his peace with God. He sailed from Cardross to Tarbert on his great ship and then on to the Isle of Arran. There he celebrated Christmas of 1328 at the hall of Glenkill near Lamlash. He visited his son and the boy's bride, both mere children, at Turnberry Castle. Then he travelled overland on a litter to Inch in Wigtownshire. At the end of March 1329 he was at Glenluce Abbey, and in early April he reached Whithorn. He fasted four or five days and prayed to the saint before returning by sea to Cardross.

  Barbour and other sources describe a final council at the king's bedside, to which he summoned his prelates and barons. He made copious gifts to religious houses and gave silver to foundations of several orders so they would pray for his soul. He arranged perpetual soul masses at the chapel of Saint Serf, at Ayr, at the Dominican friary in Berwick and at Dunfermline Abbey. He repented of failing to keep his vow to fight the 'Saracens' in the Holy Land. His last wish, spoken to Sir James Douglas and the company, was this: 'I will that as soone as I am trespassed out of this worlde that ye take my harte owte of my body, and embawme it, and take of my treasoure as ye shall thynke sufficient for that enterprise, both for your selfe and suche company as ye wyll take with you, and present my hart to the holy Sepulchre where as our Lorde laye, seyng my body can nat come there.'

  Robert died on the 7th of June 1329 at the Manor of Cardross, near Dumbarton, a month before his fifty-fifth birthday. He left the kingdom in the hands of his most trusted lieutenant, Moray, until his infant son David reached adulthood. David II succeeded him. Six days after his death, papal bulls were issued granting the privilege of unction at the coronations of future Kings of Scots.

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• 8. Heart and Bones

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  The king's body was embalmed and his sternum sawn open so that the heart could be removed. Sir James Douglas placed it in a silver casket to be worn on a chain around his neck. The viscera were buried in the chapel of Saint Serf, the king's regular place of worship near his manor. Its ruins lie in what is now Levengrove Park in Dumbarton. The body travelled east from Cardross on a carriage decked in black lawn cloth, with stops at Dunipace and Cambuskenneth Abbey. Wax weighing 478 stone was bought for the funeral candles.

  A file of mourners on foot, including Robert Stewart and a number of knights in black gowns, escorted the body into Dunfermline Abbey. A canopy chapel of imported Baltic wood was raised over the grave. Robert's wooden coffin was placed in a stone vault beneath a box tomb of white Italian marble, which Thomas of Chartres bought in Paris after June 1328. A plinth of black Frosterley Marble carried a painted and gilded alabaster effigy. The Latin epitaph around the top described him as 'the invincible blessed King Robert', and the translation continues that by his integrity he guided to liberty the Kingdom of the Scots. Robert had left funds to pay for thousands of obituary masses, so his tomb would see daily votive prayers.

  When the planned international crusade failed to materialise, Douglas and his company sailed with the casket to Spain. There Alfonso XI of Castile was mounting a campaign against the Moorish kingdom of Granada. According to Barbour, King Alfonso welcomed them cordially. The party included Sir William de Keith, Sir William St. Clair of Rosslyn and the brothers Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig and Sir Walter Logan. In August 1330, the Scots formed part of the Castilian army besieging the frontier castle of Teba. The circumstances are still disputed, but the sources agree that Douglas and a group of Scots knights, outnumbered and separated from the main army, were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed. The survivors recovered Douglas' body together with the casket. The heart and Douglas' bones were brought back to Scotland, and the heart was buried at Melrose Abbey in Roxburghshire.

  In 1920, archaeologists discovered what appeared to be the king's heart and reburied it, but the location was not marked. In 1996, construction work unearthed a casket. Scientific study by AOC archaeologists in Edinburgh showed that it held human tissue of the appropriate age. It was reburied at Melrose Abbey in 1998, in keeping with the king's wishes.

  The great tomb at Dunfermline did not survive the Reformation, but the king himself did. On the 17th of February 1818, workmen breaking ground for a new parish church on the site of the abbey choir uncovered a vault before the former high altar. Two large flat stones covered it, one of them 7 ft long with six iron rings set in it. Inside, within the remnants of a decayed oak coffin, lay a body entirely enclosed in lead, under a decayed shroud of cloth of gold. Over the head, the lead had been shaped into a crown. Fragments of marble and alabaster found around the site years earlier matched the tomb Bruce had bought in Paris.

  The Barons of Exchequer ordered the vault sealed and guarded until the walls of the new church had risen around it. The formal investigation took place on the 5th of November 1819. The cloth of gold and the lead were decaying fast after twenty-one months of exposure. The body was covered in two layers of lead, each about 5 mm thick. James Gregory and Alexander Monro, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, inspected the skeleton. The artist William Scoular took a plaster cast of the skull. The skeleton measured 5 ft 11 in, and Bruce is estimated to have stood about 6 ft 1 in as a young man. That would have made him almost as tall as Edward I, who was 6 ft 2 in.

  A large crowd had gathered outside the church, and people were allowed to file past the vault to see the king's remains. Eyewitnesses such as Henry Jardine and James Gregory confirm that small objects were removed then. Teeth and finger bones were allegedly taken. The remains were reburied in the vault the same day, in a new lead coffin into which 1,500 lbs of molten pitch were poured before it was sealed.

  The king's face has since been reconstructed by Richard Neave of the University of Manchester, by Peter Vanezis and Martin McGregor of the University of Glasgow, and by Caroline Wilkinson and Mark Roughley of the Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University. Memorials have multiplied. Large carved stone letters spelling 'King Robert the Bruce' ring the top of the abbey's bell tower, and in 1974 the Bruce Memorial Window was installed in the north transept to mark 700 years since his birth. A 1929 statue stands in the wall at the entrance to Edinburgh Castle beside one of Sir William Wallace, and a statue was erected in Annan in 2010. Stirling has held an annual commemorative dinner in his honour since 2006. Gioacchino Rossini's last opera, Robert Bruce, appeared in 1843. Nigel Tranter's Bruce Trilogy followed in 1985, and Angus Macfadyen played Bruce in Braveheart in 1995 and again in Robert the Bruce in 2019.

  Bruce's descendants include all later Scottish monarchs and all British monarchs since the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

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