A kingdom without a king
In March 1286 King Alexander III of Scotland died after a fall from his horse. His only surviving heir was a young granddaughter, Margaret, known as the Maid of Norway, who died in 1290 while being brought to Scotland. The line of kings was suddenly empty, and several noble families put forward claims. This Scottish succession crisis shaped everything that followed.
The Scots asked King Edward I of England to arbitrate. Edward agreed, but only after demanding that the claimants recognize him as feudal overlord of Scotland. After a lengthy hearing, sometimes called the Great Cause, he chose John Balliol in 1292. The other principal claimant was Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale and the grandfather of the future king. Two Roberts of the same family are involved in the story, which is a common source of confusion.
War begins
Edward treated Balliol as a subordinate, hearing appeals from Scottish cases in England and demanding military service. In 1295 Scottish leaders made an alliance with France, and in 1296 Edward invaded, sacking Berwick and defeating the Scots at Dunbar. Balliol was forced to give up the crown, and Edward took away symbols of Scottish kingship, famously including the Stone of Scone.
Resistance resumed in 1297 under William Wallace and Andrew Murray, who won at Stirling Bridge. Wallace was defeated at Falkirk in 1298 and later captured and executed in 1305. Throughout these years the future king, Robert Bruce, born in 1274, moved between the sides. He was among the nobles who sometimes submitted to Edward and sometimes joined the Scottish cause, in a period when loyalties were confusing and inherited claims, land in England and personal rivalries all mattered. Historians continue to debate how far his early choices were driven by principle or by calculation.
The killing at Dumfries and the crown
The turning point came in February 1306. Bruce met John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, a rival with his own claim linked to the Balliol family, in the church of the Greyfriars at Dumfries. They quarreled and Comyn was killed, by Bruce or his followers. The details are disputed, but the act was a sacrilege that cut off any hope of reconciliation with Edward and brought church condemnation.
Bruce acted quickly. In late March 1306 he was crowned king at Scone, in a ceremony that lacked many traditional features. The regalia were improvised, and the crowning was performed by Scottish bishops. It was followed by defeat. His forces lost at Methven and again in a fight in the west, and his supporters suffered brutally. Several of his relatives were captured and executed, and for a time he was a fugitive in the Highlands and islands.
Guerrilla war and recovery
Stories of Bruce hiding in remote places and learning perseverance from a spider are later legend and should not be relied on. What is better supported is that he returned to Scotland in 1307 and fought a campaign of raids, ambushes and avoiding large pitched engagements. He won a small victory at Loudoun Hill and in the same year, Edward I died while marching north.
Edward’s son, Edward II, was less effective in the field and faced troubles at home, which eventually led to the Edward II deposition of 1327. Bruce used this respite to overcome his Scottish enemies, including Comyn supporters, and to take back castles. His approach was often to capture strongholds and then destroy their defenses so they could not be used against him, rather than garrison them. By 1314 most major English-held castles in Scotland had fallen, except Stirling, the siege of which led to the battle of Bannockburn.
After Bannockburn
The victory strengthened Bruce’s hold but did not end the war. English kings still refused to recognize him. The Scots raided northern England, and Bruce’s brother Edward led an expedition to Ireland in 1315, hoping to open a second front. It had early successes but ended with his death in 1318.
The Kingdom of Scotland’s claim rested partly on its own history. In 1320, Scottish nobles and clergy sent a letter to Pope John XXII, now known as the Declaration of Arbroath. It defended Scotland’s independence, argued that the Scots had a long history as a kingdom, and said they would reject Bruce if he gave in to the English. Modern historians see it as a skilled piece of political writing, part of a campaign to persuade the papacy to lift Bruce’s excommunication. It is often quoted as a statement about liberty, but it was also an argument by an aristocratic community on behalf of a particular king.
The settlement of 1328
The decisive change came in England. In 1327 Edward II was deposed, and the regime of his young son Edward III was more willing to settle. By the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, England recognized Scotland as an independent kingdom and Bruce as its king. A marriage was arranged between Bruce’s young son David and an English princess.
Bruce died in 1329, probably of a long illness, and was succeeded by his five-year-old son, David II. The peace did not hold for long. A new war began in the 1330s, with Edward Balliol, John Balliol’s son, claiming the crown with English support. Scottish independence was secure in the longer term, but the Bruce settlement was far from the end of the story.
How he is remembered
Robert the Bruce is a national hero in Scotland and a figure of popular imagination, helped by the long poem The Brus, written in the 1370s by John Barbour. It praises him, and like many such works it mixes evidence with idealization. A cautious reading shows a skilled and sometimes ruthless leader who had to balance noble factions, church politics and English power. His success reflects not only his own talents but also the death of Edward I and the weakness of Edward II, and in that sense the Welsh and Scottish wars of Edward I led, in Scotland, to a result very different from the one in Wales.