Robert the Bruce's Long Road: Comyn's Murder to a Heart Carried to Spain

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Robert the Bruce was born in 1274, likely at Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire, and raised between two worlds: Norman chivalric training on his father's side and, through his mother the Countess of Carrick, Gaelic fosterage, galley seamanship and hobelar raiding on hardy ponies. In 1292 Edward I of England used the Great Cause arbitration to place John Balliol on the Scottish throne over Bruce's grandfather, and the family saw it as a stolen inheritance. Holding estates in Yorkshire and Essex as well as Scotland, Robert changed sides repeatedly between 1296 and 1306, joining William Wallace's rising and then returning to Edward's peace.

In 1306 he stabbed his rival John Comyn before the high altar of the Greyfriars Church in Dumfries and was excommunicated. He had himself crowned at Scone that March, was quickly beaten, lost a brother to execution and saw his wife, daughter and sisters imprisoned. Returning in 1307, he waged a guerrilla war, burning Comyn country in the Harrying of Buchan. After Bannockburn in 1314 he opened a second front in Ireland under his brother Edward, appealing to shared Gaelic ancestry, but famine wrecked it. The Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 and the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328 secured his crown.

• Hobelar ponies could live on scrub grass and cross marshes, letting Bruce raid in winter when armies of heavy horse went home.
• Bruce razed captured castles so that neither the English nor the Comyns could garrison them again.
• Edward Bruce was killed in Ireland and his starving army collapsed during a great European famine.
• English propaganda said he had leprosy, but study of a casting of his skull found no bone damage associated with the disease.
• In 1329 Sir James Douglas carried Bruce's heart in a silver casket to Spain; when his body was found at Dunfermline in 1818, the sternum had been sawn open.