The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain Read Free

of the mark.
    But the lass it cam wi’ was Marjorie Bruce, and her short life was as unfortunate at that of any of her more famous descendants. In 1306, after King Robert’s hurried and scarcely regular coronation at Scone, she had been sent with her mother and other female relatives, under the guardianship of the King’s youngest brother, Nigel, to the presumed safety of Kildrummy Castle, perched above the River Don in Aberdeenshire. But the castle was betrayed, Nigel was killed, and when they tried to flee north, the royal women and their companions were captured and handed over to the English.
    King Robert had been one of the many Scottish barons who had accepted Edward as overlord of Scotland and sworn allegiance to him. He may even have been a favourite of the English king. If so, his defiance – rebellion in Edward’s eyes – was all the more infuriating, and now Edward, unable to seize Bruce himself, took cruel revenge on the captured women. The Countess of Buchan, who had placed the crown on King Robert’s head, and the King’s sister Mary were imprisoned in cages hung from the battlements of the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh respectively. Edward ordered that another cage be prepared for the nine-year-old Marjorie in the Tower of London. But when the old king died, his gentler son, Edward II, commuted the sentence, and Marjorie was instead sent to be held in a convent in Yorkshire. She remained there till the year after Bannockburn, when she was returned to her father in exchange for English prisoners taken in the battle; and was straight away married to young Walter Stewart.
    Marjorie was King Robert’s only living legitimate child, but with the outcome of the war still uncertain, few can have thought a female succession desirable. Accordingly, a parliament meeting in Ayr determined that, if King Robert should die, he should be succeeded by his brother Edward. Marjorie is said to have consented to this arrangement; she would have had little choice but to do so.
    Then, in 1316, the pregnant Marjorie fell from her horse, gave birth to a boy, probably prematurely, and perhaps by a Caesarean operation, and died. She was no more than twenty. That child, named Robert after his grandfather, would be the first Stewart king, but he had to wait a long time to inherit the crown. King Robert married again, and his new wife, another de Burgh from Ulster, bore him a son. He would become David II and would reign from 1329 to 1371. He was Robert Stewart’s uncle, but eight years younger than his nephew. A Stewart succession still seemed unlikely.

Chapter 2
    Robert II (1371–90): The First Stewart King
    David II’s reign was troubled, and the King, a minor when he came to the throne, was in effective control for less than half of it. The early years saw a renewal of the war with England, and of civil strife between the adherents of the Bruces and the Balliols, arising from the young English king Edward III’s attempt to install John Balliol’s son, Edward, as a puppet king in Scotland. The attempt failed, and Edward III turned his attention to war with France. David, having attained his majority, and faithful to the French alliance, invaded England, but was wounded, defeated and taken prisoner at Neville’s Cross in 1346, the year of Edward’s great victory over the French at Crécy. He was kept captive there for eleven years, and released only on the promise of a payment of 100,000 marks. Robert Stewart acted as regent in the King’s absence, without notable success. He made no attempt to seize the throne for himself, perhaps because he was loyal, perhaps because he was too weak to do so. It was only the King’s sudden death at the age of forty-six, when he was about to marry for the third time in the hope of at last producing a legitimate heir, that opened the way to the Stewart succession. 1
    Robert II was fifty-five when he became king, on the verge of old age by medieval standards. He was a great nobleman,