Where's the Hero?

I’m busy with two short stories, one about people coping with something missing in their life for Writers Magazine and the other a bit about fake jewelry for Writers Journal but as I watched Sharpe on TV yesterday and it set me thinking that, while I have written ten novels, I don’t really have a ‘Hero’ like Sharpe or Hornblower. The closest I’ve come is Miss Kirkwood in A Land Fit for Heroes, Broon in Best in Show, and Fergus Findlay in Drover. There’s also Mrs Boniface in Oakhaven and Jinks with Broon in Cairndhu but, while I love them both, they are best in frantic cameo appearances. There is no John Wayne. I think I’d be happier with James Stewart, someone that is only violent when there is no option. In what setting? A Jacobite would be romantic and I love the Highlands, the Lord of the Isles has real potential from the Romans to Bruce and Bonny Prince Charlie, Irish history is full of myth and magic, but there is more immediacy in Kimberley and the early days of the diamond fields, lots of rogues and clowns and the excitement of finds as well as the deaths and disappointments. I like it but it’s set in the days of empire and white supremacy, would it sell? Probably not. Never mind, seek and ye shall receive, I have always believed, or maybe it’s, don’t seek and you’ll find nothing.

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Bannockburn

It is good that history provides us with heroes, people whose courage we want to imitate but, now and then, the images get distorted and it is good to put things in perspective. For me, Bruce was a brilliant and determined general and I admire him for those qualities but a patriotic leader of all Scotland? At Bannockburn, Bruce's men were heavily outnumbered. They were outnumbered because many of the Scottish nobles were with Edward trying to save their hold on to their English as well as their Scottish estates. One report suggests the Scottish nobles, and, by implication their subordinates were so split and disaffected Bannockburn was more the last pitched battle of a civil war between Scots than and invasion by Edward. To back this up, Bruce had some 5000 men - gathered from all Scotland. I've seen more watching Partick Thistle at a midweek game! I've mentioned it before but - If Bruce had accepted Edward's overlordship, the result would have been a united Britain in 1314. It had been arranged that the Maid of Norway would marry the heir to the English throne, which had been accepted by the elder Bruce. There would have been no slaughter at Bannockburn. Bannockburn was not an academic exercise or great poetry, Scots as well as English died in agony from gaping wounds there. There would have been no Flodden, no Culloden. We all bemoan the indiscriminate slaughter that was WW1 yet ... 

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Bruce stirs trouble

Before getting too deep into Bruce, we need to look at the attitude of the Scots towards the proposed merger with the Maid of Norway and the son of Edward of England The Scots don't seem to have had any problems with it, in fact, seemed to welcome the idea. There is no hint in the poem, Sir Patrick Spence, which deals with her death, that the Scots were anything other than looking forward to her arrival. The, after her death, the Scottish nobles, representing the nation, asked Edward to mediate in the dispute over the title. Not only that but the rivals all swore fealty yo him. The resulting dispute was not, therefore, over his overlordship but over his choice of Balliol instead of Bruce. There is, of course, William Wallace's rebellion, a true uprising of the people, but were the people any more severely treated than the English peasants? The English peasants revolted en masse in 1381, so they can't have been any more pleased with their governance than the Scots. From that one moves to think the dispute over who was king of Scots was really just an argument between nobles. Bruce had estates in Wimbledon and Yorkshire as well as Galloway in Scotland, all Sassenach, or as near as made no difference. His brother, named Edward (imagine that),was educated at Cambridge. This was the set up when Bruce murdered Comyn and began to impose his claim on a land, for late thirteenth, early fourteenth century, relatively at peace.

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Bruce's spider

This being hogmanay, I thought a bit of verse wouldn't go wrong.

Bruce and yon spider

Robert the Bruce sat in his cave,

All he could see was the ocean wave.

He’d already been crowned with a crown on a throne

But then he’d been sitting on destiny’s stone.

Since then he’d fought battles six,

Hadn’t won only one and was in a fix.

He’d nothing to read, or games to play,

Only that minstrel who sang all day.

With nothing to do and no paper to write,

A spider came crawling into his sight.

He watched the fool,

As it tried to spool

A web from this side to that

Of the cave wherein he sat.

It tried and tried and he started to add,

The swings it took, the attempts it had.

That’s six he muttered into his beard,

Enough is enough is what I’d feared,

But the spider had more courage than him,

And set off again on another swing.

Just at that the wind gave a puff,

And the spider was carried far enough,

To catch a hold where it wanted to be,

And Robert the Bruce said, I see, I see.

Six is the number of the Bible’s beast,

So seven tries I must make at least.

Bruce went on to win renown,

To sit on the throne and wear his crown.

So whether in word or deed,

You wish to win, succeed,

If time and again you fail the test,

Take a tip from the spider who showed the best,

Don’t sit in a cave and wonder why,

Get out there and try and try.

Happy New Year

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A Bruce's Welcome for a maid

What I am about to write was not fully revealed to me by my history teachers, nor by Nigel Tranter. I was like many others told that when Alexander 111 died, jis successor was to be a young lassie, the Maid of Norway, the daughter of a Scottish princess who had married into the royal family of what was really the Auld Ally. The lassie was to marry Edward, king of England's daughter and unite the kingdoms. What slipped under the radar was that, at the time the nobles were all waiting for the lassie to arrive, the Bishop of St Andrews, the head of the church in Scotland, a position made much of by Tranter, wrote in desperation to Edward - 'The kingdom is disturbed...Sir Robert Bruce is come with a great following...and on that account, there is fear of a general war and a great slaughter of men unless Your Majesty apply some speedy remedy.'
Of course, all the arrangements fell apart when the lassie died on the way to Scotland and that left the throne of Scotland vacant.
The Scots asked Edward of England to judge between the claims of Robert Bruce and John Balliol both swearing fealty to Edward to influence their claim, thereby giving away Scotland's independence. We were taught that Edward chose Balliol because he thought he would be easier to manipulate than Bruce, not that Balliol's claim was senior, being descended from the elder of two princesses.
We never heard that Balliol had renegued on his fealty vow and gone to war with Edward long before a Bruce took on that role, yet Ballio is portrayed as some kind of fool Scotland was glad to be rid of. He's made such a shadowy figure it's hard to get a decent picture of the man. If Bruce had backed him the way yon Jimmy, sorry, Good Sir James, The Black Douglas, backed Bruce, would Balliol have triumphed?
Following the story in this way makes one realise the killing of the Comyn in the church wasn't fuelled by patriotism but was part of a family feud. A kind of Wild West story instead of a grand noble quest.
Don't get me wrong, I love heroes. I just don't expect them to be John Wayne and squeaky clean and I don't like needless war being glorified under the name of Patriotism.

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David and the aged warrior

How the Bruce connection at the time of Matilda and Stephen slipped through the net, I do not know but before we get to deeply into the lead up to Bannockburn, let me do a bit of time travel. You'll remember that the Empress of Maud or Matilda was the niece of David 1, King of Scots, and her right to the Throne of england was disputed by Stephen. David gathered a host to invade England in support of his niece. The host, a motley collection, especially the wild men of Galloway, gathered to plunder the north of England. They set off but when they got to Northallerton, according to Sir Walter Scott, an aged warrior by the name of Bruce, who had known David in the past and had estates in both countries, went into the Scottish camp and advised David not to fight. The Galloway men accused Bruce of being a traitor and, when David had second thoughts about fighting, accused him of cowardice and rabble roused the army to charge. Prince Henry of Scotland led the Scottish cavalry, broke through the English lines and started to hack their rear while the Galloway men hacked them at the front. Things were going well when a perfidious Englishman chopped off someone's head, raised it on a pole and shouted it had belonged to the King of Scots. Whether it was Bruce or not, no one seems to have noticed, but the Scots lost heart and, encouraged by the English longbowmen, ran off home. It was this aged warrior who begat the Bruce line.
To show how unpredictable politics can be, when the peace treaty was signed, except for Newcastle and Bamborough, the whole of Northumberland and Durham became Scottish. Which confirms that, sometimes, you get more from losing than winning.
Of course, you could say that, with typical Scots stupidity, David didn't move his capital south, in accordance with English tradition, but kept it at Edinburgh in what was the middle of his realm, and an opportunity to consolidate was lost.

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Bruce and the Honourable Thing

 Our history teachers taught us all about Robert Bruce and the spider in the cave but I have discovered the Bruce family themselves were spiders drawing people into their web. We start with 1066. It was not just England that changed following that event, but the whole island. No one is sure if de Brus came with William the Conqueror, or is the canny laddie waited till he saw how things were going and came with reinforcements but when he did come, he was given large estates in Yorkshire.

The next time I stumbled over the family, now Bruce, was when one, Robert, went on a crusade. (the Big Thing in those days. Try it now and you get locked up.) Robert became friendly with a chap from South West Scotland, the Earl of Carrick. Unfortunately, the Earl was killed. When Robert came back to Yorkshire he felt it was his duty to tell his friend’s widow the sad news in person. Rather a decent thought, what! Anyway, when he got to the Earl’s castle he found the charming widow unwilling to let him go and Bruce did the honourable thing. The story goes that she locked and barred the gate and forced Robert to marry her. A malicious rumour was started that by putting the blame on the countess, Robert avoided paying the fine he would have to have paid to the king for marrying the countess without the king’s permission.

So, now we sit with Bruce having estates in Yorkshire and Scotland. I’ve no idea how he came by the Tottenham property but he may have bought it for the occasions when he had to attend Westminster.

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From the Empress of Germany to Robert Bruce

So, in our walk through the history of our island, here we are with Henry Plantagenet sitting on the English throne. His mother, the dowager Empress of Germany, no less. His grandmother  Scots by birth and his father French. A man of mixed race you might argue. Henry’s second cousin, sits on the throne of Scotland, so, when Henry marries the girl from Aquitaine, the family control the Atlantic seaboard from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. Now why was I not told that the Plantagenets had Scots blood in their veins at school? Because we were too absorbed in making sure we were true Scots and nothing else?

If we’d been told, we’d have known we had a connection to Richard Lion Heart, the one who was saved by a medieval Tom Jones, and his brother John, who, as we know, had his little ways, and sometimes no one spoke to him for  days and days and days.

The obvious question is which of them had the stronger share of Scots blood, the galant and ferocious Richard, the man with the Highland temper, or the miserable dour John.

I have , of course, glossed over the fact that Alexander 1 of Scotland had married Hery 1’s daughter, but it is time to mention that Alexander 11 of Scotland married King John’s daughter, and Alexander 111 married Henry 111’s daughter. As a result, by the middle of the 13^th century, and getting close to Robert the Bruce, the  Scottish royal line was well stocked with good English blood.

What price Brucie?

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