Robert the Bruce(1274–1329)

Robert Bruce was born at Turnberry Castle on the Ayrshire coast in 1274, into a Norman-Scottish line that had held the lordship of Annandale since the reign of David I, and into the earldom of Carrick through his mother. The Bruces were one of the three or four most powerful Scottish noble families of the late thirteenth century, with extensive English holdings as well; they had a credible, contested claim to the Scottish throne through Bruce's grandfather Robert de Brus, 'the Competitor', who had lost the Great Cause adjudication to John Balliol in 1292.

Edward I of England invaded in 1296 and deposed Balliol; the Wars of Scottish Independence began. William Wallace's victory at Stirling Bridge (1297) lifted Scottish resistance briefly before Wallace was captured and executed in 1305. The young Bruce moved between English and Scottish allegiance through the late 1290s and early 1300s — playing both sides while the kingdom hung in the balance. In February 1306 he killed his chief rival John Comyn in a church at Dumfries, an act of sacrilege that earned him excommunication. Six weeks later, on 25 March 1306, he was crowned King of Scots at Scone.

The lean years followed immediately. Defeat at Methven that summer drove Bruce into hiding on the western isles or on Rathlin off the Antrim coast — the period from which the legend of Bruce and the spider descends. Through 1307 and 1308 he rebuilt his force in the south-west, picking off Edward I's castles one at a time in a campaign of guerrilla warfare. The death of Edward I in July 1307 and the weaker leadership of his son Edward II handed Bruce the opening he needed. By 1313 only Stirling Castle remained in English hands.

On 23–24 June 1314, near Bannockburn outside Stirling, Bruce's force of about 6,000 met an English army of about 15,000 under Edward II. The Scottish victory was total — the decisive Scottish military success of the medieval period and the foundation event of Bruce kingship. The 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, drafted by Scottish nobles and sealed under Bruce's authority, asserted Scottish sovereignty in language that has shaped every nationalist argument in the country since. The Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328 secured formal English recognition of Scottish independence and of Bruce as king.

The Bruce name became royal under him. His son David II ruled Scotland from 1329 to 1371; through David's niece Marjorie Bruce, who married Walter Stewart, the Bruce blood passed into the royal House of Stewart and then through it into the modern Windsor line. The Bruce families of Annandale and Carrick continued through cadet branches and the surname today carries this royal-house weight in a way no other Scottish family name does. The Bannockburn battlefield is preserved as a national monument; the Bruce heart is buried at Melrose Abbey, his body at Dunfermline.