Bruce and the spider

A throne is not always lost in the open field, and it is not always won there either. Sometimes a crown survives because one man, in a wet cave on a coast no chronicler is watching, decides at the end of a year that has taken almost everything from him that he is not yet finished. The decision is small. The consequences are not.

THE WEIGHT OF THE YEAR 1306

Robert Bruce was crowned King of Scots at Scone on the 25th of March 1306, the circlet set on his head by Isabella of Fife in the place of her absent brother. He was thirty-one years old, grandson of a Competitor, Earl of Carrick, lately the killer of John Comyn before the high altar at Greyfriars in Dumfries. For that killing Pope Clement had excommunicated him. For the crowning, Edward of England had declared war without quarter on every man, woman and child of his name.

The summer went badly. At Methven on the 19th of June his camp was surprised before dawn by Aymer de Valence, and the king's horse was cut from under him; he was unhorsed a second time at Dalrigh in August when the MacDougalls of Lorn came out of the heather and one of them tore the brooch from his cloak as he wrenched himself free. By autumn his queen, Elizabeth de Burgh, and his daughter Marjorie, who was ten years old, had been taken at Tain and sent south. His sister Mary was hung in an open iron cage from the wall of Roxburgh. His brother Nigel had been hanged and beheaded at Berwick. Thomas and Alexander, captured at Loch Ryan, were hanged at Carlisle on Edward's writ. Of four brothers he had one left, Edward, and a winter ahead of him in which he was a king of nothing and a fugitive on his own coast.

THE CAVE

The tradition places him on Rathlin, or in a sea-cave on the Antrim shore, or under the basalt at the foot of his own earldom of Carrick. The chroniclers do not say. What the chroniclers say is that he was lost to view between the battle at Dalrigh in August and the landing at Turnberry in February, and that in those months the cause of Scotland was a handful of men sleeping on stone.

It is the rain he would have noticed first. The Atlantic rain comes sideways off that coast in January and there is no shelter from the sound of it on rock. His fire would have been kept small, because smoke on a still night carries to galleys, and the galleys of John of Lorn and the galleys of the English Warden of the West were both looking for him. He had a price on his head of his own weight in silver. His brother Edward slept against the wall. The men outside were perhaps a dozen, perhaps fewer; the chronicles disagree even on this.

THE SEVENTH ATTEMPT

Something moved on the rock above the place where he lay. He looked up. A spider had set the first thread of a web at the join of two ledges, and was trying to swing the bridging line across to the further stone. It dropped on its silk, missed by a finger, climbed back. It tried again. He did not move. The cold in the cave was the cold of February on the western sea, and his fire was out, and he was counting. The spider tried a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and on every attempt the thread fell short or the wind off the water caught it and took it past the ledge.

He was a king with three brothers in the lime, a sister in a cage, a wife and a child of ten in English keeping, and the sentence of the greater excommunication against his name in every parish from Berwick to Rome. He had, by any account a clerk in Westminster could draw, lost. The Comyns would not forgive him Greyfriars. The MacDougalls would not forgive him Dalrigh. The Pope would not absolve him. The English king had set out from Lanercost that winter in a horse-litter to come north and finish the matter in person. A reasonable man in this cave would already have written to Edward of England asking what terms might be had for the surrender of a body that was not yet a corpse.

He did not write. He watched the spider. There is no message in a spider for a rational man, and he knew it; he had been schooled in the law of the Plantagenet court and in the schools at Cambridge and he was not a man who took omens from insects. But he was also a man who had run out of council. His brothers were dead and could not advise him. His bishops were in irons. The thing on the rock had no language and needed none. On the seventh attempt the thread held, and crossed, and the spider began to draw the frame of the web upon it. He sat up. He reached to wake Edward, and then did not, and lay back down. He would sleep two more hours. Then he would walk down to the boats.

THE LANDING AT TURNBERRY

In February of 1307, by night, two galleys came in under the cliffs of Carrick. The king put ashore at Turnberry, which was his own. The castle was held for the English by Henry Percy. The king's men killed the garrison in the outbuildings while Percy slept, and were away into the hills of Galloway before the alarm was raised. It was a small thing, no battle, a knife-stroke in the dark at the door of the hall in which his father had died.

From Galloway he went up into the broken country, and the war he fought from that February was not the war of Methven. He did not stand in the open against heavy horse. He took the small castle and burned it behind him so the English could not garrison it again. He took Loudoun Hill in May against de Valence, who had broken him at Methven the year before, and this time it was de Valence who left the field. By the end of the summer the Comyn earldoms in the north were burning. By 1309 he held his first parliament at St Andrews. By 1314 he stood on the high ground above the Bannock burn with thirty thousand English in the carse below him, and at the end of two days of midsummer the army of Edward II broke and ran for Dunbar, leaving a king of England's privy seal in Scottish hands.

THE CAGES COME DOWN

His sister Mary was taken from the cage at Roxburgh in 1310, after four years, and put under guard in a Cistercian house. His sister Christian was let out of her own cage at Berwick the same year. After Bannockburn he had English earls to trade. His wife Elizabeth and his daughter Marjorie were exchanged for the Earl of Hereford in October 1314, eight years after the day at Tain. Marjorie was eighteen by then and had been a prisoner since she was ten. She married Walter Stewart and bore a son, Robert, who would be the second king of that name and the first of the house of Stewart upon the throne of Scotland; she died of a fall from a horse near Paisley two years before her father.

In 1320 the barons of Scotland set their seals to a letter to Pope John at Avignon, written in the chancery of Arbroath by Bernard de Linton, which said for the king and for the realm that quamdiu centum ex nobis vivi remanserint, nunquam Anglorum dominio aliquatenus volumus subjugari. As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any terms be subjected to the lordship of the English. The excommunication was lifted. The independence of the kingdom was acknowledged at Northampton in 1328. The king died at Cardross in June of the following year of a long illness the chroniclers call leprosy and modern physicians doubt, and his heart was cut out at his own asking and carried by James Douglas towards Jerusalem; it got as far as Spain, where Douglas fell against the Moors at Teba, and was brought home and laid at Melrose. The body lies at Dunfermline.

THE WEB

The spider is not in Barbour, who wrote his Brus fifty years after the king's death and knew the men who had known him. The spider is not in Fordun, nor in Bower. The earliest written telling is by Walter Scott in Tales of a Grandfather in 1828, and Scott himself said he had it from the Bruces of Clackmannan as a thing handed down in the family. It may be true and unrecorded, it may be a later weaving onto the bare frame of the chronicle, it may be both at once in the way such things are. What is in the chronicles is the harder fact. A king at the end of a year that had killed three of his brothers and caged his sisters and taken his wife and his daughter went, in the dark of February, back into the field, and did not stop until the field was his. The thread, by whatever hand, was thrown across the gap. On the seventh attempt it held.

Above the choir at Melrose, in a leaden casket set under the chapter-house floor, lies the heart that was carried into Spain and brought back; on the cap of the casket is incised the plain Latin of its return.