The heart of Bruce

A vow made on a deathbed travels by a stranger road than the one its maker imagined. It does not always reach the place named in the promise. Sometimes it is carried as far as a man can carry it, and is then thrown forward into the dust of a country the dying king never saw, so that the promise can finish its journey on the speed of a horse rather than the patience of pilgrimage.

THE OATH AT CARDROSS

Robert the Bruce lay at Cardross in June of 1329, sick of the long sickness chroniclers were too tactful to name, having outlived his enemies and most of his friends. He had taken the cross years before and never gone. The wars had kept him; Bannockburn had kept him; the slow stitching of a kingdom back together out of forfeited lands and broken oaths had kept him. He summoned the man who had kept him through all of it, Sir James Douglas, called by his own people the Good Sir James and by the English on the marches the Black Douglas, a name they used to frighten their children. The king asked that his heart be cut from his body when he died, embalmed, sealed, and carried on crusade in his place. Froissart, who wrote it down a generation later, has Douglas answer that he would do it gladly with all my heart. The king died on the seventh of June. The surgeons did their work. The casket was silver, the size of a fist, hung on a chain.

THE LONG ROAD SOUTH

Douglas sailed in the spring of 1330 out of Berwick with a company of knights and squires drawn from the houses he had ridden with on the marches for twenty years, William St Clair of Rosslyn, Robert and Walter Logan, Symon Locard who would carry the key of the casket and afterward change his name to Lockhart for it. They put in at Sluys. They were received in Flanders with the courtesy due to a king's heart and a famous captain. The plan was Jerusalem by way of any war the road offered, because a knight on crusade was a knight under arms, and the Holy Land was the far end of a long line of frontiers. Alfonso the Eleventh of Castile was on the Granadan frontier that summer, pressing a siege at the castle of Teba in the broken country west of Málaga. He needed horse. The Scots took service under him for the season. The casket was at Douglas's neck the whole way down, against the linen, warm from his own body. It weighed, he told one of the Logan boys on the road through Castile, no more than a loaf of bread, and more than anything he had ever worn.

THE MORNING AT TEBA

The twenty-fifth of August broke hot and dry over the Guadalteba. The ground was the colour of old straw, the rises bare, the watercourses cut deep into the rock. Othman ibn Abi'l-Ula had brought up the relieving Moorish horse out of Málaga in the night and lay along the ridge above the river. Alfonso set his line. The Scots were given the vanguard, as foreign knights often were on the frontier, both for the honour and because the Castilians knew their own ground and wanted the strangers to find it first. Douglas heard mass. He took the casket out from inside his surcoat and held it a moment in his open palm. He put it back. He mounted. The trumpets went. The two lines came forward across the broken ground, and the Moorish horse, in the manner of the frontier, broke and rode back as if in flight, drawing the Castilian centre after them in a long thin pursuit. Douglas went with the pursuit because his orders were to go with it. He went too far. He went over the rise and into the ground beyond, and when he looked behind him the Castilian line was no longer there. The Moorish horse had turned. The right wing was broken. A rider at his elbow, one of the Sinclair men, told him so in plain Scots.

A SECOND ON THE GUADALTEBA

He did the arithmetic without turning his head. Under a hundred Scots in the saddle around him, the closest of them men he had known since they were boys at Douglasdale; the standard of Othman behind him on the rise, which meant the Moors had closed the road back; in front, the line that had drawn him on, now wheeling to take him in the press. If he pulled the company out, half would die in the rout and the casket would go with the half that fell. If he pressed on, half would die in the press and the casket would go with whoever was left standing at the end of it. The arithmetic, as he saw it in that second sitting his horse on the broken ground, was the same arithmetic either way, and the only thing that changed between the two was the direction a man's body faced when the lance came in. The king had said carry me with you, and then carry me home. He had done the first part. The second part, here, with the Moorish horse already turning on his flank, was no longer something he could promise in a saddle and a sealed lead box. It was something he was going to have to do with the rest of the afternoon. He took the chain off his neck. He kissed the casket once on the lid where the silversmith in Berwick had punched the small cross. He did not say a thing to the men at his elbow, because the men at his elbow were watching him already and would understand what he did before he had finished doing it. He stood in his stirrups, wound his right arm back, and threw the casket out ahead of his horse, low and flat, into the dust of the ground the Moors were coming up. He said, in the clear voice he used on the marches when there was no time for a long order, the words the chroniclers afterwards set down in their own Latin and their own French and their own Scots: Now pass thou onward as thou wert wont, and Douglas will follow thee or die. Then he put his spurs in and rode in after it.

FORWARD

He went deeper than he should have. He had always gone deeper than he should have; it was the thing the English on the marches had learned about him over twenty years and had never found an answer to. The Moorish horse closed behind him and the fight became a knot of melee on rough stones, men fighting on foot among the legs of the horses, the dust so thick that men a lance length apart did not see one another. Douglas was unhorsed. William St Clair of Rosslyn and Robert Logan of Restalrig fought their way to the place where the casket lay in the dust and died standing over it. When the Castilians came back across the ground in the evening, with the day theirs after all, they found the body of Sir James Douglas with five wounds in it and the silver casket within reach of his open hand, the seal of lead unbroken, the heart inside it whole.

THE RETURN BY SEA

Alfonso the Eleventh sent the body home with the honours due a great captain of a friendly king. The bones were boiled from the flesh in the Castilian manner, so they could travel; the flesh was buried in Spain. The casket went north by ship through the autumn, up the long coast of Portugal and France and around into the North Sea, and was landed at Berwick and brought to Melrose Abbey, where the monks of the Cistercian house received it and laid the heart of Robert the Bruce under the chapter-house floor, where it lies. The bones of Sir James Douglas were brought to the kirk of St Bride at Douglas in Lanarkshire and laid in the choir under a stone effigy that is still there. Within a generation his nephew William, first Earl of Douglas, was riding under arms that bore a man's heart, crowned and winged, on a field of silver, and a single word for a motto, the word Douglas had said in the dust at Teba. Forward. The Black Douglases carried it and the Red Douglases carried it; the earls of Angus and of Morton, the dukes of Hamilton through the female line, the Lothian and Borders cadets, the Douglases of Drumlanrig who became Queensberry; all of them, for seven hundred years, under the heart on the shield.

A vow does not always finish where it was meant to finish. Sometimes the man entrusted with it understands, in a single second on a foreign field, that the only way to keep faith with the dying is to throw the keepsake forward and ride in after it. The casket came home. The bones came home. What stayed in Andalusia was the gesture itself, repeated since on a thousand bookplates and lintels and regimental colours, but first made on the twenty-fifth of August 1330 by a man who took a silver box off his own neck and threw it underhand into the dust of the Guadalteba so that a king's heart could go into a charge ahead of him one last time.