Kings & Queens of Scotland by Richard Oram

Kings & Queens of Scotland by Richard Oram

Author:Richard Oram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Kings & Queens of Scotland
ISBN: 9780752470993
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-09-29T16:00:00+00:00


Part Four

The House of Stewart 1371–1625

19

Robert II Stewart 1371–1390

Robert the Steward was fifty-five when he unexpectedly became king. Like John Balliol, his rule was plagued from the start by the fact that many powerful Scottish nobles continued to view Robert as their equal or less. Yet even without this problem, Robert would have offered very different prospects as king after his east-coast, anglophile, authoritarian and chivalric uncle, David II.

Robert was probably born in early 1316, about a year after the marriage in April 1315 of his father, Walter, the 6th High Steward of Scotland, to the eldest daughter of Robert I, Marjorie Bruce (who died after a fall from her horse, probably in 1317). But Robert grew up as a west-coast magnate on the Stewart family lands in Renfrew, Clydeside and the Gaelic-speaking isle of Bute, and was perhaps fostered out as a child to an Isles or Argyll family. His household and private faith would remain centred on this region throughout much of his life.

There is no doubt, however, that Robert was, even in adolescence, an extremely ambitious and capable politician. If all went well for the Bruce dynasty, Robert would remain simply the next head of his family to take up the now purely honorary title of High Steward of Scotland, a royal household role that his Breton ancestors (the FitzAlans) had been given by David I (1124–53). But Robert I’s line was by no means secure. Thus Robert Stewart’s importance in the kingdom had been inflated from the first.

Between Edward Bruce’s death in 1318 and the birth of a royal son in 1324, the infant Robert Stewart was recognised as heir to the throne; the 1326 parliamentary Act of Succession recognised him as second behind prince David. With this role came extensive new estates in Knapdale (Argyll), the Lothians and Roxburghshire. Robert may also have been promised the possible inheritance of the earldom of Fife. That made the new Steward (after the death of his father on 9 April 1327) the most important regional magnate of Scotland alongside the key Bruce allies, the Randolphs and the Douglases. So when Edward Balliol and England threatened through war to deprive Robert Stewart of his inheritance he would play a crucial part in the recovery of Bruce Scotland. On 19 July 1333 – aged just sixteen – he led a division of his landed followers against Edward III in the army of Guardian Archibald Douglas at the defeat of Halidon Hill. Then in 1334 Robert only narrowly escaped by boat to Dumbarton Castle as his western lands were overrun by his Anglo-Balliol enemies. But while David was taken into exile in France, Robert stayed to fight and, teaming up with the Campbells of Lochawe, waged a campaign to recover castles and land around the Clyde and in southwest Scotland.

At this stage, a fifteenth-century Scottish chronicler describes Robert as winning the loyalty of many Scots:‘a young man of attractive appearance above the sons of men, broad and tall in physique, kind to everyone, and modest, generous, cheerful and honest.



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