Randolph’s division first came to the support of Edward Bruce, routing the rest of Gloucester’s force. The eager Highlanders gave no mercy, their dirks and swords and longpoles clashing into metal breastplates until the blood burst through the very armor itself. By the time Gloucester’s cavalry, without its leader, managed to retreat into the carse for a respite, already the pools and streams about Milton were stained with red.
And the battle had only begun.
From the beginning, the English position was hopeless. On foot, and with their longpoles advancing before them, the Scots gradually pushed the English horsemen farther and farther back into the Bannock.
Had the English met the advancing Scots with their vastly superior infantry, hand-to-hand combat would have hugely favored the southern invaders. But the fifteen thousand English foot soldiers found themselves hemmed in behind the cavalry, as Hereford had warned, trying to muster but confined along the bank of the Bannock. The English archers and Welsh longbowmen, who might have broken both offensive and defensive schiltroned positions, were also wedged in behind the cavalry and thus unable to enter the battle.
With the advantage all on their side, the Scots army continued its methodical advance.
Randoph and Douglas now marshaled their men into two mobile schiltrons each and began moving behind hundreds of long protruding pikes, slowly, inexorably over whatever terrain they encountered. Finally, to the left, Robert Bruce’s division formed into its three mobile ovals, completing the line of nine schiltrons stretching in an arched bow northward from the bridge.
As the morning advanced, the nine hedgehog schiltrons continued the slow push, compressing and engaging the English cavalry, whose only advantage lay in attack, into a gradual, protracted retreat back . . . back . . . with nowhere to go but into the waters of the Bannock Burn. The infantry, those vast numbers who might have conquered Scotland for King Edward, could not even see the Scots for their own horsemen.
Steadily the battle wore on. And as the English staggered rearward, still more bodies fell. All morning they fell, and blood flowed, and the grass of the Carse of Stirling turned color, and even the burn of the Bannock flowed red. It was a horrible sight, but more horrible to hear, for death was everywhere.
A nation was being born . . . but men were dying.
Two companies of King Edward’s archers at length managed to slip up alongside the Forth toward higher ground. From this position they hoped to inflict damage behind the Scots lines.
But the keen eye of Robert the Bruce spotted the maneuver. He sounded the attack for his own light cavalry, under Robert Keith, to sweep round from the left of the main force, intercept the archers, and turn them back.
Still forward drove the Scots schiltrons, compressing what remained of the English cavalry tightly back against its own frustrated but immobile infantry.
Time wore on, and exhaustion gradually began to pull at both Scots and English. Most of the horsemen had realized the uselessness of their mounts and by this time were on the ground, attempting to fight by hand. Terrified horses, left riderless, tried to escape. But everywhere men were in the way. Everywhere was bog. Nowhere could man or beast move.
Neither plan nor formation ordered the English steps. All was a chaos of mud and water and blood. Speared horses crushed the living. Frantic hooves inflicted as many wounds as Scottish swords. Fallen bodies lay everywhere. Still Bruce drove his men to beat the English back, butchering the foe as they went, hour after bloody hour.
Even now, the Scots were badly outnumbered. If somehow the English King could rally his men, and bring the infantry forward, Bruce might yet be defeated.
But in the confusion and chaos, neither Edward nor his generals were capable of altering the terrible momentum of defeat. Their men began to break rank. To the rear, and facing the threat of being crushed by the horses of its own cavalry, the infantry began to flee.
There was nowhere to go but back—back across the Bannock Burn.
Looking out beyond the fray, from upon the hill at New Park, the English commanders suddenly saw a wave of Scots reinforcements streaming down the hill toward the battle-carse. Their knighted horsemen saw it too.
Horses turned . . . and the English retreat was on.
“On them!” rose up great exultant cries from the schiltrons. “On them! They fail!”
For the English it was now every man and beast for himself. Seventeen thousand soldiers had encamped on the carse the previous night. Perhaps three or four thousand bodies lay dead. But the greatest carnage was yet to come.
Some of the infantry had already found a place to ford the burn, a deep stream even in summer. But now came the deluge of swarming thousands, scrambling over one another, horses trampling men, men’s boots burying their comrades under the brown-red water. The retreat became a chaos of frantic pandemonium. And behind the fleeing English came the Scots with their long spears, running now to slay all who remained.
And from the hill behind swarmed the reinforcements who had turned the tide—peasants and neighboring Scots men and women accompanying the priests and the porters and cooks and grooms of Bruce’s own army—running into the fray with banners of tartan tied to tree branches and cloth strips from poles, running with their knives and crude spears . . . every man and woman wanting to have a part of their nation’s fight for independence.
By now the burn was choked with the dead and trampled and dying. Men and horses crossed frantically over bridges made from the bodies of their fellows. Those who somehow got across made for Stirling or the surrounding farmland.
With five hundred mounted knights led by Pembroke, Edward II made good his escape toward Stirling Castle, to which Mowbray had managed to flee with a small band the previous day. But now the governor refused his King entry. Edward turned and hastily made for Linlithgow, then Dunbar, where he boarded a ship back for England. What remained of his army was left to find its own way south to the border and beyond.
What his father, the Hammer, might have done, Edward II had no idea. But he had had enough! Let the Scots have their nation—and their King!
He had been soundly defeated, and knew it, and was not inclined to press the point further.
Thirty-Three
In the aftermath of Bannockburn, Bruce’s troops plundered Edward’s forsaken camp and found booty of magnificent proportions—food, supplies, silver, gold, wine, religious vestments, pay-chests, armor, and weapons. It was almost enough, in one place, to elevate Robert Bruce’s new Scottish kingdom to the temporary status of a wealthy nation.
The earl of Hereford was captured attempting his escape. In a bargain with the English, he was later traded for Bruce’s wife and daughter and a number of other Scots prisoners.
Bruce’s throne was now secure, both within and without. Back in London, however, Edward’s familial pride again asserted itself, and he refused to acknowledge either Scotland’s independence or her King.
The years following Bannockburn offered opportunity for Robert Bruce to reward the loyalty of his followers.
After coming over to his cause from northeastern England, Adam de Gordon was chosen one of the King’s envoys to the pope in 1320, bearing to Rome the Declaration of Arbroath, which begged the intervention of John XXII in the ongoing attempts by the English King to subdue the freedom of the Scottish people. It was a noble yet defiant document, signed by nearly forty Scottish earls and barons, expressing in writing exactly what the battle of Bannockburn had achieved by the sword—the determination of the Scots to live as a free and independent people.
When Gordon returned from the Continent, he was given the lordship over one hundred twenty square miles of lands in Strathbogie, which lands had been forfeited by David of Strathbogie for his defection against the King. Adam de Gordon removed himself to his new estates and named the village which had grown up near the castle after his home in Berwickshire. The village in the heart of Strathbogie would forever after be known as Huntly.
Donal MacDarroch
continued in Bruce’s service. He married in 1324, and in gift the King made a landowner of him, adding the title of baronet along with the property. Donal continued as a member of the King’s personal guard.
In 1327, King Edward II of England was overthrown and murdered by his wife and her lover, then succeeded on the English throne by his son, Edward III. In the following year, a treaty of peace was signed between the two nations at Northampton. In signing it, the new Edward formally recognized Scotland as a sovereign land, and Robert Bruce as its rightful King.
Bruce had conquered.
Scotland was a free and independent nation!
Thirty-Four
Donal MacDarroch’s daughter, Helen, became a Gordon in 1347, when she married a certain John de Gordon, grandson of Robert Bruce’s envoy to the pope.
Thus it was that in time the grandson of the Bruce’s groom, a certain Cailean Darroch Gordon—whose descendents would eventually lead the Gordon strain to Cliffrose on the banks of the Spey—came into the world less than two miles from where Donal himself had grown up and where, as a lad, he had first run through the streets with the name of the earl of Carrick on his lips.
That had been a long time before when, as an old man, Donal recalled the incident.
“My mother hated the man,” he said to the young Gordon grandson on his knee. “But my father,” he said with a faraway sigh and happy smile, “my father knew a king when he saw one . . . and knew what an honor it was to serve him, to be known as the King’s man.”
Donal’s thoughts drifted back, many memories now filling his mind.
The world was a far different place now than then. Because of the man he and his father had served, the Scots had been a free people since that time, and subject to no King but their own.
The daring invaders, they fled or they died . . .
Thus bold, independent, unconquer’d, and free,
Her bright course of glory for ever shall fly,
For brave Caledonia immortal must be.4
1. From John Barbour, The Bruce, originally written in 1395. Translation 1964 by Archibald A. H. Douglas (William MacLellan & Co.)
2. Note that two different branches of the Comyn family figure in this story. John the Red Comyn was earl of Badenoch. His kinsman, John Comyn, earl of Buchan, was the descendent of the Comyn who had once been given the Bruce lands of Annandale by Edward I. Robert the Bruce contended against each of these John Comyns—Badenoch and Buchan, in turn.
3. Carse—extensive flat, rutted, wet alluvial land lying along the banks of a river.
4. From Robert Burns, “Caledonia.”
12
Climax in Whitehall
One
The fading sounds of the campaign still echoed in the ear of Andrew Trentham’s imagination as he stood overlooking the ancient battle plain above the burn known as the Bannock.
How long he remained transfixed, gazing back in his mind’s eye through the mists of history, he could not have said. As he relived the old story, and the part his own recently discovered ancestor had played in it, visions of momentous events pervaded his brain. Truly no place on earth at this moment could contain more symbolism and significance to him than the precise spot on which Andrew now stood. Everything around him spoke of heroic precedent, of men who had placed the stamp of their footprint upon the byways of history for their descendents to follow. Truly had the legacy of a proud people here converged in a pinnacle of triumph.
Cailean Darroch Gordon.
The very sound of the name in his ears as he whispered it sent a tingle down his spine—grandson of the great Donal MacDarroch, baronet, son of Fergus . . . groom to the King.
Andrew glanced down again at the guidebook he had been reading in the midst of his reflections, tracing the roots of the ancient families connected with Bruce during that time.
Here was the link he had so long sought between the Gordon name and the previous ancestry he had unraveled. It had taken Adam de Gordon’s friendship with Robert Bruce to bring the Gordon name into prominence.
He would have to return for another visit to Huntly and the great castle, the Peel of Strathbogie, which he now realized his ancestor, the twin Gachan son of Darroch, had helped build. There Robert Bruce had lain ill that Christmas season, and there Fergus MacDarroch had first set eyes on the man for whom he would give his life.
It was his own ancestor, Donal MacDarroch, who had ridden at Bruce’s side, who had held the reins of his horse and perhaps even his sword.
He was heir to the Gordon name, through Lady Fayth to Sandy and Culodina and Kendrick and Aileana Gordon all the way back to Cailean Darroch Gordon and, beyond him, to Donal MacDarroch and the twins Gachan and Beath . . . and Dallais and Breathran . . . and Fintenn and Maelchon and Foltlaig . . . and all the way back to Cruithne, ancient chief of the Caldonii.
He was heir to them all! Their heritage now had come to rest all these years later . . . on him!
He, Andrew Trentham, was a Scot. And he was proud to call himself a Scot! These were his people.
The amount of Scots blood in his veins may have been a relatively small percentage. But henceforth would he walk in that heritage proudly—whatever the amount.
He stood in the descent of those ancient men of valor who had fought for freedom and won independence for this kingdom they loved.
If he, Andrew Trentham, was to be worthy of such a legacy, worthy to follow in those footsteps, how could he do other than summon his own courage . . . and continue the battle so bravely begun?
He took in one final deep draft of the warm air, now understanding the message of the breezes blowing up from the valley of the burn.
History had been changed here once. Why should not this be the place for the beginnings of a new victory for a new generation of the descendents of Robert the Bruce . . . and the descendents of Cruithne and Foltlaig and Donal?
The quiet impulses of destiny were permeating through Andrew as he stood. He pulled out his worn volume of Burns, opened it, found the passage he was looking for, then began reading, as if the words were mingled with the drum cadence of soldiers marching.
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
On to victorie!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour:
See the front o’ battle lour,
See approach proud Edward’s power—
Chains and slaverie!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?—
Let him turn, and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s King and Law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa,’
Let him follow me!
The words echoed in Andrew’s ear as if Robert the Bruce were calling out through the centuries . . . to him! These were the words he had been meant to hear.
Let him follow . . . let him follow me!
He had felt the legend . . . and now realized that its mantle was passing to him.
The spirit of Bannockburn had accomplished its work.
Andrew knew what course lay before him. It was time for him to mount his own battle steed, face the approaching army of events, and stand for the freedom and independence of his people—the Scots!
The great King Robert was only a silent monument now, presiding, it was true, over his former realm with the strength of legend, yet powerless within himself any longer to move events.
That charge must rest with others. Now he, Andrew Trentham, had to step into the footprints left behind and carry the banner of history forward, not knowing what would be the result any more than Bruce could have been assured of his victory as he overlooked the English encampment.
He would face the challenge as Bruce had, resolved Andrew, and let his progeny decide the outcome. He would do what he had to do, confident in the knowledge that his cause was tr
ue . . . hoping posterity would judge him kindly.
Andrew turned, and with a determined look of purpose on his countenance and a swelling sense of rising triumph welling up within his heart, strode from the symbolic mount of battle.
It was time for him to carry out the destiny which had been borne to his shoulders by the winds of history.
Two
The scene in the House of Commons was alive with expectation. Clearly, something extraordinary was at hand.
No one would argue this, however, simply because the erudite British body was noisy. To do so would be as logical as heeding a Scottish sheepherder’s forecast of an uncommon event on the basis of his observation that rain was falling. Neither noise in the Commons nor rain in the Highlands could be considered worthy of note.
Today’s hubbub in the chamber, however, buzzed with a different quality. The weather report was uncertain, though some predicted a thunderstorm the likes of which Whitehall had rarely witnessed.
Murmurs had circulated throughout the Palace of Westminster all day. Whispered conversations, overheard tidbits, snatches of speculation, and last-minute machinations both by the Tories and the SNP had all mounted in number and intensity as the hour had approached. Increasingly, they centered on the still-missing Andrew Trentham.
When was he expected? No one knew for certain. There were rumors, of course, but most of it bordered on gossip rather than fact. Even Maurice Fraser-Smythe, his new deputy leader, and other LibDem colleagues had not heard from him in days.
Some of the more enterprising among the press had attempted to follow his movements since the speedy getaway from his home in Cumbria a week earlier and were making the most of their discoveries. One of the tabloids had it that he had finally succumbed to the pressure and had gone north to “find himself,” describing the journey in mystical religious phrases and likening his movements to a Tibetan pilgrimage. A photograph, inconclusive but purported to be of the LibDem leader, showed a man walking alone at the top of an unidentified rocky peak. Another of the papers claimed that the young MP had fallen in love and was moving about secretively in order to keep his clandestine love affair from the press. Someone claimed to have an informant on the staff of one of Edinburgh’s prestigious kilt and bagpipe makers, who possessed a story he would sell for a handsome price.
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