Robert Bruce - Death

Death

Robert I had been suffering from a serious illness from at least 1327. The Lanercost Chronicle and Scalacronica state that the king is said to have contracted leprosy and died of it. Jean Le Bel also stated that in 1327 the king was a victim of ‘la grosse maladie’, which is usually taken to mean leprosy. However, the ignorant use of the term ‘leprosy’ by fourteenth-century writers meant that almost any major skin disease might be called leprosy. The earliest mention of this illness is to be found in an original letter written by an eye-witness in Ulster at the time the king made a truce with Sir Henry Mandeville on 12 July 1327. The writer of this letter reported that Robert I was so feeble and struck down by illness that he would not live, ‘for he can scarcely move anything but his tongue’. Barbour writes of the king’s illness that ‘it began through a benumbing brought on by his cold lying’, during the months of wandering from 1306 to 1309. None of the Scottish accounts of his death hint at leprosy. It has been proposed that, alternatively, he may have suffered from tuberculosis, syphilis, motor neurone disease or a series of strokes. There does not seem to be any evidence as to what the king himself or his physicians believed his illness to be. Nor is there any evidence of an attempt in his last years to segregate the king in any way from the company of friends, family, courtiers or foreign diplomats.

In October 1328 the Pope finally lifted the interdict from Scotland and the excommunication of Robert I. The king’s last journey appears to have been a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Ninian at Whithorn; this was possibly in search of a miraculous cure, or to make his peace with God. With Moray by his side, Robert set off from his manor at Cardross for Tarbert on his ‘great ship’, thence to the Isle of Arran where he celebrated Christmas of 1328 at the hall of Glenkill near Lamlash, and thence he sailed to the mainland to visit his son and his bride, both mere children, now installed at Turnberry Castle, the head of the earldom of Carrick and once his own main residence. He journeyed overland, being carried on a litter, to Inch in Wigtownshire: houses were built there and supplies brought to that place, as though the king’s condition had deteriorated. At the end of March 1329 he was staying at Glenluce Abbey and at Monreith, from where St Ninian’s cave was visited. Early in April he arrived at the shrine of St Ninian at Whithorn. He fasted four or five days and prayed to the saint, before returning by sea to Cardross.

Barbour and other sources relate that Robert summoned his prelates and barons to his bedside for a final council at which he made copious gifts to religious houses, dispensed silver to religious foundations of various orders, so that they might pray for his soul, and repented of his failure to fulfil a vow to undertake a crusade to fight the ‘Saracens’ in the Holy Land. Robert’s final wish reflected conventional piety, and was perhaps intended to perpetuate his memory. After his death his heart was to be removed from his body and borne by a noble knight on a crusade against the Saracens and carried to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, before being brought back to Scotland:

"I will that as soone as I am trespassed out of this worlde that ye take my harte owte of my body, and embawme it, and take of my treasoure as ye shall thynke sufficient for that enterprise, both for your selfe and suche company as ye wyll take with you, and present my hart to the holy Sepulchre where as our Lorde laye, seyng my body can nat come there."

Robert died on 7 June 1329, at the Manor of Cardross, near Dumbarton He died utterly fulfilled, in that the goal of his lifetime’s struggle – untrammelled recognition of the Bruce right to the crown – had been realised, and confident that he was leaving the kingdom of Scotland safely in the hands of his most trusted lieutenant, Moray, until his infant son reached adulthood. Six days after his death, to complete his triumph still further, papal bulls were issued granting the privilege of unction at the coronation of future Kings of Scots.

The king’s body was embalmed and his sternum was sawn to allow extraction of the heart, which Sir James Douglas placed in a silver casket to be worn on a chain around his neck. The body was taken to Dunfermline Abbey, and Robert I was interred in what was then the very centre of the abbey, beneath the high altar, and beside his queen. The king’s tomb was carved in Paris by Thomas of Chartres from alabaster brought from England and was decorated with gold leaf. The tomb was transported to Dunfermline via Bruges and was erected over the king’s grave in the autumn of 1330. Ten alabaster fragments from the tomb are on display in the National Museum of Scotland and traces of gilding still remain on some of them.

When a projected international crusade failed to materialise, Douglas and his company sailed to Spain where Alfonso XI of Castile was mounting a campaign against the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Douglas was killed in battle during the siege of Teba in August 1330 while fulfilling his promise. His body and the casket containing the embalmed heart were found together upon the field. They were both conveyed back to Scotland by Sir William Keith of Galston. In accordance with Bruce's written request, the heart was buried at Melrose Abbey in Roxburghshire. In 1920, the heart was discovered by archaeologists and was reburied, but the location was not marked. In 1996, a casket was unearthed during construction work. Scientific study by AOC archaeologists in Edinburgh, demonstrated that it did indeed contain human tissue and it was of appropriate age. It was reburied in Melrose Abbey in 1998, pursuant to the dying wishes of the King.