109 



ROBERT I. (OF SCOTLAND). 



ROBERT II. (OF SCOTLAND). 



110 



shrines in France, and went to Rome in 1019 to visit the tombs of the 

 Apostles; perhaps also, as some have supposed, with- the view of 

 inducing the pope to annul his marriage with Constance, and to 

 sanction his reunion with his first wife, Bertha. 



He persecuted the Jews, and procured, in a council held in 1022, at 

 Orleans, the condemnation of some priests charged with heresy, which 

 was described as ' Gnosticism,' or ' Manicheism,' but the true character 

 of which it is not easy now to ascertain. They were brought to the 

 stake at Orleans, and Constance, with characteristic ferocity, struck 

 out the eye of ono of the sufferers, formerly her own confessor, as he 

 passed her in the way to execution. 



However Robert may have been led astray by the superstitious and 

 persecuting spirit of the age, his moderation and love of peace were 

 exemplary. He mediated between the Duke of Normandy and the 

 Count of Chartre?, who were engaged in hostilities, and obtained the 

 confidence of the Emperor Henry II., who visited him in his camp 

 in 1023. On the death of this emperor he refused, both for himself 

 and his son, the crown of Italy, which was offered him by the mal- 

 contents of that country. 



His eldest son, Hugues, to whom he had given the title of king 

 in 1022, provoked by the cruelty of his mother, broke out into rebel- 

 lion, but being taken and delivered up to the king, was pardoned. 

 Hugues died however soon after (1026). Henry, his next son, was 

 then associated with him in the royal title, in spite of the endeavours 

 of Constance, who espoused the interest of Robert, the third son. 

 Robert took up arms against his father, but his rebellion was sup- 

 pressed. Shortly after quiet was restored King Robert died at Mclun, 

 in 1031, sincerely regretted, as it appears, by his subjects. He was 

 buried at St. Denis. 



ROBERT I., King of Scotland. [BRUCE, ROBERT.] 



ROBERT II., King of Scotland, the first of the House of Stewart 

 who reigned in that country, was born on the 2nd of March 1316, and 

 was the only child of Walter, the Stewart of Scotland, and his wife 

 Marjory, daughter of King Robert Bruce, to whom he had been 

 married the preceding year. All that is known of the House of 

 Stewart previous to this date is, that a Walter, son of Alan, was 

 Stewart or Dapifer of Scotland in the reigns of David I. and Mal- 

 colm IV. ; that he was succeeded in that hiiih office by his son Alan; 

 this Alan by his son Walter ; Walter by his son Alexander, who was 

 one of the regents appointed during the minority of Alexander III., 

 and who, in 1263, commanded the Scottish army at the battle of 

 Largs ; Alexander, by his son James, who was regent after the death 

 of Alexander III., and died in 1309 at the age of sixty-six, and he, 

 by his son Walter, the father of Robert II. This Walter was one of 

 the commanders of the Scottish army at the battle of Bannockburn ; 

 and early in the following year, 1315, Bruce gave him in marriage his 

 daughter and then only child Marjory, upon whom, provided she 

 should marry with the consent of her father, or, after his death, with 

 the consent of the majority of the community (or states) of the king- 

 dom, the crown had been settled, failing the heirs male of her father 

 and of his brother Edward, in a parliament held at Ayr on the 26th 

 of April in that same year. Robert was the only issue of this mar- 

 riage. Lord Hailes (' Annals of Scotland,' vol. ii., Appendix i.) has 

 sufficiently refuted the tradition that Marjory was killed by being 

 thrown from her horse when big with child, and that Robert was 

 brought into the world by the Csesarean operation ; but it appears 

 that she died either in giving birth to the infant or soon after her 

 delivery. Her husband died on the 9th of April 1326, after having 

 had another son, Sir John Stewart of Railstone, by a second marriage 

 with a sister of Graham of Abercorn. 



Bruce was succeeded by his son David II., born of a second mar- 

 riage, 5th of March 1324 ; and his unfortunate reign marked by a 

 long minority and a succession of regencies, during which the king- 

 dom was overrun by Edward Balliol and his ally Edward III., and 

 David was obliged to make his escape to France, and after that by the 

 defeat of Neville's Cross, when David was taken prisoner by the 

 English fills up the interval from 1329 to 1371. Robert, the Stewart, 

 acted a principal part throughout this reign, and was as much dis- 

 tinguished by his personal merits and conduct as by his high rank. 

 While yet only a youth of sixteen, he commanded the second division 

 of the Scottis-h army at the decisive battle of Halidon, fought, and 

 lost by the Scots, 19th of July 1333 ; and after that fatal day he was 

 one of the first to uplift again the standard of the national inde- 

 pendence. In 1334, he and the Earl of Moray assumed the regency 

 of the kingdom, and, although not formally invested with the govern- 

 ment by any assembly of the states, were recognised by the people as 

 entitled, in the infancy and exile of the king, to wield all the authority 

 of the crown. Fordun's description of the Stewart at this time, as 

 Lord Hailes translates the passage, is as follows : " He was a comely 

 youth, tall and robust, modest, liberal, gay, and courteous; and, for 

 the innate sweetness of his disposition, generally beloved by true- 

 hearted Scotsmen." In a subsequent passage however he hints that 

 his conduct as yet was not always regulated by absolute wisdom, 

 " qui tune non magna regebatur sapientia." On the Earl of Moray 

 being taken prisoner by the English the following year, the Stewart, 

 in concert with the Earl of Athol, concluded with Edward III., on 

 the 18th of August 1335, the treaty of Perth, which was in fact a 

 submission, though upon honourable conditions, to the English king. 



After this we hear no more of the Stewart till 1338, when, upon the 

 death of the regent, Sir Andrew Moray, we find him again appointed 

 to that supreme office. His resumption of the government was soon 

 followed by the expulsion of the English from all their strongholds to 

 the north of the Forth, and hid regency was terminated by the return 

 of the king, on the 4th of May 1341. In 1346, after the capture of 

 the king at the battle of Neville's Cross, where he commanded the 

 left wing of the Scottish army, in conjunction with the Earl of March, 

 the Stewart was again elected regent, or ' locum tenens serenissirni 

 principis David,' &c., and he held this poet till the release of David, 

 in 1357, governing the country, it is affirmed, with remarkable pru- 

 dence and ability in the difficult circumstances in which he was 

 placed. In 1359 the earldom of Strathearn was conferred upon him 

 by the king. When David, in 1363, astonished the nation by pro- 

 posing to a parliament, held at Scone, that in the event of his dying 

 without issue, Lionel, duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., should 

 be chosen king, the Stewart, whose interests, as well as his patriotic 

 prejudices, this project so nearly touched, was one of the foremost of 

 those who adopted instant measures to defeat it. He entered into an 

 association with the earls of March and Douglas, and with his own 

 sons, and he even appears to have taken up arms with the avowed 

 determination of driving the king from the throne, if he persisted in 

 bis purpose. David however found means, without making any 

 formal concession, to put down this threatened resistance ; and, upon 

 a general amnesty being granted, the Stewart, on the 14th of May 

 1363, renewed his oath of fealty, and entered into a bond to abstain 

 from all such confederacies in time coming, on pain of forfeiting for 

 ever all right and title to the crown, as well as to his private in- 

 heritances. Soon after this David, who had lost his first wife, 

 Joanna, a daughter of Edward II., in the preceding year, contracted 

 a second marriage with Margaret Logan : but she also bore him no 

 children ; indeed he had separated from her some time before his 

 death, which took place on the 22nd of February 1371. 



Upon this event the states of the kingdom immediately assembled 

 at Linlithgow; and after a slight opposition on the part of the Earl of 

 Douglas, who conceived that he had himself a claim to the vacant 

 dignity, as representing the families both of Comyn and Balliol, the 

 Stewart was unanimously declared king, by the title of Robert II. 

 He was crowned at Scone, on the 26th of March, and next day, 

 according to custom, received the homage of the bishops and barons, 

 seated on the moot-hill there. 



Robert II., when he thus succeeded to the throne, was somewhat 

 peculiarly situated in regard to his domestic relations ; and the point 

 demands particular notice, inasmuch as a controversy has thence 

 arisen on the question of the legitimacy of the Stuarts, which con- 

 tinued to be agitated, both among antiquaries and political writers, 

 down to the middle of the last century. His first wife was Elizabeth, 

 daughter of Sir Adam Mure, of Rowallan ; but the family he had by 

 her, consisting of four sons and six daughters, had all been born before 

 their marriage. In ordinary circumstances a subsequent marriage 

 might probably, in Scotland, even at this early date, have legitimated 

 these children, at least in the eye of the Church, although their 

 right of civil succession, and especially of succession to the crown, 

 might not have been in that way so certainly established ; but there 

 was a very awkward speciality in the present case. Robert and 

 Elizabeth Mure had been living not only in concubinage, but in what 

 the Church considered incest, for they were related, it seems, in the 

 fourth degree. Nay, to make matters worse, the Stewart, before his 

 acquaintance with Elizabeth Mure, had been connected in the same 

 way with Isabella Boutelier, who was related to her in the third 

 degree ; and this, according to the canonical doctrine, placed him in a 

 relationship by affinity of the same, that is, of the third degree, to 

 Elizabeth Mure. His marriage in any circumstances therefore with 

 that lady, would have demanded a papal dispensation ; but it was far 

 from being universally admitted that even the authority of the pope 

 could establish the legitimacy of children born in a connection which 

 thus openly violated and set at defiance what was believed to be the 

 divine law. It is obvious that a dispensation to persons within the 

 prohibited degrees to marry is an exercise of prerogative on the part 

 of the head of the Church much inferior to the legitimisation of the 

 children already produced from an incestuous connection. So strongly 

 in the present case does this appear to have been felt, that the pope's 

 dispensation actually proceeds upon the monstrous supposition that 

 Robert and his wife Elizabeth Mure, long as they had lived together, 

 had been all the while ignorant of their relationship, and on that 

 manifestly fictitious ground alone does his holiness profess to sanction 

 their marriage, and to pronounce the legitimacy of their children. 

 But the dispensation by no means satisfied the popular feeling of the 

 time ; and there is reason to believe that the supposed defect in the 

 right of the reigning family materially contributed in exciting and 

 sustaining some of the most formidable of the insurrectionary 

 attempts which convulsed the Scottish kingdom in the course of the 

 succeeding century. Robert, after the death of Elizabeth Mure, had 

 married Euphemia Ross, a daughter of the Earl of Ross, by whom he 

 had two more sons and four daughter's, also all born when he came to 

 the crown. Thus circumstanced, in 1371, immediately after his acces- 

 sion, he got the states to pass an act recognising John, earl of Carrick his 

 eldest son by Elizabeth Mure, as his successor ; and, still better to secure 



