There are those I have maligned, or used for my own ends. Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, for one. All that is known, for certain, is that she existed, was married to the Earl of Buchan and, at one crucial moment in history, deserted marriage and party to side with her husband’s enemies, by becoming the hereditary MacDuff, Crowner of Scottish kings, and helping to legitimise Bruce.
She suffered for it, being subsequently captured and imprisoned in a cage on the walls of Berwick. Her later life is debatable, the best theory being that she was huckled off to a nunnery, her husband, the earl, having died.
The rest is my intepretation and invention – even her age is a confusion of accounts; her marital status is based on the evidence of her turning her back on her husband in favour of the Bruce faction. That and her lack of children told me much about her personal relationship with Buchan. Her supposed love affair with Bruce is mentioned as a rumour in some sources, probably scurriously anti-Bruce propaganda; her love affair with Hal of Herdmanston is pure invention.
Kirkpatrick is another invention and, though I have based him on the real Sir Roger Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, I have deliberately made him a fictional figure, since the real one crops up, irritatingly, on the English side far too often to be the firm Bruce henchman I needed for the story. Until, that is, he appeared on the scene to complete the murder of the Red Comyn in Greyfriars Church. That killing persuaded me of his darkly murderous character, though he is invention, as is his counterpart, the vicious Malise Bellejambe. Another villain, Malenfaunt, is a legitimate family name, but the saturnine and dubious Sir Robert does not exist.
Hal of Herdmanston, of course, is also fiction – though the Sientclers (or St Clairs, St Clares, Sinclairs or any other variant spelling you care to dream up) are not. They and Roslin became renowned, not least for Rosslyn Chapel – but Herdmanston, though it existed, is now no more than a rickle of unmarked stones in a field in Lothian. The other Sientclers are real enough, save for the Auld Templar, who rode into my head at the start of this tale and was just too magnificent to wave on.
Why the Sientclers at all? Because I needed a powerful Lothian family who could be opposed to the dominant force in the area, Patrick of Dunbar, who, with his son, was a committed supporter of the English right up until the aftermath of Bannockburn. Why Lothian? Because that was the battleground of the Wars of Independence, more so than any other part of Scotland.
There are other lights, lesser or greater, who may or may not be fictional – I hope I have written this well enough to leave the reader guessing most of the time.
Lastly – Edward I was never known as Hammer of the Scots in his lifetime. That name was given to him in the sixteenth century when it was carved on the unsubtle square slab of his tomb. Yet I prefer to believe that it did not spring, full-formed at the time, but came from all the whispers that had gone before.
The start of this is purportedly written by an unknown monk in February of 1329, three months before Robert the Bruce is finally acknowledged as king of Scots by the Pope – and four months before his death.
Think of this as stumbling across a cache of such hidden monkish scribblings which, when read by a flickering tallow candle, reveal fragments of lives lost both in time and legend.
If any interpretations or omissions jar – blow out the light and accept my apologies.
List of Characters
ADDAF the Welshman
Typical soldier of the period, raised from the lands only recently conquered by Edward I. The Welsh prowess with the bow and spear was already noted, but the true power of the former, the Crecy and Agincourt massed ranks, was a strategy still forming during the early Scottish Wars. Like all of the Welsh, Addaf’s loyalty to the English is tenuous.
BADENOCH,
Lord of Any one of two, father and son. Both called Sir John and both members of a powerful branch of the Comyn, they were favoured because, after John Balliol, they had a legitimate right to claim Scotland’s throne as good if not better than the Bruce one. The Badenochs were known as Red Comyn, because they adopted the same wheatsheaf heraldy as the Buchan Comyns, but on a red shield instead of blue. Sir John, second Lord of Badenoch, was also referred to as the Black Comyn because of his grim demeanour – a former Guardian of Scotland, he died in 1302, leaving the title to his son who was known as the Red Comyn. Despite being married to Joan de Valence, sister to Aymer De Valence, Earl of Pembroke, John the Red Comyn was a driving force in early resistance to Edward I – and truer to the Scots cause than Bruce at the time. He was murdered by Bruce and his men in Greyfriars Church, Dumfries in February 1306.
BALLIOL, King John
A member of one of the more powerful families of Scotland and backed by an equally powerful one, the Comyn, John Balliol was elected to the vacant throne of Scotland by a conclave of Scotland’s nobility and prelates, a conclave chaired by King Edward I of England. By the time the Scots discovered they had been duped by Edward, it was too late and subsequent attempts to exert their independence resulted in invasion, defeat and the stripping of the regalia of the kingdom – the Stone of Scone, the Black Rood and the Seal – and also the public humiliation of King John Balliol. His royal coat of arms was torn from his tunic, leaving him with the name that still resonates down through history – Toom Tabard, or Empty Coat. The Balliol and Comyn were arch-rivals of the Bruces.
BANGTAIL HOB
Fictional character. One of Hal of Herdmanston’s retainers, a typical Scots retinue fighter of the period. Mounted on garrons – small, shaggy ponies – they are armed with Jeddart staffs, a combination spear, pike and hook, and are not cavalry, but mounted infantry. The English counterparts are called ‘hobilars’ because they are mounted on small ponies known as ‘hobbies’ (hence the term hobby-horse). Bangtail and the likes of Tod’s Wattie, Ill Made Jock, Will Elliott and others are the common men of Lothian and the Border regions – the March – who formed the bulk and backbone of the armies on both sides.
BEK, Anthony, Bishop of Durham
Commander of one of the four knightly ‘hosts’ at Falkirk, he led some 400-plus heavy horse.
BELLEJAMBE, Malise
Fictional character, the Earl of Buchan’s sinister henchman and arch-rival of Kirkpatrick.
BISSET, Bartholomew
Fictional character. Notary clerk to Ormsby, Edward’s appointed justiciar of Scotland. His information leads Hal and others on the trail of the mysterious murderers of a master mason found near Douglas.
BRUCE, Robert
Any one of three. Robert, Earl of Carrick, later became King Robert I and is now known as Robert the Bruce. His father, also Robert, was Earl of Annandale (he renounced the titles of Carrick to his son when they fell to him because, under a technicality, he would have had to have sworn fealty to the Comyn for them and would not do that). Finally, there is Bruce’s grandfather, Robert, known as The Competitor from the way he assiduously pursued the Bruce rights to the throne of Scotland, passing the torch on to his grandson.
BUCHAN, Countess of
Isabel MacDuff, one of the powerful, though fragmented, ruling house of Fife. She acted as the official ‘crowner’ of Robert Bruce in 1306, a role always undertaken by a MacDuff of Fife – but the only other one was her younger brother, held captive in England. In performing this, she not only defied her husband but the entire Comyn and Balliol families. Captured later, she was imprisoned, with the agreement of her husband, in a cage hung on the walls of Berwick Castle.
BUCHAN, Earl of
A powerful Comyn magnate, (the Red Comyn Lord of Badenoch was his cousin) he was the bitterest opponent of the Bruces. Robert Bruce finally overcame the Comyn, following the death of Edward I and a slackening of English pressure, in a campaign that viciously scorched the lands of Buchan and Badenoch in a virtual Scottish ethnic cleansing of Bruce’s rivals. Defeated and demoralised, the earl fled south and died in 1308.
CLIFFORD, Sir Robert
One of Edward I’s trusted commanders, he and Sir Henry Percy were given the task of subduing the initial Scottish revolt and negotiated Bruce and other rebel Scots nobles back into the ‘king’s peace’ in 1297, but could not
