rman knight who came over with
the Conqueror. His son, Robert, was one of those hated foreign
adventurers at the Court of David I., and received from that King a
large grant and the Lordship of Annandale. The grandson of this first
Earl of Annandale married Isabel, the granddaughter of David I., and so
it was that the house of Bruce came into the line of royal succession.
It was Robert, the son of Isabel, who competed with Baliol for the
throne of Scotland.

Robert Bruce, who stands forth as the greatest character in Scottish
history, was twelve years old when his grandfather was defeated by
Baliol in this competition. No family in the vassal kingdom was more
trusted by England's King, nor more friendly to his pretensions. The
young Robert's father had accompanied King Edward to Palestine in his
own youth, and he himself was being trained at the English Court. His
English mother had large estates in England, and, in fact there was
everything to bind him to the King's cause. He and his father, {265}
and the High Steward of Scotland, together with other Scottish-Norman
nobles, had been with the King in his triumphal march through Scotland
when Baliol was dethroned, and at the time of the rising under Wallace,
Robert Bruce had not one thing in common with him or his cause. And as
for the people in the Highlands, if he ever thought of them at all, it
was as troublesome malcontents, who needed to be ruled with a strong
hand. Wallace was in rebellion against an established authority, to
which all his own antecedents reconciled him. How the change was
wrought, how his bold and ardent spirit came to its final resolve, we
can only surmise. Was it through a complicated struggle of forces, in
which ambition played the greatest part? Or did the splendid heroism
of Wallace, and the spirit it evoked in the people, awaken a slumbering
patriotism in his own romantic soul? Or was it the prescience of a
leader and statesman, who saw in this newly developed popular force an
opportunity for a double triumph, the emancipation of Scotland, and the
realization of his own kingship?

Whatever the process, a change was going {266} on in his soul. He
wavered, sometimes inclining to the party of Wallace, and sometimes to
that of the King, until the year 1304. In that year, the very one in
which Wallace died, he made a secret compact with the Bishop of
Lamberton, pledging mutual help against any opponents. While at the
Court of Edw