The death of Edward the First arrested only for a moment the advance of his army to the north.  The Earl of Pembroke led it across the border, and found himself master of the country without a blow.  Bruce’s career became that of a desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he found shelter were bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be king of their foes in the Lowlands.  It was this adversity that transformed the murderer of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation’s cause.  Strong and of commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships of his career with a courage and hopefulness that never failed.  In the legends that clustered round his name we see him listening in Highland glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass single-handed against a crowd of savage clansmen.  Sometimes the small band which clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunting and fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their enemies tracked them to their lair.  Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags.  Little by little, however, the dark sky cleared.  The English pressure relaxed.  James Douglas, the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king’s cause.  Once he surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate.  Then he staved in the wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and wood-pile on fire.

[Sidenote:  Edward the Second]

A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the revival of the country went steadily on.  Pembroke and the English forces were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between the new king and his baronage.  The moral purpose which had raised his father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy, idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets.  He had no love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses added to the Charter.  The son’s purpose was the same, that of throwing off what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly dependent on the Crown.  We have already noticed the change by which the “clerks of the King’s chapel,” who had been the ministers of arbitrary government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council.