3 - ‘A traitor to the kingdom’: Robert Bruce and the Use of Treason in Fourteenth-Century Scotland

Summary

IN early August 1320, in a meeting of the Scottish parliament, a group of nobles was condemned for conspiring against their king, Robert Bruce. According to a near-contemporary chronicle, their actions were judged to be lese majesty, ‘the crime which surpasses all other crimes,’ plotting the death or downfall of one's own king. By conspiring against King Robert, these nobles had committed high treason and now faced the full penalty of the horrific death reserved for traitors. However, 14 years earlier in the late summer of 1306 it had been Bruce who was denounced as a traitor. Robert's seizure of the Scottish throne and the killing of his rival, John Comyn, which preceded it, were widely condemned as unforgiveable betrayals of both earthly laws and moral precepts. ‘The guilt of homicide and the stain of treason’ justified the brutal treatment of Bruce's family and followers by Edward I of England, a fate which Robert himself would have shared had he been captured. The wars over Scotland between 1296 and 1357 were struggles to claim and exercise authority over the kingdom. Charges of treason provided a way of signalling the illegitimacy of resistance to a ruler, stigmatising opposition, and providing the means to dispossess and eliminate those who acted against their royal lord. Their effectiveness was bound up with prevailing political conditions as much as fixed legal principles. Once he had secured control of the kingdom, the man accused of treason could bring the same charge against his own opponents. Moreover, from the late thirteenth century, treason law developed as a way of framing sovereignty. It defined the scope of royal authority by criminalising those accused of harming it within the territory and legal framework of the realm. In a struggle which centred on the status of Scotland and its rulers, treason was a central issue and a legal weapon.

If treason represented an element in the struggle to control Scotland, over a longer period and more widely it was a measure of relations between rulers and subjects and the right of the latter to resist their prince. In Scottish historiography there is an ongoing debate about the nature of this relationship during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.