The author and a castle
Who was this ‘Braveheart’ chap that all the Royal Mile tourists are on about, anyway? While we seem to have forgiven the conspicuous absence of Stirling Bridge in Mel Gibson’s depiction of the eponymous battle of 1297, surely they at least bothered to pin the right label on its protagonist.
As a North American immigrant, I can assure you that ‘William Wallace = Braveheart’ marks the beginning and end of what the vast majority of folk on that side of the pond know about the title and the man behind it. Of course, as is so often the case with Scottish history, the truth weaves a far more intoxicating tale.
Technically speaking, Braveheart was a dried up heart inside a silver casket, hung around the neck of Sir James Douglas and baking in the Spanish sun circa 1330. This was not just any heart though – it was nothing less than the heart of the recently deceased Robert de Bruce, King of Scots and champion of the early Wars of Independence. When Bruce felt his final hours approaching, he asked his closest peers to nominate a man among them to carry his heart to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on crusade. Douglas was the unanimous outcry, and no wonder. The English even had a bogeyman rhyme about him for the kids, and the man was still walking about:
Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye,
Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye,
The Black Douglas shall not get ye
After all, Douglas had been wreaking havoc with Bruce since nearly the beginning. He stood with Bruce during the dark days of Methven and Dalrigh in 1306, orchestrated the famous ‘Douglas Larder’ raid to recapture Douglas Castle, waged a terrifically effective campaign of raids into Northumbria and Cumbria, and stood triumphant at Bannockburn in 1314. Not a bad CV.
Douglas couldn’t make it to Jerusalem, so instead he sailed with a retinue of hand-picked Scots to assist Alfonso XI of Castile in the crusade against the Moors. They met the Moorish army near the Castillo della Estrada between Seville and Granada, with the famous Scot leading a contingent. Fatefully, a command got lost in translation and Douglas led his men into the thick of the Moorish infantry line before the rest of the crusaders could arrange themselves to support them. Pushing through to safety, Douglas became hemmed in and was without hope of escape.
This is where things get too good to be true. Removing the silver casket containing the heart of his king and old friend from his neck, Douglas – presumably raising the visor of his helm for dramatic effect – cast it into the advancing enemy and let cry, ‘Go forward, brave heart, and I will follow or die!’. When the Scots scoured the field after the battle, they found Douglas’ tattered body encircled by a ring of dead Moors, with the casket underneath. Someone phone Gerard Butler, I have a script for him.
The specifics vary depending on who you ask – mention of the ‘brave heart’ incident is made in Barbour’s ‘The Brus’ in 1375, but it seems to be added by a later hand. Walter Scott reinforced the romantic image of Douglas and the heart in his ‘Tales of a Grandfather’ (if there was ever the Romantic equivalent of a Midas Touch, Scott possessed it). But that’s okay, I’ve learned to take my Scottish folk heroes with a pinch of salt – like their porridge, would they have had it any other way?
Even if it never happened, the throwing of the heart is, for me, really about the extraordinary camaraderie and commitment that these individuals would have developed in their struggle to free their nation and protect the ones they loved. As in the case of Robert the Bruce, whose brothers were executed and whose wife, two sisters and daughter were locked in cages by Edward I, the latter of these goals often had tragic results that would have reinforced him and his followers’ stake in each other. As far as I’m concerned, even if Douglas never threw the heart, he didn’t have to; he had been following it into peril since the first, if not always quite so poetically.
I had just finished reading David Ross’s ‘On the Trail of Robert the Bruce’ and was captivated by the story of Douglas bearing Bruce’s heart; seeing the Douglas heart emblazoned above the postern gate on the outer wall with undeniable pride was just enough to make me feel a part of it.
Having been to more than 50 castles and fortifications, all of which are fantastic in their own right, I can nonetheless count on one hand the number of moments where I’ve got shivers up my spine from sheer inspiration – catching first sight of incomparable Dunnottar on its rocky promontory, standing atop the vertigo-inducing height of Tantallon’s curtain wall (another Douglas stronghold), watching Duart come into view from the deck of the Oban to Craignure ferry – and this one ranks with the best of them. Have a read about Douglas’ Andalucian adventure in the postscript of Ross’s book (the rest is quite good, too), take the trip to south Lanarkshire, and find the heart – I cannot think of a better way for an amateur historian to spend a day.
So who, after all that, is Braveheart? It’s certainly not William Wallace, deceased 24 years before Bruce’s own passing. That leaves Bruce himself, the inspiration for such devotion, and Good Sir Douglas, whose last moments inspired the creativity of later writers. For that matter, you could say that Braveheart is actually the intellectual product of John Barbour or Walter Scott, minters of the moniker. My money’s on Douglas, how about yours?
David Weinczok works with the National Trust for Scotland and is writing a user-friendly book on the history and curiosities of Scotland’s castles. He would love to hear your take or any questions, so get in touch at dcweinczok@gmail.com
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