The Declaration of Arbroath

1. Context and purpose

By 1320 Scotland's war for survival was six years past its most famous victory yet nowhere near settled. As Card #8 established, Bannockburn (1314) did not end the war: Edward II still refused to renounce his claim to overlordship of Scotland, and the papacy — then resident at Avignon — refused to recognise Robert I as a lawful king. Bruce had been excommunicated after murdering John Comyn before the altar of the Greyfriars church at Dumfries in 1306; the sentence had been reaffirmed, and after the Scots defied a papally demanded truce, John XXII moved to excommunicate Robert and his bishops again in June 1320.

The Declaration was one of a coordinated set of three letters despatched to Avignon in the spring of 1320 — one from the barons and "community of the realm" (the surviving document), one from King Robert himself, and one from four Scottish bishops — all making similar points. Only the barons' letter survives. Its aims were specific and diplomatic: to have the Pope recognise Scotland as an ancient, independent kingdom; to accept Bruce as its rightful king and lift his excommunication; and to press Edward II to abandon his wars. It even offered an incentive attuned to papal priorities — that a Scotland at peace could join a crusade to the Holy Land. Robert I was also under domestic pressure: with his brother Edward Bruce dead in Ireland (1318) and only the infant Robert Stewart as heir, some Scottish nobles were quietly weighing the rival claim of Edward Balliol, son of the deposed King John Balliol.

2. Authorship and the seals

The drafting is traditionally attributed to Bernard, Abbot of Arbroath and Chancellor of Scotland (often called Bernard de Linton, though modern scholarship identifies him more securely as Bernard of Kilwinning). As chancellor he would have known the text intimately, and it was sent from his abbey — but the attribution remains probable rather than proven. The Scottish History Society's learning resource is blunt: "There is no conclusive proof for the author's identity." Alexander Kinninmonth, one of the envoys who carried the letter to Avignon, has also been suggested. A.A.M. Duncan's study showed the letter's main points were likely settled by the king and council at Newbattle in March 1320, then engrossed and sealed — an "impressive government-led effort," not the spontaneous act of a great assembly.

The document names 39 men — 8 earls and 31 barons — followed by the crucial collective framing: "and the other barons and freeholders and the whole community of the realm of Scotland." Medieval documents were authenticated by wax seals rather than signatures; seals were gathered over subsequent weeks, with nobles sending in their seal-matrices to be appended, and clerks writing names onto the seal-tags. Not everyone named necessarily sealed it, and some seals present are of men not named in the text. According to National Records of Scotland, the document "was sent in the names of eight earls and 31 barons," and "Perhaps as many as 50 seals might once have been attached"; 19 seals survive today, "of what might have been 50 originally, and many are in poor condition," hanging on tags at the foot of the parchment. Tellingly, four men named at the head of the Declaration were within months implicated in the Soules Conspiracy against Bruce — a reminder that the "community" was less united than the ringing prose implies.

3. The famous "freedom" passage

The authoritative English translation held by National Records of Scotland (the revised Fergusson/Borthwick text) renders the celebrated lines: "Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."

Popular culture frequently softens "subjected to the lordship of the English" into "brought under English rule," and detaches the "freedom alone" sentence from its context as a plea to the Pope. The accurate meaning is a collective refusal of English lordship (overlordship/suzerainty), framed within a formal supplication to the papacy — not a free-standing declaration of independence in the modern sense. It is also not original: as G.W.S. Barrow and Edward J. Cowan showed, the passage is stitched together, nearly word for word, from the Roman historian Sallust's Bellum Catilinae ("But we ask neither for power nor for riches… but only for freedom, which no true man gives up except with his life"). This does not diminish its power, but it locates the Declaration firmly in the learned Latin rhetorical tradition of its clerical drafters.

4. The "right to remove the king" clause examined carefully

The deposition clause — that if Robert should submit to England, the community would "drive him out as our enemy… and make some other man… our King" — is genuinely striking, and historians agree it carries constitutional content. But its meaning is contested, and it is easy to overstate. Three broad readings exist:

A constitutional statement (Cowan): the first governmental statement in Europe of "contractual" kingship in its full sense — that a king who fails his people may be deposed by the barons in the name of the community. Cowan links this to contemporary theory (John of Paris, 1302) and to Bruce's own 1306 seizure of the throne from the failed John Balliol. A rhetorical flourish (Simpson): one of a recognised genre of letters to the Pope in which a king's barons claim they will not permit him to obey papal demands — a dramatic pose written for the Pope's benefit, not a domestic constitutional charter. Kings John and Edward I of England and Philip II of France produced comparable letters. A coded political weapon (Broun, Goldstein/Grant): aimed at the Balliol threat — asserting that even if the Bruce line died out, the cause of independence would continue under "some other man," and that a king (like Edward Balliol) who depended on English support would forfeit the crown.

Part of the "contractual kingship" argument rests on the claim that the Scots had already removed a king, John Balliol, from power in 1295. Fiona Watson cautions that this precedent is weaker than it looks. The 1295 "deposition" is reported only by English chroniclers, no medieval Scottish chronicler mentions it, and she finds no sustained discussion in the Scottish chronicles of a king acting against the community's will until the Book of Pluscarden (begun 1478), written as James III's own troubles unfolded. She concludes that historians keen to show Scotland's precocious constitutionalism "have gone too far".

The essential caution — shared by Barrow, Duncan, Broun and Cowan — is against reading modern democracy backwards into a feudal document. The "community of the realm" meant, in Barrow's words, "in practice, no doubt, nobles, prelates and substantial freeholders, but in theory the entire Scottish nation." Many people in 1320 Scotland were unfree and had no part in this "freedom." The clause is a remarkable medieval statement of conditional, communal kingship — but it is not a charter of popular democracy, and later patriotic retellings have often blurred that distinction.

5. Possible models and influences: the Irish Remonstrance and classical rhetoric

The Declaration did not appear in a vacuum. Just three years earlier, the Irish Remonstrance of 1317 — sent by Donal O'Neill (Domhnall Ó Néill), king of Tír Eoghain, and allied Irish lords to the same Pope John XXII — made broadly comparable arguments against English overlordship, invoked an ancient origin-legend (the Milesian descent from Spain), catalogued English atrocities, and pledged perpetual resistance. The Remonstrance was bound up with the Bruce brothers' Irish campaign (Edward Bruce had been made High King in 1315). Because the Remonstrance circulated in Scotland and survives only in Scottish manuscripts (Fordun/Bower's Scotichronicon), some scholars have argued it served as a "prototype" or model for the Declaration, evidence of Irish–Scottish cooperation against England. This is a plausible and increasingly discussed connection, but it should be presented as a scholarly argument rather than a settled fact.

The classical influence is better established: the freedom clause's dependence on Sallust is demonstrable, and the origin-myth material (the journey from "Greater Scythia," the Pillars of Hercules, the destruction of the Picts, the "113 kings" of unbroken royal line) draws on earlier sources including Henry of Huntingdon and Scottish king-lists — much of it, as the Scottish History Society notes wryly, "in parts totally unhistorical."

The origin story has a sharper political edge than it first appears. Dauvit Broun shows that the "113 kings" figure derives from a Scottish king-list (known to scholars as "b") and can only be reached by counting the Pictish kings as Scots, even though the Declaration also has the Scots destroying the Picts. Together with Baldred Bisset's 1301 pleading at the papal court and a verse history of 1296–1306, the Declaration is among the earliest surviving texts to present Scotland, rather than Ireland, as the Scots' homeland. That claim was itself a product of the war with England.

6. The papacy's actual response — a nuanced, multi-causal account

The romantic story that the Declaration "worked" is misleading. In fact its immediate aims failed: Robert I and his bishops had already been excommunicated in June 1320, before the letter even reached Avignon, and the excommunication was not lifted in response to it. What the Pope did do, in August 1320, was write to Edward II urging reconciliation — while carefully declining to grant Bruce the royal title, referring to him only as the man "who calls himself king of Scotland."

Recognition then came incrementally, and historians attribute it mainly to the wider military and political situation rather than to the letter's rhetoric. The sequence is best understood as four distinct milestones: 1324 — the Pope first formally addresses Robert as King of Scots, following the Scottish victory at Byland (1322) and the 13-year Anglo-Scottish truce of 1323. March 1328 — the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, in which the new English regime recognises Scottish independence and Bruce as king. October 1328 — the Pope formally lifts the interdict on Scotland and the excommunication of King Robert, after the Anglo-English peace. 1329 — a papal bull grants the King of Scots the right to be anointed and crowned — a major propaganda victory, of which David II would be the first beneficiary.

National Records of Scotland's archivist Dr Alan Borthwick put the consensus plainly (NRS blog, 5 April 2023): "The Declaration on its own did not cause all this, but its stirring language, and its evocative sentiments of nationhood and freedom have given it a special distinction." The decisive factor was the deposition and murder of Edward II in 1327 and the resulting weak Isabella–Mortimer regime that conceded the 1328 treaty. Barrow allowed that the Declaration's polished royal Latin "probably impressed" the Pope; but even he framed recognition as a gradual change of heart finalised in 1324, not an instant result. The letter was a skilful move in a long diplomatic and military game — not the move that won it.

7. Modern legacy and the American Declaration of Independence question

Two things must be held apart: what the Declaration meant in 1320, and what it has been made to mean since. The name "Declaration of Arbroath" is itself modern — coined around the late 19th/early 20th century; earlier it was simply the "Barons' Letter." From 1689 onwards its deposition clause was repeatedly repurposed — to justify offering the Scottish crown to William of Orange, and in the Union debates of 1703–1707 — which is how, in Cowan's phrase, it acquired a "parahistorical" status as "an oath, a manifesto, a sacred charter."

The most persistent modern claim is that the Declaration directly inspired the American Declaration of Independence (1776). Specialist scholarship rejects this as essentially unfounded. US cultural geographer Professor Euan Hague, in "National Tartan Day: Rewriting history in the United States" (Scottish Affairs 38, 2002), examined the sources used by the 1776 Declaration's compilers and the contents of their personal libraries and concluded that "the Declaration of Arbroath is conspicuous only by its total absence." Dr Laura Harrison (Historic Environment Scotland / University of Glasgow) traces the supposed link to a recent origin: "It appears to be relatively new. The earliest mention I have found is from 1975… in an American Scottish Clan Society's members magazine," spread later through political speeches and even a US chat show (The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson); she adds that we "can safely say Thomas Jefferson did not have a picture of it hanging in his study as he drafted the Declaration of Independence." Harvard's Professor David Armitage has gone further, arguing provocatively that if anything the American Declaration shaped the modern reception of Arbroath, not the reverse. The honest position is therefore neither patriotic overstatement nor blanket dismissal of every connection: there are genuine thematic parallels (popular consent, resistance to tyranny), and many American founders were of Scottish descent, but there is no evidence of direct textual or documentary influence.

Nonetheless, the myth is embedded in US law. US Senate Resolution 155, submitted by Senator Trent Lott on 10 November 1997 and "Considered and agreed to" on 20 March 1998, designated 6 April each year as National Tartan Day; its text asserts that "the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish Declaration of Independence, was signed on April 6, 1320 and the American Declaration of Independence was modeled on that inspirational document." A companion House resolution followed in 2005 and a presidential proclamation in 2008. The date deliberately marks the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath — a case of the myth being commemorated in statute regardless of the historical evidence.

8. The physical document and its custody

The surviving parchment is the "Tyninghame" copy — the file copy retained in Scotland; the version sent to Avignon is lost. It is a single sheet of parchment, roughly A3 in size, written in Latin, "bottom-heavy" with its surviving 19 wax seals hanging on tags. It was damaged over the centuries — notably by damp and rodents while stored at Tyninghame in the 17th century — and is acutely sensitive to light, which causes cumulative, irreversible fading. It is cared for by National Records of Scotland (reference SP13/7) and is only very occasionally displayed: it was shown at the National Museum of Scotland for the 700th anniversary in 2020 and again in 2023, but for most of its life it lives in a darkened, climate-controlled store. Dr Alice Blackwell, Senior Curator of Medieval Archaeology and History at National Museums Scotland, has stressed both the "misconceptions" that surround the document and the extreme care its fragility demands.

9. Bridging to 1349

The Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton (1328) finally secured what Bannockburn had not: England, under the regency of Isabella and Mortimer, recognised Scotland as an independent kingdom and Robert the Bruce as its lawful king, renouncing all claims to overlordship and fixing the border as under Alexander III. The peace was sealed by the marriage of Bruce's four-year-old son David to Edward III's young sister Joan of the Tower, and by a large Scottish payment to England. Contemporaries on the English side derided it as a "shameful peace" (turpis pax).

Robert the Bruce died on 7 June 1329 at Cardross, aged 54, shortly before the papal bull granting his dynasty the right of coronation and unction. His illness in his final years was described by hostile English chroniclers as leprosy, and the label stuck for centuries — but the diagnosis is now seriously questioned. A 2016–17 study led by bio-archaeologist Andrew Nelson, examining a cast of Bruce's skull, found none of the tell-tale bone changes of leprosy; other historians have suggested a range of possibilities. The honest verdict is that the exact nature of his final illness is uncertain. His body was buried at Dunfermline Abbey and his heart taken (per his wish) toward the Holy Land, eventually interred at Melrose.

His son succeeded as the child-king David II (crowned at Scone in 1331). The Bruce peace proved short-lived. In 1332 Edward Balliol — son of the former King John Balliol — landed with a small army of "the Disinherited" (nobles stripped of Scottish lands under Bruce), tacitly and then openly backed by Edward III. At the Battle of Dupplin Moor (11 August 1332) a far larger Scottish army was destroyed, its dead reportedly heaped high, by the devastating combination of dismounted men-at-arms and flanking longbowmen; Balliol had himself crowned. Though soon driven out, he returned with English support, and at the Battle of Halidon Hill (19 July 1333) — where Edward III besieged Berwick — the Scots suffered another catastrophic defeat to the same tactics. With southern Scotland ceded to England and the country under threat, the young David II was evacuated to France in 1334, where he remained in exile at the court of Philip VI until it was safe to return in 1341. The outbreak of the Hundred Years' War (1337) diverted English attention and gave the Bruce cause room to recover — the situation as Scotland moved toward the arrival of the Black Death in the late 1340s (Card #10).