A LETTER TO THE POPE
courtesy of National Message
WHEN Alexander III galloped over a precipice to his death in 1290, Scotland was plunged into 30 bloodsoaked years of war with the English King. Out of the press arose Robert Bruce, whose forceful letter to Pope John XXII issued in the complete independence of his country. Called by many “Scotland’s most precious possession,” Bruce’s letter preserves an intriguing allusion to the origin of the Scots, and may well point the way to the solution of one of history’s most fascinating problems: the fate of the “lost” tribes of Israel.
Impetuous, that was Robert Bruce’s trouble. But it was also his strength: impetuous but resolutely determined. That is why his Coronation as Robert I of Scotland was such a miserable affair.
Robert de Brus belonged to one of the noblest families of Scotland. His ancestors were Norman and had come over to Scotland when Frenchmen were fashionable at the Court of old King David who died in 1153. Since then 150 years had flown, and the Bruces, lords of Annandale, were one of the most powerful families in the land. But things had never been the same since King Alexander’s tragic death, for Scotland had been plunged into war with the greedy land-grabbing Edward I of England, who was bent on uniting the four island kingdoms under his crown.
At first the eighteen-year-old Bruce had remained on his estates, though deep in his heart smouldered indignation at Edward’s high-handed treatment of Scotland.
His resentment burst into flame in 1305. Indeed, all Scotland was scandalized by the savage treatment meted out by the King of England to Sir William Wallace, the darling of the Scottish nation who had fallen into Edward’s hands. The grim details of his execution at the Elms in West Smithfield reached Bruce and forced home to him the nature of Edward’s determination to rule Scotland his way. It also drove him into plotting for the Scottish crown. The mantle of Wallace had fallen upon Bruce.
Unbeknown to him, however, a traitor moved in their midst, for John Comyn was in direct touch with the English king and faithfully relayed the plans of the plotters as soon as hatched.
When Comyn’s treachery was discovered, Bruce, upon impulse, followed him into the cloisters of Dumfries Abbey and there slew him. Now, his hand having been forced, he rode promptly to Scone. In the presence of only five earls, four bishops and one abbot, and with the papal curses ringing about his ears – together with the ill-omened absence of the Stone of Destiny, which, because of its sacred association with Jacob of Bible days, was reverently used as a throne by the Scots-he received the Scottish crown at the hands of the Countess of Buchan, who performed the ceremony in default of her brother the Earl of Fife.
Indeed, with most of his own countrymen against him, things might have gone hard for Bruce had not Edward, the terrible “Hammer of the Scots,” conveniently expired by the wayside whilst on his way to punish him.
After that, the campaign petered out.When the showdown did come between the two countries – some years later – the English defeat was so decisive and the desertion of Edward II (who shamelessly fled the field, showing a clean pair of heels as far as Dunbar) so disgraceful that the name Bannockburn was a source of embarrassment to many an Englishman for a long time after.
Still, Edward was not going to give up without a struggle. He had another card to play. A clever one.
Pope John XXII was the newly-installed pope, and held his purple court just across the Channel at Avignon. “His Holiness” was soon gratified by the arrival of the English ambassadors, whose master seemed most anxious to make up for previous neglect. At least, that is what it looked like when they began to lavish upon him a king’s ransom of precious stones and jewels.
It was not long before the “Vicar of Christ” had entered into the spirit of things. And in 1317 Edward reaped his reward. A couple of cardinals, hot from Avignon, arrived “en Angleterre” armed with a pontifical order to establish a truce between the two countries – the first step towards ousting Bruce.
Not daring themselves to put a foot in Scotland, their illustrious lordships persuaded a local friar to deliver the papal command to Bruce.The poor man reached Bruce only to be informed that as the letters were not addressed to the King they could not be received. Realizing the delicacy of his position, the unfortunate monk requested a safe conduct for his return journey; but, as Mackie says, he was advised – “Terram evacuare quancitius poterat” – to clear out as quickly as he could!
The amusing story is told that upon his way back he was waylaid by some of Bruce’s men, stripped and, to the astonishment of the citizens, was seen to wander naked into the streets of Berwick!
The pope was furious and instructed his cardinals to excommunicate the impudent monarch for sacrilege!
All the same, Bruce recognized his position. If peace was ever to be restored, the pope would have to be made to see sense and use his influence upon Edward.
In April of the year 1320 Bruce called the Scottish Parliament, which sat at Arbroath Abbey, and they hammered out a letter to the pope in which they showed the great antiquity of the Scottish people and how they had always been ruled by their own kings.
Besides, they objected, the King of England ought to be satisfied with what he had, seeing that England used of old to be enough for seven kings or more. His Holiness would know how to treat the shameful English contention that they found it impossible to go to the succour of the Holy Land on account of the wars which they had with their neighbours! The true reason, they suggested, was that in the subjugation of their smaller neighbours the English reckoned the advantage nearer and the resistance feebler.
Here is an extract from the document itself, which rests in the Register House at Edinburgh.
“We know, Most Holy Father and Lord, and from the chronicles and books of the ancients do gather, that among other illustrious nations ours, to wit the nation of the Scots, has been distinguished by many honours: which passing from the greater Scythia through the Mediterranean Sea and Pillars of Hercules and sojourning in Spain among the most savage tribes through a long course of time could nowhere be subjugated by any people however barbarous.
And coming thence one thousand two hundred years after the outgoing of the people of Israel they…acquired for themselves the possessions in the West, which they now hold after expelling the Britons and completely destroying the Picts and although often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, always kept themselves free from all servitude, as the histories of the ancients testify.
In their kingdom one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, no stranger intervening, having reigned, whose nobility and merits, if they were not clear otherwise, yet shine out plainly enough from this that the King of kings, even our Lord Jesus Christ, after His Passion and Resurrection called them, though situated at the uttermost parts of the earth, almost the first to His Most Holy faith.”
“His Holiness,” somewhat mollified by this epistle, suspended his proceedings against the Scots and even went so far as to induce Edward to drop his by means of a face-saving truce.
It is an important discovery to learn that Bruce and his knights, whose seals are affixed to this historic Declaration, claimed to have sprung from those peoples who moved westward from Scythia via the Mediterranean Sea.
Scythia lay to the north of the Caspian and Black Seas and actually merged with the Assyrian territories into which the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel” were absorbed about 700 B.C.
One of the last references to them occurs in the Bible, which speaks of the paganised tribes (not the Jews) as “swallowed up,” and “wanderers among the nations” (Hosea 8:8; 9:17).
It may well be that their historical continuity is to be explained in the admittedly westward drift of pagan peoples from Greater Scythia, one branch of which according to Bruce’s Declaration, employing the sea routes, settled in Scotland: whence they were “almost the first” to be called to the Christian Faith. Certainly this would help to explain many prophecies.
The possibility of connecting the closely-related migratory peoples who invaded these islands in successive waves from the beginning of the Christian Era up to the Norman Invasion of 1066 with the Hebrew peoples in dispersion in the Caspian area should be borne in mind – particularly in view of the phenomenal development of western Protestant Christianity with all its implications for the world at large.
