There is a cave on the coast of Arran where Robert Bruce is said to have watched a spider try seven times to swing its thread across a gap, failing six times and succeeding on the seventh. Whether the story happened or not — and the honest answer is we don't know — it captures exactly where Robert Bruce was in the winter of 1306-07: a fugitive hiding in a cave on a Scottish island after the worst defeats of his life, watching Scotland being hammered by Edward I of England. He went back. He fought. He won. At Bannockburn in 1314 he inflicted on the English one of the most complete military defeats in the history of medieval warfare.
The spider story may be the most famous thing about Robert Bruce, and it almost certainly did not happen exactly as told. The version everyone knows: Robert Bruce, hiding in a cave after a devastating defeat, watches a spider try to attach a thread to a beam. It fails. Again. Again. Six times. On the seventh attempt it succeeds. Bruce takes this as a sign. He goes back and wins. The cave in question is pointed out on the island of Arran, or sometimes in a cave near the Irish coast — different traditions place it in different locations, which tells you something about the story's historical basis. What is certain: in the winter of 1306-07, Robert Bruce was a fugitive. He had been crowned King of Scotland in March 1306 at Scone, in defiance of Edward I of England, and within months had been defeated in battle twice, forced to watch several of his brothers executed, seen his womenfolk taken prisoner, and was hiding somewhere in the western islands or the Irish coast with a handful of followers while Edward's forces hunted him. He went back. That part is definitely true.
At Bannockburn in June 1314, Robert Bruce's Scottish army destroyed a far larger English force — killing roughly ten thousand and routing the rest — in one of the most complete military victories of the medieval period.
How Scotland Got Into This Position
The trouble started with a succession crisis in Scotland in 1286, when King Alexander III rode his horse off a cliff in the dark and died without a clear heir. A brief period of regency ended when the young heir Margaret — a child of seven called the Maid of Norway — also died during the sea voyage to Scotland. The Scottish nobles could not agree on a successor from among themselves. They asked King Edward I of England to arbitrate. This was a mistake of historic proportions. Edward chose John Balliol, one of the claimants, and then used his arbitration role to extract concessions that effectively reduced Scotland to an English dependency. He demanded Scottish soldiers for his French wars. He demanded that the Scottish nobles appear in English courts to answer cases. He treated Scotland as a vassal state. The Scottish nobles rebelled. They expelled Balliol from the throne and formed an alliance with France. Edward invaded and crushed the rebellion with brutal thoroughness, taking the Stone of Destiny — the coronation stone of Scottish kings — to Westminster Abbey, where it sat until 1996. William Wallace led a guerrilla resistance that won the remarkable Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, where a bridge crossing worked catastrophically against the English cavalry. Wallace was eventually captured, taken to London, and executed in a manner that medieval England reserved for traitors, in 1305. Into this situation — Scotland's nobility scattered, its resistance apparently broken, its symbolic objects in London — stepped Robert Bruce.
The Comeback That Took Seven Years
Edward I died in 1307, still in the north of England planning another Scottish campaign. His son Edward II inherited both the crown and the Scottish problem, and where the father had been formidable, the son was indecisive and distracted by court favorites who absorbed his attention in ways that made serious military governance nearly impossible. Bruce came back from hiding and began fighting. Not great pitched battles — he had learned from experience what those cost when the forces were mismatched. He used the terrain. He avoided sieges of the great English-held castles. He raided, retreated, hit supply lines, and wore down garrisons. When he did take castles, he demolished them rather than garrison them — he did not have enough men to spare for castle duty. Year by year he tightened his grip on Scotland. By 1313 he held most of the country. Only Stirling Castle — strategically essential, sitting on the rock above the main north-south route through Scotland — remained under English control. His brother Edward Bruce besieged Stirling and made a deal with the governor: if no English army came to relieve the castle by midsummer 1314, the governor would surrender. It was a chivalrous agreement and a dangerous one, because it guaranteed that Edward II would have to come north with an army.