The first blow in the renewed struggle was struck at Methven, near Perth, where, on the 19th June, 1306, the Earl of Pembroke inflicted a defeat upon King Robert.  The Lowlands were now almost entirely lost to him; he sent his wife[47] and child to Kildrummie Castle in Aberdeenshire, whence they fled to the sanctuary of St. Duthac, near Tain.  In August, Bruce was defeated at Dalry, by Alexander of Lorn, a relative of the Comyn.  In September, Kildrummie Castle fell, and Nigel Bruce, King Robert’s brother, fell into the hands of the English and was put to death at Berwick.  To complete the tale of catastrophes, the Bruce’s wife and daughter, two of his sisters, and other two of his brothers, along with the Countess of Buchan, came into the power of the English king.  Edward placed some of the ladies in cages, and put to death Sir Thomas Bruce and Alexander Bruce, Dean of Glasgow (February, 1306-7).  Meanwhile, King Robert had found it impossible to maintain himself even in his own lands of Carrick, and he withdrew to the island of Rathlin, where he wintered.  Undeterred by this long series of calamities, he took the field in the spring of 1307, and now, for the first time, fortune favoured him.  On the 10th May, he defeated the English, under Pembroke, at Loudon Hill, in Ayrshire.  He had been joined by his brother Edward and by the Lord James of Douglas (the “Black Douglas"), and the news of his success, slight as it was, helped to increase at once the spirit and the numbers of his followers.  His position, however, was one of extreme difficulty; he was still only a king in name, and, in reality, the leader of a guerilla warfare.  Edward was marching northwards at the head of a large army, determined to crush his audacious subject.  But Fate had decreed that the Hammer of the Scots was never again to set foot in Scotland.  At Burgh-on-Sand, near Carlisle, within sight of his unconquered conquest, the great Edward breathed his last.  His death was the turning-point in the struggle.  The reign of Edward II in England is a most important factor in the explanation of Bruce’s success.

With the death of Edward I the whole aspect of the contest changes.  The English were no longer conducting a great struggle for a statesmanlike ideal, as they had been under Edward I—­however impossible he himself had made its attainment.  There is no longer any sign of conscious purpose either in their method or in their aims.  The nature of the warfare at once changed; Edward II, despite his father’s wish that his bones should be carried at the head of the army till Scotland was subdued, contented himself with a fruitless march into Ayrshire, and then returned to give his father a magnificent burial in Westminster Abbey.  King Robert was left to fight his Scottish enemies without their English allies.  These Scottish enemies may be divided into two classes—­the Anglo-Norman nobles who had supported the English cause more or less consistently, and the personal enemies