The spider, they say, that kept Robert the Bruce afloat across that dreadful winter of 1306, after his spirit had been nearly broken by English King Edward II. I will try a seventh time, he told himself. After watching the spider fail, fail again, fail better. It is said that the M(a)cLennan Clan first emerged from the Logans: our shared coat of arms includes a heart with two passion nails, which refer to Highland brothers Sir Robert and Sir Walter Logan, who accompanied the mummified heart of Robert the Bruce to the Holy Lands in 1330. This was Robert the Bruce’s deathbed wish, after all, and the campaign the brothers helped organize quickly emerged as a mission akin to the Crusades, that sequence of devastating conquests that even by then should have remained in the past. Oh, how the gesture of the religious Crusade burns of colonial impulse. Is that all I am? Is that all there is? The English and Scottish knights who declared their faith enough to override any local interest upon the predominantly-Muslim populations of and surrounding Jerusalem. Not simply a doctrine of spiritual belief, but one intertwined with imperialism, racism, vanity, what have you. It feels just so damned small-minded and cruel. Stupid, really. Perhaps this is why I declare any notions of my own faith and spirituality, if I’ve any at all, as comfortably irreligious: somewhere between atheist and agnostic. I’m not sure what I don’t believe. Certainty, in either direction, being the worst of it.
Led by Sir James Douglas, this cluster of religious pilgrims carrying Robert the Bruce’s heart landed in what is now Spain, in the Kingdom of Granada. Once there, they joined a campaign by Alfonso XI of Castille, who was laying siege to the Moorish castle of Teba. The brothers Logan, along with the bulk of their campaign, as well as their leader, were soon killed for their troubles, during what is now known as the Battle of Teba. Another Crusade, offering the suggestion of a pure name over such dark presumption. One might ask: what was the point, exactly? The English Monarchs website adds:
Douglas, in the thick of the fighting and deserted by his Spanish allies, threw the heart of the Bruce deep into the melee, biding it “Go first as thou hast always done.”
Both the remains of the knights and the mummified heart of Robert the Bruce were returned to Scotland, and the Bruce’s heart now rests at Melrose Abbey at Melrose, Roxburghshire, in the Scottish Borders. Bruce’s travelling heart didn’t even make it beyond Continental Europe before returning, unaltered, to where he’d began. Is that all there is?