IN this second part of my Yuletide divertissement for Christmas and New Year, which I’ve called 1513 And All That, A Memorable History of Scotland, Comprising All The Bits You Can Remember including Lots of Woad, several Kings, a couple of Bad Queens, a Reformation and – boo! – a Union, I have reached the Very Important Bits.

You will recall I am doing this as a sort of homage to one of my favourite childhood books, namely 1066 And All That by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, only this parody is about Scottish and not English history. I will be writing a third part next week about “British” history, dealing with the Union and the Empire – that just might be satirical.

To understand Scotland and its history, you need to know one special thing – for most of its existence, Scotland has been two countries called the Highlands and the Lowlands. The Highlands includes the islands, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, while Orkney and Shetland were latecomers to the Scottish party – more about them later.

As I showed last week, King David I did a lot of reorganising of Scotland, introducing Norman lords, the feudal system and burghs and sheriffs, not to mention several abbeys and monasteries. After he died in 1153, there came a series of rebellions against the new king Malcolm IV. The biggest of these was by a very fierce Gaelic chief of Norse descent, Somerled, who made himself King of Argyll, the Isles and Man – yes, we could have had our own tax-dodging dependency if only the English hadn’t taken it away.

Somerled was a great naval commander and won many sea battles but he wasn’t so hot on land, apart from laying waste to Glasgow around 1153-54. He came back in 1164, leading his fleet up the Clyde to just past where the Erskine Bridge is now. Malcolm was hiding in Edinburgh but sent an army to meet Somerled’s crew, most probably under the command of his High Steward, Walter FitzAlan, an English-born baron who knew a thing or two about fighting dirty.

The story goes that FitzAlan “turned” some of Somerled’s guards, who were bribed to kill their chief during the Battle of Renfrew, although that tale might have been made up by Somerled’s fans to explain how he foolishly lost the battle and his life.

Malcolm IV was a weak and very pious individual – so much so he was nicknamed the Maiden – and died aged just 24. He was succeeded by his brother William I, who has come down to us through history as William the Lion.

Actually, although he eventually exerted control of his kingdom, he was no lion and indeed a bit of a diddy when it came to international relations – he picked quarrels with the Pope, which was a real no-no in those days and, most damagingly, got involved in a long struggle with King Henry II of England.

When William invaded Northumberland in support of rivals to Henry, the English king sent his army north. William got himself captured in 1174 at the Battle of Alnwick – he forgot to look or he would have seen his soldiers far behind him – and was then sent to prison in Falaise in Normandy, then part of Henry’s kingdom.

TO get home, William signed the Treaty of Falaise acknowledging Henry’s overlordship of Scotland, and English kings would use that treaty signed under duress to claim their “rights” over Scotland for the next 150 years.

William’s son, Alexander II, had better dealings with England, and signed the Treaty of York in 1237 which set the border between the two countries roughly along the same line as it is today. He also married Joan, sister of King Henry III – they did that sort of dynastic marriage in those days, no matter what the bride or groom looked like or whether they loved each other.

Alexander met a weird end – he had decided to subjugate the Western Isles, then part of Norway’s empire, once and for all, and in 1249 set out with his army, reaching Kerrera near Oban. He had a dream in which the shade of St Columba warned him against attacking the isles, but it turned out to be a nightmare as Alexander ignored his ghostly warning and ordered the advance, dying quickly before any fighting could start.

The army of his son, Alexander III, won the Battle of Largs against King Haakon of Norway in October 1263, though it was a huge storm which really won the battle as it scattered Haakon’s navy. Haakon died on the way home and the Norwegians decided their Scottish possessions were not worth the candle and ceded the Western Isles and the Isle of Man in the Treaty of Perth in 1266. It would be another two centuries before Orkney and Shetland came to Scotland as the dowry of James III.

NOW for the first Very Important Bit. All was going swimmingly for Scotland in March 1286 until Alexander III decided on a midnight ride to visit his second wife, the young, beautiful and just pregnant Yolande de Dreux who was living at Kinghorn in Fife.

Alexander had been drinking with his chums in Edinburgh and by the time he got over the Forth the weather was foul. Consumed by what our National Bard would have termed “flashy lust”, Alexander insisted on riding on and just west of Kinghorn he fell off his horse and broke his neck. So, as a result of a king’s randiness, Scotland was plunged into chaos for nearly three decades.

His heir was his three-year-old grand-daughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, who stayed at the Norwegian court of her father King Eric II for another four years. Eventually, she was sent for in 1290 but she died on Orkney, aged seven, after a terrible sea voyage in which the poor wee lassie was constantly sick. She was never crowned and consequently some lists of monarchs miss her out which is dreadfully unfair because she had actually been queen for about four years.

The National: Margaret, the Maid of NorwayMargaret, the Maid of Norway

There was a bizarre postscript to the Maid’s young life, and you are probably about to read about False Margaret for the first time. In 1301, a woman arrived in Bergen in Norway claiming to be the Maid of Norway. She said she hadn’t died in 1290 but had been taken to Germany where she married.

The only problem with this pretender was that King Eric II had definitely identified his daughter’s body and False Margaret was examined and found to be in her late 30s whereas the real Maid would have been just 17 or 18. She paid a high price for her foolish gamble – King Haakon V had her tried for treason and burned at the stake, while her husband, who had been in on the con, was beheaded.

Now we have another Very Important Bit and a Very Important Mistake it was, too. The Maid’s early death meant that in 1290 there was no obvious heir to the throne. A group of bishops and nobles had acted as regents during the Maid’s childhood in Norway and these jumped-up personages gave themselves the title “the Guardians of Scotland”.

They were no guardian angels but quite a silly committee because they started a glorified board game called the Great Cause in which no fewer than 13 men – and they were all men – claimed the throne. All 13 Competitors, as they were known, had varying degrees of connection to the royal lineage, with the two closest being John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, and Robert de Brus, 5th Lord of Annandale.

The Guardians decided to ask King Edward I of England to adjudicate on the Great Cause. Big, big mistake, because Edward – nicknamed Longshanks due to his height – decided to use the opportunity to proclaim himself overlord of Scotland.

More than 100 auditors – a sort of grand jury – were appointed to debate the matter and on November 17, 1292, Edward delivered the verdict and John Balliol became King of Scots.

Oops, as he turned out to be a bit of a numpty, except that in 1295 with Edward Longshanks wanting to conquer both Scotland and France, Balliol signed the Auld Alliance treaty with France, a sport of mutual defence pact against the bullying English.

LONGSHANKS was furious and invaded Scotland, his army razing Berwick to the ground and beating the Scots at Dunbar before occupying much of lowland Scotland with King John deposed, stripped of his robes – hence his nickname Toom Tabard or empty shirt – and exiled to France. Anyone who tells you Scotland has never been conquered is talking nonsense.

The Oscar-winning documentary Braveheart does occasionally play fast and loose with the facts but gets at least one thing right – the rebellion against English rule began with William Wallace, a junior noble whose wife Murrin was killed by the Sheriff of Lanark, or so Blind Harry the poet wrote in The Wallace almost 200 years later.

Joined by the northern army of Sir Andrew Murray – no relation to the tennis star – Wallace led his army to Stirling in September 1297 where they waited until half the English army had crossed the bridge over the Forth before charging and slaughtering them en masse.

Wallace was promptly made Guardian of Scotland but possibly began to believe his own publicity as he gathered his troops at Falkirk a year later to meet the much larger English army led by Longshanks with its far-from-secret weapon, archers armed with longbows. The Scots had no match for the English – actually mostly Welsh – archers and fled the field.

There were pockets of resistance to English rule but the next Very Important Bit was when Wallace was betrayed and captured near Glasgow in 1305. Wallace died courageously in London after a mock trial, being hung, drawn and quartered, and no, this punishment was not invented for him by Longshanks.

The year after Wallace’s execution, Robert the Bruce met his remaining rival for the throne, John Comyn, in a church in Dumfries and after an argument, Bruce murdered him. This was possibly no bad thing as Comyn was known as “the Red”, and we couldn’t have a commie on the throne then, could we?

Anyhow Bruce decided “in for a penny, in for a crown” and proclaimed himself king at Scone a few weeks later. He then set about enforcing his rule and that led to years of strife until he recruited a spider and from then on he never lost a battle.

The National: King Edward I LongshanksKing Edward I Longshanks

Edward Longshanks did the Scots a favour by dying while on his way north to subdue the Bruce and his son, Edward II, backed off for a while so that Bruce was able to beat all his domestic enemies.

Bruce invented guerilla warfare as he struck quickly and decisively, capturing English-occupied castles across the land. But two of his brothers were caught and executed and his womenfolk were imprisoned in cages on castle walls, which only made the Bruce more determined to free Scotland from English rule.

Eventually, only Stirling Castle remained under English control and Edward II and his army marched to relieve the siege of the castle. On June 23-24, the Battle of Bannockburn was fought, starting with English champion Sir Henry de Bohun charging at Robert the Bruce who promptly split De Bohun’s head in two, though the king broke his best axe in doing so.

The Bruce also had a secret weapon. He had trained his men to form schiltrons, like giant hedgehogs with long spears, and instead of waiting for the English to charge he sent the schiltrons moving at their opponents.

The English proclaimed “that’s not fair” and Edward II and his top guards ran away. Robert the Bruce had triumphed and Scotland’s independence was won forever – oh really?