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Robert Bruce comes on with the axe already up. A gold band circles his helmet so both armies could see who he was. De Bohun’s lance has gone by above his shoulder.

Sir Henry de Bohun saw the whole war laid out in front of him and reached for it. It was the afternoon of the twenty-third of June, 1314. The two armies had come to the boggy ground below Stirling Castle. Out ahead of the Scottish line rode a single man on a grey pony, small and lightly armed. He wore a gold circlet over his helmet so that everyone would know him. It was Robert Bruce, King of Scots. De Bohun was young and well mounted and armored to the throat. He dropped his lance and spurred his warhorse straight at the king, and for a few seconds the entire quarrel between two countries narrowed to one horse closing on another. Bruce did not run, and he had no lance to lower at him. He waited, then at the last stride swung the pony aside, rose in the stirrups, and brought his axe down through de Bohun’s helmet and skull. John Barbour wrote his poem The Bruce some 60 years later, when men who had been there could still be asked. He says the blow split the head to the neck and shattered the axe-haft in the king’s hand. Bruce rode back to his own captains, who scolded him for gambling the war on a duel. His only answer, Barbour has it, was regret for a different loss: he had broken his good axe. That was the first day. The battle proper came the next, the twenty-fourth, on the flat between the Bannock burn and the castle. Bruce had spent it well. His men fought on foot in the schiltron, a hedgehog of long spears. Where the English horse would have to come, he had dug pits and covered them over with sticks and grass. The heavy cavalry of Edward the Second, the finest thing his army owned, rode into ground it could not use, jammed between the burn and the bog, unable to charge home and unable to turn. The spears held. The horses foundered in the pits and the mud. By the end of it the English army had come apart. Edward was hustled off the field to Stirling, and the man holding the castle would not let him in. He rode for the border and did not stop until he reached Dunbar and a ship. The picture that fixes the scene in the popular mind is Victorian. James Doyle drew it for his Chronicle of England in 1864, and Edmund Evans engraved and printed it in color. De Bohun comes from the left under his crested helm, his lance out and already past its mark. Bruce is on the right on the pale horse with the axe up, the castle small on its rock behind him. Bruce won his kingdom over the following years and never quite got the church to stop excommunicating him. He had killed a rival on an altar step in a Dumfries church eight years before, which the Pope had not forgotten, and which no gold circlet could quite cover.