(Bruis - Leland preserves the original spelling): from the castle of Brus or Bruis (now called Brix), near Cherbourg. The ruins of an extensive fortress built there in the eleventh century by Adam de Brus, and called after him Château d’Adam, yet remain. Robert de Brus was at the battle of Hastings, and held a great barony of ninety-four manors in Yorkshire (Domesday), where he built Skelton Castle. Either he or his son of the same name (from the dates probably the son, as it is scarcely likely that the elder Robert should have outlived the Conquest for seventy-five years) married Agnes daughter of Fulk de Paganell, who brought him as her dowry Hart and Hartnesse in the Bishopric of Durham, “the maritime key of the Palatinate.” How he acquired Annandale and his great Scottish estates is not so clear. Some say they were a grant from David I., having from his youth been “a friend and familiar of the King of Scots” at the court of his brother-in-law Henry I.; others believe that his second wife was Agnes of Annan, a Scottish heiress. It was probably both as an old acquaintance and liegeman that he was sent to offer terms of peace to the Scottish king on his invasion of England in 1138, and it is curious to note, that he was associated in this embassy with Bernard de Baliol. On the king’s refusal, these two barons, whose descendants were destined to be such deadly rivals, fought side by side at the Battle of the Standard, and were also soon after ranged under the same banners as partizans of the Scotch intruder Cumin. Bruce died in 1141, and was buried in the Abbey he had founded at Guisborough, leaving by his first wife two sons; Adam, founder of the elder line of Skelton, who was with his father at Cowton Moor: and Robert, whose posterity sat on the throne of Scotland.

The Lords of Skelton ended in the fifth generation with Peter de Brus, Constable of Scarborough Castle, who died in 1271. His four sisters divided the inheritance; and the extent of his territory may be estimated from the share allotted to each of them. That of Laderina, the youngest, is not specified: hut the elder, Agnes, married to William de Fauconberg, had Skelton Castle and lands; Lucy, married to Marmaduke Thweng, had Danby with its chase and adjacent manors, and the whole forest of Vaux; while Margaret brought to her husband Robert de Ros the entire barony of Kendal.

Robert de Bruce, the younger son, received Annandale as his appanage, and “being thus a liegeman of the Crown of Scotland, he was taken prisoner in fair battle by his own father, who sent him to the English monarch: and he, struck probably with the extraordinary situation of the parties, and pleased with the good faith of the father, placed his captive once more at the disposal of his own parents. The story has yet a sequel: the young Lord of Annandale, amongst other familiar discourse, complained that his valley of Annan afforded no wheaten bread, and his father, to compensate for the privation, gave him the wheat-producing district of Hart and Hartness.”—Surtees. It was the great grandson of this Robert that made the famous alliance with the blood royal of Scotland, through his wife Isabel, one of the co-heiresses of David Earl of Huntingdon, the brother of William the Lion: and in her right their son Robert, sixth of this hereditary name, formed one of the crowd of competitors for the Scottish throne that appeared on the death of the Maid of Norway in 1291. He had been one of the fifteen Regents of Scotland in 1255, and a faithful adherent of Henry III. throughout the Barons’ War, having been taken prisoner while commanding the Scottish contingent with Baliol and Comyn at the battle of Lewes. When Edward I., the appointed umpire, decided in favour of Baliol’s claim to the throne, he appears to have at once accepted the decision, and acknowledged the new king. The next Robert, who was several times summoned to parliament by Edward I., went with him in his earlier days to Palestine, and on his return chanced to meet the young Countess of Carrick (heiress of an Earl Neil killed in the Crusades), hunting in the woods near her castle of Tumbery, and she, seeing this “gallant young knight, handsome and courteous,” just come back from the Holy Land with Prince Edward, fell in love with him at first sight, and invited him to be her guest. He was unwilling to comply, but she seized his bridle reins “with a gentle violence,” led him to her castle, and within fifteen days became his wife. From that time he was Earl of Carrick, de jure uxoris, till the death of the Countess, when he passed on the title to his eldest son. Like his father, he acknowledged the title of Baliol, andremained through life the staunch liegeman of England. He even forfeited his Scottish estates by attending the King in the invasion of Scotland that followed Baliol’s renunciation of allegiance in 1298, having had, it is said, some hopes held out to him of receiving the Scottish crown. But “when the prize was won, and Bruce reminded the King of his promise, the stem monarch turned round upon him, “Ne avons nous autres choses à faire que à voz reaumes gagner?”

His son was of different metal. It is true that he, too, began by twice taking the oath of fealty to England; but he speedily stood forth as the chosen champion who was to achieve the independence of Scotland; and the heroic and romantic story of Robert the Bruce, crowned King at Scone in 1306, yet long a hunted fugitive in his own dominions, maintaining the stubborn and desperate struggle that closed with the glories of Bannockburn, stirs the heart of every Scotsman, and cannot need to be recalled here. He was twice married. His first wife, Isabel of Mar, brought him only a daughter named Marjory, by the second, Elizabeth de Burgh (the “proud English wife,” who despised the homely Scottish court, and taunted him with being but “a summer’s king”), he had one son, who succeeded him on the throne as David II., and whose marriage he had the triumph to “contract, en plein souverain, with the daughter of that English Edward who had so lately trampled the crown of Scotland in the dust.”—Surtees. But Joan Plantagenet brought David no children. Nor did any of the Bruce’s brothers leave any posterity. Edward, the second, was crowned King of Ireland in 1316, and killed at the battle of Dundalk two years afterwards; and the three others, Thomas, Alexander, and Nigel, all fell into the hands of the English, and were mercilessly put to death as traitors. One cousin remained—Sir John Bruce, the son of his uncle Sir Bernard, who was seated at Exton in Rutlandshire: but he, too, left no heir save a daughter: and thus the royal male line of Bruce came to an early end. It was King Robert’s eldest daughter, Princess Marjory, the wife of the Lord High Steward of Scotland, who eventually transmitted the crown to her son Robert II., and was the ancestress of the long line of Stuart kings, of whom one was destined to unite under his sceptre the rival kingdoms so long and so bitterly divided.

“A French queen shall bear the son, Shall rule all Britain to the sea, He of the Bruce’s blood shall come, As near as of the ninth degree.” —Thomas the Rhymer.

There were two other co-heiresses, the half-sisters of Marjory, bom of her father’s second marriage: first, the Princess Margaret, Countess of Sutherland, now represented by the Duke of Sutherland; next the Princess Maud, married to Thomas de Izac, from whom descended the Stuarts of Rossythe in Fife, and New Halls in West Lothian.

The still existing families that bear this proud name descend from a distant kinsman and namesake of Robert the Bruce, to whom David II. granted the castle and manor of Clackmannan, with some other manors, in 1359, by a charter in which he designates him as Dilecto et fideli consanguineo suo Roberto de Bruis. At what period these cousins had branched off from the parent stock is not known; but it cannot have been less than 140 years before that date, as they clearly made no claim to the succession, and did not therefore descend from Robert V., who married the Scottish princess Isabel, and succeeded his father as Lord of Annandale in 1215. This Sir Robert Bruce of Clackmannan had a very numerous posterity. From him came the Bruces of Kennet, represented by Lord Balfour of Burleigh; the Bruces of Blair Hall, whose chief is the Earl of Elgin: the Bruces of Airth, the Bruces of Stenhouse, &c. Their detailed pedigrees are given in Drummond’s ‘Noble British Families.’ The first Lord Elgin was the second son of Edward Bruce, created in 1603 Lord Bruce of Kinloss, and succeeded his elder brother (killed in a duel by Sir Edward Sackville) in the barony in 1613: ten years later he received his Earldom, and in 1641 an English peerage with the title of Lord Bruce of Whorlton. His son was made Earl of Aylesbury in 1664, but both these English creations expired on the death of Charles, third Earl of Aylesbury, and fourth Earl of Elgin, in 1774. This Earl Charles, having early lost his only son, obtained a fresh patent of his barony with remainder to his adopted heir, Thomas Brudenell (the youngest son of his sister Elizabeth, Countess of Cardigan), who consequently succeeded him as Lord Bruce of Tottenham in Wiltshire, was afterwards created Earl of Aylesbury, and was the father of the first Marquess of that name.

The Scottish honours passed to his heirs-general, the Bruces of Carnock, who had been since 1647 Earls of Kincardine; and thus Charles Bruce, who succeeded his namesake exactly a hundred years afterwards as fifth Earl of Elgin, was already the ninth Earl of Kincardine, and united the two Scottish titles now jointly borne by his descendants.

The name is still represented in France. “A branch of the Barons of Bruce continued in Normandy, and had a seat in the Exchequer, and the arms they quarter are the arms of Bruce of Annandale.”—Sir F. Palgrave.