Ayrshire > Volume 1

96 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
the Scots, was a great gain to Scotland and the cause of
Robert the Bruce. It deprived England of a capable,
resolute, dominating head, and substituted for the
greatest of the Plantagenets a weak and a pleasure-loving
monarch.
Bruce was not the man to neglect his opportunity.
It was on May ioth that he had fought and won at
Loudounhill. On June ist he was at Bothwell, ordering
six hundred men to reinforce the garrison at Ayr ; on
the nth he had taken up his own headquarters at Ayr ;
from July 16th to 19th he was at Dalmellington, and by
the 24th he had scoured the hill country as far as the
Glenkens. Returning to Ayr in the end of the month,
he issued a despatch requiring wines and victuals to be
sent from Dumfries for nine knights whom he was
leaving in charge of the town. Edward II. began by
taking the field in person and marching into Scotland
with the intention of crushing the rebellion, but he was
not composed of the same stern stuff as his father, and
when, in the middle of August, he had advanced up
Xithsdale, and had got into Ayrshire as far as Cumnock,
he gave orders for the army to retreat. Why, it is not
difficult to surmise. Campaigning in a dangerous
country was much less to his liking than were the
dissipations of his own capital. He appointed Sir
Ingram de Umfraville warden of Carrick. In Galloway,
Edward Bruce, a soldier only less distinguished for
physical prowess, for energy, and for the capacity to
avail himself of every occasion of harassing and worrying
the common enemy than his brother, wrought valiantly.
He tamed the pride of the Macdougalls, and, having
driven out the English, his royal brother was free to
deal with the other branch of the same family, the
Macdougalls of Lome. Thus the work went on, the
English King occasionally showing signs of awaking to
activity, and as regularly foregoing his resolutions when
the time came for giving effect to them, and the Bruce
making occasional raids into England, harrying the
northern counties, and returning to Scotland with great