Ayrshire > Volume 1

io6 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
been done at a considerably later period ; for, at the
time when Seton was executed, the King's prospects
were of the most hopeless description. He was a fugitive,
in hiding, with but few followers, condemned to inaction,
hardly even befriended of his own kith and kin, a King
without a crown, a desperate adventurer in an
enterprise the success of which nothing but the eye of
faith could ever have descried.
Ayrshire's connection with the Bruce family did not
cease with the monarch himself. From Turnberry by
the sea, on the Carrick coast, however, the interest
passes to the Castle of Dundonald, the cradle of the
Stuart dynasty. If Carrick gave Scotland the Bruces,
Kyle gave the nation her Stuarts. This also was a
Norman family. It was Walter, the first Lord High
Steward, who built Dundonald, and he lived much in
the castle, founding, among other religious institutions,
the churches of Monkton and Prestwick. Dying in the
middle of the twelfth century, he was succeeded by his
son Alan, a favourite at the Court of William the Lion,
and he, in 1204, by another Walter, in 1230 Justiciary
of Scotland. Alexander, the fourth Steward, was a
famous fighter in the Crusades, and later commanded
the Scottish forces at the Battle of Largs. James, the
fifth Steward, was one of the Regents of Scotland at the
opening of the times made troublous and fateful by Sir
William Wallace, and after him came James, who
fought through the greater part of the campaign with
Bruce, and was one of the principal leaders of the Scots
at Bannockburn. This was he who wedded Marjory
Bruce, and the only child of their union, Robert Bruce
Stewart, was the first of the Stewart, or Stuart, Kings.
His mother, unfortunately, died in the act of giving him
birth, and at the age of twelve he lost his father. Like
many another son of his race, he had a life that was not
without its sorrows and its troubles. When but seventeen
he was in the heat of the Battle of Halidon Hill ; after
that he was a disinherited wanderer on his possessions
in Bute when Edward III. and the traitorous Baliol