EDWARD DE BRUCE HIGH KING OF IRELAND
While on assignment at Faughart grave yard I stumbled upon the grave of Edward Bruce the former High King of Ireland.
Over seven hundred years ago, Edward Burce was crowned last High King of Ireland. The English colonists in Ireland vehemently opposed him.
Edward, the brother of the King of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, led a three-year military campaign, known as the Bruce Invasion, against the Anglo-Norman lordship of Ireland.
This invasion, which lasted from 1315 to 1318, ultimately gave rise to the two nations we recognize now as Ireland and Scotland.
In May 1315, a Scots army of up to six thousand soldiers landed on the Antrim coast. That June, near Carrickfergus, many Gaelic lords led by Ó Néill of Ulster.
“All the Gaels of Ireland agreed to grant him lordship and they called him King of Ireland,” declared the Irish annals.
The invasion coincided with the Great European Famine, which brought hardship and disillusionment among Bruce’s followers.
The annals ruefully commented: “falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.”
In February 1317, Dublin, the capital of the English royal administration in Ireland came close to being captured by the Bruce brothers.
The brothers were encamped at Castleknock within sight of the city walls.
The panicking Dubliners burned the suburbs of the city. In order to re-fortify the city walls, they dismantled the Dominican priory north of the Liffey Bridge and tore down the bridge across the river.
The Bruce brothers did not lay siege to the city and instead moved south to Munster.
In 1318, the invasion was brought to an end when, after marching south from Ulster for one last push, Edward Bruce risked an open battle with an English army north of Dundalk at Faughart and was killed.
His corpse was dismembered, and portions of it hung over the gates of various Irish towns. His decapitated head was brought to King Edward II of England by the victor, John de Bermingham, a minor Anglo-Irish baron who was elevated to the status of ‘Earl of Louth’ for bringing the Bruce Invasion of Ireland to an end.
