IN this final part of 1513 And All That, A Memorable History of Scotland, Comprising All The Bits You Can Remember including Lots of Woad, several Kings, a couple of Bad Queens, a Reformation and – boo! – a Union.

I will chart some more Very Important Bits.

You will recall I am doing this as a sort of homage to one of my favourite childhood books, namely 1066 And All That by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, only this parody is about Scottish and not English history. It will end with Scotland regaining its independence – you can sense this is a fanciful account … Probably the Most Important Bit of all was the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, which was the crucial victory in securing Scotland’s independence, and, as the documentary film Braveheart showed, the Scots had dispensed with their woad faces.

The fact is that it took King Robert the Bruce another 14 years to make that independence stick. During that time, Bruce’s armies regularly hammered the English, even without the assistance of his famous spider.

READ MORE: 1513 And All That: A Memorable History of Scotland - pt 2

In 1320, the nobles and senior clerics of Scotland lost their collective rag with England and sent a letter from Arbroath declaring to the Pope that the Bruce was their rightful king – as long as the people said so – and as long as 100 Scots stayed alive they would never submit to the domination of the English. We’ll see how that worked out 387 years later.

The Bruce eventually got English recognition of his kingship and Scotland’s independence in 1328 when 16-year-old Edward III of England (below) conceded these issues. The treaty was so good they named it twice, Edinburgh and Northampton.

The National:

A curious fact of the treaty is that the English said they would return the Stone of Destiny stolen by Edward Longshanks back in 1298. The Scots never seriously pressed for its repatriation, however, suggesting it was a fake taken from the toilets at Scone and not Jacob’s Pillow.

Robert the Bruce died in 1329 at his west-coast manor in the parish of Cardross near Dumbarton. He was the first and only king of Scots to be buried in three places, a fact that is rarely mentioned.

His internal organs were removed and interred at St Serf’s Church, the remains of which can be seen in Levengrove Park in Dumbarton. His body and head were embalmed and buried in Dunfermline Abbey while his heart was famously taken in a casket to the Crusades by his great friend and lieutenant Sir James Douglas. The Good Sir James – not the Black Douglas as the English called him – charged at the Moorish army at the Battle of Teba in Spain and was killed. His body and the Bruce casket were recovered and taken back to Scotland with Bruce’s heart buried at Melrose Abbey.

Perfidious Albion – it took Edward III less than four years to break the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton when he backed Edward Balliol, son of deposed King John Balliol, in his ultimately futile attempt to usurp the throne of King David II.

Hostilities between England and Scotland continued for the rest of the 14th century, by which time the English were thankfully embroiled in the Hundred Years War with Scotland’s auld ally France. And yes, Scottish soldiers really did fight for France.

The Bruce line ran out with David II and his nephew Robert, the High Steward of Scotland, succeeded him in 1371, starting the Stewart dynasty, their name a neat play on the word steward. The Stewarts would reign over Scotland until 1714, though how they managed that is a wonder given their early history was a complete mess with four kings in succession meeting violent and premature ends.

The third Stewart king, James I, was captured by the English at the age of 11 and spent 18 years down south, either in prison or at court, and even marrying an English woman, Joan of Beaufort.

HE returned as King of Scots in 1424 and got himself assassinated 13 years later after fighting for years with many of the nobility. He was trapped in Blackfriars monastery in Perth and tried to make a Shawshank Redemption-like escape through the sewer only to be caught there and savagely murdered.

His son, James II, was king at the age of six, and the nobility fought among themselves as to who should be regent until he came of age.

Infighting nobles and regents were to become a recurring theme for the Stewarts but James II also intervened personally, stabbing William, the 8th Earl of Douglas, at Stirling Castle in February 1452, with the king’s guards beating Douglas’s brains out and throwing his dead body out of a high window. Talk about Game of Thrones ...

James II was killed at the age of 29 when one of his own cannons exploded beside him at the Siege of Roxburgh Castle in August 1460. A piece of gun metal smashed into his thigh and severed an artery so that he quickly expired.

That was just pure bad luck on his part, but his son James III proved to be an arguably even more unlucky monarch as he survived two nobles’ rebellions only to be murdered after the Battle of Sauchieburn on June 11, 1488.

The rebels this time had as their figurehead the king’s son, who became James IV. He was a highly intelligent and cultured man but was nobody’s idea of a soldier as he took leave of his senses and charged the English army at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He was chopped to bits and his dead body was taken to London where it was subsequently lost. The story that workmen played footie with his skull cannot be verified.

James V came to the throne at the age of just 17 months, and his mother Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, was his first regent. When he eventually started his personal rule, it was clear that James V was also a poor leader and when the Scots lost the battle of Solway Moss in 1542, he took to his bed and died a few days later. His only child, Mary, became queen at the age of just six days. Good queen or bad queen – you decide … There was the usual battle between the nobles as to who should have control of the infant monarch, but it was her mother, Mary of Guise, who had the biggest say. Henry VIII wanted Mary to marry his son and had a strange way of making a proposal – his army invaded Scotland in what was later called the Rough Wooing Mary and her four friends, also all called Mary, were shipped over to France where she was educated and then engaged to Francis the Dauphin, the crown prince of France. When Francis became King in 1558, Mary was thus Queen of Scotland and France but he died in December 1560 and Mary returned to reign over Scotland the following year. While in France she changed her name to Stuart, the French spelling of Stewart, and that has confused history students ever since.

Mary was a devout Catholic but unfortunately for her, Scotland had its Reformation virtually overnight in 1560 and now she faced fierce Protestants led by the fiery preacher John Knox. The two of them had numerous debates, more like stairheid rammies, and despite being a good queen at first, Mary’s lustful obsession with her half-cousin Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, proved her undoing.

HE turned out to be a spoiled brat and annoyed just about everybody, so much so that a band of nobles got together and killed him in February 1567, Darnley’s body being found after an explosion destroyed his Edinburgh house, Kirk O’Field.

Mary then married the likely chief murderer, James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell. Big mistake … Most of the nobility rose up against Mary and Bothwell and she was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James VI. Imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, Mary seduced her jailers and managed to escape, only for her forces to lose the Battle of Langside near Glasgow. Mary fled to England to seek the mercy of her relative, Queen Elizabeth. Eventually, after 18 years in captivity, Mary was implicated in a Catholic plot to depose Elizabeth, who duly had Mary’s head chopped off.

Back in Scotland, James VI didn’t say too much about his mother’s execution as he had a long game in play, one that was successful as he gained the crown of England when Gloriana died in 1603.

The Union of the Crowns survived the Gunpowder Plot and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, but James VI’s son Charles I didn’t – Oliver Cromwell and the Parliament forces gave him the same treatment as his granny by decapitating him in 1649. The Scots were not too chuffed at their king being rendered headless and named his son Charles II as king of Scotland.

Cromwell was none too pleased and brought his New Model Army north where they routed the Scottish army at Dunbar. For the second time, though, Scotland was conquered and Cromwell incorporated the Scots into his new Commonwealth, the first union that no Unionist talks about because if one union can be discontinued, so could another … The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 saw Scotland and England go their separate ways but not for long. The prospect of James as a Catholic king infuriated the Protestant authorities in both England and Scotland and led to the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution in 1688 when William and Mary usurped the throne of her father James VII and II, becoming William II and Mary II of Scotland.

William in particular wanted to unite the two countries into one, but it fell to his successor, Mary’s sister Anne, to preside over the Union in 1707.

There’s been more tosh written and spoken about the Union than any other part of Scottish history. Forget all the Unionist propaganda. It really was driven through by aristocrats and gentry, Burns’s Parcel of Rogues, who were all bribed to accede to it. There really were riots in the streets by the common people who were opposed to it, and English troops really were on standby to suppress an uprising.

Threatened with economic disaster and military might, the Scottish people reluctantly acquiesced to the Acts of Union which, please note, contain absolutely no clauses about resiling from the Union. Scotland’s independence was sold for a mess of pottage.

Here’s the irony – the Union was the key to the start of a great experiment, the British Empire. It was also the greatest con in British history – the Scots set about the imperial business with great gusto and no little success while all the time hoodwinking the English into thinking it was their empire.

READ MORE: 1513 And All That: A Memorable History of Scotland - part one

Scotland had its Enlightenment and became a world leader in, among other fields, medical science, and in the 19th and 20th centuries it was Scots who invented much of the modern world, developing steamships, many industrial processes, roads, pneumatic tyres and bicycles and inventing the telephone and television, with arguably the greatest discovery being antibiotics.

As the empire became moribund, all the time the clamour for regaining independence was growing and the reconstitution of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 showed that desire for self-government.

In 2025, with a referendum gained by the SNP putting Labour into power in a hung UK Parliament, Scotland voted by a slim but clear majority to become independent again, with the European Union and the United Nations welcoming us with open arms.

A pity that last paragraph is the only bit that’s not true – yet.