The Declaration of Arbroath: Scotland's Letter to the Pope
In 1320, the nobles of Scotland sent a letter to Pope John XXII asserting their nation's independence and their right to choose their own king. The Declaration of Arbroath remains one of the most powerful statements of national sovereignty ever written.
James Ross Jr.
Author of The Forge of Tongues — 22,000 Years of Migration, Mutation, and Memory
A Nation Writes Its Case
On April 6, 1320, a letter was sealed at the Abbey of Arbroath and dispatched to Pope John XXII in Avignon. It bore the seals of thirty-nine Scottish barons and nobles, though it was written on behalf of the entire community of the realm of Scotland. The letter had one purpose: to convince the Pope that Scotland was an independent kingdom with an ancient right to self-governance, and that the English claim to sovereignty over Scotland was illegitimate.
The context was desperate. Scotland had been at war with England, intermittently, for over two decades. Robert the Bruce had won the decisive military victory at Bannockburn in 1314, but England refused to recognize Scottish independence, and the Pope — under pressure from the English crown — had excommunicated Bruce and placed Scotland under interdict. Without papal recognition, Scotland's position remained precarious. Medieval politics required the approval of the Church, and the Church was siding with England.
The Declaration of Arbroath was Scotland's appeal to the highest authority in Christendom. It was written in Latin, composed with legal precision and rhetorical skill almost certainly by Bernard de Linton, the Abbot of Arbroath and Chancellor of Scotland. It made three arguments: that Scotland was an ancient nation with an unbroken history of independence, that the English had been the aggressors in the conflict, and that the Scots had the right — indeed the duty — to resist tyranny.
The Words That Endure
The Declaration's most famous passage is justly celebrated. In it, the nobles declare their willingness to fight for freedom not out of loyalty to Bruce personally but out of commitment to the principle of liberty itself:
"For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."
This is extraordinary language for a medieval document. The Declaration does not simply assert that Scotland should be independent because it has always been independent, though it makes that argument too. It asserts that freedom is a value worth dying for — a principle that transcends the personal loyalty any individual lord owes to any individual king. The Declaration subordinates the monarch to the nation, stating that if Bruce himself were to submit to English rule, the Scots would replace him with someone who would defend their liberty.
That idea — that the king serves the nation, not the other way around — was radical in 1320. It anticipated by centuries the political philosophy that would later be articulated during the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. It is no coincidence that the American Declaration of Independence echoes the language and logic of the Declaration of Arbroath. The Scots who emigrated to the American colonies carried this tradition of principled resistance with them.
The History It Claimed
The Declaration opens with a sweeping historical narrative, tracing the Scottish nation from supposed origins in "Greater Scythia" through a long migration to Scotland. It claimed that 113 kings had reigned in unbroken succession, "the line unbroken by a single foreigner." This was an exaggeration, but it served the argument: Scotland's independence was a fact of history stretching back to antiquity, and English interference was a violation of ancient right.
The historical claims matter less for their accuracy than for what they reveal about how medieval Scots understood their nation. Scotland was not a creation of recent convenience. It was an ancient community with a legitimate place among the nations of Christendom, with as much right to exist as France or England.
The Legacy of April 6
The immediate effect of the Declaration was limited. Pope John XXII was sympathetic but cautious, and full papal recognition of Scottish independence was slow in coming. England did not formally recognize Scotland's independence until the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, and even then the peace was fragile and temporary. The Wars of Independence dragged on, and the Stone of Destiny remained in Westminster.
But the Declaration of Arbroath outlasted the political circumstances that produced it. It became a foundational document of Scottish national identity — a text that Scots returned to again and again in moments of political crisis. When the Act of Union merged the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707, opponents invoked the Declaration. When the Scottish independence movement revived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Declaration was cited as evidence of an unbroken tradition of Scottish sovereignty.
April 6, the date of the Declaration, is now celebrated as Tartan Day in the United States and Canada — a recognition of the enormous contribution of the Scottish diaspora to North American life and culture. The document sealed at Arbroath in 1320 is not merely a historical curiosity. It is a living text, invoked whenever the question of Scottish self-determination is raised, carrying across seven centuries the argument that a small nation on the edge of Europe has the right to govern itself.