David II (1329–1371), Bruce's son, was crowned at five, exiled at ten, captured at Neville's Cross at twenty-two — and returned from eleven years' captivity to rule, against every expectation, as one of medieval Scotland's most effective kings.
David II's reign was framed by his father's unfinished business: crowned at five (the first Scots king anointed with papal blessing — Bruce's diplomatic legacy), he was evacuated to France at ten when Edward Balliol and the Disinherited overran the kingdom, and returned at seventeen to lead it — straight into the disaster at Neville's Cross (1346), where, honouring the French alliance after Crécy, he was wounded by two arrows and captured.
Eleven years an honoured prisoner, ransomed in 1357 for 100,000 marks, he then confounded the story written for him: the ransom's tax machinery rebuilt crown finance, the over-mighty Stewarts were faced down, castles and customs came back under royal hands, and the ransom itself was diplomatically stalled until his sudden death in 1371 — childless, which was the one failure that mattered dynastically.
Born at Dunfermline in 1324 to the ageing Bruce and Elizabeth de Burgh, David was married at four — to Joan of the Tower, Edward III's seven-year-old sister, under the treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton — and king at five when his father died in 1329. The peace died almost as fast: Edward Balliol's invasion and Dupplin Moor (1332), Halidon Hill (1333), and the child king and queen were shipped to Château Gaillard in 1334 for seven years' French refuge.
He came home in 1341 to a kingdom the Guardians — Moray, the young Robert Stewart, Douglas of Liddesdale — had clawed back fortress by fortress, and took up personal rule at seventeen with border raiding already habitual.
The chronicle tradition — Bower and Wyntoun, writing under the Stewarts his policy had slighted — handed down a wastrel: extravagant, uxorious (the Margaret Logie marriage scandalised them), soft on England, unworthy of his father. Twentieth-century record scholarship reversed the portrait almost completely: the exchequer rolls show a king who tripled ordinary revenue, ran the toughest parliaments of the century, and made the crown feared in the localities as it had not been since Bruce.
The personal courage was never in question — at Neville's Cross he fought on with an arrowhead lodged in his face and knocked out the teeth of his captor — and the political nerve matched it: the notorious "Plantagenet succession" proposals he dangled before Edward III (a Plantagenet prince to succeed him, failing heirs) are now generally read as calculated ransom-diplomacy, trading a phantom to defer six-figure instalments, with parliament reliably staged to refuse. The failure the record cannot rehabilitate is the marriage-bed: three wives, one divorce pursued to Avignon, and no heir — the gap through which the Stewarts entered.
The captivity years (1346–1357) hollowed the kingdom — Balliol ceded the southern shires outright to Edward III in 1356, the year of the Burnt Candlemas devastation — while Robert Stewart, lieutenant and heir-presumptive, governed comfortably and negotiated his uncle's release without urgency. The treaty of Berwick (October 1357) priced the king at 100,000 marks over ten years.
The restored king governed like a man repossessing his house: customs rates quadrupled and collection centralised; the great earldoms escheated or redirected as they fell in; the Steward's sons imprisoned and the Steward himself forced to reseal his allegiance after the abortive magnate confrontation of 1363; Edinburgh built up — David's Tower rising over the castle — as something like a capital. Payments on the ransom, suspended more often than made, had transferred barely a third of the price when king and obligation quietly expired together.
David died suddenly in Edinburgh Castle on 22 February 1371, a month short of forty-seven, planning a third marriage that might yet have disinherited the Stewarts; Robert II was crowned at Scone within the month, the Bruce dynasty ending after two kings — the hero and the son written out of the hero's story.
Modern verdicts run with the records: the unlucky king was among the ablest administrators to hold the medieval Scottish crown, and the monarchy the early Stewarts let slacken was one he had wound tight. His true memorial is negative and considerable — the kingdom his father freed did not, despite Neville's Cross, eleven years' captivity, and a ransom designed to cripple it, slip back under English lordship.