Only child of Robert the Bruce’s first marriage, held captive in England from 1306 to 1314, she married Walter Stewart, High Steward of Scotland, and died about 1316 soon after bearing Robert II, the first Stewart king.
Marjorie Bruce was the only child of Robert the Bruce's first marriage, to Isabella of Mar, and for most of her short life the only direct heir of the Bruce line. When her father seized the Scottish throne in 1306 she became a princess, and within months a prisoner: the English captured her with her stepmother and aunts, and Edward I of England kept her in a Yorkshire nunnery for the next eight years.
Freed after the Battle of Bannockburn, she married Walter Stewart, the young High Steward of Scotland, in 1315, and died soon after giving birth to their son Robert, traditionally on 2 March 1316. That son became Robert II of Scotland in 1371, the first king of the House of Stewart, so every Stewart monarch of Scotland, and through them the later kings and queens of Great Britain, descends from her.
Marjorie was born around 1296, when her father was still Earl of Carrick, and was named after his mother, Marjorie, Countess of Carrick. Her mother Isabella, a daughter of the Earl of Mar, died soon after the birth, and Robert did not marry again until 1302, when he wed Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of the Earl of Ulster. Marjorie's childhood coincided with the English conquest of Scotland and with her father's shifting loyalties between Edward I and the Scottish cause. In February 1306 Robert killed his rival John Comyn at Dumfries, and in late March he was crowned King of Scots at Scone. Marjorie, aged about ten, became heir to a kingdom that was still largely in English hands.
No letter, speech or description of Marjorie survives, and the records that mention her were written about her by people who did not know her. English documents of 1306 show only how Edward I treated her: he first ordered a cage built for her in the Tower of London, then changed his mind and sent her to the Gilbertine nuns at Watton in Yorkshire. Her treatment was lighter than that of her aunt Mary Bruce and of Isabella MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, who were kept in cages at Roxburgh and Berwick castles, but nothing in the record reveals how a girl of ten bore eight years of captivity.
Later writing is mostly about her place in the dynasty. John Barbour's poem The Bruce, written in the 1370s while her son Robert II was king, celebrates her father and her husband and records her marriage as the union of the Bruce and Stewart lines. The romantic stories attached to her, such as the tale that her parents had been deeply in love, or the Paisley tradition of her fatal fall and her son's delivery by an unskilled hand, come from local and much later sources and cannot be tested. Modern novels and the film Outlaw King have made her a figure of youthful courage, but that picture is imagined.
In June 1306 Robert's small army was routed by the English at the Battle of Methven, near Perth. He sent the royal women north for safety, but his queen, his daughter, his sisters Mary and Christina and the Countess of Buchan were seized at the sanctuary of Saint Duthac at Tain by William, Earl of Ross, and handed over to the English. Edward I treated them as rebels. Elizabeth de Burgh, whose father was his ally, was held under house arrest in Yorkshire; Christina was sent to a nunnery; Mary and the countess were shut in cages. Marjorie spent the next eight years at Watton. Edward I died in July 1307, but his son Edward II of England kept her there, and in those years three of her uncles were executed by the English.
The Scottish victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314 changed her fortunes. Among the English prisoners was Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and that autumn he was exchanged for Robert's wife, sisters and daughter and other Scottish captives. Walter Stewart, the High Steward, who had fought in the battle, was sent to receive the women at the border. In April 1315 a council at Ayr settled the succession on Robert's brother Edward Bruce and his male heirs, with Marjorie's consent and her own claim to follow, and she married Walter soon afterwards. Her dowry included the barony of Bathgate in West Lothian.
Edward Bruce was killed at Faughart in Ireland in October 1318, and a parliament at Scone that December recognised Marjorie's infant son Robert as heir presumptive. The birth of Robert the Bruce's son David in 1324 pushed the Stewart boy back in line, but David II of Scotland died childless in 1371 and Marjorie's son took the throne.
The traditional story, told in Renfrewshire, is that on 2 March 1316 Marjorie, heavily pregnant, was thrown from her horse near Paisley, went into labour and died after her son was delivered. Around 1710 the local historian George Crawfurd recorded the tradition that the child was cut from her body, that his eye was hurt in the operation, which was why Robert II was called King Blearie, and that a cross called Queen Blearie's Cross marked the place. These details are late and confused, and some accounts suggest she lived into 1317, perhaps dying after another fall during a second pregnancy. A cairn at the Knock, at the junction of Renfrew Road and Dundonald Road in Paisley, marks the spot where she is said to have fallen.
She was buried in Paisley Abbey, the monastery founded by her husband's family and the burial place of the High Stewards. A tomb in the choir with a much-restored female effigy is traditionally hers, but it was reconstructed from fragments of different origin, its base probably taken from the stone screen that once divided the nave from the choir, and there is no evidence that she lies at that spot.