But the heavy English cavalry could not break the squares of spears; Keith cut up the archers of England; the main body could not deploy, and the slow, relentless advance of the whole Scottish line covered the plain with the dying and the flying. A panic arose, caused by the sight of an approaching cloud of camp-followers on the Gillie's hill; Edward fled, and hundreds of noble prisoners, with all the waggons and supplies of England, fell into the hands of the Scots. In eight strenuous years the generalship of Bruce and his war-leaders, the resolution of the people, hardened by the cruelties of Edward, the sermons of the clergy, and the utter incompetence of Edward II., had redeemed a desperate chance. From a fief of England, Scotland had become an indomitable nation. LATER DAYS OF BRUCE. Bruce continued to prosper, despite an ill-advised attempt to win Ireland, in which Edward Bruce fell (1318.) This left the succession, if Bruce had no male issue, to the children of his daughter, Marjory, and her husband, the Steward. In 1318 Scotland recovered Berwick, in 1319 routed the English at Mytton-on-Swale. In a Parliament at Aberbrothock (April 6, 1320) the Scots announced to the Pope, who had been interfering, that, while a hundred of them survive, they will never yield to England. In October 1322 Bruce utterly routed the English at Byland Abbey, in the heart of Yorkshire, and chased Edward II. into York. In March 1324 a son was born to Bruce named David; on May 4, 1328, by the Treaty of Northampton, the independence of Scotland was recognised. In July the infant David married Joanna, daughter of Edward II. On June 7, 1329, Bruce died and was buried at Dunfermline; his heart, by his order, was carried by Douglas towards the Holy Land, and when Douglas fell in a battle with the Moors in Spain, the heart was brought back by Sir Simon Lockhart of the Lee. The later career of Bruce, after he had been excommunicated, is that of the foremost knight and most sagacious man of action who ever wore the crown of Scotland. The staunchness with which the clergy and estates disregarded papal fulminations (indeed under William the Lion they had treated an interdict as waste-paper) indicated a kind of protestant tendency to independence of the Holy See. Bruce's inclusion of representatives of the Burghs in the first regular Scottish Parliament (at Cambuskenneth in 1326) was a great step forward in the constitutional existence of the country. The king, in Scotland, was expected to "live of his own," but in 1326 the expenses of the war with England compelled Bruce to seek permission for taxation. CHAPTER IX. DECADENCE AND DISASTERS--REIGN OF DAVID II.