King Robert the Bruce, another, as we have already seen, of the royal victims of the malady, died at the age of 55.[270] But it is difficult to fix the precise date of the first attack of the disease in the case of the Scottish king, and hence difficult to deduce the exact duration of the malady in this particular instance. His faithful biographer, Barbour, describes him as “tuk with sic a sicknes” before the battle of Inverury in 1307, “that he mycht nothyr rid na ga”[271]—(that he might neither ride nor walk). Kerr, in his _History of the Life and Reign of the Bruce_, seems to hint that this was the commencement of the disease which ultimately carried him off;[272] and indeed Barbour, in a subsequent part of his poem, describes his fatal malady as “beguth”—(begun) throuch his cald lying Quhen in his gret myscheiff wes he.—P. 407. But if the affection commenced in so acute a form at that date, it must have lasted for the long period of twenty-two years, as his death did not take place till 1329. If the disease under which the king suffered so severely in 1307 had been leprosy, it would not in all probability have left his activity and individual prowess for so long a date unimpaired. The battle-axe which, on the evening before the battle of Bannockburn, cleft at a single blow the helmet and skull of Henry de Bohun, could scarcely have been wielded by the arm of one whose body had for some years previously been the seat of a mortal disease. Some facts, however, would seem to show that the malady had assumed a marked and severe form a considerable time before the Bruce’s death. I have already shown, from the _Chronicle of Lanercost_, that three years before his demise the Bruce was already so incapacitated by the inroads of the leprosy that he was unable to undertake the command of the army in their descent upon the northern counties of England.[273] The same reason rendered him, as we are informed by Barbour, unable to attend the peaceful nuptial feast of his son at Berwick in 1328. It may not be considered uninteresting to add, as a part both of the history of the man and of the disease under which he was labouring, that during these three last years of his life, and whilst “the sicknes” affected his body “so fellely” (to use Barbour’s words), “and him trawaillat sa that he considered death certen,” his naturally energetic mind was still active and vigorous. The accounts of his chamberlain, preserved in the Register House of Edinburgh,[274] show that, during the very last year of his life, he was busied in making experiments on ship-building and navigation in his retirement at Cardross Castle, near the banks of the Clyde, in Dumbartonshire. Within a month before his death, he indited from this place a letter (the original of which still exists among the old archives of Melrose Abbey, preserved in the General Register House, Edinburgh[275]), desiring his heart to be buried within the precincts of