Whatever uncertainty may hang over the details, there is no doubt about the completeness of the victory. The number of the slain may well have been large, seeing how the knights and men-at-arms were crowded together in a confused mass, incapable of resistance. The gross incompetence of Edward II. or his advisers, who with all the material for victory in their hands, and the precedent of Falkirk to guide them, threw their advantage away, was responsible for the defeat. Their hasty flight was also probably the cause of the dispersion in panic rout of the whole English host, a disgrace which has never since fallen on an English army. According to Barbour, the king with his immediate attendants sought shelter in Stirling Castle, and was refused admittance by Mowbray the governor, who pointed out that the castle could not hold out long, now that the English army was defeated, and that therefore the king's only chance of safety lay in making off. How Edward could possibly have made his way round to Stirling Castle, with the victorious Scots between him and it, can with difficulty be imagined. The advice, however, if ever given, was sound as far as it went. Better judgment still would have bidden him rally his host, for even after the defeat he must still have greatly outnumbered the Scots. But if he had been capable of taking this obvious and soldierlike step, he would not have committed the folly which lost the battle. The victory of Bannockburn virtually gained the cause of Scottish independence, though fourteen years had yet to elapse before England acknowledged it by treaty. That the Scots fully deserved to win their independence, and that they had a right to win it if they could, no one in modern times will deny. No impartial reader of history can doubt that in some sense they had been dependent on England before the war, or that the exaggerated claims of Edward I. gave reasonable ground for repudiating them entirely. Whether the success of the Scots was for their permanent benefit is another question. The union of the whole island into one kingdom was, it may be fairly said, inevitable sooner or later. Scotland must needs have gained enormously in all material respects by incorporation with her more advanced neighbour. Had this taken place before centuries of political antagonism and repeated wars had developed national hatred, and quickened into a passion Scottish national feeling, the union would have been easier and more thorough. With Scotland added, instead of permanently hostile, the weight of England in the European scale, already great, would have been much increased, with consequences impossible to calculate. At the same time the world would have been the poorer for the loss of the distinctive character, which was developed in the Scots mainly through their separate Reformation. INTERMEDIATE NOTE THE LONG-BOW