Exclusive interview with author Jack Whyte and a review of his novel about Robert the Bruce
Rating: Four Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“Braveheart was a great, Hollywood-style adventure story, but it is hardly historically accurate,” says Robert the Bruce author Jack Whyte. “The French princess, for example, who took such great delight in the movie in telling Edward of England that she was pregnant by Wallace, did not set foot in England to marry the gay prince until long after Wallace died in 1305.”
Whyte tells the story of how Robert the Bruce, also known at Robert I, became Scotland’s greatest warrior. Robert the Bruce is initially loyal to the English throne until King Edward I makes a fool of him. That is the catalyst is that drives Bruce to fight for Scotland independence. Whyte’s battle scenes are vivid in scope and description. The characters are based on real people and we gain an insight into them as people.
“He (Bruce) kicked the English out of Scotland for 150 years when he won the phenomenal victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314,” says Whyte. “This novel, Robert the Bruce, is the second in a series that started with The Forest Laird, a look at the life of young William Wallace, Scotland’s national hero, before, and up to the point at which, he finally grew angry enough to change his name to Mel Gibson and become the Braveheart.” Whyte says he looks forward to participating in the 700th anniversary of that battle, a date that will be hugely celebrated in Scotland in 2014.
The script of the Braveheart movie was based solidly on a famous epic poem, The Wallace, written by a poet called Blind Hary. It is the most famous poem in all of Scottish history, and it was written in the fifteenth century, over a hundred years after Wallace’s death.
“All we know with any kind of certainty about The Wallace’s historical accuracy is that it is a poem written in the fifteenth century by a man called Blind Hary, who may or may not have been blind and whose name was almost certainly not Hary,” says Whyte.
“Practically everything I’ve discovered on this project since the get-go has been surprising and unexpected,” says Whyte. “In Scotland, in those days, there weren’t even any consistent written records. Even the famous Wallace Sword, which people believed for hundreds of years to be Wallace’s own, has recently been shown to be a hundred years younger than it should be, dating only to the fifteenth century.”
“I thought, when I started to write the first of this series, dealing with Wallace the Braveheart, that I might tick off those Scots, and there are thousands of them, who believe that Wallace was the Braveheart, just as Hollywood portrayed him,” says Whyte.
“But it never occurred to me, going in, that I would end up offending almost every Englishman in the world by suggesting that their national hero Robin Hood was actually a Scots outlaw who terrified all England in his day.”
Whyte is currently working on The Guardian, the third novel in the series. It examines the friendship and political relationship between Robert the Bruce and Wallace the Braveheart, who was Guardian of Scotland for a time before Bruce seized the throne.
Whyte is the author of the internationally bestselling Dream of Eagles series and the Templar trilogy. Prior to his current series, all Whyte’s books had been set outside of Scotland, nine of them, the series known as The Camulod Chronicles in the USA, were set in post-Roman, 5th century England, and three more, the Knights Templar Trilogy, in France and in the Holy Lands during the 12th to13th century era of the Crusades.
Whyte lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. He was born in Scotland in the town of Johnstone, less than three miles from the village where William Wallace was raised and educated seven hundred years ago.
Robert the Bruce (Guardians Trilogy) by Jack Whyte. Hardcover, 592 pages, Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition (August 6, 2013) Language: English, ISBN: 9780765331571 $27.99.
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