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Bishop Robert Wishart 

 
 

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Robert Wishart was the second son of Adam Wyschard, who founded the House of Logie Wishart, having obtained lands in Forfar in 1272 and 1279.  He followed his uncle William Wishart into the Church, and became Bishop of Glasgow in 1272, a post he was to hold for 44 years.

Robert Wishart was a Privy Councillor of Alexander III and one of six Guardians of Scotland during the interregnum which followed the king's death in 1286. After the English occupation of Scotland under Edward I, Bishop Robert Wishart joined the patriotic party in 1297 and became one of the leading statesmen on the side of William Wallace and Robert Bruce in the war of independence. At King Robert's coronation at Scone on 27 March 1306, Bishop Wishart is said to have supplied the robes from his own wardrobe in which King Robert was crowned.

Robert Wishart was captured by the English following the battle of Methven in 1306 and imprisoned in irons in Wessex dungeons. But after the Scots won at Bannockburn in 1314, he was exchanged for the Earl of Hertford. By then he was frail and nearly blind, and he died on 26 November 1316. His tomb is in Glasgow Cathedral, and he is commemorated in a window of the north wall of Biggar Kirk in Upper Clydesdale.  It shows St. Andrew, left, and Bishop Wishart, right.

The Scottish historian Robert Barrow sums up Robert Wishart as "indisputably one of the great figures in the struggle for Scottish independence, the statesman of the period 1286-91, the patron and friend of Wallace and Bruce, the persistent opponent of Plantagenet pretensions, an unheroic hero of the long war". It was for Robert Wishart's allegiance to Scotland and the Standard of Wallace that the design of the Wishart tartan was based on the ancient Wallace tartan recorded in Vestiarium Scoticum.