The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  The Wolf’s activities, and those of his sons who led or organised plundering raids through Angus in 1391 and 1392, highlighted the emergence of a ‘Highland problem’ that was to persist through the reigns of all the early Stewart kings. To some extent this turbulence may be seen as a reaction to their attempts to establish royal authority throughout a part of the kingdom hitherto left largely to its own devices and to the government of clan chiefs and local magnates. There had, however, been disorder and intermittent clan warfare in Moray for years, and an attempt to settle this took the form of a staged battle between the clans Chattan and Kay (both in fact groupings of a number of different clans) in Perth in 1396. The contest was a macabre parody of the tournament, the favourite sport of chivalry. Thirty men from each clan assembled on the North Inch, a meadow on the banks of the Tay.1 Stands were erected for spectators,2 and King Robert, his court and a number of foreign dignitaries graced the occasion. The fierce battle was long remembered: Walter Scott made it the climax of his last successful novel, The Fair Maid of Perth. The King’s heir, Prince David, acted as umpire, and throughout the afternoon the warriors, denied body armour, hacked at each other until eleven men of Clan Chattan were left on their feet, victorious, while the only survivor of their rivals escaped by diving into the river and swimming free. The pro-Stewart chronicler Bower judged that the day had its desired effect, since ‘for a long time the north remained quiet’. His verdict may be received with some scepticism.

  Unable to manage his brothers, King Robert was compelled to surrender the effective government of the kingdom to the dominating figure of his sibling Robert, Earl of Fife, whom he created Duke of Albany in 1398. At the same time, Prince David was made Duke of Rothesay, the title still borne by the eldest son of the sovereign. It would soon be apparent, however, that if the King could not control his brothers, he could not protect his sons either.

  In 1399 there was a shift in power. Albany was accused by rival members of the Council of ‘misgovernance of the realm’, and Rothesay was named as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Rothesay was an attractive but wild and, by repute, dissolute young man, and soon made enemies, not only among the fathers, brothers and uncles of girls he had seduced. He married a daughter of the Earl of Douglas, in itself a politic move to ally the Crown to the greatest family of the Borders. Unfortunately he had already contracted to marry a daughter of the Earl of March, who, greatly insulted, departed to England. His arrival at the English court, and the news he brought of widespread disaffection in Scotland, persuaded Henry IV to revive the moribund English claim to overlordship. He invaded Scotland, met little resistance, occupied Edinburgh, and then withdrew, having in truth achieved little of substance, but having demonstrated the inability of young Rothesay to defend the kingdom. Discontent was now rife. Albany seized the chance to make a comeback, and compelled the King to consent to his son’s arrest. Taken in St Andrews, the young Duke was transferred to Falkland Castle – not yet the fine Renaissance palace that would later be constructed, but a grim keep. Within two months he was dead. The death of his nephew and rival was too convenient for Albany to be allowed to pass without comment, but he obliged the Council to issue a proclamation declaring that Rothesay had ‘departed this life through the divine dispensation and not otherwise’. Few can have been convinced, though most kept quiet. A generation later Bower wrote that the Prince had died ‘of dysentery or, as some have it, of starvation’. The same explanation had been offered in England two years previously for the death of the deposed Richard II in Pontefract Castle. In The Fair Maid of Perth, Scott, basing his account on John of Fordoun’s chronicle, has Rothesay murdered by Albany’s agents, though in the manner of the murder, they exceed their instructions. The intention had indeed been to starve the young man to death, but on investigation, ‘the dying hand of the Prince was found to be clenched upon a lock of hair, resembling, in colour and texture, the coal-black bristles of Bonthron.3 Thus, though famine had begun the work, it would seem that Rothesay’s death had been finally accomplished by violence.’ Hector Boece, writing his history of the Scottish kings more than a hundred years later, was certain of Albany’s guilt. Rothesay was deliberately starved, and ‘brocht, finalie, to sa miserable and hungry appetite that he eit, nocht onlie allegedly, the filth of the toure quhar he wes, bot his awin fingaris: to his gret martyrdome’. The last vivid touch, if not true, is well and horribly invented.

  Scott’s version, based on these chroniclers, is dramatically convincing and politically persuasive.4 The King was now over sixty and in poor health. Rothesay was his heir. Albany’s power, and perhaps his life, had been threatened by the prospect of his nephew’s succession to the throne. Rothesay was in his hands, and Rothesay did not survive. It requires considerable generosity of mind to acquit Albany of responsibility for his nephew’s death. There can be nothing surprising in his murder, any more than in the murder of Richard II at the command of his cousin and usurper Henry IV. Family feeling may easily be extinguished when power is the prize.

  King Robert, too weak to challenge his dominant brother, had little choice but to accept the official version of his son’s death. He now withdrew to Rothesay Castle on the Isle of Bute, an old Stewart stronghold, and surrendered the government to Albany. But he had a younger son, James, a boy of only eight when Rothesay died or was murdered. Two years later he was made Earl of Carrick, the old title of the Bruces, and it was decided to send him to France, ostensibly to complete his education. It is reasonable to suppose, as men did at the time, that the young heir to the throne was in fact sent away for his own safety. The King’s health was failing fast. What chance would the boy have with Albany as regent?

  This can only be supposition, yet there is some evidence to support it. Instead of taking ship at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, the young Prince was brought with an armed escort, commanded by an old friend of the King’s, Sir David Fleming of Cumbernauld, to the Bass Rock off the East Lothian coast, where he was to wait for a boat on its way from Leith to France. (There was then no Scottish navy.) The elaborate scheme suggests that there was some fear he might be prevented from boarding a vessel in Leith. He had to wait a month on the Rock (more often used throughout Scottish history as a prison) until he was able to embark on a ship trading out of Danzig, which was carrying wool and hides to France. He never arrived there. The boat was intercepted and boarded by English pirates off Flamborough Head. They recognised the value of their catch, handed James over to Henry IV and were rewarded with the ship’s cargo. Did Albany have a hand in this? There is no evidence either to acquit him or prove his guilt. Is it significant that Sir David Fleming, on his way back from the coast, was attacked and killed by Sir James Douglas of Balveny? Albany may have been responsible; or again, not, with Fleming the victim of a private feud. What is certain is that the young Prince’s capture and imprisonment in England suited the Duke very well.

  Robert III survived the news of his son’s misfortune for only a few weeks. He died requesting to be buried in a midden with the epitaph ‘Here lies the worst of kings and most miserable of men’. The cause of death was sympathetically ascribed to that ailment beloved by historians and sentimental romancers but unknown to medical science: a broken heart. But since he was in his seventieth year, the true cause may have been more prosaic.

  The two Roberts had been ineffectual kings. Yet the dynasty was well established. James might be a prisoner in England, but his right of succession was recognised. Two months after Robert’s death, a Council of the Scottish Estates – the name given to the Scottish parliament at the point – named him king and authorised Albany to continue to act as lieutenant-governor of the realm. The Duke may have hoped to be king himself. If so, he lacked sufficient support. His government was therefore limited and provisional. When he died in 1420, at the age of eighty, he was succeeded as governor by his son Murdoch, who had himself spent some years in English captivity. But the rule of father and son was maintained only with the consent of the most powerfu
l nobles, who made it clear that they owed allegiance to James and would not tolerate the usurpation of his throne. Just as when David II had been a prisoner in England, loyalty to the rightful king outweighed the inconvenience of his absence.

  Chapter 4

  James I (1406–37): The Poet-King

  The great Cambridge historian F. W. Maitland wrote of ‘the mournful procession of the Jameses’. The judgement was uncharacteristically sweeping, uncharacteristically unfair also. Stewart kingship was far from being a failure. The times were violent. None of the five Jameses lived beyond the age of forty-three – in marked contrast to the ineffectual Roberts – but they were all men of unusual ability, capable of asserting themselves and subduing recalcitrant nobles. It was the misfortune of the dynasty, though not necessarily of Scotland, that the reigns of four of them began with a minority.

  Comparison with England and France serves, however, to put their troubled history in perspective. If two of the Jameses were murdered and two killed in battle, the years between 1399 and 1485 saw three English kings deposed and murdered, one mad, and another – believed to have murdered his own nephews – killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Moreover, for thirty years, 1455–85, England suffered intermittent civil war, on a scale far beyond anything Scotland experienced, and three changes of dynasty. Indeed it is arguable that what many constitutional historians have seen as an advantage enjoyed by England but denied to Scotland – the existence of a strong monarchy and a comparatively centralised state – actually provoked this instability. Since the king possessed bureaucratic machinery that might allow him to impose his will on the great territorial barons, they were more likely, if dissatisfied with the Crown’s policies, to combine to resist them and change the government.

  In France, the fifteenth century was even more terrible than in England. It began with a mad king, Charles VI, and the murder in the streets of Paris of his brother, Louis d’Orléans, by cut-throats in the pay of his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy. Civil war between the Orléanists (or Armagnacs) and the Burgundians followed. Then came an English invasion, supported by the Burgundians, the disaster of Agincourt and utter humiliation before a miraculous saviour appeared in the person of a shepherd girl from Lorraine, Joan of Arc. Thirty years later, a ‘strong’ king, Louis XI, found himself challenged in the ‘War of the Common Weal’ by a group of leading nobles, defending their traditional collective rights and privileges against the centralising policies of the Crown.

  The century to which the Dutch historian Huizinga gave the name ‘the Waning of the Middle Ages’ was disordered, bloody, violent. In Scotland, England and France alike, the penalty of political failure was often death by the dagger, sword or headsman’s axe.

  Nothing in Scotland, however, matched the horrors perpetrated in Paris in the summer of 1418 after the Burgundians seized control of the city and took their revenge on their Armagnac rivals. First, Bernard d’Armagnac, the Orléanists’ leader, and his associates in government were hacked to death. Two months later the fury of the mob was directed, not spontaneously, at foreigners: Bretons and Gascons, Lombards and Genoese, Catalans and Castilians, ‘in the absence’, as one French historian sardonically puts it, ‘of Jews. Stripped, mutilated, profaned, impaled, their bodies were thrown into the middle of the street as if they had been swine.’ The next year the Armagnacs had their revenge. The Duke of Burgundy was murdered by adherents of the Dauphin, the King’s eldest son, on the bridge over the Seine at Montereau; he had come there to negotiate a peace. There were like horrors in England: the murder of Richard II in Pontefract Castle in 1399, the summary execution of Richard, Duke of York, after the Battle of Wakefield; the murders of Henry VI, the Duke of Clarence and (almost certainly) the boy king Edward V and his younger brother Richard. All this should be borne in mind as the story of the five Jameses unfolds.

  When Henry IV was told that his young captive Prince James had been travelling to France only to further his education, he replied that this was unnecessary because ‘I speak good French myself.’ Actually it is probable that James could already speak the language: his mother, Annabelle Drummond, had been accustomed to correspond with his elder brother, David of Rothesay, in French. This need occasion no surprise. The now longstanding French alliance, as a result of which many Scots served in the French army – one of them, James Power or Polwarth, designing Joan of Arc’s banner – meant that the Scottish court and nobility were acquainted with the French tongue and well versed in French culture. Indeed, French influence is evident in many aspects of Scottish life throughout the Stewart period. In church and castle architecture France, not England, supplied the model. Young noblemen were often sent to France to further their education. French words entered the Scots language. The lords’ claret was poured from a ‘gardevin’ (wine jug) into a ‘tassie’ (cup), and their food was served on an ‘ashet’ (assiette). Scots law diverged from English common law and the foundations were laid in the fifteenth century of a Franco-Roman legal system, which, despite the vast accretions of statute law passed by the United Kingdom parliament since 1707, survives to this day. When universities were founded – St Andrews in 1412, Glasgow in 1455 and King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1495 – the model was the Sorbonne in Paris, not Oxford or Cambridge.

  Henry’s remark may have been a joke, but he did see to it that the education of the captive Prince was not neglected. James soon learned to read Latin for pleasure, and to write fluently. Though he was lodged at first in the Tower of London, where other prisoners included his cousin Murdoch, captured on a raid into England, and Griffith, the son of the rebel Welsh prince Owen Glendower, the conditions of his captivity were not severe. There was the royal menagerie to amuse them, and James was soon allotted his own household servants. He was even on occasion permitted to exercise his regal powers. So, for instance, in November 1412 he issued ‘from Croydon’ letters confirming two members of the extensive Douglas family in possession of the Border lands of Drumlanrig, Hawick, Selkirk and Cavers. The documents, given ‘under the signet usit in selying of oure letters’, are declared to be ‘rate with oure proper hand’, and are the first examples we have of the handwriting of any King of Scots.

  Nevertheless, captivity must have been irksome for a young and ambitious prince, especially since his uncle Albany made no effort to secure his release. On the contrary; when Henry IV died in 1413, Albany negotiated the return to Scotland of his own son Murdoch, in exchange for Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (who had taken refuge in Scotland after an unsuccessful rebellion), but left the King where he was.

  Events turned in James’s favour, however, when the English triumph at Agincourt was followed by further successes. The French called for assistance from their Scottish ally, and a force of some six or seven thousand men was sent to France under the command of Albany’s second son, the Earl of Buchan, and Archibald, fourth Earl of Douglas, who was married to James’s sister Margaret. This army defeated the English at Bauge in 1421, stimulating renewed French resistance.

  The presence of the Scots in France persuaded Henry V to take James with him on his next campaign, so that his subjects could be charged with fighting against their king, thus being guilty of treason. James was not reluctant. He admired Henry, had been present at his marriage to Catherine of Valois, and been knighted by him at Windsor. They may even have been friends inasmuch as friendship was possible between kings, or indeed between keeper and prisoner. He was by Henry’s side at the siege of Melun and issued an order commanding all Scots in the French army to lay down their arms. The commander, James’s cousin Buchan, not surprisingly declined to obey the King’s order, but a dozen Scots who had been taken prisoner were hanged for having borne arms against their lawful king. James may have had no choice in the matter. On the other hand, he may well have approved. He had no reason to love Buchan, whose father had been content to leave him a prisoner in England. Certainly such approval would be in keeping with the ruthlessness he would display when at last he returned to Sco
tland and began to govern.

  That day was not far off. In 1422 Henry V died. His son and heir, Henry VI, was still a baby. A council of regency was established. Its chief members were the late king’s brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and their uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. The King’s death would have consequences for the war with France, never again prosecuted so successfully, and for the political relations between England and Scotland. The new government saw merit in releasing James. An Anglo-Scottish agreement, even if falling short of an alliance, might lead to the withdrawal of the Scottish army from France. The rapproachement between England and Scotland would be cemented by a marriage. A suitable bride for James was available. She was Joan Beaufort, niece of the Bishop of Winchester. The marriage was undeniably a political arrangement, but, unlike most royal marriages, it may have been a love match too.

  For James was not only a king; he was also a poet, and in The Kingis Quair, he told, or purported to tell, the story of his romance. It is a long poem of 119 seven-line stanzas, which shows the influence of Chaucer, and though in many ways conventional in theme and imagery, also reads like the product of personal experience.

  He tells how he is lying awake in his chamber unable to sleep. So in the manner of insomniacs, he picks up a book: The Consolations of Philosophy by the fifth-century Roman Boethius, itself reputedly written in prison and often quoted by Chaucer. He reads for some time, then lays it aside and muses on the mutability of fortune till he hears the bell ring for Matins. He then recounts the story of his youth and capture and years of captivity. This depresses him, and so, in an attempt to lighten his mood, he goes to the window overlooking a garden where a nightingale has been singing.