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

by Allan Massie

  And therewith kest I doun my eye ageyne,

  Quhare as I saw, walking under the toure,

  Ful secretly new cummyng hir to pleyne,

  The fairest or the freschest yonge floure

  That ever I sawe, me thought, before that houre,

  For quhich sodayn abate, anon astert

  The blude of all my body to my hert.

  And though I stude abaisit tho a lyte

  No wonder was, forquhy my wittis all

  Were so ouercome with pleasaunce and delyte

  Only throe latting of myn eyen fall,

  That suddenly my hert become hit thrall

  For ever of free wyll; for of manace

  There was no takyn in hir suete face.

  And so it continues, as the poet invokes the aid of classical goddesses (first, naturally, Venus), visits the Court of Love, seeks advice from Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, and travels through an enchanted land before arriving triumphant at the port of love.

  Much of the imagery is trite, but this should be no occasion for criticism. Poets then did not aim for originality of either manner or matter. Nevertheless, there is a freshness to the poem, and the delight that it conveys arises in part from the growing conviction that this is no mere exercise in verse-making but an expression of true feeling. The circumstances of that first encounter may be invented. Seeing a beautiful lady in a garden from a tower window was a poetic convention dating back to at least the Provençal troubadours of the twelfth century. Yet there is a directness in the tone that gives the impression of sincerity, allowing us to believe that the marriage of James Stewart and Joan Beaufort may indeed have been founded in the King’s desire and love of his wife. Doubts as to James’s authorship have been raised, for no good reason. Kings may be poets, even talented ones. At least two of James’s descendants, Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI, wrote verse of some merit.

  A royal marriage may be a love match, as the poem suggests, but it can never be only that. Inevitably it has a political significance. Joan Beaufort was not only a lovely sweet-faced girl observed by a poet as she walked in a garden. She was also a piece on the political chessboard.

  The Beauforts were royal, but dubiously so. Joan was the granddaughter of John of Gaunt (Shakespeare’s ‘time-honoured Lancaster’), the youngest son of Edward III and father of Henry IV. But her grandmother, Catherine Swynford, had been Gaunt’s mistress before becoming his third wife in 1396, and their children were born out of wedlock. At Gaunt’s request, Parliament legitimised them in 1397, but ten years later the words ‘excepta dignitate regali’ were interpolated; so they were legitimate, but barred from succession to the throne. Catherine had other children, legitimate ones from her first marriage to Sir Hugh Swynford, a member of Gaunt’s household. One son, Thomas Swynford, had supported his stepbrother Henry Bolingbroke in the rebellion that resulted in the deposition of Richard II, and was popularly thought to be Richard’s murderer.

  When Henry V died, two Beaufort brothers, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas, Duke of Exeter, were members of the Council of Regency for the infant Henry VI. They could see advantages in marrying their niece Joan to the King of Scots and restoring him to his kingdom. It might be a means of breaking the Franco-Scottish alliance and of establishing peace on the Anglo-Scottish border, both of benefit to the war effort in France. For James, too, the advantages of the match were obvious. It might be the only way, as it was certainly the surest, to obtain his release from captivity. Even so, there was little enough trust, and burdensome conditions were attached to his restoration. Scotland was to be charged £40,000, ostensibly payment for the cost of keeping and educating the King in England for eighteen years. Since he had not been there willingly, this might more exactly have been called a ransom. In recognition of Scotland’s poverty and the shortage of cash in the kingdom, the money was to be paid in four annual instalments, and twenty-one young Scots of noble birth were to be sent to England as hostages, surety for the debt. However, with rare generosity, the Beauforts consented to remit one-sixth of the sum – this to be regarded as their niece’s dowry, a bargain for them since it cost them nothing. Not surprisingly, payments were delayed: in the course of James’s reign, seventy-two young Scots were to serve time as hostages. He would find this useful, a means of ridding himself for a time of troublemakers and also of keeping their families in line.

  It says something for the attachment of the Scottish political class to the concept of their rightful king that, as with David II, there was no usurpation of the throne in the eighteen years of James’s captivity, and that the burden of the ransom was assumed, apparently willingly. And this is the more remarkable because there was no shortage of men with a claim to the crown, not only Albany (father and son), but also the descendants of Robert II’s second marriage, whose claim was all the stronger, to their mind at least, because of the doubts surrounding the legitimacy of the offspring of the old King’s first marriage to Elizabeth Mure. Nevertheless, there seems to have been no attempt to set James aside.

  James is the first Stewart of whose character it is possible to form a fair estimate. This is principally because he was far more active than his father and grandfather, more determined to establish his authority, and not particularly scrupulous as to the means of doing so. Yet though many would come to loathe him as a tyrant, his concept of his royal role was laudable, even idealistic. He is said to have announced his determination that ‘If God give me life, though it be but the life of a dog, then throughout all Scotland, with His help, will I make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush the cow.’ In other words, the rule of law was to prevail, due process superseding arbitrary violence. Within seven weeks of his return north, he summoned a parliament and had it declare that ‘ferme and sikkir pece be keepit and haldin throu all the realme’. His sense of the necessity of justice seems to have been sincere – at least where his own immediate interest was not concerned; he even appointed an advocate who was to act in the courts on behalf of poor litigants. It is not perhaps too fanciful to suggest that his English education and his reading of Chaucer and Langland may have given him some sympathy for the common people, whether they were landless peasants, tenant farmers or townsfolk.

  Or maybe it is, for England had taught him a harsher lesson too: that the king’s authority must not be challenged by unruly barons if the country was to enjoy security and prosperity. He had observed the ruthless speed with which his friend Henry V had condemned three noblemen – Richard, Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scrope of Masham and Sir Thomas Grey of Northumberland – to death for alleged conspiracy with France; and he would be quick to imitate him.

  Even before he was crowned at Scone in May 1424, James arrested Walter Stewart, a son of his cousin Albany, and two other noblemen, on an unknown charge. Stewart was imprisoned on the Bass Rock, where as a boy James had waited for the ship that was to carry him to France. A few weeks later he instituted inquiries into the legal titles to estates that had formerly belonged to the Crown, and arrested Albany’s father-in-law, the Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham, a connection of the descendants of Euphemia Ross, Robert II’s second wife, whose marriage had been undeniably lawful. He then moved against Albany himself. imprisoning him along with his youngest son, Alexander, and seizing his castles – Falkland, where the Duke of Rothesay had been murdered, and Doune in Perthshire. The speed and certainty with which he acted suggests he was carrying out plans long brooded on in his years of exile.

  Alarm spread among the nobility. Here was a king with a strength of will such as Scotland had not known for a long time. James Stewart, the only one of Albany’s sons still at liberty, took up the challenge. He raised a rebellion in the west, burned Dumbarton and killed the governor of its castle, an old Stewart who was the King’s uncle or perhaps great-uncle. James responded quickly and effectively. The rebellion was snuffed out. James Stewart and his ally, the Bishop of Argyll, fled to Ireland. Failure though it was, the rising had sealed the fate of the p
risoners. They were tried by an assize of nobles in the presence of the King, and condemned to death. Some may have been horrified, few surprised. Walter Stewart, brought from the Bass Rock, was the first to be executed, in the forecourt of Stirling Castle. The next day his father Albany, brother Alexander and the aged Earl of Lennox followed him to the block. The King took possession of their estates, and the Crown was thereby enriched by the revenues of the earldoms of Fife, Menteith and Lennox. James then dispatched Malise Graham, nephew of Robert Graham and great-grandson of Robert II and Euphemia Ross, to England as one of the hostages for the security of his still unpaid ransom. In a few weeks he had made himself more thoroughly master of Scotland than any king since Robert the Bruce. In doing so, he had cut a swathe through the Stewart cousinship and eliminated a number of possible rivals. There was a price to be paid: the King was now feared but also hated.

  Previous Scottish kings had mostly been content to select wives and husbands for their children from the ranks of the native nobility. The Stewarts themselves owed their throne to such a marriage. James, perhaps on account of the troubles he had endured and the dangers he had run at the hands of his Stewart cousins, had different ideas. He himself had married into the English royal family; his children should also marry out of Scotland. This would elevate their consequence and the King’s also. It would mark him out as being more than ‘the first among equals’ and leave fewer of the Scots nobility with a claim to the throne. So his eldest daughter Margaret was married – at the age of twelve – to the heir to the French throne, the future Louis XI, a man whose contradictions of character have fascinated and disgusted contemporaries and future historians alike, and are memorably brought to life in the best of Scott’s medieval novels, Quentin Durward.1 Margaret, however, did not live to be his queen. She died at the age of twenty, of what one French historian called ‘une maladie de langueur’, murmuring ‘Fi de la vie de ce monde, et ne m’en parlez plus, et plus qu’autre chose m’ennuie.’2 Later Stewarts might fall into melancholy and depression, but Margaret is the only one recorded as dying of boredom.

  Her sisters were married to other European nobles – the Duke of Brittany and an Austrian duke among them. There was a single exception. One daughter, Joan, was married to the Douglas Earl of Morton. But it so happened that she had been born deaf and dumb, and so could not be regarded as an asset in the royal marriage market.

  James was active, enquiring and energetic. He sought to reform the machinery of the law, commanding, for instance, that no one should come to any court with a band of retainers (who would inevitably be armed). He created a new civil court, which more than a century later would re-emerge as the Court of Session, still the highest civil court in Scotland. He tried to secure the independence of the Scots Church by forbidding churchmen to go to Rome to lobby for benefices in Scotland. At the same time he imitated his mentor Henry V by taking a strictly orthodox line on heresy; at least one heretic was burned in his reign, only the second known to have suffered such punishment in Scotland. He supported the new university of St Andrews, founded by his old tutor Bishop Wordlow, although at one stage he suggested that it should be moved to Perth. St Andrews was remote, at the extremity of Fife, a county cut off to both north and south by the Firths of Tay and Forth and at the same time exposed to attack from the sea. However, he relented, and displayed his approval of the university by attending lectures there himself. James was Scotland’s first Renaissance prince, a patron of learning and culture, a stern judge, vigorous ruler, and practitioner of cruelty.

  He had an affection for Perth and may even have considered establishing his capital there. It had advantages over Edinburgh, the future capital city. It was in the centre of the kingdom, on the fringe of the Highlands, and was further from the English border and less open to attack. Fixing the capital there might have helped bring together the two Scotlands – the Gaelic-speaking north and Scots-speaking south.

  In contrast to his predecessors, who had perforce left barons to act as petty kings in their locality so long as they did not engage in active rebellion, James was determined to establish royal authority throughout the kingdom, even in the Highlands, where obedience to the Crown was an unfamiliar concept. He impressed its advisability on the clan chiefs by leading an army to Inverness, arresting several, beheading two and hanging another. Among those held prisoner were Alexander, Lord of the Isles,3 and his mother, the Countess of Ross. On their eventual release, Alexander was brought to the King’s court, ostensibly to learn manners – in itself an offensive proposition – but principally that he might be kept under surveillance. He disliked what he found there; the southern lords made his dress and accent subject for mockery. He soon escaped and demonstrated his independence of spirit and action by gathering an army and burning Inverness. James could not tolerate such defiance, and marched north to Lochaber in the summer of 1431. Alexander now found the clans that had joined him unwilling to fight against the King in person; the lesson of James’s last punitive venture north was too recent to be forgotten. So he surrendered and was this time compelled to make his submission public in humiliating fashion. He was led, in the guise of a penitent, stripped to his shirt and drawers, into the abbey church at Holyrood, where he was required to present his sword to the King before the high altar. This done, the Queen fell to her knees and implored James to spare the young man’s life. He graciously consented. It was an impressive theatrical performance. But it could not be said that James had pacified the Highlands. He would not be the last king to learn that any success gained there was only temporary.

  The two Roberts, content or obliged by their weakness to receive honour rather than obedience, and to leave the nobility to their own devices, had died in their beds. James, far more active in asserting what he conceived to be the rights of the Crown, bore hard on the interest of the nobility. They resented his attempts to extend his power and also his greed for money. Significantly, the bitterest among them were to be found in what remained of the extensive Stewart cousinhood, which had suffered at his hands and feared there might be worse to come.

  A conspiracy was formed. Its guiding spirit was Sir Robert Graham, who had been imprisoned by James a dozen years previously. Having escaped, he denounced the King, not without reason, as a tyrant. There were other candidates for the throne if James could be removed: Graham’s nephew Malise was still held in England as a hostage at the King’s request, but his claim might be thought inferior to that of Walter, Earl of Atholl, the youngest and last legitimate survivor of Robert II’s numerous brood. Atholl had been on good enough terms with his nephew the King, but now, though around seventy years old, was persuaded to join the conspiracy, perhaps with the promise of the crown. He may have been influenced by his grandson, Sir Robert Stewart, whose own ambitions extended to the throne. This Stewart was also the King’s domestic chamberlain and as such a key figure in the plot.

  The King had passed Christmas of 1436 at the Dominican abbey in Perth. The building, which no longer exists, stood on the northern edge of the town, beyond the burgh walls, and was protected by a ditch, originally perhaps the moat of the old wooden castle destroyed in a flood some two hundred years previously. Legend has it that James was warned of danger by an old woman with second sight as he journeyed to the town; but such legends are often the creation of chroniclers or ballad-makers eager to make more dramatic a story that is already strong enough. Since James was a hero to Stewart chroniclers, this wise woman may have been introduced into their story in imitation of the soothsayer Artemidorus who warned Julius Caesar to beware the Ides of March. If, however, there was such a warning, James paid no attention to it.

  He remained as a guest of the Black Friars for some weeks – January and February were not inviting months to travel in medieval Scotland. No doubt he conducted business there; he also played tennis energetically, perhaps in an effort to reduce his weight4 – an ambassador from Rome, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), had described him a few years before as
‘oppressed by his excessive corpulence’.5 Irritated by losing tennis balls down a drain that ran from the abbey cellars, the King ordered it to be blocked up. The command would cost him his life.

  On the evening of 20 February, the chamberlain Sir Robert Stewart had word from his fellow conspirators that all was ready. He dismissed the guards on some pretext and drew back the bolts on the outer door of the abbey. Under cover of darkness the assassins laid planks across the old moat and crept up to the door. Towards midnight they made their entry unchallenged and approached the chamber where the King was playing chess. Later legend has it that the bolts from that door too had been removed and that one of the Queen’s ladies, Catherine Douglas, thrust her arm through the staples on the door frame to check the murderers and give the King time to escape.6

  Early versions of the story tell of how James, alarmed by the sound of his enemies’ approach, tore up some of the floorboards and hid in the vault below, from which ran the drain he had ordered to be stopped. For a little while it seemed that he might escape. The conspirators searched the Queen’s apartments and were apparently ready to retire baffled. James then emerged, too soon, from his hiding place, for his enemies returned to find him climbing back into the room. He was in his nightgown and unarmed; yet struggled bravely before being overpowered and dispatched with – accounts vary – either sixteen or twenty-eight dagger wounds. He was buried in the Charterhouse of Perth, which he had recently given the monks of the Carthusian order licence to establish. His heart was removed and taken on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and then brought back to Scotland by a knight of the Order of St John. This was a piece of theatrical symbolism, linking the murdered monarch to his great-grandfather, the hero-king Robert the Bruce, whose heart had been carried by Sir James Douglas on crusade against the Moors in Spain.