History of Scotland

Our ongoing history of Scotland that chronicles the events in Scotland over the past million years with a special focus on the last thousand as you might expect. We have also digitised a copy of Patrick Tytler's History of Scotland which is an eccentric but wonderfully written history of the the mediaeval years in Scotland. The project of chronicling Scotland's history is ongoing, as is the process of organising and structuring and linking the pages together.

CHAPTER IX. DECADENCE AND DISASTERS—REIGN OF DAVID II.

The heroic generation of Scotland was passing off the stage. The King was a child. The forfeiture by Bruce of the lands of hostile or treacherous lords, and his bestowal of the estates on his partisans, had made the disinherited nobles the enemies of Scotland, and had fed too full the House of Douglas. As the star of Scotland was thus clouded—she had no strong man for a King during the next ninety years—the sun of England rose red and glorious under a warrior like Edward III. The Scottish nobles in many cases ceased to be true to their proud boast that they would never submit to England. A very brief summary of the wretched reign of David II. must here suffice.

First, the son of John Balliol, Edward, went to the English Court, and thither thronged the disinherited and forfeited lords, arranging a raid to recover their lands. Edward III., of course, connived at their preparations.

After Randolph’s death (July 20, 1332), when Mar—a sister’s son of Bruce—was Regent, the disinherited lords, under Balliol, invaded Scotland, and Mar, with young Randolph, Menteith, and a bastard of Bruce, “Robert of Carrick,” leading a very great host, fell under the shafts of the English archers of Umfraville, Wake, the English Earl of Atholl, Talbot, Ferrers, and Zouche, at Dupplin, on the Earn (August 12, 1332). Rolled up by arrows loosed on the flanks of their charging columns, they fell, and their dead bodies lay in heaps as tall as a lance.

On September 24, Edward Balliol was crowned King at Scone. Later, Andrew Murray, perhaps a son of the Murray who had been Wallace’s companion-in-arms, was taken, and Balliol acknowledged Edward III. as his liege-lord at Roxburgh. In December the second son of Randolph, with Archibald, the new Regent, brother of the great Black Douglas, drove Balliol, flying in his shirt, from Annan across the Border. He returned, and was opposed by this Archibald Douglas, called Tineman, the Unlucky, and on July 19, 1333, Tineman suffered, at Halidon Hill, near Berwick, a defeat as terrible as Flodden; Berwick, too, was lost, practically for ever, Tineman fell, and Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, was a prisoner. These Scots defeats were always due to rash frontal attacks on strong positions, the assailants passing between lines of English bowmen who loosed into their flanks. The boy king, David, was carried to France (1334) for safety, while Balliol delivered to Edward Berwick and the chief southern counties, including that of Edinburgh, with their castles.

There followed internal wars between Balliol’s partisans, while the patriots were led by young Randolph, by the young Steward, by Sir Andrew Murray, and the wavering and cruel Douglas, called the Knight of Liddesdale, now returned from captivity. In the desperate state of things, with Balliol and Edward ravaging Scotland at will, none showed more resolution than Bruce’s sister, who held Kildrummie Castle; and Randolph’s daughter, “Black Agnes,” who commanded that of Dunbar. By vast gifts Balliol won over John, Lord of the Isles. The Celts turned to the English party; Edward III. harried the province of Moray, but, in 1337, he began to undo his successes by formally claiming the crown of France: France and Scotland together could always throw off the English yoke.

Thus diverted from Scotland, Edward lost strength there while he warred with Scotland’s ally: in 1341 the Douglas, Knight of Liddesdale, recovered Edinburgh Castle by a romantic surprise. But David returned home in 1341, a boy of eighteen, full of the foibles of chivalry, rash, sensual, extravagant, who at once gave deadly offence to the Knight of Liddesdale by preferring to him, as sheriff of Teviotdale, the brave Sir Alexander Ramsay, who had driven the English from the siege of Dunbar Castle. Douglas threw Ramsay into Hermitage Castle in Liddesdale and starved him to death.

In 1343 the Knight began to intrigue traitorously with Edward III.; after a truce, David led his whole force into England, where his rash chivalry caused his utter defeat at Neville’s Cross, near Durham (October 17, 1346). He was taken, as was the Bishop of St Andrews; his ransom became the central question between England and Scotland. In 1353 Douglas, Knight of Liddesdale, was slain at Williamshope on Yarrow by his godson, William, Lord Douglas: the fact is commemorated in a fragment of perhaps our oldest narrative Border ballad. French men-at-arms now helped the Scots to recover Berwick, merely to lose it again in 1356; in 1357 David was set free: his ransom, 100,000 merks, was to be paid by instalment. The country was heavily taxed, but the full sum was never paid. Meanwhile the Steward had been Regent; between him, the heir of the Crown failing issue to David, and the King, jealousies arose. David was suspected of betraying the kingdom to England; in October 1363 he and the Earl of Douglas visited London and made a treaty adopting a son of Edward as king on David’s demise, and on his ransom being remitted, but in March 1364 his Estates rejected the proposal, to which Douglas had assented. Till 1369 all was poverty and internal disunion; the feud, to be so often renewed, of the Douglas and the Steward raged. David was made contemptible by a second marriage with Margaret Logie, but the war with France drove Edward III. to accept a fourteen years’ truce with Scotland. On February 22, 1371, David died in Edinburgh Castle, being succeeded, without opposition, by the Steward, Robert II., son of Walter, and of Marjorie, daughter of Robert Bruce. This Robert II., somewhat outworn by many years of honourable war in his country’s cause, and the father of a family, by Elizabeth Mure of Rowallan, which could hardly be rendered legitimate by any number of Papal dispensations, was the first of the Royal Stewart line. In him a cadet branch of the English FitzAlans, themselves of a very ancient Breton stock, blossomed into Royalty.
PARLIAMENT AND THE CROWN.

With the coming of a dynasty which endured for three centuries, we must sketch the relations, in Scotland, of Crown and Parliament till the days of the Covenant and the Revolution of 1688. Scotland had but little of the constitutional evolution so conspicuous in the history of England. The reason is that while the English kings, with their fiefs and wars in France, had constantly to be asking their parliaments for money, and while Parliament first exacted the redress of grievances, in Scotland the king was expected “to live of his own” on the revenue of crown-lands, rents, feudal aids, fines exacted in Courts of Law, and duties on merchandise. No “tenths” or “fifteenths” were exacted from clergy and people. There could be no “constitutional resistance” when the Crown made no unconstitutional demands.

In Scotland the germ of Parliament is the King’s court of vassals of the Crown. To the assemblies, held now in one place, now in another, would usually come the vassals of the district, with such officers of state as the Chancellor, the Chamberlain, the Steward, the Constable or Commander-in-Chief, the Justiciar, and the Marischal, and such Bishops, Abbots, Priors, Earls, Barons, and tenants-in-chief as chose to attend. At these meetings public business was done, charters were granted, and statutes were passed; assent was made to such feudal aids as money for the king’s ransom in the case of William the Lion. In 1295 the seals of six Royal burghs are appended to the record of a negotiation; in 1326 burgesses, as we saw, were consulted by Bruce on questions of finance.

The misfortunes and extravagance of David II. had to be paid for, and Parliament interfered with the Royal prerogative in coinage and currency, directed the administration of justice, dictated terms of peace with England, called to account even hereditary officers of the Crown (such as the Steward, Constable, and Marischal), controlled the King’s expenditure (or tried to do so), and denounced the execution of Royal warrants against the Statutes and common form of law. They summarily rejected David’s attempt to alter the succession of the Crown.

At the same time, as attendance of multitudes during protracted Parliaments was irksome and expensive, arose the habit of intrusting business to a mere “Committee of Articles,” later “The Lords of the Articles,” selected in varying ways from the Three Estates—Spiritual, Noble, and Commons. These Committees saved the members of Parliament from the trouble and expense of attendance, but obviously tended to become an abuse, being selected and packed to carry out the designs of the Crown or of the party of nobles in power. All members, of whatever Estate, sat together in the same chamber. There were no elected Knights of the Shires, no representative system.

The reign of David II. saw two Scottish authors or three, whose works are extant. Barbour wrote the chivalrous rhymed epic-chronicle ‘The Brus’; Wyntoun, an unpoetic rhymed “cronykil”; and “Hucheoun of the Awle Ryal” produced works of more genius, if all that he is credited with be his own.

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CHAPTER X. EARLY STEWART KINGS: ROBERT II. (1371-1390).

Robert II. was crowned at Scone on March 26, 1371. He was elderly, jovial, pacific, and had little to fear from England when the deaths of Edward III. and the Black Prince left the crown to the infant Richard II. There was fighting against isolated English castles within the Scottish border, to amuse the warlike Douglases and Percies, and there were truces, irregular and ill kept. In 1384 great English and Scottish raids were made, and gentlemen of France, who came over for sport, were scurvily entertained, and (1385) saw more plundering than honest fighting under James, Earl of Douglas, who merely showed them an army that, under Richard II., burned Melrose Abbey and fired Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee. Edinburgh was a town of 400 houses. Richard insisted that not more than a third of his huge force should be English Borderers, who had no idea of hitting their Scottish neighbours, fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law, too hard. The one famous fight, that of Otterburn (August 15, 1388), was a great and joyous passage of arms by moonlight. The Douglas fell, the Percy was led captive away; the survivors gained advancement in renown and the hearty applause of the chivalrous chronicler, Froissart. The oldest ballads extant on this affair were current in 1550, and show traces of the reading of Froissart and the English chroniclers.

In 1390 died Robert II. Only his youth was glorious. The reign of his son, Robert III. (crowned August 14, 1390), was that of a weakling who let power fall into the hands of his brother, the Duke of Albany, or his son David, Duke of Rothesay, who held the reins after the Parliament (a Parliament that bitterly blamed the Government) of January 1399. (With these two princes the title of Duke first appears in Scotland.) The follies of young David alienated all: he broke his betrothal to the daughter of the Earl of March; March retired to England, becoming the man of Henry IV.; and though Rothesay wedded the daughter of the Earl of Douglas, he was arrested by Albany and Douglas and was starved to death (or died of dysentery) in Falkland Castle (1402). The Highlanders had been in anarchy throughout the reign; their blood was let in the great clan duel of thirty against thirty, on the Inch of Perth, in 1396. Probably clans Cameron and Chattan were the combatants.

On Rothesay’s death Albany was Governor, while Douglas was taken prisoner in the great Border defeat of Homildon Hill, not far from Flodden. But then (1403) came the alliance of Douglas with Percy; Percy’s quarrel with Henry IV. and their defeat; and Hotspur’s death, Douglas’s capture at Shrewsbury. Between Shakespeare, in “Henry IV.,” and Scott, in ‘The Fair Maid of Perth,’ the most notable events in the reign of Robert III. are immortalised. The King’s last misfortune was the capture by the English at sea, on the way to France, of his son James in February-March 1406. {52} On April 4, 1406, Robert went to his rest, one of the most unhappy of the fated princes of his line.
THE REGENCY OF ALBANY.

The Regency of Albany, uncle of the captured James, lasted for fourteen years, ending with his death in 1420. He occasionally negotiated for his king’s release, but more successfully for that of his son Murdoch. That James suspected Albany’s ambition, and was irritated by his conduct, appears in his letters, written in Scots, to Albany and to Douglas, released in 1408, and now free in Scotland. The letters are of 1416.

The most important points to note during James’s English captivity are the lawlessness and oppression which prevailed in Scotland, and the beginning of Lollard heresies, nascent Protestantism, nascent Socialism, even “free love.” The Parliament of 1399, which had inveighed against the laxity of Government under Robert II., also demanded the extirpation of heresies, in accordance with the Coronation Oath. One Resby, a heretical English priest, was arraigned and burned at Perth in 1407, under Laurence of Lindores, the Dominican Inquisitor into heresies, who himself was active in promoting Scotland’s oldest University, St Andrews. The foundation was by Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St Andrews, by virtue of a bull from the anti-pope Benedict XIII., of February 1414. Lollard ideas were not suppressed; the chronicler, Bower, speaks of their existence in 1445; they sprang from envy of the wealth, and indignation against the corruptions of the clergy, and the embers of Lollardism in Kyle were not cold when, under James V., the flame of the Reformation was rekindled.

The Celtic North, never quiet, made its last united effort in 1411, when Donald, Lord of the Isles, who was in touch with the English Government, claimed the earldom of Ross, in right of his wife, as against the Earl of Buchan, a son of Albany; mustered all the wild clans of the west and the isles at Ardtornish Castle on the Sound of Mull; marched through Ross to Dingwall; defeated the great northern clan of Mackay, and was hurrying to sack Aberdeen when he was met by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, the gentry of the northern Lowlands, mounted knights, and the burgesses of the towns, some eighteen miles from Aberdeen, at Harlaw. There was a pitched battle with great slaughter, but the Celts had no cavalry, and the end was that Donald withdrew to his fastnesses. The event is commemorated by an old literary ballad, and in Elspeth’s ballad in Scott’s novel, ‘The Antiquary.’

In the year of Albany’s death, at a great age (1420), in compliance with the prayer of Charles VII. of France, the Earl of Buchan, Archibald, Douglas’s eldest son, and Sir John Stewart of Derneley, led a force of some 7000 to 10,000 men to war for France. Henry V. then compelled the captive James I. to join him, and (1421) at Baugé Bridge the Scots, with the famed La Hire, routed the army of Henry’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, who, with 2000 of the English, fell in the action. The victory was fruitless; at Crevant (1423) the Scots were defeated; at Verneuil (1424) they were almost exterminated. None the less the remnant, with fresh levies, continued to war for their old ally, and, under Sir Hugh Kennedy and others, suffered at Rouvray (February 1429), and were with the victorious French at Orleans (May 1429) under the leadership of Jeanne d’Arc. The combination of Scots and French, at the last push, always saved the independence of both kingdoms.

The character of Albany, who, under his father, Robert III., and during the captivity of James I., ruled Scotland so long, is enigmatic. He is well spoken of by the contemporary Wyntoun, author of a chronicle in rhyme; and in the Latin of Wyntoun’s continuator, Bower. He kept on friendly terms with the Douglases, he was popular in so far as he was averse to imposing taxation; and perhaps the anarchy and oppression which preceded the return of James I. to Scotland were due not to the weakness of Albany but to that of his son and successor, Murdoch, and to the iniquities of Murdoch’s sons.

The death of Henry V. (1422) and the ambition of Cardinal Beaufort, determined to wed his niece Jane Beaufort to a crowned king, may have been among the motives which led the English Government (their own king, Henry VI., being a child) to set free the royal captive (1424).

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CHAPTER XI. JAMES I

On March 28, 1424, James I. was released, on a ransom of £40,000, and after his marriage with Jane Beaufort, grand-daughter of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. The story of their wooing (of course in the allegorical manner of the age, and with poetical conventions in place of actual details) is told in James’s poem, “The King’s Quair,” a beautiful composition in the school of Chaucer, of which literary scepticism has vainly tried to rob the royal author. James was the ablest and not the most scrupulous of the Stuarts. His captivity had given him an English education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a fiery determination to put down the oppression of the nobles. “If God gives me but a dog’s life,” he said, “I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush keep the cow.” Before his first Parliament, in May 1424, James arrested Murdoch’s eldest son, Sir Walter Fleming of Cumbernauld, and the younger Boyd of Kilmarnock. The Parliament left a Committee of the Estates (“The Lords of the Articles”) to carry out the royal policy. Taxes for the payment of James’s ransom were imposed; to impose them was easy, “passive resistance” was easier; the money was never paid, and James’s noble hostages languished in England. He next arrested the old Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham of the Kincardine family, later his murderer.

These were causes of unpopularity. During a new Parliament (1425) James imprisoned the new Duke of Albany (Murdoch) and his son Alexander, and seized their castles. {57} The Albanys and Lennox were executed; their estates were forfeited; but resentment dogged a king who was too fierce and too hurried a reformer, perhaps too cruel an avenger of his own wrongs.

Our knowledge of the events of his reign is vague; but a king of Scotland could never, with safety, treat any of his nobles as criminals; the whole order was concerned to prevent or avenge severity of justice.

At a Parliament in Inverness (1427) he seized the greatest of the Highland magnates whom he had summoned; they were hanged or imprisoned, and, after resistance, Alastair, the new Lord of the Isles, did penance at Holyrood, before being immured in Tantallon Castle. His cousin, Donald Balloch, defeated Mar at Inverlochy (where Montrose later routed Argyll) (1431). Not long afterwards Donald fled to Ireland, whence a head, said to be his, was sent to James, but Donald lived to fight another day.

Without a standing army to garrison the inaccessible Highlands, the Crown could neither preserve peace in those regions nor promote justice. The system of violent and perfidious punishments merely threw the Celts into the arms of England.

Execution itself was less terrible to the nobles than the forfeiting of their lands and the disinheriting of their families. None the less, James (1425-1427) seized the lands of the late Earl of Lennox, made Malise Graham surrender the earldom of Strathearn in exchange for the barren title of Earl of Menteith, and sent the sufferer as a hostage into England. The Earl of March, son of the Earl who, under Robert III., had gone over to the English cause, was imprisoned and stripped of his ancient domains on the Eastern Border; and James, disinheriting Lord Erskine, annexed the earldom of Mar to the Crown.

In a Parliament at Perth (March 1428) James permitted the minor barons and freeholders to abstain from these costly assemblies on the condition of sending two “wise men” to represent each sheriffdom: a Speaker was to be elected, and the shires were to pay the expenses of the wise men. But the measure was unpopular, and in practice lapsed. Excellent laws were passed, but were not enforced.

In July-November 1428 a marriage was arranged between Margaret the infant daughter of James and the son (later Louis XI.) of the still uncrowned Dauphin, Charles VIII. of France. Charles announced to his subjects early in 1429 that an army of 6000 Scots was to land in France; that James himself, if necessary, would follow; but Jeanne d’Arc declared that there was no help from Scotland, none save from God and herself. She was right: no sooner had she won her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Pathay, and elsewhere (May-June 1429) than James made a truce with England which enabled Cardinal Beaufort to throw his large force of anti-Hussite crusaders into France, where they secured Normandy. The Scots in France, nevertheless, fought under the Maid in her last successful action, at Lagny (April 1430).

An heir to the Crown, James, was born in October 1430, while the King was at strife with the Pope, and asserting for King and Parliament power over the Provincial Councils of the Church. An interdict was threatened, James menaced the rich and lax religious orders with secular reformation; settled the Carthusians at Perth, to show an example of holy living; and pursued his severities against many of his nobles.

His treatment of the Earl of Strathearn (despoiled and sent as a hostage to England) aroused the wrath of the Earl’s uncle, Robert Graham, who bearded James in Parliament, was confiscated, fled across the Highland line, and, on February 20, 1437, aided, it is said by the old Earl of Atholl (a grandson of Robert II. by his second marriage), led a force against the King in the monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, surprised him, and butchered him. The energy of his Queen brought the murderers, and Atholl himself, to die under unspeakable torments.

James’s reforms were hurried, violent, and, as a rule, incapable of surviving the anarchy of his son’s minority: his new Court of Session, sitting in judgment thrice a-year, was his most fortunate innovation.

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CHAPTER XII. JAMES II.

Scone, with its sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood (March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the important post of Commander of Edinburgh Castle; the other by Sir Alexander Livingstone of Callendar.

The great old Houses had been shaken by the severities of James I., at least for the time. In a Government of factions influenced by private greed, there was no important difference in policy, and we need not follow the transference of the royal person from Crichton in Edinburgh to Livingstone in Stirling Castle; the coalitions between these worthies, the battles between the Boyds of Kilmarnock and the Stewarts, who had to avenge Stewart of Derneley, Constable of the Scottish contingent in France, who was slain by Sir Thomas Boyd. The queen-mother married Sir James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorne, and (August 3, 1439) she was captured by Livingstone, while her husband, in the mysterious words of the chronicler, was “put in a pitt and bollit.” In a month Jane Beaufort gave Livingstone an amnesty; he, not the Stewart family, not the queen-mother, now held James.

To all this the new young Earl of Douglas, a boy of eighteen, tacitly assented. He was the most powerful and wealthiest subject in Scotland; in France he was Duc de Touraine; he was descended in lawful wedlock from Robert II.; “he micht ha’e been the king,” as the ballad says of the bonny Earl of Moray. But he held proudly aloof from both Livingstone and Crichton, who were stealing the king alternately: they then combined, invited Douglas to Edinburgh Castle, with his brother David, and served up the ominous bull’s head at that “black dinner” recorded in a ballad fragment. {61} They decapitated the two Douglas boys; the earldom fell to their granduncle, James the Fat, and presently, on his death (1443), to young William Douglas, after which “bands,” or illegal covenants, between the various leaders of factions, led to private wars of shifting fortune. Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews, opposed the Douglas party, now strong both in lands newly acquired, till (July 3, 1449) James married Mary of Gueldres, imprisoned the Livingstones, and relied on the Bishop of St Andrews and the clergy. While Douglas was visiting Rome in 1450, the Livingstones had been forfeited, and Crichton became Chancellor.
FALL OF THE BLACK DOUGLASES.

The Douglases, through a royal marriage of an ancestor to a daughter of the more legitimate marriage of Robert II., had a kind of claim to the throne which they never put forward. The country was thus spared dynastic wars, like those of the White and Red Roses in England; but, none the less, the Douglases were too rich and powerful for subjects.

The Earl at the moment held Galloway and Annandale, two of his brothers were Earls of Moray and Ormond; in October 1448, Ormond had distinguished himself by defeating and taking Percy, urging a raid into Scotland, at a bloody battle on the Water of Sark, near Gretna.

During the Earl of Douglas’s absence in Rome, James had put down some of his unruly retainers, and even after his return (1451) had persevered in this course. Later in the year Douglas resigned, and received back his lands, a not uncommon formula showing submission on the vassal’s favour on the lord’s part, as when Charles VII., at the request of Jeanne d’Arc, made this resignation to God!

Douglas, however, was suspected of intriguing with England and with the Lord of the Isles, while he had a secret covenant or “band” with the Earls of Crawford and Ross. If all this were true, he was planning a most dangerous enterprise.

He was invited to Stirling to meet the king under a safe-conduct, and there (February 22, 1452) was dirked by his king at the sacred table of hospitality.

Whether this crime was premeditated or merely passionate is unknown, as in the case of Bruce’s murder of the Red Comyn before the high altar. Parliament absolved James on slender grounds. James, the brother of the slain earl, publicly defied his king, gave his allegiance to Henry VI. of England, withdrew it, intrigued, and, after his brothers had been routed at Arkinholm, near Langholm (May 18, 1455), fled to England. His House was proclaimed traitorous; their wide lands in southern and south-western Scotland were forfeited and redistributed, the Scotts of Buccleuch profiting largely in the long-run. The leader of the Royal forces at Arkinholm, near Langholm, was another Douglas, one of “the Red Douglases,” the Earl of Angus; and till the execution of the Earl of Morton, under James VI., the Red Douglases were as powerful, turbulent, and treacherous as the Black Douglases had been in their day. When attacked and defeated, these Douglases, red or black, always allied themselves with England and with the Lords of the Isles, the hereditary foes of the royal authority.

Meanwhile Edward IV. wrote of the Scots as “his rebels of Scotland,” and in the alternations of fortune between the Houses of York and Lancaster, James held with Henry VI. When Henry was defeated and taken at Northampton (July 10, 1460), James besieged Roxburgh Castle, an English hold on the Border, and (August 3, 1460) was slain by the explosion of a great bombard.

James was but thirty years of age at his death. By the dagger, by the law, and by the aid of the Red Douglases, he had ruined his most powerful nobles—and his own reputation. His early training, like that of James VI., was received while he was in the hands of the most treacherous, bloody, and unscrupulous of mankind; later, he met them with their own weapons. The foundation of the University of Glasgow (1451), and the building and endowment of St Salvator’s College in St Andrews, by Bishop Kennedy, are the most permanent proofs of advancing culture in the reign of James.

Many laws of excellent tendency, including sumptuary laws, which suggest the existence of unexpected wealth and luxury, were passed; but such laws were never firmly and regularly enforced. By one rule, which does seem to have been carried out, no poisons were to be imported: Scottish chemical science was incapable of manufacturing them. Much later, under James VI., we find a parcel of arsenic, to be used for political purposes, successfully stopped at Leith.

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CHAPTER XIII. JAMES III

James II. left three sons; the eldest, James III., aged nine, was crowned at Kelso (August 10, 1460); his brothers, bearing the titles of Albany and Mar, were not to be his supports. His mother, Mary of Gueldres, had the charge of the boys, and, as she was won over by her uncle, Philip of Burgundy, to the cause of the House of York, while Kennedy and the Earl of Angus stood for the House of Lancaster, there was strife between them and the queen-mother and nobles. Kennedy relied on France (Louis XL), and his opponents on England.

The battle of Towton (March 30, 1461) drove Henry VI. and his queen across the Border, where Kennedy entertained the melancholy exile in the Castle of St Andrews. The grateful Henry restored Berwick to the Scots, who could not hold it long. In June 1461, while the Scots were failing to take Carlisle, Edward IV. was crowned, and sent his adherent, the exiled Earl of Douglas, to treat for an alliance with the Celts, under John, Lord of the Isles, and that Donald Balloch who was falsely believed to have long before been slain in Ireland.

It is curious to think of the Lord of the Isles dealing as an independent prince, through a renegade Douglas, with the English king. A treaty was made at John’s Castle of Ardtornish—now a shell of crumbling stone on the sea-shore of the Morvern side of the Sound of Mull—with the English monarch at Westminster. The Highland chiefs promise allegiance to Edward, and, if successful, the Celts are to recover the ancient kingdom from Caithness to the Forth, while Douglas is to be all-powerful from the Forth to the Border!

But other intrigues prevailed. The queen-mother and her son, in the most friendly manner, met the kingmaker Warwick at Dumfries, and again at Carlisle, and Douglas was disgraced by Edward, though restored to favour when Bishop Kennedy declined to treat with Edward’s commissioners. The Treaty of England with Douglas and the Celts was then ratified; but Douglas, advancing in front of Edward’s army to the Border, met old Bishop Kennedy in helmet and corslet, and was defeated. Louis XI., however, now deserted the Red for the White Rose. Kennedy followed his example; and peace was made between England and Scotland in October 1464. Kennedy died in the summer of 1465.

There followed the usual struggles between confederations of the nobles, and, in July 1466, James was seized, being then aged fourteen, by the party of the Boyds, Flemings, and Kennedys, aided by Hepburn of Hailes (ancestor of the turbulent Earl of Bothwell), and by the head of the Border House of Cessford, Andrew Ker.

It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history. Boyd made himself Governor to the king, his son married the king’s eldest sister, Mary, and became Earl of Arran. But brief was the triumph of the Boyds. In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of his house was arranged. Boyd fled the country; the king’s sister, divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal Stewarts, if that family were extinct. The Hamiltons, the wealthiest house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy’s successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian. Graham dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country, always jealous of interference from Rome. But he was reported on as more or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed. Had he been defending (as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an unfavourable view of his intellect. In any case, whether the clergy, backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the universal rule. Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance, were attaining their lowest level. {67} By 1476 the Lord of the Isles, the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross, which was attached to the Crown (1476). His treaty of Ardtornish had come to light. But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James’s devotion to the arts—a thing intolerable—and to the society of low-born favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, “a stone-cutter,” prepared the sorrows and the end of his reign.

The intrigues which follow, and the truth about the character of James, are exceedingly obscure. We have no Scottish chronicle written at the time; the later histories, by Ferrerius, an Italian, and, much later, by Queen Mary’s Bishop Lesley, and by George Buchanan, are full of rumours and contradictions, while the State Papers and Treaties of England merely prove the extreme treachery of James’s brother Albany, and no evidence tells us how James contrived to get the better of the traitor. James’s brothers Albany and Mar were popular; were good horsemen, men of their hands, and Cochrane is accused of persuading James to arrest Mar on a charge of treason and black magic. Many witches are said to have been burned: perhaps the only such case before the Reformation. However it fell out—all is obscure—Mar died in prison; while Albany, also a prisoner on charges of treasonable intrigues with the inveterate Earl of Douglas, in the English interest, escaped to France.

Douglas (1482) brought him to England, where he swore allegiance to Edward IV., under whom, like Edward Balliol, he would hold Scotland if crowned. He was advancing on the Border with Edward’s support and with the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and James had gone to Lauder to encounter him, when the Earl of Angus headed a conspiracy of nobles, such as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge. The most tangible grievance was the increasing debasement of the coinage. James was immured at Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates. Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland. In 1483 Albany renewed, with many of the nobles, his intrigues with Edward for the betrayal of Scotland. In some unknown way James separated Albany from his confederates Atholl, Buchan, and Angus; Albany went to England, betrayed the Castle of Dunbar to England, and was only checked in his treasons by the death of Edward IV. (April 9, 1483), after which a full Parliament (July 7, 1483) condemned him and forfeited him in his absence. On July 22, 1484, he invaded Scotland with his ally, Douglas; they were routed at Lochmaben, Douglas was taken, and, by singular clemency, was merely placed in seclusion in the Monastery of Lindores, while Albany, escaping to France, perished in a tournament, leaving a descendant, who later, in the minority of James V., makes a figure in history.

The death of Richard III. (August 18, 1485) and the accession of the prudent Henry VII. gave James a moment of safety. He turned his attention to the Church, and determined to prosecute for treason such Scottish clerics as purchased benefices through Rome. He negotiated for three English marriages, including that of his son James, Duke of Rothesay, to a daughter of Edward IV.; he also negotiated for the recovery of Berwick, taken by Gloucester during Albany’s invasion of 1482. After his death, and before it, James was accused, for these reasons, of disloyal dealings with England; and such nobles as Angus, up to the neck as they were in treason and rebellion, raised a party against him on the score that he was acting as they did. The almost aimless treachery of the Douglases, Red or Black, endured for centuries from the reign of David II. to that of James VI. Many nobles had received no amnesty for the outrage of Lauder Bridge; their hopes turned to the heir of the Crown, James, Duke of Rothesay. We see them offering peace for an indemnity in a Parliament of October 1487; the Estates refused all such pardons for a space of seven years; the king’s party was manifestly the stronger. He was not to be intimidated; he offended Home and the Humes by annexing the Priory of Coldingham (which they regarded as their own) to the Royal Chapel at Stirling. The inveterate Angus, with others, induced Prince James to join them under arms. James took the Chancellorship from Argyll and sent envoys to England.

The rebels, proclaiming the prince as king, intrigued with Henry VII.; James was driven across the Forth, and was supported in the north by his uncle, Atholl, and by Huntly, Crawford, and Lord Lindsay of the Byres, Errol, Glamis, Forbes, and Tullibardine, and the chivalry of Angus and Strathtay. Attempts at pacification failed; Stirling Castle was betrayed to the rebels, and James’s host, swollen by the loyal burgesses of the towns, met the Border spears of Home and Hepburn, the Galloway men, and the levies of Angus at Sauchie Burn, near Bannockburn.

In some way not understood, James, riding without a single knight or squire, fell from his horse, which had apparently run away with him, at Beaton’s Mill, and was slain in bed, it was rumoured, by a priest, feigned or false, who heard his confession. The obscurity of his reign hangs darkest over his death, and the virulent Buchanan slandered him in his grave. Under his reign, Henryson, the greatest of the Chaucerian school in Scotland, produced his admirable poems. Many other poets whose works are lost were flourishing; and The Wallace, that elaborate plagiarism from Barbour’s ‘The Brus,’ was composed, and attributed to Blind Harry, a paid minstrel about the Court. {71}

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James IV to Flodden

The new king, James IV. with Angus for his Governor, Argyll for his Chancellor, and with the Kers and Hepburns in office, was crowned at Scone about June 25, 1488. He was nearly seventeen, no child, but energetic in business as in pleasure, though lifelong remorse for his rebellion gnawed at his heart. He promptly put down a rebellion of the late king’s friends and of the late king’s foe, Lennox, then strong in the possession of Dumbarton Castle, which, as it commands the sea-entrance by Clyde, is of great importance in the reign of Mary and James VI. James III. must have paid attention to the navy, which, under Sir Andrew Wood, already faced English pirates triumphantly. James IV. spent much money on his fleet, buying timber from France, for he was determined to make Scotland a power of weight in Europe. But at the pinch his navy vanished like a mist.

Spanish envoys and envoys from the Duchess of Burgundy visited James in 1488-1489; he was in close relations with France and Denmark, and caused anxieties to the first Tudor king, Henry VII., who kept up the Douglas alliance with Angus, and bought over Scottish politicians. While James, as his account-books show, was playing cards with Angus, that traitor was also negotiating the sale of Hermitage Castle, the main hold of the Middle Border, to England. He was detected, and the castle was intrusted to a Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell; it was still held by Queen Mary’s Bothwell in 1567. The Hepburns rose to the earldom of Bothwell on the death of Ramsay, a favourite of James III., who (1491) had arranged to kidnap James IV. with his brother, and hand them over to Henry VII., for £277, 13s. 4d.! Nothing came of this, and a truce with England was arranged in 1491. Through four reigns, till James VI. came to the English throne, the Tudor policy was to buy Scottish traitors, and attempt to secure the person of the Scottish monarch.

Meanwhile, the Church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the newly-created Archbishop of Glasgow (1491) and the Archbishop of St Andrews, and disturbed by the Lollards, in the region which was later the centre of the fiercest Covenanters,—Kyle in Ayrshire. But James laughed away the charges against the heretics (1494), whose views were, on many points, those of John Knox. In 1493-1495 James dealt in the usual way with the Highlanders and “the wicked blood of the Isles”: some were hanged, some imprisoned, some became sureties for the peacefulness of their clans. In 1495, by way of tit-for-tat against English schemes, James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard III. Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between Ireland and Burgundy since 1488. He was welcomed by James at Stirling in November 1495, and was wedded to the king’s cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, now supreme in the north. Rejecting a daughter of England, and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared to invade England in Perkin’s cause; the scheme was sold by Ramsay, the would-be kidnapper, and came to no more than a useless raid of September 1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497. The Spanish envoy, de Ayala, negotiated a seven-years’ truce in September, after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton.

The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the Border; he put them down, and made Argyll Lieutenant of the Isles. Between the Campbells and the Huntly Gordons, as custodians of the peace, the fighting clans were expected to be more orderly. On the other hand, a son of Angus Og, himself usually reckoned a bastard of the Lord of the Isles, gave much trouble. Angus had married a daughter of the Argyll of his day; their son, Donald Dubh, was kidnapped (or, rather, his mother was kidnapped before his birth) for Argyll; he now escaped, and in 1503, found allies among the chiefs, did much scathe, was taken in 1506, but was as active as ever forty years later.

The central source of these endless Highland feuds was the family of the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, claiming the earldom of Ross, resisting the Lowland influences and those of the Gordons and Campbells (Huntly and Argyll), and seeking aid from England. With the capture of Donald Dubh (1506) the Highlanders became for the while comparatively quiescent; under Lennox and Argyll they suffered in the defeat of Flodden.

From 1497 to 1503 Henry VII. was negotiating for the marriage of James to his daughter Margaret Tudor; the marriage was celebrated on August 8, 1503, and a century later the great grandson of Margaret, James VI. came to the English throne. But marriage does not make friendship. There had existed since 1491 a secret alliance by which Scotland was bound to defend France if attacked by England. Henry’s negotiations for the kidnapping of James were of April of the same year. Margaret, the young queen, after her marriage, was soon involved in bitter quarrels over her dowry with her own family; the slaying of a Sir Robert Ker, Warden of the Marches, by a Heron in a Border fray (1508), left an unhealed sore, as England would not give up Heron and his accomplice. Henry VII. had been pacific, but his death, in 1509, left James to face his hostile brother-in-law, the fiery young Henry VIII.

In 1511 the Holy League under the Pope, against France, imperilled James’s French ally. He began to build great ships of war; his sea-captain, Barton, pirating about, was defeated and slain by ships under two of the Howards, sons of the Earl of Surrey (August 1511). James remonstrated, Henry was firm, and the Border feud of Ker and Heron was festering; moreover, Henry was a party to the League against France, and France was urging James to attack England. He saw, and wrote to the King of Denmark, that, if France were down, the turn of Scotland to fall would follow. In March 1513, an English diplomatist, West, found James in a wild mood, distraught “like a fey man.”

Battle of Flodden

Chivalry, and even national safety, called him to war; while his old remorse drove him into a religious retreat, and he was on hostile terms with the Pope. On May 24th, in a letter to Henry, he made a last attempt to obtain a truce, but on June 30th Henry invaded France. The French queen despatched to James, as to her true knight, a letter and a ring. He sent his fleet to sea; it vanished like a dream. He challenged Henry through a herald on July 26th, and, in face of strange and evil omens, summoned the whole force of his kingdom, crossed the Border on August 22nd, took Norham Castle on Tweed, with the holds of Eital, Chillingham, and Ford, which he made his headquarters, and awaited the approach of Surrey and the levies of the Stanleys. On September 5th he demolished Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the deep and sluggish water of Till at its feet. Surrey, commanding an army all but destitute of supplies, outmanœuvred James, led his men unseen behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain himself, he was upon James’s line of communications, and thence marched against him to Branxton Ridge, under Flodden Edge.

James was ignorant of Surrey’s movement till he saw the approach of his standards. In place of retaining his position, he hurled his force down to Branxton, his gunners could not manage their new French ordnance, and though Home with the Border spears and Huntly had a success on the right, the Borderers made no more efforts, and, on the left, the Celts fled swiftly after the fall of Lennox and Argyll. In the centre Crawford and Rothes were slain, and James, with the steady spearmen of his command, drove straight at Surrey. James, as the Spaniard Ayala said, “was no general: he was a fighting man.” He was outflanked by the Admiral (Howard) and Dacre; his force was surrounded by charging horse and foot, and rained on by arrows. But

“The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,”

when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance’s length of Surrey (so Surrey writes), and died, riddled with arrows, his neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his body. Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phalanx, but when dawn arrived only a force of Border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field. Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master; there too lay his natural son, the young Archbishop of St Andrews, and the Bishops of Caithness and the Isles. Scarce a noble or gentle house of the Lowlands but reckons an ancestor slain at Flodden.

Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of supplies, by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men, by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish king. It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James’s adherence to the French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry. But he had passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter. If he rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew well that the turn of Scotland would come soon. The ambitions and the claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards. England was bent on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the entire Tudor period England was the home and her monarch the ally of every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish Crown.

Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort. Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attests the great increase in comfort and in wealth.

In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while (1496) Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of barons and freeholders of competent estate. Prior Hepburn founded the College of St Leonard’s in the University of St Andrews; and in 1507 Chepman received a royal patent as a printer. Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad example. But with Dunbar, Henryson, and others, Scotland had a school of poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of Chaucer. Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the Revival of Learning; and James, like Charles II., fostered the early movements of chemistry and physical science. But Flodden ruined all, and the country, under the long minority of James V., was robbed and distracted by English intrigues; by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor; by actual warfare between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place; by the ambitions and treasons of the Douglases and other nobles; and by the arrival from France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III.

The Minority of James IV.

The truth of the saying, “Woe to the kingdom whose king is a child,” was never more bitterly proved than in Scotland between the day of Flodden and the day of the return of Mary Stuart from France (1513-1561). James V. was not only a child and fatherless; he had a mother whose passions and passionate changes in love resembled those of her brother Henry VIII. Consequently, when the inevitable problem arose, was Scotland during the minority to side with England or with France? the queen-mother wavered ceaselessly between the party of her brother, the English king, and the party of France; while Henry VIII. could not be trusted, and the policy of France in regard to England did not permit her to offer any stable support to the cause of Scottish independence. The great nobles changed sides constantly, each “fighting for his own hand,” and for the spoils of a Church in which benefices were struggled for and sold like stocks in the Exchange.

The question, Was Scotland to ally herself with England or with France? later came to mean, Was Scotland to break with Rome or to cling to Rome? Owing mainly to the selfish and unscrupulous perfidy of Henry VIII., James V. was condemned, as the least of two evils, to adopt the Catholic side in the great religious revolution; while the statesmanship of the Beatons, Archbishops of St Andrews, preserved Scotland from English domination, thereby preventing the country from adopting Henry’s Church, the Anglican, and giving Calvinism and Presbyterianism the opportunity which was resolutely taken and held.

The real issue of the complex faction fight during James’s minority was thus of the most essential importance; but the constant shiftings of parties and persons cannot be dealt with fully in our space. James’s mother had a natural claim to the guardianship of her son, and was left Regent by the will of James IV., but she was the sister of Scotland’s enemy, Henry VIII. Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow (later of St Andrews), with the Earl of Arran (now the title of the Hamiltons), Huntly, and Angus were to advise the queen till the arrival of Albany (son of the brother of James III.), who was summoned from France. Albany, of course, stood for the French alliance, but when the queen-mother (August 6, 1514) married the new young Earl of Angus, the grandson and successor of the aged traitor, “Bell the Cat,” the earl began to carry on the usual unpatriotic policy of his house. The appointment to the see of St Andrews was competed for by the Poet Gawain Douglas, uncle of the new Earl of Angus; and himself of the English party; by Hepburn, Prior of St Andrews, who fortified the Abbey; and by Forman, Bishop of Moray, a partisan of France, and a man accused of having induced James IV. to declare war against England.

After long and scandalous intrigues, Forman obtained the see. Albany was Regent for a while, and at intervals he repaired to France; he was in the favour of the queen-mother when later she quarrelled with her husband, Angus. At one moment, Margaret and Angus fled to England where was born her daughter Margaret, later Lady Lennox and mother of Henry Darnley.

Angus, with Home, now recrossed the Border (1516), and was reconciled to Albany; against all unity in Scotland Henry intrigued, bribing with a free hand, his main object being to get Albany sent out of the country. In early autumn, 1516, Home, the leader of the Borderers at Flodden, and his brother were executed for treason; in June, 1517, Albany went to seek aid and counsel in France; when the queen-mother returned from England to Scotland, where, if she retained any influence, she might be useful to her brother’s schemes. But, contrary to Henry’s interests, in this year Albany renewed the old alliance with France; while, in 1518, the queen-mother desired to divorce Angus. But Angus was a serviceable tool of Henry, who prevented his sister from having her way; and now the heads of the parties in the distracted country were Arran, chief of the Hamiltons, and Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, standing for France; and Angus representing the English party.

Their forces met at Edinburgh in the street battle of “Cleanse the Causeway,” wherein the Archbishop of Glasgow wore armour, and the Douglases beat the Hamiltons out of the town (April 30, 1520). Albany returned (1521), but the nobles would not join with him in an English war (1522). Again he went to France, while Surrey devastated the Scottish Border (1523). Albany returned while Surrey was burning Jedburgh, was once more deserted by the Scottish forces on the Tweed, and left the country for ever in 1524. Angus now returned from England; but the queen-mother cast her affections on young Henry Stewart (Lord Methven), while Angus got possession of the boy king (June 1526) and held him, a reluctant ward, in the English interest.

Lennox was now the chief foe of Arran, and Angus, with whom Arran had coalesced; and Lennox desired to deliver James out of Angus’s hands. On July 26, 1526, not far from Melrose, Walter Scott of Buccleuch attacked the forces guarding the prince; among them was Ker of Cessford, who was slain by an Elliot when Buccleuch’s men rallied at the rock called “Turn Again.” Hence sprang a long-enduring blood-feud of Scotts and Kers; but Angus retained the prince, and in a later fight in the cause of James’s delivery, Lennox was slain by the Hamiltons, near Linlithgow. The spring of 1528 was marked by the burning of a Hamilton, Patrick, Abbot of Ferne, at St Andrews, for his Lutheran opinions. Angus had been making futile attacks on the Border thieves, mainly the Armstrongs, who now became very prominent and picturesque robbers. He meant to carry James with him on one of these expeditions; but in June 1528 the young king escaped from Edinburgh Castle, and rode to Stirling, where he was welcomed by his mother and her partisans. Among them were Arran, Argyll, Moray, Bothwell, and other nobles, with Maxwell and the Laird of Buccleuch, Sir Walter Scott. Angus and his kin were forfeited; he was driven across the Border in November, to work what mischief he might against his country; he did not return till the death of James V. Meanwhile James was at peace with his uncle, Henry VIII. He (1529-1530) attempted to bring the Border into his peace, and hanged Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, with circumstances of treachery, says the ballad,—as a ballad-maker was certain to say.

Campbells, Macleans, and Macdonalds had all this while been burning each other’s lands, and cutting each other’s throats. James visited them, and partly quieted them, incarcerating the Earl of Argyll.

Bothwell and Angus now conspired together to crown Henry VIII. in Edinburgh; but, in May 1534, a treaty of peace was made, to last till the death of either monarch and a year longer.

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James V. & the Reformation

The reign of James V was notable for the changes and controversies in religion that saw the European reformation finally wash up on the shores of Scotland. At the same time, James was required to guard constantly against the ambitions of England's Henry VIII.

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The Childhood of Mary Stuart

After the death of James V, Scotland is ruled by regents in the stead of the baby Mary Stuart who veer between different religious states and must constantly guard against the continued ambitions of Henry VII. who strives to suborn various Scottish nobles.

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1540s The Regency of Arran

After Beaton's death, there followed a period of uncertainty as different parties jostled for power whilst the Earl of Arran held the regency. Henry VIII's plan to abduct the young queen is foiled when she flees by ship to France.

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Timeline of Scottish History

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Battle of Flodden

The Minority of James IV.

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