The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (10 page)

BOOK: The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain
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It is probable that the tale has gained in the telling, but it was quickly disseminated, and may have served the purpose of making Albany appear a bold, even heroic, figure.

It was not long before he was ready to make trouble again. Finding Louis XI of France unwilling to help him (though he did provide him with a noble wife), he crossed over to England and came to an agreement with Edward IV.

In the letter of this agreement, Albany, styling himself ‘Alexander R’, swore to do homage to the English king for ‘my realm of Scotland’, to break the old alliance with France, and to hand over Berwick to England. The next day, either thinking he had not gone far enough to secure Edward’s goodwill, or perhaps compelled by the English king, he added much of southern Scotland – Liddesdale, Eskdale, Annandale and Lochmaben – to the gift of Berwick. He also promised to marry Edward’s daughter Cecily (who happened to be engaged to his brother James’s heir) as soon as he could ‘clear himself from all other women’.

This was a remarkable document.

In 1482, at the head of an English army reinforced by dissident Scots, among them the long-exiled Earl of Douglas, Albany invaded Scotland. James, despite his wish for friendship with England, had no choice but to assemble an army to meet the invaders. He did so with difficulty, for many of his nobles were disaffected. They distrusted the King, and resented the influence of his ‘low-born’ favourites. A particular grievance was a recent devaluation of the coinage, brass and other base metals being mixed with silver to make coins that were supposed to retain their original value. This was held to be the work of the detested Cochrane, and had rendered the King as unpopular with merchants and craftsmen as he already was with the nobility. His critics took advantage of the opportunity and confronted James with an ultimatum: he must dismiss his favourites and restore the value of the coinage, or he could confront his rebel brother without their assistance. Showing characteristic Stewart obstinacy, James refused to meet their demands. They acted promptly, seized a number of his favourites, Cochrane among them, and hanged them in a row from the high bridge at Lauder, where the King had assembled his army. Only one, a sixteen-year-old boy, John Ramsay of Balmain, was spared. The King had begged for his life, but the unusual clemency was more likely prompted by the realisation that young Ramsay was both a Scot and well born.

According to a story that became popular in legend, but that may have a kernel of truth, the dissident nobles, while eager to lynch the King’s favourites, nevertheless suffered from cold feet, none daring to make the first move. They therefore found themselves in the position of the mice in the fable resolved to hang a bell round the cat’s neck so that they might be warned of his approach, but each reluctant to undertake the dangerous duty. The matter was settled only when the Red Douglas Earl of Angus stepped forward to declare that he would ‘bell the cat’. At this moment Cochrane swaggered into the chamber in all his finery, and was seized upon by Angus. The story deserves this much credence: that posterity remembered Angus by the nickname ‘Bellthe-Cat’.
4

Having disposed of the favourites, the rebel lords then made peace with Albany. The discredited King was kept under house arrest in Edinburgh Castle and Albany was named lieutenant of the kingdom of Scotland. His new appointment did not prevent him from continuing to assure Edward IV of England that he stood by the treaty he had made. However, his ascendancy did not last long, either on account of his incapacity or because rumours of his relations with the English king were circulating and undermining his position. Meanwhile James was cultivating the moderates among his critics and promising to amend his ways. A rightful king who acted in a conciliatory fashion could usually regain ground, such was the innate respect for the authority of the Crown, if not for the individual who wore it. In 1483 Albany resigned, or, more probably, was compelled to resign his lieutenancy, and returned to England. The death of his patron Edward in the same year further weakened his position, and Parliament, prompted by the King, obediently declared his estates forfeit to the Crown. It was perhaps in desperation that Albany led another, largely English, army north a few months later. This time the King’s army came to battle and won the victory. Albany’s ally, the aged Earl of Douglas, was taken prisoner, but permitted to retire to a monastery, so that, after thirty years of exile, the last of the Black Douglases ended his turbulent career in the odour of piety. Albany himself fled to France, where he was killed in a skirmish a year later: a squalid end to a futile life.

James had seen off his brother, but his position was not secure, though he may have supposed it now was. He acted vigorously rather than wisely. He continued to neglect the nobles, who regarded themselves as his proper councillors, while at the same time threatening their interests. In 1487 he proposed to annex half the revenues of the Benedictine monastery of Coldingham in order to attach them to his own Chapel Royal. His motive may have been admirable. James was personally devout, interested in new developments in the Church, notably the collegiate chapels and their offering of a more refined and spiritual form of worship. The monasteries on the other hand were regarded by some as institutions that no longer served the religious needs of the time. James’s action was therefore defensible, in tune with advanced thinking. Unfortunately for him, the revenues of Coldingham had been assigned to the powerful border family of Home, who naturally resented their appropriation. Matters were made worse in January 1488 when James had Parliament threaten action against anyone who opposed this transfer of revenues. This was alarming. If the King was supported by Parliament in this attack on property rights, whose property could be thought secure? The Homes found allies among the disgruntled nobility, notably Bell-the-Cat himself.

James had alienated the greater part of the nobility of southern Scotland, but he could still look for support from nobles north of the Forth. His position was far from hopeless. He held Stirling Castle, the key stronghold of central Scotland, and, leaving his fifteen-year-old son and heir, Prince James, in the charge of its governor, Shaw of Fintrie, crossed the Forth to muster an army. Meanwhile the rebel lords issued a proclamation accusing the King of bringing Englishmen into the country to subvert the traditional liberties of Scotland. More significantly, they bribed Shaw to break his promise to the King and deliver the Prince into their keeping. Then they announced their intention of deposing this unworthy King, who was proving himself a traitor to Scotland, and putting the Prince on the throne in his stead. The charges were false, but James was now so unpopular that many were ready to believe them.

Nevertheless, he was able to raise troops in the north, and the two armies met at Sauchieburn, near Stirling, on 11 June. The battle may have been no more than a skirmish, but the King’s men were scattered. James himself, making his escape, was thrown from his horse. A woman drawing water from a well asked him who he was, and got the reply, ‘I was your King this day at morn.’ He was taken into her cottage, where he asked her to fetch a priest. A man appeared, saying he was indeed a priest, entered the cottage, and stabbed the King to death.
5

The murderer was never discovered, and it seems that no great attempt was made to do so. It is not even known whether he was a priest or not. The conclusion must be that James’s death was so convenient that few, if any, questions were asked. If he was indeed ‘the most enigmatic of the Stewarts’, then it may be thought appropriate that his death remains mysterious. Yet it is curious that, in comparison with the murder of James I before him, and Mary Stuart’s husband Darnley later, this unsolved crime has attracted so little attention.

In some respects James III was an untypical Stewart, evidently lacking the ability possessed by so many members of the family to charm and attract loyalty; lacking also native authority. Clearly too something about him aroused mistrust. In this he bears some resemblance to his descendant Charles I; and like Charles, his virtues were private rather than public. He was a patron of the arts, sincerely religious, and a loving husband; a good man perhaps, but an inadequate king. There was a perceived shiftiness in his character and he evidently lacked the tough masculinity that his position demanded. As a measure of his failure, one may observe that no other medieval Scottish king was confronted with a rebellion apparently led by his own son.

Chapter 7

James IV (1488–1513): The Flower of the Scottish Renaissance

There was a fifteenth-century French saying: ‘
fier comme un Ecossais
’,
1
and it might have been coined with James IV in mind. His reign would see the brief flowering of Renaissance Scotland, and James seemed to embody its spirit. He encouraged and patronised the arts, letters and sciences; William Dunbar, the most accomplished virtuoso among Scottish poets, was employed as his court laureate, complaining, however, as writers will, that he was inadequately rewarded. The King built nobly: the Great Hall of Stirling Castle, much of Falkland Palace, Linlithgow Palace, and the first Palace of Holyroodhouse date from his reign. He created a navy – though it is now recognised that his father had set this work in motion. He travelled all over his kingdom, dispensing justice, a duty his father had been accused, rightly or wrongly, of neglecting. The great Dutch scholar Erasmus, employed as tutor to the King’s illegitimate son, Alexander, said that James had ‘a wonderful intellectual power, and astonishing knowledge of everything, unconquerable magnanimity and the most abundant generosity’.
2
The Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Ayala,
3
reported to his sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, that James was ‘of noble stature, neither tall nor short, and as handsome in complexion and shape as a man can be. He speaks the following languages: Latin, very well; French, German, Flemish, Italian and Spanish.’ To these may be added Scots, English and Gaelic; he was the last King of Scots to be fluent in the tongue that Gaels call ‘the language of the gods’.
4

Kings of course are there to be flattered, and when a king condescends to a commoner, it is natural that he should be praised in return. But Ayala, writing in cipher to his employers, can have had little reason to dissemble. It is fair therefore to conclude that this was indeed the impression that James made on those who knew him. The list of his acknowledged mistresses suggests that he may have been as attractive to women as his descendant Charles II was to be. Like Charles too he cared for his illegitimate children, but while Charles made his bastard sons dukes, James made his favourite among them, Alexander, Erasmus’s pupil, Archbishop of St Andrews when the boy was only eleven, and chancellor before he was twenty-one.

There was a darker side to the King’s character, however, reflected in the sobriquet ‘James of the Iron Belt’. His involvement, whether voluntary or not, in the rebellion that had led to his father’s death seems to have weighed heavy on his conscience, and as penance, he wore an iron chain round his waist next to his skin. He made frequent pilgrimages to shrines such as that of St Ninian at Whithorn and St Dutho at Tain, though the austerity of these excursions was alleviated by the company of minstrels and other entertainers, while he broke at least one journey to Tain with a visit to his mistress at Darnaway. Nevertheless, there is no reason to think him insincere in displaying contrition for his part in his father’s death. But it is worth remarking that while he immediately paid for Masses to be said for the soul of his mother, Margaret of Denmark, who had died in 1486, it was to be eight years before he did the same for his murdered father.

He had already celebrated his sixteenth birthday when he came to the throne. The circumstances of his accession were awkward, for the rebellion that had resulted in his father’s murder had been that only of a discontented faction, members of which now seized, or were rewarded with, some of the great offices of state. Those who had been loyal to James III could not be expected to approve. The records of the Scots parliament refer to the ‘unhappy field’ of Sauchieburn, ‘in the quhilk the King our soverane lord happinit to be slane’. If this prudently glossed over the murder, it fell short of excusing it. It was perhaps to emphasise the legitimacy of the succession that the young King was crowned at Scone, the historic crowning place of Scottish kings dating back to legendary times, till Edward I of England had taken possession of the coronation stone – the Stone of Destiny – and carried it off to Westminster Abbey. Despite the stone’s absence, Robert the Bruce had been crowned at Scone, but neither James II nor James III had been – perhaps because they were only small children when they became king. The decision that James IV’s coronation be celebrated there was thus of some significance. Scone would not see another coronation till 1650, when Charles II was crowned there after the execution of his father.

James IV had one advantage over his immediate predecessors, and indeed his successors. He was, at sixteen, old enough to assume control of the government himself. Scotland was therefore spared yet another minority, and James’s personal reign of twenty-five unchallenged years was to be the longest of any Scots monarch since Alexander III in the thirteenth century.

In other respects too he was in a much stronger position than any of his Stewart ancestors. Whatever the failings and mis fortunes of James III, his reign had not interrupted the process set in motion by James I. It had been that king’s intention to elevate the Crown above the nobility, and, despite the minorities and baronial faction-fighting, this had been achieved by the time of James IV. Through the recovery of Crown lands alienated in the reigns of the two Roberts and during the minorities, the confiscation of estates of condemned rebels, and the securing of the payment of customs duties to the Crown, the Stewarts were now far richer than any of their nobility. The King was no longer merely first among equals as the two Roberts had been.

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