The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (14 page)

Angus, however, was not finished. In Albany’s absence he dominated the Council, and as the head of the pro-English party became in fact, though not in name, regent. He was powerful enough by 1526, the year before the annulment of his marriage, to take possession of the young King, now aged fourteen, and to make a treaty with England. A previous Council decree had stipulated that the King should reside in turn with four great magnates – Angus, Arran, the Earl of Lennox and his own mother – but Angus felt powerful enough to disregard this decree and refused to surrender the King’s person. Meanwhile, he sought to bolster his position by granting lands and the principal offices in the state and the royal household to his supporters and members of his extended family. According to Pitscottie, ‘The tyranny of the house of Douglas became every day more intolerable to the nation. To bear the name was esteemed sufficient to cover the most atrocious crime, even in the streets of the capital; and during the sitting of parliament, a baron who had murdered his opponent on the threshold of the principal church, was permitted to walk openly abroad, solely because he was a Douglas.’
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Angus’s supremacy did not last. It provoked the resentment of the young King, of all those nobles excluded from power and influence, and of the pro-French party, now headed by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews and chancellor from the year of Flodden until he was displaced by Angus. The young King, eager to escape the Earl’s control, contrived to resume communication with his mother, now married to her third husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Methven.
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She held Stirling Castle, and as soon as James was assured of a welcome and refuge there, he made plans to escape.

In the late summer of 1528, Angus had left him at Falkland Castle in Fife, under the guard of his own uncle, Archibald, his brother George, and another kinsman, James Douglas of Parkhead, captain of the guard. A few days after Angus’s departure, Archibald went to Dundee on private business and George to St Andrews, apparently to investigate some matter connected with the finances of the diocese, leaving the King in the charge of James Douglas and a hundred-strong guard. The King then proposed that they should spend the next day hunting and that invitations be sent to certain Fife lairds, for, he said, ‘he was determined to slay a deer or two for his pleasure’. He asked for his ‘disjeuner’
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to be served at four in the morning, and urged James Douglas to go to bed early so that he might rise the sooner. Then, when all was quiet, he eluded the sentries – one wonders if they were bribed or perhaps drunk – and with only two servants, one a stable boy named Jockie Hart, who provided the horses, escaped and rode hard for Stirling, reaching the castle as dawn was breaking. The gates were closed behind him, in case of a pursuit, and the captain of his mother’s guard ‘laid the King in his bed, because he had ridden all that night’.

Pitscottie in his chronicle takes up the story:

We will lat him sleep in his bed, and return to George Douglas, who came home to Falkland at eleven hours at night, and required at the porters what the King was doing, who answered that he was in his own chamber sleeping, who was to rise tymous to the hunting, and right so said the watchmen. George hearing this went to his bed, till on the morn that the sun rose. Then came Patrick Carmichael, Baillie of Abernethie, and knocked at George Douglas’s chamber door, and inquired of him what the king was doing. George answered that he was not waked as yet in his own chamber. The Baillie answered: ‘Ye are deceaved; he is along the bridge of Stirling this night.’ Then George Douglas gat up hastily and went to the porters and watchmen and inquired for the King, who still answered that he was sleeping in his own chamber. Then George Douglas came to the king’s chamber door and found it locked, and dang it up, but found no man in it. Then he cried, ‘Fye, treason, the King is gone.’
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Pitscottie’s account is vivid and suitably dramatic, yet open to question. How, one wonders, could Baillie Carmichael have had the information he relayed? And if he did somehow know that the King had ridden to Stirling, it was surely bold to the point of rashness to reveal it to George Douglas. Moreover, there is some confusion in his narrative, for he goes on to relate that some said the King had slipped out ‘to visit a gentlewoman’ at Bambriefe. This seems to have been thought credible, for though James was only sixteen, it is said that Angus had not neglected to supply him with women who might serve as a distraction – and indeed he would have at least three illegitimate children before he was twenty. But the Douglases’ hope was soon disappointed. The bird had indeed flown. Angus was sent for urgently and hurried from his castle of Tantallon on the other side of the Forth, and then they mustered their forces and headed for Stirling in a desperate attempt to retrieve the situation.

They were met with news that a herald had been sent to the town cross to proclaim a royal decree that neither Angus nor any of his company should approach within six miles of the King upon pain of death. Some would have defied the command, but perhaps they were too weak; perhaps the Earl’s nerve cracked. At any rate they withdrew to Linlithgow to await events. By this time other nobles were congregating at Stirling protesting their loyalty, among them Archbishop Beaton. A few months earlier he had been so fearful of Angus that he had gone into hiding disguised as a shepherd. Then he had apparently made peace with the Earl, resuming control of his diocese and entertaining Angus and the King for the Easter feast. It may be, however, that he already knew of the King’s plans and had perhaps detained George Douglas at St Andrews in order to facilitate the escape. Certainly some must have been apprised of it; otherwise it is difficult to see how so many of the nobility could have rallied so quickly to the King.

James made his way to Edinburgh where he summoned a Council that proclaimed Angus, his brother and uncle to be traitors, forbidding anyone to have intercourse with them or offer them help or risk being held as their accomplices. The King laid forth all the grounds of his complaints. The Douglases were dismissed from all offices and the Council sent an envoy to England to inform Henry that the government of Scotland was now in the King’s own hands. For a few weeks Angus held out in Tantallon Castle, but his position was hopeless. He sued for peace, surrendering the castle in return for a promise (which, surprisingly perhaps, was kept) that he should be allowed to go into exile in England. Other members of the family would be less fortunate. Angus’s brother-in-law, the Master of Forbes, was charged with plotting to kill the King and was executed. The Earl’s sister Lady Glamis was condemned for conspiring to poison James and was burned. (She had previously been acquitted of an attempt to poison her own husband.) James Douglas of Parkhead, the jailer the King had outwitted, was also put to death, and other members of the family, including the young Earl of Morton, found their estates forfeited.

The reversal, which may even be described as a royal coup, had political consequences. Angus, inasmuch as he had any political aims other than the securing of his own power, had been the leader of the pro-English faction. It was natural that James, in his detestation of his former stepfather, should be confirmed in his preference for the French alliance. Andrew Lang, nineteenth-century historian, essayist, poet and collector of folklore, marked its significance:

James became implacable to the whole Douglas name. But to shake off and break down the Douglases, a thing desirable in itself, was to turn away from England, the patron of the Douglases, to turn away from Protestantism, to court France, and to choose the doomed cause of Catholicism in the north…These dull and squalid intrigues of a selfish, sensual termagant [Margaret Tudor] and her unscrupulously ambitious husband Angus, determined the fate of the Stuart line. They were to lean on France and lose three crowns for a mass. Exile, the executioner’s axe, and broken hearts were to be their reward in a secular series of sorrows flowing from the long minority and unhappy environment of James V.
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This was to read history backwards, or to interpret it in deterministic fashion. The fate of the Stuart line would indeed unfold in the manner Lang describes. But it need not have done so. There were to be many moments in the following two centuries when different decisions might have been taken, different policies pursued. What happened – the ultimate failure of the Stuarts – was the course history took. Nothing can alter that. Yet one does not have to be a devotee of what is called counter-factual history to believe that the course of the river of history might have been diverted into other channels.

Freed from the control of the Douglases, James, at the age of seventeen, took charge of the government himself. His first aim was to restore the authority of the Crown and to bring the country to a degree of order. With this intention he made an expedition in 1529 into the notoriously lawless Borders. That country had been ravaged by the recurrent wars with England, and the Border clans or families made raids indifferently across the frontier, into the Lowlands, and on each other. They were thieves and murderers, but not lacking in a certain glamour, and their wild way of life is immortalised in the great ‘Riding Ballads’ of the borderland.

James was determined to pacify the Borders. The exercise was billed as a ‘justice ayre’ (or eyre), but was really a punitive miliary expedition. He seized several of the most prominent Border barons, among them the Earl of Bothwell, Scott of Buccleuch, lords Home and Maxwell, Ker of Fernihurst, and various Elliots, and imprisoned them. Then he summoned one of the most celebrated reivers (brigands), Johnnie Armstrong of Gilknockie, to meet him at Carlinrig on the road between Hawick and Langholm. Armstrong was a notable scoundrel, guilty of many thefts and murders either side of the border – a sixteenth-century mafioso; but one with a style and panache that had won him the admiration of many. According to a ballad published by Scott in
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
, the King had sent him a promise of safe conduct:

The King he wrytes a loving letter,

With his ain hand sae tenderly;

And he hath sent it to Johnnie Armstrong,

To cum and speik with him speedily.
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Armstrong, trusting in the promise and confident of his own prowess, swaggered to the meeting, richly dressed, at the head of some fifty men. The King remarked on his splendour and then accused him of many crimes. The reiver defended himself boldly, arguing that he was a good Scot, a loyal subject of King James, and no traitor. Then, becoming aware that he was in imminent peril, he exclaimed that King Henry of England would ‘downweigh my best horse with gold to know that I was condemned to die this day’.

As Alistair Moffat writes in his history of the Borders, Armstrong was ‘missing the subtleties of the political reality behind his situation. Henry would have paid dearly; that was the point.’
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James had no wish to be on anything but good terms with his uncle of England; suppressing the reivers was good policy.

So the noose was slipped round Armstrong’s neck as he sat his horse. It was attached to the overhanging branch of a tree, the horse given a whack on its rump, and Johnnie was left swinging in the air. The same treatment was meted out to his followers. But the ballad-maker gives Johnnie the last word, and it is a fine one:

To seik het water beneath cauld ice,

Surely it is a greit folie;

I have asked grace at a graceless face

But there is nane for my men and me.

Asking grace of a graceless face, and being refused it; that is one picture of James V, and it is a fair one. Yet the other side of the King’s character should not be forgotten, the side that caused him to be remembered in song and story with affection by the common people. If he aroused the animosity, even hatred, of many of his nobles, this was at least in part because of his determination to enforce laws to protect the weak against the oppression of the strong. His care for justice was sincere, and he would be remembered as the ‘King of the Commons’ and ‘the Gudeman of Ballenguich’, this latter the name he reputedly assumed when travelling the country incognito so that, as Scott puts it in his
Tales of a Grandfather
, ‘he might hear complaints which might not otherwise reach his ears, and, perhaps, that he might enjoy amusements which he could not have partaken of in his avowed royal character’.

It is in this guise that he appears as a character in Scott’s poem
The Lady of the Lake
, and in one of the notes appended to the poem Scott wrote:

The two excellent comic songs, entitled ‘The Gaberlunzie Man’ and ‘We’ll gae nae mair a-roving’, are said to have been founded on his amorous adventures when travelling in the guise of a beggar. Another adventure, which had nearly cost him his life, is said to have taken place at the village of Cramond, near Edinburgh, where he had rendered his addresses acceptable to a pretty girl of the lower rank. Four or five persons, whether relations or lovers of his mistress is uncertain, beset the disguised monarch as he returned from his rendez-vous. Naturally gallant and an admirable master of his weapon, the king took post on the high and narrow bridge over the Almond river, and defended himself bravely with his sword. A peasant, who was threshing in a neighbouring barn, came out upon the noise, and, whether moved by compassion or natural gallantry, took the weaker side, and laid about so effectively with his flail as to disperse the assailants. He then conducted the king into his barn, where his guest requested a basin and a towel, to remove the stains of the broil. This being procured with difficulty, James employed himself in learning what was the summit of his deliverer’s earthly wishes, and found that they were bounded by the desire of possessing, in property, the farm of Braehead on which he laboured as a bondsman. The lands happened to belong to the Crown, and James directed him to come to the palace of Holyrood, and enquire for the Gudeman (i.e. farmer) of Ballengiech, a name by which he was known in his excursions, and which answered to the Il Bondocani of Haroun al-Raschid. He presented himself accordingly, and found, with due astonishment, that he had saved his monarch’s life, and that he was to be gratified with a crown charter of the lands of Braehead, under the service of presenting a ewer, basin and towel, for the king to wash his hands when he shall happen to pass the Bridge of Cramond.
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