The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (4 page)

Chapter 3

Robert III (1390–1406): A Troubled Reign

John of Carrick succeeded his father in 1390, when he was already fifty-three. He chose to be known as Robert III. The name John was thought unlucky for a king. John of England had lost almost all the Angevin empire in France and had been threatened with deposition by his barons. The vassal king John Balliol, poor ‘Toom Tabard’ (empty coat), had been notably unsuccessful. John of France had been taken prisoner by the English at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. But the change of name hardly ensured good fortune.

The new king was in poor health. In 1388 a kick from a horse had left him lame. He soon appeared to be a chronic invalid. Indeed he was regarded as being so unfitted for government that his younger brother, the Earl of Fife, who had actually been christened Robert, was appointed to execute justice and defend the kingdom on account of the King’s ‘infirmity’. The exact nature of this is unknown, but evidently Robert III, though amiable and kindly, lacked the vigour of the most prominent of his brothers, Fife, and Alexander, Earl of Buchan. The latter’s wildness earned him the sobriquet ‘the Wolf of Badenoch’. His most notorious exploit was the burning of Elgin Cathedral, described as ‘the ornament of the realm, the glory of the kingdom, the delight of foreigners’; even today in its ruined state it remains impressive. The Wolf burned the town too; all this because the Bishop of Moray had had the temerity to command him to return to the wife he had deserted. He did penance for his crime, but suffered no other punishment, either because the King had an affection for his wayward brother, or, more probably, because he wasn’t strong enough to impose any penalty. Alexander continued to flourish as a semi-independent warlord; and, when he died in 1405, was buried in Dunkeld Cathedral, where an inscription commemorates him, with doubtless unintentional irony, as a benefactor of the Church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

James I (1406–37): The Poet-King

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

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

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

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

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