The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (5 page)

When Henry IV was told that his young captive Prince James had been travelling to France only to further his education, he replied that this was unnecessary because ‘I speak good French myself.’ Actually it is probable that James could already speak the language: his mother, Annabelle Drummond, had been accustomed to correspond with his elder brother, David of Rothesay, in French. This need occasion no surprise. The now longstanding French alliance, as a result of which many Scots served in the French army – one of them, James Power or Polwarth, designing Joan of Arc’s banner – meant that the Scottish court and nobility were acquainted with the French tongue and well versed in French culture. Indeed, French influence is evident in many aspects of Scottish life throughout the Stewart period. In church and castle architecture France, not England, supplied the model. Young noblemen were often sent to France to further their education. French words entered the Scots language. The lords’ claret was poured from a ‘gardevin’ (wine jug) into a ‘tassie’ (cup), and their food was served on an ‘ashet’ (
assiette
). Scots law diverged from English common law and the foundations were laid in the fifteenth century of a Franco-Roman legal system, which, despite the vast accretions of statute law passed by the United Kingdom parliament since 1707, survives to this day. When universities were founded – St Andrews in 1412, Glasgow in 1455 and King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1495 – the model was the Sorbonne in Paris, not Oxford or Cambridge.

Henry’s remark may have been a joke, but he did see to it that the education of the captive Prince was not neglected. James soon learned to read Latin for pleasure, and to write fluently. Though he was lodged at first in the Tower of London, where other prisoners included his cousin Murdoch, captured on a raid into England, and Griffith, the son of the rebel Welsh prince Owen Glendower, the conditions of his captivity were not severe. There was the royal menagerie to amuse them, and James was soon allotted his own household servants. He was even on occasion permitted to exercise his regal powers. So, for instance, in November 1412 he issued ‘from Croydon’ letters confirming two members of the extensive Douglas family in possession of the Border lands of Drumlanrig, Hawick, Selkirk and Cavers. The documents, given ‘under the signet usit in selying of oure letters’, are declared to be ‘rate with oure proper hand’, and are the first examples we have of the handwriting of any King of Scots.

Nevertheless, captivity must have been irksome for a young and ambitious prince, especially since his uncle Albany made no effort to secure his release. On the contrary; when Henry IV died in 1413, Albany negotiated the return to Scotland of his own son Murdoch, in exchange for Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (who had taken refuge in Scotland after an unsuccessful rebellion), but left the King where he was.

Events turned in James’s favour, however, when the English triumph at Agincourt was followed by further successes. The French called for assistance from their Scottish ally, and a force of some six or seven thousand men was sent to France under the command of Albany’s second son, the Earl of Buchan, and Archibald, fourth Earl of Douglas, who was married to James’s sister Margaret. This army defeated the English at Bauge in 1421, stimulating renewed French resistance.

The presence of the Scots in France persuaded Henry V to take James with him on his next campaign, so that his subjects could be charged with fighting against their king, thus being guilty of treason. James was not reluctant. He admired Henry, had been present at his marriage to Catherine of Valois, and been knighted by him at Windsor. They may even have been friends inasmuch as friendship was possible between kings, or indeed between keeper and prisoner. He was by Henry’s side at the siege of Melun and issued an order commanding all Scots in the French army to lay down their arms. The commander, James’s cousin Buchan, not surprisingly declined to obey the King’s order, but a dozen Scots who had been taken prisoner were hanged for having borne arms against their lawful king. James may have had no choice in the matter. On the other hand, he may well have approved. He had no reason to love Buchan, whose father had been content to leave him a prisoner in England. Certainly such approval would be in keeping with the ruthlessness he would display when at last he returned to Scotland and began to govern.

That day was not far off. In 1422 Henry V died. His son and heir, Henry VI, was still a baby. A council of regency was established. Its chief members were the late king’s brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and their uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. The King’s death would have consequences for the war with France, never again prosecuted so successfully, and for the political relations between England and Scotland. The new government saw merit in releasing James. An Anglo-Scottish agreement, even if falling short of an alliance, might lead to the withdrawal of the Scottish army from France. The rapproachement between England and Scotland would be cemented by a marriage. A suitable bride for James was available. She was Joan Beaufort, niece of the Bishop of Winchester. The marriage was undeniably a political arrangement, but, unlike most royal marriages, it may have been a love match too.

For James was not only a king; he was also a poet, and in
The Kingis Quair
, he told, or purported to tell, the story of his romance. It is a long poem of 119 seven-line stanzas, which shows the influence of Chaucer, and though in many ways conventional in theme and imagery, also reads like the product of personal experience.

He tells how he is lying awake in his chamber unable to sleep. So in the manner of insomniacs, he picks up a book:
The Consolations of Philosophy
by the fifth-century Roman Boethius, itself reputedly written in prison and often quoted by Chaucer. He reads for some time, then lays it aside and muses on the mutability of fortune till he hears the bell ring for Matins. He then recounts the story of his youth and capture and years of captivity. This depresses him, and so, in an attempt to lighten his mood, he goes to the window overlooking a garden where a nightingale has been singing.

And therewith kest I doun my eye ageyne,

Quhare as I saw, walking under the toure,

Ful secretly new cummyng hir to pleyne,

The fairest or the freschest yonge floure

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

For quhich sodayn abate, anon astert

The blude of all my body to my hert.

And though I stude abaisit tho a lyte

No wonder was, forquhy my wittis all

Were so ouercome with pleasaunce and delyte

Only throe latting of myn eyen fall,

That suddenly my hert become hit thrall

For ever of free wyll; for of manace

There was no takyn in hir suete face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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