The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (6 page)

Alarm spread among the nobility. Here was a king with a strength of will such as Scotland had not known for a long time. James Stewart, the only one of Albany’s sons still at liberty, took up the challenge. He raised a rebellion in the west, burned Dumbarton and killed the governor of its castle, an old Stewart who was the King’s uncle or perhaps great-uncle. James responded quickly and effectively. The rebellion was snuffed out. James Stewart and his ally, the Bishop of Argyll, fled to Ireland. Failure though it was, the rising had sealed the fate of the prisoners. They were tried by an assize of nobles in the presence of the King, and condemned to death. Some may have been horrified, few surprised. Walter Stewart, brought from the Bass Rock, was the first to be executed, in the forecourt of Stirling Castle. The next day his father Albany, brother Alexander and the aged Earl of Lennox followed him to the block. The King took possession of their estates, and the Crown was thereby enriched by the revenues of the earldoms of Fife, Menteith and Lennox. James then dispatched Malise Graham, nephew of Robert Graham and great-grandson of Robert II and Euphemia Ross, to England as one of the hostages for the security of his still unpaid ransom. In a few weeks he had made himself more thoroughly master of Scotland than any king since Robert the Bruce. In doing so, he had cut a swathe through the Stewart cousinship and eliminated a number of possible rivals. There was a price to be paid: the King was now feared but also hated.

Previous Scottish kings had mostly been content to select wives and husbands for their children from the ranks of the native nobility. The Stewarts themselves owed their throne to such a marriage. James, perhaps on account of the troubles he had endured and the dangers he had run at the hands of his Stewart cousins, had different ideas. He himself had married into the English royal family; his children should also marry out of Scotland. This would elevate their consequence and the King’s also. It would mark him out as being more than ‘the first among equals’ and leave fewer of the Scots nobility with a claim to the throne. So his eldest daughter Margaret was married – at the age of twelve – to the heir to the French throne, the future Louis XI, a man whose contradictions of character have fascinated and disgusted contemporaries and future historians alike, and are memorably brought to life in the best of Scott’s medieval novels,
Quentin Durward
.
¹
Margaret, however, did not live to be his queen. She died at the age of twenty, of what one French historian called ‘
une maladie de langueur
’, murmuring ‘
Fi de la vie de ce monde, et ne m’en parlez plus, et plus qu’autre chose m’ennuie
.’
²
Later Stewarts might fall into melancholy and depression, but Margaret is the only one recorded as dying of boredom.

Her sisters were married to other European nobles – the Duke of Brittany and an Austrian duke among them. There was a single exception. One daughter, Joan, was married to the Douglas Earl of Morton. But it so happened that she had been born deaf and dumb, and so could not be regarded as an asset in the royal marriage market.

James was active, enquiring and energetic. He sought to reform the machinery of the law, commanding, for instance, that no one should come to any court with a band of retainers (who would inevitably be armed). He created a new civil court, which more than a century later would re-emerge as the Court of Session, still the highest civil court in Scotland. He tried to secure the independence of the Scots Church by forbidding churchmen to go to Rome to lobby for benefices in Scotland. At the same time he imitated his mentor Henry V by taking a strictly orthodox line on heresy; at least one heretic was burned in his reign, only the second known to have suffered such punishment in Scotland. He supported the new university of St Andrews, founded by his old tutor Bishop Wordlow, although at one stage he suggested that it should be moved to Perth. St Andrews was remote, at the extremity of Fife, a county cut off to both north and south by the Firths of Tay and Forth and at the same time exposed to attack from the sea. However, he relented, and displayed his approval of the university by attending lectures there himself. James was Scotland’s first Renaissance prince, a patron of learning and culture, a stern judge, vigorous ruler, and practitioner of cruelty.

He had an affection for Perth and may even have considered establishing his capital there. It had advantages over Edinburgh, the future capital city. It was in the centre of the kingdom, on the fringe of the Highlands, and was further from the English border and less open to attack. Fixing the capital there might have helped bring together the two Scotlands – the Gaelic-speaking north and Scots-speaking south.

In contrast to his predecessors, who had perforce left barons to act as petty kings in their locality so long as they did not engage in active rebellion, James was determined to establish royal authority throughout the kingdom, even in the Highlands, where obedience to the Crown was an unfamiliar concept. He impressed its advisability on the clan chiefs by leading an army to Inverness, arresting several, beheading two and hanging another. Among those held prisoner were Alexander, Lord of the Isles,
³
and his mother, the Countess of Ross. On their eventual release, Alexander was brought to the King’s court, ostensibly to learn manners – in itself an offensive proposition – but principally that he might be kept under surveillance. He disliked what he found there; the southern lords made his dress and accent subject for mockery. He soon escaped and demonstrated his independence of spirit and action by gathering an army and burning Inverness. James could not tolerate such defiance, and marched north to Lochaber in the summer of 1431. Alexander now found the clans that had joined him unwilling to fight against the King in person; the lesson of James’s last punitive venture north was too recent to be forgotten. So he surrendered and was this time compelled to make his submission public in humiliating fashion. He was led, in the guise of a penitent, stripped to his shirt and drawers, into the abbey church at Holyrood, where he was required to present his sword to the King before the high altar. This done, the Queen fell to her knees and implored James to spare the young man’s life. He graciously consented. It was an impressive theatrical performance. But it could not be said that James had pacified the Highlands. He would not be the last king to learn that any success gained there was only temporary.

The two Roberts, content or obliged by their weakness to receive honour rather than obedience, and to leave the nobility to their own devices, had died in their beds. James, far more active in asserting what he conceived to be the rights of the Crown, bore hard on the interest of the nobility. They resented his attempts to extend his power and also his greed for money. Significantly, the bitterest among them were to be found in what remained of the extensive Stewart cousinhood, which had suffered at his hands and feared there might be worse to come.

A conspiracy was formed. Its guiding spirit was Sir Robert Graham, who had been imprisoned by James a dozen years previously. Having escaped, he denounced the King, not without reason, as a tyrant. There were other candidates for the throne if James could be removed: Graham’s nephew Malise was still held in England as a hostage at the King’s request, but his claim might be thought inferior to that of Walter, Earl of Atholl, the youngest and last legitimate survivor of Robert II’s numerous brood. Atholl had been on good enough terms with his nephew the King, but now, though around seventy years old, was persuaded to join the conspiracy, perhaps with the promise of the crown. He may have been influenced by his grandson, Sir Robert Stewart, whose own ambitions extended to the throne. This Stewart was also the King’s domestic chamberlain and as such a key figure in the plot.

The King had passed Christmas of 1436 at the Dominican abbey in Perth. The building, which no longer exists, stood on the northern edge of the town, beyond the burgh walls, and was protected by a ditch, originally perhaps the moat of the old wooden castle destroyed in a flood some two hundred years previously. Legend has it that James was warned of danger by an old woman with second sight as he journeyed to the town; but such legends are often the creation of chroniclers or ballad-makers eager to make more dramatic a story that is already strong enough. Since James was a hero to Stewart chroniclers, this wise woman may have been introduced into their story in imitation of the soothsayer Artemidorus who warned Julius Caesar to beware the Ides of March. If, however, there was such a warning, James paid no attention to it.

He remained as a guest of the Black Friars for some weeks – January and February were not inviting months to travel in medieval Scotland. No doubt he conducted business there; he also played tennis energetically, perhaps in an effort to reduce his weight
⁴
– an ambassador from Rome, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), had described him a few years before as ‘oppressed by his excessive corpulence’.
⁵
Irritated by losing tennis balls down a drain that ran from the abbey cellars, the King ordered it to be blocked up. The command would cost him his life.

On the evening of 20 February, the chamberlain Sir Robert Stewart had word from his fellow conspirators that all was ready. He dismissed the guards on some pretext and drew back the bolts on the outer door of the abbey. Under cover of darkness the assassins laid planks across the old moat and crept up to the door. Towards midnight they made their entry unchallenged and approached the chamber where the King was playing chess. Later legend has it that the bolts from that door too had been removed and that one of the Queen’s ladies, Catherine Douglas, thrust her arm through the staples on the door frame to check the murderers and give the King time to escape.
⁶

Early versions of the story tell of how James, alarmed by the sound of his enemies’ approach, tore up some of the floorboards and hid in the vault below, from which ran the drain he had ordered to be stopped. For a little while it seemed that he might escape. The conspirators searched the Queen’s apartments and were apparently ready to retire baffled. James then emerged, too soon, from his hiding place, for his enemies returned to find him climbing back into the room. He was in his nightgown and unarmed; yet struggled bravely before being overpowered and dispatched with – accounts vary – either sixteen or twenty-eight dagger wounds. He was buried in the Charterhouse of Perth, which he had recently given the monks of the Carthusian order licence to establish. His heart was removed and taken on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and then brought back to Scotland by a knight of the Order of St John. This was a piece of theatrical symbolism, linking the murdered monarch to his great-grandfather, the hero-king Robert the Bruce, whose heart had been carried by Sir James Douglas on crusade against the Moors in Spain.

Told baldly, the story of the murder, drawn from accounts written decades later, is unconvincing, scarcely credible in detail. If James found time to tear up the floorboards, wouldn’t he also have had time to seize sword and shield or summon help – not all his retainers or members of his household can have been in on the plot – even put on armour? It seems probable that the version we have is that authorised by his widow, Queen Joan, and that it was framed, or spun, so as to emphasise the wicked treachery of the assassins and the heroism of the King, thus deepening the pathos. The nineteenth-century historian Andrew Lang, who called James ‘the ablest and not the most scrupulous of the Stewarts’, hints at this: ‘the dramatic story of his death had won him a sympathy which his aims deserve better than his methods’. This judgement may be too harsh. Certainly when the citizens of Perth learned of the murder, they hurried to the abbey calling for vengeance. The conspirators, alarmed by this incursion, took flight and made for the hills.

James had been harsh, cruel, overbearing, careless of what his nobles considered to be their rights. He had failed to practise the necessary art of conciliation, had made his determination to exercise his authority to the full all too obvious, and in doing so had rendered his nobles insecure. Yet this was only a murder, not a
coup d’état
, for the conspirators had made no provision to seize power. Perhaps they expected that the murder would be popular. If so, they were mistaken. Within a month, James’s six-year-old son was crowned king. Only the decision to hold the ceremony at Holyrood, so much further from the Highland Line and from the estates of some of the conspirators than Scone, traditional crowning-place of Scottish kings, suggests that there was any apprehension about the future of the dynasty.

The murderers were soon rounded up and dealt with. They were first tortured, as an act of revenge, but also in an attempt to discover how widespread the conspiracy had been, and then executed. Sir Robert Graham, the instigator of the murder, defended his action vigorously, declaring that he had renounced his allegiance to King James and was thereby entitled to slay him. His memory would, he said, be honoured as a tyrannicide. But he deceived himself. A popular rhyme expressed the general opinion: ‘Robert Graham, / That slew our king, / God Grant him shame!’ The aged Earl of Atholl protested his innocence; in vain. It was impossible to believe that he was not privy to the conspiracy, even if he took no part in the actual murder. In fact he admitted that his son, Sir Robert Stewart, had told him of the plot, but pathetically maintained that he had tried to dissuade him. In the belief that the old man had been the designated successor, a crown of red-hot iron was placed on his head. By her swift severity, inspired perhaps by grief for the husband who had celebrated her beauty in his verse, Queen Joan, the regent, not only assured her son’s succession; she all but completed the destruction of the Stewart cousinship that her husband had begun with the execution of Albany and his sons thirteen years before. Only Malise Graham, Earl of Strathearn, survived in the male line of descent from Robert II and Euphemia Ross, but he was still a prisoner-hostage in England, and Queen Joan could rely on her Beaufort relations to see that he remained there.