A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lang

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The Celtic North, never quiet, made its last united effort in 1411, when
Donald, Lord of the Isles, who was in touch with the English Government,
claimed the earldom of Ross, in right of his wife, as against the Earl of
Buchan, a son of Albany; mustered all the wild clans of the west and the
isles at Ardtornish Castle on the Sound of Mull; marched through Ross to
Dingwall; defeated the great northern clan of Mackay, and was hurrying to
sack Aberdeen when he was met by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, the
gentry of the northern Lowlands, mounted knights, and the burgesses of
the towns, some eighteen miles from Aberdeen, at Harlaw. There was a
pitched battle with great slaughter, but the Celts had no cavalry, and
the end was that Donald withdrew to his fastnesses. The event is
commemorated by an old literary ballad, and in Elspeth's ballad in
Scott's novel, 'The Antiquary.'

In the year of Albany's death, at a great age (1420), in compliance with
the prayer of Charles VII. of France, the Earl of Buchan, Archibald,
Douglas's eldest son, and Sir John Stewart of Derneley, led a force of
some 7000 to 10,000 men to war for France. Henry V. then compelled the
captive James I. to join him, and (1421) at Bauge Bridge the Scots, with
the famed La Hire, routed the army of Henry's brother, the Duke of
Clarence, who, with 2000 of the English, fell in the action. The victory
was fruitless; at Crevant (1423) the Scots were defeated; at Verneuil
(1424) they were almost exterminated. None the less the remnant, with
fresh levies, continued to war for their old ally, and, under Sir Hugh
Kennedy and others, suffered at Rouvray (February 1429), and were with
the victorious French at Orleans (May 1429) under the leadership of
Jeanne d'Arc. The combination of Scots and French, at the last push,
always saved the independence of both kingdoms.

The character of Albany, who, under his father, Robert III., and during
the captivity of James I., ruled Scotland so long, is enigmatic. He is
well spoken of by the contemporary Wyntoun, author of a chronicle in
rhyme; and in the Latin of Wyntoun's continuator, Bower. He kept on
friendly terms with the Douglases, he was popular in so far as he was
averse to imposing taxation; and perhaps the anarchy and oppression which
preceded the return of James I. to Scotland were due not to the weakness
of Albany but to that of his son and successor, Murdoch, and to the
iniquities of Murdoch's sons.

The death of Henry V. (1422) and the ambition of Cardinal Beaufort,
determined to wed his niece Jane Beaufort to a crowned king, may have
been among the motives which led the English Government (their own king,
Henry VI., being a child) to set free the royal captive (1424).

CHAPTER XI. JAMES I.

On March 28, 1424, James I. was released, on a ransom of 40,000 pounds,
and after his marriage with Jane Beaufort, grand-daughter of John of
Gaunt, son of Edward III. The story of their wooing (of course in the
allegorical manner of the age, and with poetical conventions in place of
actual details) is told in James's poem, "The King's Quair," a beautiful
composition in the school of Chaucer, of which literary scepticism has
vainly tried to rob the royal author. James was the ablest and not the
most scrupulous of the Stuarts. His captivity had given him an English
education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a
fiery determination to put down the oppression of the nobles. "If God
gives me but a dog's life," he said, "I will make the key keep the castle
and the bracken bush keep the cow." Before his first Parliament, in May
1424, James arrested Murdoch's eldest son, Sir Walter Fleming of
Cumbernauld, and the younger Boyd of Kilmarnock. The Parliament left a
Committee of the Estates ("The Lords of the Articles") to carry out the
royal policy. Taxes for the payment of James's ransom were imposed; to
impose them was easy, "passive resistance" was easier; the money was
never paid, and James's noble hostages languished in England. He next
arrested the old Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham of the Kincardine
family, later his murderer.

These were causes of unpopularity. During a new Parliament (1425) James
imprisoned the new Duke of Albany (Murdoch) and his son Alexander, and
seized their castles. {57} The Albanys and Lennox were executed; their
estates were forfeited; but resentment dogged a king who was too fierce
and too hurried a reformer, perhaps too cruel an avenger of his own
wrongs.

Our knowledge of the events of his reign is vague; but a king of Scotland
could never, with safety, treat any of his nobles as criminals; the whole
order was concerned to prevent or avenge severity of justice.

At a Parliament in Inverness (1427) he seized the greatest of the
Highland magnates whom he had summoned; they were hanged or imprisoned,
and, after resistance, Alastair, the new Lord of the Isles, did penance
at Holyrood, before being immured in Tantallon Castle. His cousin,
Donald Balloch, defeated Mar at Inverlochy (where Montrose later routed
Argyll) (1431). Not long afterwards Donald fled to Ireland, whence a
head, said to be his, was sent to James, but Donald lived to fight
another day.

Without a standing army to garrison the inaccessible Highlands, the Crown
could neither preserve peace in those regions nor promote justice. The
system of violent and perfidious punishments merely threw the Celts into
the arms of England.

Execution itself was less terrible to the nobles than the forfeiting of
their lands and the disinheriting of their families. None the less,
James (1425-1427) seized the lands of the late Earl of Lennox, made
Malise Graham surrender the earldom of Strathearn in exchange for the
barren title of Earl of Menteith, and sent the sufferer as a hostage into
England. The Earl of March, son of the Earl who, under Robert III., had
gone over to the English cause, was imprisoned and stripped of his
ancient domains on the Eastern Border; and James, disinheriting Lord
Erskine, annexed the earldom of Mar to the Crown.

In a Parliament at Perth (March 1428) James permitted the minor barons
and freeholders to abstain from these costly assemblies on the condition
of sending two "wise men" to represent each sheriffdom: a Speaker was to
be elected, and the shires were to pay the expenses of the wise men. But
the measure was unpopular, and in practice lapsed. Excellent laws were
passed, but were not enforced.

In July-November 1428 a marriage was arranged between Margaret the infant
daughter of James and the son (later Louis XI.) of the still uncrowned
Dauphin, Charles VIII. of France. Charles announced to his subjects
early in 1429 that an army of 6000 Scots was to land in France; that
James himself, if necessary, would follow; but Jeanne d'Arc declared that
there was no help from Scotland, none save from God and herself. She was
right: no sooner had she won her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Pathay,
and elsewhere (May-June 1429) than James made a truce with England which
enabled Cardinal Beaufort to throw his large force of anti-Hussite
crusaders into France, where they secured Normandy. The Scots in France,
nevertheless, fought under the Maid in her last successful action, at
Lagny (April 1430).

An heir to the Crown, James, was born in October 1430, while the King was
at strife with the Pope, and asserting for King and Parliament power over
the Provincial Councils of the Church. An interdict was threatened,
James menaced the rich and lax religious orders with secular reformation;
settled the Carthusians at Perth, to show an example of holy living; and
pursued his severities against many of his nobles.

His treatment of the Earl of Strathearn (despoiled and sent as a hostage
to England) aroused the wrath of the Earl's uncle, Robert Graham, who
bearded James in Parliament, was confiscated, fled across the Highland
line, and, on February 20, 1437, aided, it is said by the old Earl of
Atholl (a grandson of Robert II. by his second marriage), led a force
against the King in the monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, surprised
him, and butchered him. The energy of his Queen brought the murderers,
and Atholl himself, to die under unspeakable torments.

James's reforms were hurried, violent, and, as a rule, incapable of
surviving the anarchy of his son's minority: his new Court of Session,
sitting in judgment thrice a-year, was his most fortunate innovation.

CHAPTER XII. JAMES II.

Scone, with its sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was
perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood
(March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied
to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of
Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the
strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the
important post of Commander of Edinburgh Castle; the other by Sir
Alexander Livingstone of Callendar.

The great old Houses had been shaken by the severities of James I., at
least for the time. In a Government of factions influenced by private
greed, there was no important difference in policy, and we need not
follow the transference of the royal person from Crichton in Edinburgh to
Livingstone in Stirling Castle; the coalitions between these worthies,
the battles between the Boyds of Kilmarnock and the Stewarts, who had to
avenge Stewart of Derneley, Constable of the Scottish contingent in
France, who was slain by Sir Thomas Boyd. The queen-mother married Sir
James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorne, and (August 3, 1439) she was
captured by Livingstone, while her husband, in the mysterious words of
the chronicler, was "put in a pitt and bollit." In a month Jane Beaufort
gave Livingstone an amnesty; he, not the Stewart family, not the queen-
mother, now held James.

To all this the new young Earl of Douglas, a boy of eighteen, tacitly
assented. He was the most powerful and wealthiest subject in Scotland;
in France he was Duc de Touraine; he was descended in lawful wedlock from
Robert II.; "he micht ha'e been the king," as the ballad says of the
bonny Earl of Moray. But he held proudly aloof from both Livingstone and
Crichton, who were stealing the king alternately: they then combined,
invited Douglas to Edinburgh Castle, with his brother David, and served
up the ominous bull's head at that "black dinner" recorded in a ballad
fragment. {61} They decapitated the two Douglas boys; the earldom fell
to their granduncle, James the Fat, and presently, on _his_ death (1443),
to young William Douglas, after which "bands," or illegal covenants,
between the various leaders of factions, led to private wars of shifting
fortune. Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews, opposed the Douglas party, now
strong both in lands newly acquired, till (July 3, 1449) James married
Mary of Gueldres, imprisoned the Livingstones, and relied on the Bishop
of St Andrews and the clergy. While Douglas was visiting Rome in 1450,
the Livingstones had been forfeited, and Crichton became Chancellor.

FALL OF THE BLACK DOUGLASES.

The Douglases, through a royal marriage of an ancestor to a daughter of
the more legitimate marriage of Robert II., had a kind of claim to the
throne which they never put forward. The country was thus spared
dynastic wars, like those of the White and Red Roses in England; but,
none the less, the Douglases were too rich and powerful for subjects.

The Earl at the moment held Galloway and Annandale, two of his brothers
were Earls of Moray and Ormond; in October 1448, Ormond had distinguished
himself by defeating and taking Percy, urging a raid into Scotland, at a
bloody battle on the Water of Sark, near Gretna.

During the Earl of Douglas's absence in Rome, James had put down some of
his unruly retainers, and even after his return (1451) had persevered in
this course. Later in the year Douglas resigned, and received back his
lands, a not uncommon formula showing submission on the vassal's favour
on the lord's part, as when Charles VII., at the request of Jeanne d'Arc,
made this resignation to God!

Douglas, however, was suspected of intriguing with England and with the
Lord of the Isles, while he had a secret covenant or "band" with the
Earls of Crawford and Ross. If all this were true, he was planning a
most dangerous enterprise.

He was invited to Stirling to meet the king under a safe-conduct, and
there (February 22, 1452) was dirked by his king at the sacred table of
hospitality.

Whether this crime was premeditated or merely passionate is unknown, as
in the case of Bruce's murder of the Red Comyn before the high altar.
Parliament absolved James on slender grounds. James, the brother of the
slain earl, publicly defied his king, gave his allegiance to Henry VI. of
England, withdrew it, intrigued, and, after his brothers had been routed
at Arkinholm, near Langholm (May 18, 1455), fled to England. His House
was proclaimed traitorous; their wide lands in southern and south-western
Scotland were forfeited and redistributed, the Scotts of Buccleuch
profiting largely in the long-run. The leader of the Royal forces at
Arkinholm, near Langholm, was another Douglas, one of "the Red
Douglases," the Earl of Angus; and till the execution of the Earl of
Morton, under James VI., the Red Douglases were as powerful, turbulent,
and treacherous as the Black Douglases had been in their day. When
attacked and defeated, these Douglases, red or black, always allied
themselves with England and with the Lords of the Isles, the hereditary
foes of the royal authority.

Meanwhile Edward IV. wrote of the Scots as "his rebels of Scotland," and
in the alternations of fortune between the Houses of York and Lancaster,
James held with Henry VI. When Henry was defeated and taken at
Northampton (July 10, 1460), James besieged Roxburgh Castle, an English
hold on the Border, and (August 3, 1460) was slain by the explosion of a
great bombard.

James was but thirty years of age at his death. By the dagger, by the
law, and by the aid of the Red Douglases, he had ruined his most powerful
nobles--and his own reputation. His early training, like that of James
VI., was received while he was in the hands of the most treacherous,
bloody, and unscrupulous of mankind; later, he met them with their own
weapons. The foundation of the University of Glasgow (1451), and the
building and endowment of St Salvator's College in St Andrews, by Bishop
Kennedy, are the most permanent proofs of advancing culture in the reign
of James.

Many laws of excellent tendency, including sumptuary laws, which suggest
the existence of unexpected wealth and luxury, were passed; but such laws
were never firmly and regularly enforced. By one rule, which does seem
to have been carried out, no poisons were to be imported: Scottish
chemical science was incapable of manufacturing them. Much later, under
James VI., we find a parcel of arsenic, to be used for political
purposes, successfully stopped at Leith.

CHAPTER XIII. JAMES III.

James II. left three sons; the eldest, James III., aged nine, was crowned
at Kelso (August 10, 1460); his brothers, bearing the titles of Albany
and Mar, were not to be his supports. His mother, Mary of Gueldres, had
the charge of the boys, and, as she was won over by her uncle, Philip of
Burgundy, to the cause of the House of York, while Kennedy and the Earl
of Angus stood for the House of Lancaster, there was strife between them
and the queen-mother and nobles. Kennedy relied on France (Louis XL),
and his opponents on England.

The battle of Towton (March 30, 1461) drove Henry VI. and his queen
across the Border, where Kennedy entertained the melancholy exile in the
Castle of St Andrews. The grateful Henry restored Berwick to the Scots,
who could not hold it long. In June 1461, while the Scots were failing
to take Carlisle, Edward IV. was crowned, and sent his adherent, the
exiled Earl of Douglas, to treat for an alliance with the Celts, under
John, Lord of the Isles, and that Donald Balloch who was falsely believed
to have long before been slain in Ireland.

It is curious to think of the Lord of the Isles dealing as an independent
prince, through a renegade Douglas, with the English king. A treaty was
made at John's Castle of Ardtornish--now a shell of crumbling stone on
the sea-shore of the Morvern side of the Sound of Mull--with the English
monarch at Westminster. The Highland chiefs promise allegiance to
Edward, and, if successful, the Celts are to recover the ancient kingdom
from Caithness to the Forth, while Douglas is to be all-powerful from the
Forth to the Border!

But other intrigues prevailed. The queen-mother and her son, in the most
friendly manner, met the kingmaker Warwick at Dumfries, and again at
Carlisle, and Douglas was disgraced by Edward, though restored to favour
when Bishop Kennedy declined to treat with Edward's commissioners. The
Treaty of England with Douglas and the Celts was then ratified; but
Douglas, advancing in front of Edward's army to the Border, met old
Bishop Kennedy in helmet and corslet, and was defeated. Louis XI.,
however, now deserted the Red for the White Rose. Kennedy followed his
example; and peace was made between England and Scotland in October 1464.
Kennedy died in the summer of 1465.

There followed the usual struggles between confederations of the nobles,
and, in July 1466, James was seized, being then aged fourteen, by the
party of the Boyds, Flemings, and Kennedys, aided by Hepburn of Hailes
(ancestor of the turbulent Earl of Bothwell), and by the head of the
Border House of Cessford, Andrew Ker.

It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now
the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history. Boyd made
himself Governor to the king, his son married the king's eldest sister,
Mary, and became Earl of Arran. But brief was the triumph of the Boyds.
In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her
dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of
his house was arranged. Boyd fled the country; the king's sister,
divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who
were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black
Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal
Stewarts, if that family were extinct. The Hamiltons, the wealthiest
house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their
nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time
of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy's
successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian. Graham
dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the
Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country,
always jealous of interference from Rome. But he was reported on as more
or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed. Had he been defending
(as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons
against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an
unfavourable view of his intellect. In any case, whether the clergy,
backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles
made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the
universal rule. Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance,
were attaining their lowest level. {67} By 1476 the Lord of the Isles,
the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and
Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross,
which was attached to the Crown (1476). His treaty of Ardtornish had
come to light. But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with
fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James's
devotion to the arts--a thing intolerable--and to the society of low-born
favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, "a stone-cutter," prepared the
sorrows and the end of his reign.

The intrigues which follow, and the truth about the character of James,
are exceedingly obscure. We have no Scottish chronicle written at the
time; the later histories, by Ferrerius, an Italian, and, much later, by
Queen Mary's Bishop Lesley, and by George Buchanan, are full of rumours
and contradictions, while the State Papers and Treaties of England merely
prove the extreme treachery of James's brother Albany, and no evidence
tells us how James contrived to get the better of the traitor. James's
brothers Albany and Mar were popular; were good horsemen, men of their
hands, and Cochrane is accused of persuading James to arrest Mar on a
charge of treason and black magic. Many witches are said to have been
burned: perhaps the only such case before the Reformation. However it
fell out--all is obscure--Mar died in prison; while Albany, also a
prisoner on charges of treasonable intrigues with the inveterate Earl of
Douglas, in the English interest, escaped to France.

Douglas (1482) brought him to England, where he swore allegiance to
Edward IV., under whom, like Edward Balliol, he would hold Scotland if
crowned. He was advancing on the Border with Edward's support and with
the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and James had gone to Lauder to
encounter him, when the Earl of Angus headed a conspiracy of nobles, such
as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of
James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge. The most tangible grievance
was the increasing debasement of the coinage. James was immured at
Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates.
Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland.
In 1483 Albany renewed, with many of the nobles, his intrigues with
Edward for the betrayal of Scotland. In some unknown way James separated
Albany from his confederates Atholl, Buchan, and Angus; Albany went to
England, betrayed the Castle of Dunbar to England, and was only checked
in his treasons by the death of Edward IV. (April 9, 1483), after which a
full Parliament (July 7, 1483) condemned him and forfeited him in his
absence. On July 22, 1484, he invaded Scotland with his ally, Douglas;
they were routed at Lochmaben, Douglas was taken, and, by singular
clemency, was merely placed in seclusion in the Monastery of Lindores,
while Albany, escaping to France, perished in a tournament, leaving a
descendant, who later, in the minority of James V., makes a figure in
history.

The death of Richard III. (August 18, 1485) and the accession of the
prudent Henry VII. gave James a moment of safety. He turned his
attention to the Church, and determined to prosecute for treason such
Scottish clerics as purchased benefices through Rome. He negotiated for
three English marriages, including that of his son James, Duke of
Rothesay, to a daughter of Edward IV.; he also negotiated for the
recovery of Berwick, taken by Gloucester during Albany's invasion of
1482. After his death, and before it, James was accused, for these
reasons, of disloyal dealings with England; and such nobles as Angus, up
to the neck as they were in treason and rebellion, raised a party against
him on the score that he was acting as they did. The almost aimless
treachery of the Douglases, Red or Black, endured for centuries from the
reign of David II. to that of James VI. Many nobles had received no
amnesty for the outrage of Lauder Bridge; their hopes turned to the heir
of the Crown, James, Duke of Rothesay. We see them offering peace for an
indemnity in a Parliament of October 1487; the Estates refused all such
pardons for a space of seven years; the king's party was manifestly the
stronger. He was not to be intimidated; he offended Home and the Humes
by annexing the Priory of Coldingham (which they regarded as their own)
to the Royal Chapel at Stirling. The inveterate Angus, with others,
induced Prince James to join them under arms. James took the
Chancellorship from Argyll and sent envoys to England.

The rebels, proclaiming the prince as king, intrigued with Henry VII.;
James was driven across the Forth, and was supported in the north by his
uncle, Atholl, and by Huntly, Crawford, and Lord Lindsay of the Byres,
Errol, Glamis, Forbes, and Tullibardine, and the chivalry of Angus and
Strathtay. Attempts at pacification failed; Stirling Castle was betrayed
to the rebels, and James's host, swollen by the loyal burgesses of the
towns, met the Border spears of Home and Hepburn, the Galloway men, and
the levies of Angus at Sauchie Burn, near Bannockburn.

In some way not understood, James, riding without a single knight or
squire, fell from his horse, which had apparently run away with him, at
Beaton's Mill, and was slain in bed, it was rumoured, by a priest,
feigned or false, who heard his confession. The obscurity of his reign
hangs darkest over his death, and the virulent Buchanan slandered him in
his grave. Under his reign, Henryson, the greatest of the Chaucerian
school in Scotland, produced his admirable poems. Many other poets whose
works are lost were flourishing; and _The Wallace_, that elaborate
plagiarism from Barbour's 'The Brus,' was composed, and attributed to
Blind Harry, a paid minstrel about the Court. {71}

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