The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (3 page)

All medieval monarchies were partnerships. It couldn’t be otherwise. No king could govern without the acquiescence of the nobility and the Church. Indeed he required more than acquiescence; he needed collaborators. Kingship might be hereditary; it was also, if only informally, contractual. In Scotland the idea of contractual monarchy had been made explicit in the Declaration of Arbroath, addressed in 1320 to the Pope by ‘the Community of the Realm’. Composed in an attempt to persuade the Pope to lift the sentence of excommunication imposed on Robert the Bruce after he murdered his rival John Comyn in Dumfries Abbey before he was crowned king of Scots, it set out its authors’ understanding of monarchy. It first recited the pseudo-historical (in truth, utterly mythical) origin of the Scots, who, having come from Scythia by way of Spain and Ireland, had then overcome Picts, Britons, Angles and Norsemen to establish the independence of Scotland under a succession of 113 native kings (most of whom were imaginary). His Holiness was then informed that the Scots had been rescued from the violence of the English by their chosen king, Robert, now compared to the biblical heroes Joshua, son of Nun, and Judas Maccabeus. He was king by the choice of the community of the realm as well as by hereditary right, but the authors of the declaration boldly announced that, should he prove faithless, he would be set aside and replaced by another king: ‘for so long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never submit or be subject to the English’. This was fine rhetorical stuff, to be regarded in later ages as the definitive statement of Scotch nationality; but in truth all medieval monarchs were in a like position, required to govern in a manner agreeable to the great men of the realm, and might be removed if they failed to do so. In England Edward II would be deposed seven years after this declaration was addressed to the Pope, and Richard II would be replaced by Henry IV in 1399.

For the fact is that, without a regular army, without a police force, medieval government depended on two things: the personality of the monarch and his ability to obtain the consent of the barons, knights, churchmen and merchants who constituted the political class. In this respect Scotland was no different from other countries. Nevertheless, in Scotland the Crown was indeed weaker than in England, principally because the administrative apparatus of the state was far less developed. Building on the organisation of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, with its effective system of royal writs directed to sheriffs and local magnates, the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England had established a form of government that, in the hands of a capable ruler, was the most efficient in Europe. There was nothing comparable in Scotland. The monarch – King of Scots, rather than of Scotland – was the leader of a tribal nation. His power was even more dependent on his personality and prestige than was the case in England. It rested very largely on his ability to command respect and approval.

The power of the Crown was indeed very limited. It scarcely existed north of the River Tay, except up the eastern seaboard to Aberdeen and the Moray Firth. The Highlands were largely self-governing, inasmuch as they were governed at all. The Lord of the Isles, controlling the Hebrides and much of the north-west Highlands, was a quasi-independent sovereign, any allegiance to the king being merely verbal. Orkney and Shetland were not yet part of the kingdom, and in name at least were Norwegian dependencies. The Border counties, ravaged by intermittent war with England, were wild and unruly, a debatable land of frontier brigands, scarcely governable, controlled only in part by the heads of the great families established there – the Douglases, Maxwells, Johnstones, Scotts – whose loyalty to the Crown was provisional, their obedience ever uncertain. Every Stewart king, until the Union of the Crowns of 1603, had to scheme and struggle to establish his authority. Success in that struggle was never more than temporary.

The unity of the state was merely political, neither cultural nor linguistic. Suspicion, fear and resentment divided Highland and Lowland Scotland. The fourteenth-century chronicler, John of Fordoun,
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writing in Aberdeen, had declared that:

The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken among them, the Scottish and the Teutonic,
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the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and the plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilized habits, trusty, patient and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in divine worship, yet always ready to resist a wrong at the hands of their enemies. The Highlanders and peoples of the islands on the other hand are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, easy-living, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress. Hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to the diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that John of Fordoun was himself a Lowlander, one moreover who, living close to the Highland line, was even more suspicious of the mountaineers and hostile to them than those dwelling further south might be. But every medieval writer makes the same sort of distinction, John Mair
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in the early sixteenth century writing of the ‘wild Scots’ and the ‘house-holding Scots’. For others the Highlanders were ‘the Irish’ (their language generally being called ‘Erse’) and the Lowlanders the true ‘Scots’.

The Scotland of the early Stewarts, scarcely recovered from the destructive Wars of Independence, when the richest part of the country had been ravaged time and again by English armies, with crops ruined and towns burned, was poor and in many respects backward. Though burghs had been growing in number and, intermittently, in prosperity since the eleventh century, they mostly remained very small. There was no capital city, no Scottish equivalent of London or Paris. Edinburgh did not receive a royal charter till Robert the Bruce gave it one in 1329; there are many more ancient burghs in Scotland. It was only in the time of the later Stewarts that it became a favoured royal residence. The court itself was peripatetic; therefore the administration too, for what we should call the civil service still operated out of the king’s household. There was as yet no Scottish equivalent of the English exchequer working from a fixed base. In any case, all medieval monarchs were almost constantly on the move, because this was the only way in which they could exercise justice, and because it was easier to bring the court to food stores than to carry the food stores, in a land with few serviceable roads or navigable inland waterways, to the court. Finally, the royal revenues, drawn from the king’s own estates and from the customs duties, were always inadequate, quite insufficient to allow for the creation of a strong state – another reason why the co-operation of the nobility and the consent of the community of the realm, expressed in parliaments, were essential if government was to function at all. Parliament, known usually as ‘the Estates’, met infrequently, and its members – barons, knights, bishop, abbots and burgesses – were summoned or invited by the king rather than elected.

This parliament, which had a judicial as well as a legislative function, was in a sense an extension of the General Council, which was composed of members of the royal family, leading ecclesiastics, earls and chief barons of the realm, and, significantly, officers of the royal household. The Council advised the king and authenticated the charters he granted. Over the years the influence of the officers of the royal household increased. They had the advantage of being always to hand, unlike the magnates, whose attendance at court might be infrequent, since they were occupied in the management of their own estates and the administration of justice in their baronial courts. The principal officers were: the constable, or chief military officer; the chamberlain, who looked after the king’s revenues until this task was taken over in James I’s reign by the treasurer; the chancellor, who kept the records and the Great Seal of the Kingdom, required to authenticate royal ordinances, and who was a sort of secretary of state; and the justiciar, or chief law officer. Except for the constable, they were usually, but not invariably, churchmen. Their presence at the heart of government explains why, in several of the minorities of the fifteenth century, men of comparatively undistinguished birth were able to secure possession of the king’s person and take control of the government.

It was not only the power of the Crown that was limited. The business of government itself was limited too. Kings were concerned with foreign policy, with administering justice, with maintaining law and order as far as this was possible, with promoting trade by granting charters to burghs (something barons also did on their own estates), with raising revenue and supporting the Church as part of the established order. Laws were indeed passed to encourage some activities and discourage others – as when, for example, James I legislated in 1428 in an attempt to stop people from playing football because it distracted them from archery practice – but there was little that we might recognise as a programme of government in the modern sense. Nor did the common people play any part in politics – less indeed in Scotland than in either England or France, for, partly because of the more limited, and therefore less oppressive, government of the Scottish kingdom, there was no equivalent there of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, or the ‘Jacqueries’, riotous expressions of popular discontent, which disturbed France in 1360 and often subsequently.

Robert II’s position was difficult. He lacked prestige and had no military reputation. He had been one of the commanders at Neville’s Cross, a quarter of a century back, and was thought to have ordered a retreat with unseemly haste as soon as King David had been taken prisoner. Though seemingly loyal during the eleven years of the King’s captivity, he had subsequently engaged in a feeble sort of rebellion with the earls of Douglas and March. No warrior in his prime, he commanded little respect as he approached old age. Other members of the nobility had been accustomed to regard him as an equal, and were not disposed to treat him with greater deference merely because he had now inherited the Crown thanks to his father’s fortunate marriage. Nevertheless, whatever his personal failings, he was king and the Crown itself had prestige. Robert indeed was the ninety-ninth King of Scots in descent, according to one version of the manufactured but widely accepted table of genealogy, from the mythical Fergus. Far from being lost in the mists of antiquity, the origins of the Scottish monarchy as recounted in the Declaration of Arbroath were a matter of common knowledge, repeated by bards and heralds on great occasions of state. This ensured that the Crown itself was revered, no matter the failings of the man who currently wore it.

Robert had himself been married twice, and this was to be a cause of confusion, dispute and some danger to the state. His first wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Mure of Rowallan, his second Euphemia, daughter of the Earl of Ross. These were baronial alliances, not royal ones, entangling the new king in a web of cousinship. The Bruces had been short of heirs; the early Stewarts had too many. There was a further complication. By his first wife he had four sons and six daughters, several of whom were born out of wedlock, and were therefore, properly speaking, bastards. They had subsequently been legitimised after their parents’ marriage, but the legality of this was open to question, at least in the eyes of the children of the King’s second marriage. This had produced two sons and several daughters. The exact number is unrecorded, as is that of other illegitimate children whom Robert fathered, but these seem to have included eight boys. Whatever his deficiencies in battle and his feebleness in the council chamber, Robert was active enough in bed.

Though in fact the succession was secured to the descendants of Elizabeth Mure, the doubt as to the validity of their legitimisation meant that for several decades the descendants of Euphemia Ross could believe that they had a superior claim to the throne. Their resentment would come to a head in the reign of Robert’s grandson, James I.

The early Stewarts practised what modern historians have called ‘laissez-faire kingship’
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, leaving for the most part strong local lords to their own devices so long as they did not set themselves up openly against the Crown. Whether this was policy or necessity is irrelevant, but it is evidence of the weakness of the Crown and the incapacity of Robert II and his eldest son, Robert III. Both were elderly when they became king. It is not surprising that they lacked vigour. In any case an energetic king, seeking to impose himself on his barons, was always likely to run into trouble, as their contemporary Richard II of England discovered when he provoked the baronial revolt that resulted in his deposition and murder. The two Roberts might have been timid or lazy, or merely incompetent, but they survived for a total of thirty-five years without facing any serious threat to their position. This was an achievement of a sort.

We have no portrait of either king. Robert II is said to have been tall and handsome as a young man. The French chronicler Froissart,
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visiting Scotland, found him unprepossessing in his old age. He had ‘red bleared eyes, the colour of sandalwood, which clearly showed he was no valiant man, but one who would rather remain at home than march to the field’. This was a harsh judgement on a man of seventy. By that time indeed his oldest son, John, Earl of Carrick (the old Bruce lordship), had been associated with him in government on the grounds that ‘our lord the King, for certain causes, is not able to attend regularly and thoroughly in all things to the execution of the government and the law of the kingdom’. These causes are not specified, but evidently Robert was no longer thought competent to conduct the business of government. He was over seventy, a very old man by medieval standards, and it is possible that he may have suffered the loss of faculties characteristic of senile decay. Certainly, well before his death in 1390, he was king in name only.