The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (9 page)

Though this was all done through the Estates, it is clear that these acts reflected the will of the King and his determination to consolidate by law what he had gained by war. He was aiming to strengthen central government at the expense of the localities, and to move away from the ‘laissez-faire Stewart monarchy’ towards the ideal of the Renaissance prince, no longer first among equals, but set above his nobility. There should be no surprise if this was so. It was the fashion of the age. His sometime brother-in-law, Louis XI, was pursuing the same policy in France; the Yorkist and Tudor kings would do likewise in England. But James had the good sense to see that he could best achieve his aim by associating the Estates, which represented the solid interest of the Church, the lesser barons and burgesses, with him. Peace, order, the rule of law, and prosperity, all of which had been threatened or disturbed by the ambitions of the Douglases and other unruly lords, were in the general interest – as the pronouncements of his parliament made evident.

All rebels and disturbers of the peace had been removed, ‘no masterful party remaining’, and the King was requested to execute the laws passed by the parliament – unnecessarily, one may think, since he had in all probability inspired them – so ‘that God may be empleased of him, and all his lieges may pray for him to God and give thanks to Him that sends them such a prince to be their governor and defender’.
¹³
The flattery may well have been sincere. No King of Scots had stood so high in the esteem of his subjects; none had enjoyed such mastery of the kingdom. The way towards an increasingly autocratic monarchy, on the French or English model, was open.

James was not to live long to enjoy his triumph and establish such a style of kingship. In the late summer of 1460, taking advantage of the unsettled state of England, where the Lancastrian king had been taken prisoner by his Yorkist rivals, he took the opportunity to try to recapture Roxburgh Castle, which had been in the hands of the English for generations. On 3 August, as he stood admiring the firing of one of his great guns, of the type known as bombards, one of the wedges used to tighten the iron bands round the barrel broke loose, flew through the air and, striking the King in the face, killed him. He was not yet thirty, and Scotland was faced with another minority.

Chapter 6

James III (1460–88): A Study in Failure

‘“My God, sire!” exclaimed Sir Richard, clasping his hands together in impatience; “of what great and inexpiable crime can your Majesty’s ancestors have been guilty, that they have been punished by the infliction of judicial blindness on their whole generation.”’

This outburst by a loyal Jacobite is directed at the Prince, Charles Edward, in Scott’s novel
Redgauntlet
,
¹
which features a last – in this case purely fictional – attempt to restore the exiled Stuarts almost twenty years after the cause went down in April 1746 on Culloden Moor, the last pitched battle fought on British soil. It expresses the view, commonly held, romantically inspired, of the Stuarts as doomed to failure and defeat on account of their own obstinacy, ‘punished by the infliction of judicial blindness’ – that is, by an inability to see the true nature of a case. To many, James III is the first of the line who seems to fit that pattern.

James has been called ‘the most enigmatic of the Stewart kings’,
²
and the judgement is a fair one, even if a fuller knowledge of his predecessors might reveal them as equally puzzling. We know rather more about James’s character, and we have an authentic portrait of him, painted by a Dutchman, Hugo van der Goes, for the Church of the Holy Trinity in Edinburgh, founded in 1462 by the young King’s mother, Mary of Gueldres. There is always a temptation to read more into a portrait than is reasonable, but this image suggests a serious and sensitive, possibly troubled, young man. He was perhaps eighteen when it was painted.

Only nine when his father died, the boy king was first entrusted, as was proper, to his mother, who acted as regent in association with Bishop Kennedy. But Mary died in 1363 and Kennedy two years later. Power was then seized by the governor of Edinburgh Castle, Sir Alexander Boyd, a member of an Ayrshire family of no great previous distinction. Boyd and his allies, who included one Hepburn of Hailes, an ancestor of Mary, Queen of Scots’ third husband, Bothwell, swooped on the young King at Linlithgow, forced him to mount a horse, and carried him off to Edinburgh, as their prisoner in all but name. Soon afterwards Boyd persuaded or compelled James to issue him with a pardon for what might have been construed as an act of treason. James would not be the last of his family to be rendered suspicious of his nobility by the rough treatment and lack of respect he received at their hands when still a boy.

In 1469, at the age of eighteen, he was married. His bride was Margaret of Denmark, and this marriage completed the kingdom of Scotland, for the islands of Orkney and Shetland were pledged in lieu of a promised dowry and, the dowry never being paid, passed to the Scottish Crown. Margaret was reputed devout, so much so that after her death there was a move to have her canonised, but we know nothing of her relations with James, beyond the fact that they had three children and that he is not recorded as having any illegitimate ones. So the marriage may have been happy. A few of the Stewarts were faithful husbands, even uxorious, though most of them were not.

James was capable of decisive action. Soon after his marriage he disposed of the Boyds. Sir Alexander, despite the pardon he had extracted in 1465, was accused of treason and beheaded, while his brother and nephew found their estates forfeited to the Crown. Sir Alexander’s son, Thomas, who had been created Earl of Arran and married to the King’s eldest sister, Margaret, escaped to the Continent, where he entered the service of the Duke of Burgundy, who later sent him to England as his ambassador. But if on occasion decisive, James was scarcely persistent, and his attention to the business of government was at best intermittent.

Unlike his vigorous father, he had little enthusiasm for war or for an energetic foreign policy. He was eager to be at peace with England, and was soon criticised for ‘the inbringing of Englishmen and to the perpetual subjection of this realm’. This was an easy charge to bring, and a hypocritical one, for his critics did not scruple to seek aid from England themselves when it suited them.

James was easily diverted from the business of government. His interests were primarily artistic and intellectual. His tutor – later secretary – Archibald Whitelaw, who had taught at the University of Cologne, was a scholar and collector of manuscripts and an enthusiast for Roman antiquities, and it is reasonable to suppose that he helped form James’s taste. In 1467 James himself commissioned the production of a copy of Mandeville’s
Travels
, and possibly also a copy of
The Aeneid
now in Edinburgh University Library.

Two other associates were William Scheves and John Ireland, notable scholars, who greatly disliked each other. Scheves, a graduate of St Andrews, entered the royal household as the King’s physician, and within a few years was made Archbishop of St Andrews. He too was a bibliophile, collecting medical books and Scottish chronicles. His learning and interest in science aroused suspicion; sixteenth-century chroniclers would accuse him of gaining influence over the King by his mastery of the occult, a suspicion probably baseless but generated by James’s keen interest in astrology. Ireland, educated at the Sorbonne and later a teacher at the College of Navarre, had served Louis XI of France before returning to Scotland, where he became the King’s confessor and a member of his council. The presence at court of men like Whitelaw, Scheves and Ireland demonstrates a stirring of intellectual activity, encouraged by the King and reflecting his temperament and tastes.

Despite later criticism, association with such men did no harm to the King’s reputation among contemporaries. They were churchmen and scholars, regarded as suitable royal advisers. If the nobility weren’t all illiterate, few among them were competent to draw up bills to be presented to Parliament or to engage in diplomatic correspondence with foreign states. The King needed clerks, and only the Church could supply them. He needed advisers as comfortable with the written as the spoken word, and again these were to be found only among ecclesiastics.

It was, however, a different matter when the King chose to consort with social inferiors rather than members of the nobility; still worse if he was believed to be guided by their advice. And this was the case with James III. Most kings have had favourites, those with whom they feel at ease and pass their hours of leisure, but to nobles quick to take offence it seemed scandalous that the King should prefer the company of ‘masons and fiddlers’.

The mason in this instance was one Robert Cochrane, certainly close to the King, but probably an architect rather than the mere stonemason as which he was disparaged. James was the first of the Stewart kings to evince an interest in building, which accounts for his patronage of Cochrane, even if the claim that he was responsible for the Great Hall of Stirling Castle is not supported by evidence. But James did commission work at the castle and also at Linlithgow, and promoted the building of collegiate churches, and it is reasonable to suppose that Cochrane had a hand in this. The ‘fiddler’ was William Rogers – not only a social inferior, but an Englishman. Rogers was in all probability an accomplished musician, and James had sufficient interest in music to have sent a favoured lute-player overseas to further his musical education, and to have presented an organ to the collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, his mother’s foundation in Edinburgh. (These collegiate churches, a recent development, specialised in enriching divine service with choral and instrumental musical accompaniments.) A later, more civil, age would have found nothing reprehensible in such royal patronage of a distinguished musician.

Among the other favourites were Torphichen, a fencing master, Hommyl, described as a tailor, and Leonard, said to be a shoemaker. Again it is likely that the descriptions handed down to us were wilfully derogatory. James was also a patron of poets, among them Robert Henryson from Dunfermline, one of the most accomplished and sophisticated of the so-called ‘Scottish Chaucerians’. The names of other poets, whose work has not survived but who were subsequently listed by William Dunbar in his poem ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’, appear in the treasurer’s accounts as recipients of royal pensions. All this suggests that James III’s interests were wider than those of most of the nobility, and that the King was something of an aesthete and intellectual, one, moreover, if the association with William Scheves is anything to go by, who dabbled in science. This may render him interesting and even admirable. It didn’t in the circumstances of his age equip him to be a successful monarch.

He was unfortunate in another respect; he had brothers of mature years: Alexander, Duke of Albany, and John, Earl of Mar. Albany at least was ambitious, and, as time would show, unscrupulous. Of Mar’s character nothing is known, but he does seem to have enjoyed some popularity, which suggests that he may have had an ease of manner and a degree of charm. Both excelled in the manly exercises of hunting, hawking and competing in tournaments, for which the King had little taste, and both were jealous of James’s ‘favourites’, especially if they believed that he preferred their company and advice; likewise the favourites had little love for the royal brothers.

Albany held the office of Warden of the Eastern March and was also governor of Berwick. In this capacity he fell out with some of the Border lords, the Homes and the Hepburns, who were quick to accuse him of treasonable correspondence with England. According to one tale, they persuaded Cochrane to use his influence with the King to destroy Albany. Cochrane, the story goes, then produced an astrologer who declared that a lion would be devoured by its own whelps, the meaning of which was that the King would be killed by members of his own family. The story, it must be said, has every indication of being a later invention.
³

The King was persuaded. Albany and Mar were arrested, the former charged with treasonable communication with England, the latter with having employed witchcraft against the King. Albany may well have been guilty; certainly his subsequent conduct makes the accusation credible. As for Mar, there is no evidence one way or the other.

Mar died in prison, and there were some ready to hold that he had been murdered by order of the King. There are different versions of the supposed murder. According to one account, the Earl was smothered in his bath; according to another, he slowly bled to death. Equally he may have died of natural causes, and James may have been innocent of any crime. Foolishly, however, he gave some credibility to the rumour by granting Cochrane the revenues from the dead man’s earldom and perhaps – accounts vary – the title of Earl of Mar also.

Albany was held in Edinburgh Castle and contrived a dramatic escape. Friends sent him two casks of wine and, concealed in them, a coil of rope, and a letter warning him to act quickly, for the date of his execution had been set. The Duke, who shared lodgings with one of his retainers, invited the governor to dine with him. The governor accepted the invitation and brought a couple of his officers with him. They were settled by the fire and the wine flowed freely, until at last governor and officers were either incapably drunk or asleep. Whereupon Albany and his colleague seized their daggers, murdered them and threw their bodies on the fire. They then unwound the rope to make their escape. The retainer went first, found the rope too short, fell and broke his leg. Albany lengthened the rope with the sheets from his bed, made his descent, and, carrying his comrade on his shoulders, headed for Leith and a waiting ship, which carried him to France.