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Even so, the conspirators failed to achieve their ends. A wounded Queen Joan was able to send a message to Edinburgh to shield the young Prince James from any attempts to embroil him in the conspiracy. A period of civil war ensued, but a coalition fighting in the name of the queen and her young son defeated Atholl and his co-conspirators.
Atholl, Sir Robert Stewart and Sir Robert Graham were tortured for three days before being executed. Graham felt justified and said:
Yet I do not doubt but that you shall see the day and time that you shall pray for my soul, for the great good that I have done to you, and to all in this realm of Scotland, that I have thus slain and delivered you of so cruel a tyrant.
History has delivered a different verdict than Graham’s. Today James I is seen as a moderniser, a king who tried to raise the stature of the monarchy against the powerful members of the Scottish nobility. The attempt cost him his life, but his policy of reducing the power of the great magnates was to be continued by his son, James II.
The Reign of James II
On 25 March 1437, James II, nicknamed ‘Fiery Face’ because of a red birthmark on his face, was 6 years old when he was crowned king at Holyrood Abbey (rather than the traditional site of coronation, Scone). Another break from tradition was anointment by the bishop of Dunblane rather than St Andrews.
James II’s minority brought the usual contest for power waged by the major players among the Scottish nobility. However, there was a twist: due to a combination of war, forfeiture and youth, only two adult earls were left in Scotland at the end of 1437. The main power brokers were Joan, Queen Dowager, and Archibald, 5th Earl of Douglas. The latter headed up the government as lieutenant general, but his death in 1439 saw power divided between William Crichton, 1st Lord Crichton, Lord Chancellor of Scotland (sometimes in co-operation with the earl of Avondale), and Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, who had possession of the young king as the warden of Stirling Castle. A struggle ensued between the major players – one that would end in the defeat and exile of the powerful Black Douglas earls and a further enlargement of royal resources and prestige.
The minority of James II
With the powerful Douglas family temporarily weakened by Archibald’s death, Livingston took the lead by placing Queen Joan and her new husband, Sir John Stewart, under ‘house arrest’ at Stirling Castle on 3 August 1439. They were released a month later, but only after
Agreeing to put James in the custody of the Livingston family
Giving up Joan’s dowry for the young king’s maintenance
Confessing that Livingston had acted only with thought for the king’s safety
Crichton was jealous of the house of Douglas. He organised a di
The Black Douglases
On 3 July 1449, James II, having reached adulthood, married 15-year-old Mary of Guelders, great-niece of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, at Holyrood. This marriage removed James II from the clutches of the Livingston family, whom he had not forgiven for the brief arrest of his mother and her husband.
By the autumn of 1449, Sir Alexander and two of his family had been arrested. By mid-January of 1450, the Scottish Parliament had found them guilty of treason and they were executed on Edinburgh’s Castle Hill. The only powerful family left in Scotland was the Black Douglases, who at the time controlled three earldoms and was claiming a fourth. Their rule stretched over Galloway, Douglasdale, A
The king became obsessed with curbing the power of the Black Douglases. Because of this, relations between James and William, 8th Earl of Douglas, deteriorated to a fatal degree. Things came to a climax over the case of Patrick Maclellan of Bombie, Sheriff of Galloway, a staunch royalist, who had refused an invitation to join Douglas and the earls of Ross, Crawford and Ormond in an alliance against James.
Against the express orders of the monarch, Maclellan was imprisoned and executed by the 8th Earl of Douglas. Maclellan’s execution led to the fatal confrontation between James and Douglas in Stirling Castle on 22 February 1452. James, 23 years old at the time, personally led a murderous and vicious attack on Douglas by stabbing him in the neck. Douglas’s body was further mutilated by the king’s men and thrown from a window into the garden below. Douglas had no fewer than 26 stab wounds.
Horrific as it was, the 8th earl’s murder did not mark the end of the Douglas family. Instead, it caused a civil war of sorts between the Douglas family and the crownfrom1452 to 1455.
James’s military campaigns against his Douglas rivals during this period tended to end indecisively, and he faced the possibility at times of being overthrown and forced to flee Scotland. But while James was in England, he was introduced to the black arts of kingship – in particular, the use of bribery and corruption. Thanks to his predecessors and his own systematic a
Three years later, James struck a decisive blow against the Douglases at the Battle of Arkinholm, near Langholm, Dumfries-shire. The head of the family, James Douglas, 9th Earl of Douglas, had gone to England to rally support, but his three younger brothers were present at the battle. Of the brothers, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Moray, was killed and his head presented to the king; Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormond, was captured and executed shortly afterward; and John Douglas, Lord of Balvenie, escaped to England. With the fall of the last Douglases’ stronghold, Threave Castle, Kirkcudrightshire, after a two-month siege, the main rivals to the king had all been eliminated.
In the months that followed, the Scottish Parliament declared the Douglas lands and possessions forfeit and permanently a
With the head of the Douglas family in permanent exile in England, James finally had the freedom to govern as he wished – a freedom he bequeathed to his successors. The destruction of the Black Douglases, along with the forfeiture of the Albany Stewarts in the reign of his father, cemented the consolidation of royal power in Scotland. Future Stewart kings of Scotland never had to face such a powerful challenge from a rival family to their authority again.
Accidents will happen
James’s style of centralised government was more like the English and French styles than the governments of his ancestors, which had relied on alliances with powerful noble families to keep the peace. He surrounded himself with bureaucrats and clerics rather than nobles. He carried on as his father had done to place Scotland and its monarchy in a European context. Isabella, his second sister, was married off to the duke of Brittany in 1442, and two other sisters had foreign matches made for them in 1444. He also tried to increase the standing of Scotland in Europe through military expeditions against the English, which proved lethal.
Ending the English occupation of Roxburgh Castle had become a bit of a
cause célèbre
for James and the Scottish nobility. In 1460, James laid siege to the castle, taking with him a large number of a new type of ca
On 3 August, James was attempting to fire one of them, known as ‘The Lion’, when it accidentally exploded, killing him outright. A contemporary described his death:
as the King stood near a piece of artillery, his thigh bone was dug in two with a piece of misframed gun that brake [broke] in shooting, by which he was stricken to the ground and died hastily.
Led by George (the Red) Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, the Scots carried on with the siege, and Roxburgh Castle fell a few days later. But for James, it was a little late. At the age of 29, he was laid to rest at Holyrood, and his widow became regent of Scotland (see Chapter 9).
Economic and Social Life in Medieval Scotland
Medieval Scotland was a hierarchical society. Most people lived on the land, rather than in towns, and they owed allegiance to their social superiors in some form or other.
Hierarchy signified massive inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power. At the very top of the pile was a tiny group made up of the monarch and the greater nobility; at the bottom were the peasants and other labourers. The earl of Mar, for example, between the years1412 and 1422, received £4,238 from the crown in the form of pensions and a
But because the nobility included lesser nobles and
lairds
(small landowners), it was far from being a uniform category. The same applies to the peasantry.
The unwashed
Peasants made up about 98 per cent of Scottish society in the Middle Ages. They were generally looked down upon by those above them. Abbot Walter Bower, in his noted chronicle of the period, the
Scotichronicon,
compared them to dogs. But the term
peasantry
was a catch-all for a really diverse group of people.
During the first half of the 13th century, there were free and unfree peasants. The
unfree,
or serfs, were tied to the landlord and forced to perform labour services; like slaves, they could be bought and sold. But this form of exploitation was dying out toward the end of the 13th century. Landlords wanted rents not services, although peasants were still forced to grind their corn in the masters’ mills and, of course, were subject to the masters’ justice.
Above the unfree were the
husbandmen
– the wealthiest peasants who hired labour from among the landless. But even their livelihood was precarious because all tenants and sub-tenants were on short leases that could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.
Strangely enough, in spite of the massive inequalities in landed society, the Scottish peasants never revolted as they did in England in 1381. A number of reasons have been put forward to explain the relative calm in Scotland:
Wars increased the sense of national identity, and that blunted social antagonisms. We were all in it together!
Landowners were more sensitive to their tenants’ problems.
Scotland was more of a kin-based society, where members of the kindred look after each other.