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His relatives did not fare as well. James took revenge on those Douglases still in Scotland. Not only were their lands confiscated by the crown in July 1537, but Douglas’s third youngest sister, Lady Glamis, was found guilty of conspiring against the king’s life and was burnt at the stake on Castle Hill, Edinburgh.
The Renaissance prince
Like his father, James V thought of himself as a Renaissance prince. His spending on the royal palaces exceeded £50,000 – more than the total sum spent by the previous four Stewart kings combined. This was possible because he was able to generate greater income than the others. He had the Scottish Parliament pass a law allowing him to
feu
(rent) out crown lands; he made sure his taxes were collected and paid; he even had a flock of 10,000 sheep grazing on the royal estate at Ettrick, near Selkirk. Through these and other schemes, James was able to increase royal household income by around 40 per cent, or from just over £9,000 per year in 1509 to £15,000 per year by the time of his death in 1542.
However, the best way he had of raising royal income was through marriage because it brought with it a dowry. In Europe, James was considered a highly eligible marriage prospect, with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France interested in finding him a suitable bride. But by invoking the Treaty of Rouen, which provided for the Scottish king a daughter of France, James was able to secure the hand of Francis’s 16-year-old daughter, Madeleine, in marriage on 1 January 1537 in Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral.
James returned to Scotland with his bride in May 1537, but Madeleine died two months later of consumption. Another bride was provided by the French king – the daughter of the duke of Guise, Mary. She was a widow of 22, already with two sons, but she came with a dowry of 150,000 French livres, which allowed James and his new wife a lavish lifestyle. They married on 12 June 1538, and Mary bore him two sons. Both sons died in infancy, but a daughter born in 1542 at Linlithgow Palace survived; she later became Mary, Queen of Scots.
James’s early experiences of noble duplicity and treachery created an enmity within him against the elite in Scottish life. He tried to co
Gudeman
means ‘landlord’ or ‘farmer’, and Ballengeich was a road next to Stirling Castle.
This distrust was also evident in the way James promoted lesser men above the more traditional ruling elites. In the Scottish Borders, he bestowed on them the warden of the marches; in the Highlands, he refused to grant the 4th earl of Argyll lord lieutenancy of the Isles and gave it instead to his sworn enemy MacDonald of Islay. The lords of the north and west of Scotland were also warned regarding their pocketing of the king’s tax revenues. By these means, James was able to create a group of nobles who owed their elevation to him and, hence, their loyalty.
James V and the Reformation
After Martin Luther, a German priest, nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses
to the door of his local church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, complaining about corruption within the Catholic Church, particularly the selling of indulgences, the papacy was faced with a doctrinal revolt.
In Scotland, the late medieval Catholic Church was in a state of disarray even before the attacks of Protestant critics like Luther. The problem was that the Church at a local level was ceasing to exist as churches fell into disrepair through neglect and war. The priesthood had similarly declined and was generally made up of illiterate and debauched men. In contrast, the closed abbeys and monasteries enriched themselves at the expense of the wider interests of the Church. Only 23 monks lived in the vast Melrose Abbey; the monks at Incholm kept women in their monastery; and the Church hierarchy ignored the laws of celibacy, with Cardinal Beaton of St Andrews fathering eight illegitimate children. By the 16th century, it was estimated that 40 per cent of all legitimations of bastards were for the offspring of the clergy.
James V also appointed many of his own illegitimate children to lucrative ecclesiastical positions, such as Robert Stewart, 1st Earl of Orkney, son of Euphame Elphinstone, who became commendator of Holyrood Abbey. So, many of the monasteries were run by men with little interest or training in religious affairs. You can see that the critics had a point.
Critical Protestant literature was being smuggled in from England and the Low Countries. Such was the extent of the smuggling of ba
James was a staunch Catholic and opposed the spread of heretical ideas in Scotland. He actively pursued Protestant reformers, the most famous of whom was Patrick Hamilton, a great-grandson of James II. Hamilton had studied under Luther in Wittenberg and Erasmus at Louvain. When he returned to Scotland in 1527, he set about preaching the reformed religion. He concentrated less on the abuses of the Catholic Church, and instead emphasised a doctrine that was much more dangerous: ‘Faith unites Man to God.’ In this faith, every man was his own priest, so there was no need for bishops or cardinals or the entire hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Archbishop Beaton of St Andrews had Hamilton arrested. In 1528, when Hamilton refused to recant, he was burned at the stake for heresy, becoming Scotland’s first Protestant martyr.
The execution itself was horrific. It was a damp, wet February day in St Andrews and the fire was difficult to stoke. Hamilton endured six hours of torture. But his death was a propaganda coup for the reformers, as an adviser to Beaton pointed out:
My lord if ye burn any more … ye will utterly destroy yourselves. If ye burn them, let them be burned in deep cellars, for the reek of Master Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon.
Hamilton was the first of 21 martyrs executed between 1528 and 1558. James himself oversaw the burning of two heretics outside the walls of Edinburgh Castle in 1534. But with each execution, the dissent in the country grew, reaching epic proportions in the late 1550s (see Chapter 10).
James’s defence of traditional religious beliefs also brought him into conflict with England. Henry VIII’s desire to marry A
To reconcile the Scottish king to his religious policy, Henry arranged to meet him at York in 1536, but James refused the invitation. For his defence of the established Church against the heresies coming from south of the border, a grateful Pope Paul III sent James a blessing symbolised in the gift of a cap and a sword. But to the English, it was a clear sign that James had thrown in his lot with the Catholic Church and France. There was a telltale clue: he had married two French women, one the king of France’s daughter!
Two English plots to murder the king were discovered, and James also foiled an attempt by Henry to have him kidnapped. Although in 1540 the English king made another attempt to win the support – or at least the neutrality – of James for his religious policy, the relations between the two countries had become very hostile. Another meeting was arranged in 1541 at York, but the Scottish nobility refused to let their king leave the country in case he might be held prisoner by the English. There was, after all, some precedent for this!
The breakdown in communications led to a number of border clashes. In August 1542, the Scots, led by the earl of Huntly, inflicted a heavy defeat on the English army at Haddon Rig. In October of that year, furious, Henry sent north an English force of 20,000 men, under the duke of Norfolk; it burnt Kelso and Roxburgh as it progressed.
James ordered his nobles to meet him at Fala Muir, just outside Edinburgh, but the response was lukewarm to say the least. The memory of Flodden, and the fact that the Scots saw themselves as pawns in the larger power struggles between France and England, influenced the decision not to answer the call, or the refusal to march on the English border. At the town of Lauder, the Scottish army disbanded. It didn’t matter. The English army had decided to leave Scotland – they had run out of beer!
The Battle of Solway Moss
Ever the optimist, James issued another call to arms and, with around 15,000 men under the command of Sir Oliver Sinclair, marched into England. There, they were confronted by an English army only 3,000 strong at Solway Moss on 24 November 1542. The battle can scarcely be called a battle – it was more like a farce that ended in humiliation for the Scots.
For a start, the morale of the Scottish army was low and there was no recognised command structure. Although Sinclair, James’s favourite among the Scottish nobility, was the appointed commander, most of the generals refused to accept this. So, disunity among the leaders precipitated the break-up of the army almost as soon as the battle began. Outflanked and outmanoeuvred, the Scots surrendered. As it turned out, only 7 English soldiers and 20 Scots were killed in combat, but many more drowned in the River Esk, and 1,200 Scottish prisoners were taken. They included Sinclair and the other main commanders, the earls of Cassillis, Glencairn and Maxwell.
The shameful nature of the defeat saw the death, less than a month later, of James V, who was only 30 years old. Some say he died of a broken heart; others claim he died of a fever. We’ll never know. He was buried at Holyrood Abbey along with his first wife and his two infant sons. The tomb was destroyed during the English occupation of Edinburgh in 1544.
With the defeat, the international status of Scotland changed from player to pawn. Prior to the disasters of Flodden and Solway Moss, Scotland appeared a valuable ally to those powers, especially France, engaged in fighting European wars. But everything rested on the military threat posed by the Scots, and after 1542, the potency of that threat was considerably diminished.
Everyday Life in Renaissance Scotland
How did all this affect ordinary Scots as they went about their daily lives? How did people survive in an age of private wars, foreign invasion and political uncertainty; of economic hardship and insecurity; of dislocation in religious and cultural life? How did they cope from day to day – lairds and tenants, merchants and craftsmen, rural labourers, urban dwellers in service jobs, wives, widows and unmarried women? In this section, I shed some light.
The economy