James I

Michael Brown

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781898410409
• eBook ISBN: 9781788853644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Conditioned by a childhood surrounded by the rivalries of the Stewart family, and by eighteen years of enforced exile in England, James I was to prove a king very different from his elderly and conservative forerunners. This major study draws on a wide range of sources, assessing James I's impact on his kingdom. Michael Brown examines James's creation of a new, prestigious monarchy based on a series of bloody victories over his rivals and symbolised by lavish spending at court. He concludes that, despite the apparent power and glamour, James I's 'golden age' had shallow roots; after a life of drastically swinging fortunes, James I was to meet his end in a violent coup, a victim of his own methods. But whether as lawgiver, tyrant or martyr, James I has cast a long shadow over the history of Scotland.

1

Fortune’s Wheel

PRINCE AND STEWARD

In his autobiographical poem The Kingis Quair, James I of Scotland pictured himself at the mercy of Fortune and ‘hir tolter quhele’, which raised men from the depths to the heights of power and could equally cast them down again.¹ For the first thirty years of his life James was very much a victim of circumstance. From his birth until he began to rule Scotland in person, he experienced drastic changes of fortune and was a pawn in both the complex manoeuvrings of his family in Scotland and the diplomacy of western Europe. For although he became the nominal King of Scots in 1406 at the age of twelve, James spent the first eighteen years of his reign as a prisoner of the English, an uncrowned king in frustrating exile. Despite this lack of personal power, it was in these three decades that the character and aims of James’s own rule were established and the king himself was subject to the influences which forged his personal tastes and ambitions.

James Stewart was the third son and the sixth or seventh child of Robert III and his queen, Annabella Drummond. He was born at Dunfermline in 1394, probably in late July, as his mother wrote to Richard II of England on 1 August complaining of ‘malade denfant’ following the birth of a son ‘a non Jamez’.² The choice of the name James, which was to have such long-lasting consequences for the dynasty, was unusual, though it had been held previously in the Stewart family. Whether it was as a family name or in connection with St James’s day (25 July), it is clear that unlike his elder brothers, David and Robert, the new prince was given a name without royal precedent in Scotland.

However, as striking as the choice of his name was the timing of James’s birth. James was born much later after three of his sisters, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth, who were all married before or shortly after James’s birth. He was also sixteen years younger than his eldest brother, David, while Robert, the second son, was probably approaching adulthood in 1394 as well.³ In addition, James was born to parents who had been married for twenty-seven years before his birth. His father was in his late fifties and his mother was at least forty in 1394.⁴

Although the age of James’s parents and the gap between the ages of the first group of children and the new prince is not unique, it may suggest special circumstances. If James’s brother Robert, who is last recorded in February 1393, died before July 1394 it would have left the royal house with only a single male heir in David, Earl of Carrick.⁵ In contrast the family of Robert, Earl of Fife, the next younger brother of the king and next in line to the throne, was well provided with heirs. By 1394 Fife not only had four adult sons but his heir, Murdac, had married in 1392 and by the time of James’s birth Murdac’s elder two sons, Robert and Walter, had been born.⁶ Thus, James’s birth may have been part of a deliberate attempt to strengthen the dynastic position of Robert III in relation to his brother.

The desire of Robert III to make his own branch of the Stewart family more secure against the interference of the Earl of Fife would fit in with the rivalry between the two men. This rivalry was the political legacy of their father, Robert II, the first Stewart king. His long and uncertain career led him to concentrate power in the hands of his immediate family. By the latter part of Robert’s reign his five sons held eight out of the fifteen Scottish earldoms among them.⁷ Although this accumulation of power within the Stewart family ensured that Robert II’s descendants would occupy the throne, the creation of a family firm dominating the nobility posed a serious problem for the exercise of royal authority by the senior Stewart line.

Of the younger sons of Robert II, three were to establish dynasties which dominated much of Scotland for the next half-century: Alexander, Earl of Buchan, the so-called ‘Wolf of Badenoch’, Walter, Earl of Atholl, the ‘old serpent’ of Scottish politics and, most importantly, Robert, Earl of Fife and Duke of Albany, the uncrowned ruler of Scotland for thirty years.⁸ All three lived to be over sixty and in their long careers amassed power and influence in various parts of Scotland. They and their families formed a group of royal magnates too close to the crown in terms of blood and resources to allow the early Stewart kings to rule with ease.

Robert III was the victim of this situation. He began his reign in 1390, already in political eclipse. Two years earlier he had been declared unfit to rule after a period as guardian for his father and this stigma clearly clouded his accession. Before he inherited the throne he was forced to endure a five-month delay and to change his name from the ill-omened John to make himself more acceptable. He dropped the name of the unfortunate Balliol king and took Robert, recalling the Bruce blood in his veins, his credentials to be king. More importantly, though, power remained in the hands of his able and aggressive younger brother, Robert, Earl of Fife, who acted as guardian.⁹

During the later 1390s, James’s role was simply as second in line to the throne. It seems reasonable to assume that he was brought up in the household of his mother, Queen Annabella. Although James was only seven when the queen died in 1401, she may have had some influence on her youngest son. At least one of her servants, her marshal, William Giffard, served James for the rest of his life, and the prince’s household may have been formed from that of his mother, perpetuating her own political views.¹⁰ In contrast to her husband, Robert III, who was famed most for his humility and dogged with ill-health, Annabella seems to have exerted considerable political influence. She reportedly ‘raised high the honour of the kingdom . . . by recalling to amity magnates and princes who had been roused to discord’ and clearly backed the interests of her sons and their right to exercise power.¹¹

It may have been due in part to her efforts that her eldest son, David, was accorded an increased significance in the 1390s. The promotion of David culminated in his elevation to the title of Duke of Rothesay in 1398 and his appointment as lieutenant for his father for three years in January 1399.¹² This grant of authority clearly reduced the influence of Robert of Fife and, although he had been made Duke of Albany at the same time as his nephew’s promotion, he had reason to worry that Rothesay’s lieutenancy was the prelude to his reign as King David III.

If Queen Annabella had been involved in Rothesay’s appointment, she did not live to see its conclusion. Her death at Scone at ‘harvest-time’ in 1401 began a period of rapidly changing fortunes for James and, with more fatal consequences, for his elder brother, Rothesay.¹³ The loss of Annabella’s support was to leave David dangerously isolated. As a young man exercising politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Maps and genealogical tables
• Introduction. ‘Our Lawgiver King’
• 1 Fortune’s Wheel
• 2 The Destruction of the Albany Stewarts
• 3 The Albany Stewart Legacy
• 4 ‘The King’s Rebels in the North Land’
• 5 A Fell, A Farseeing Man’: Royal Image and Reality
• 6 ‘A Tyrannous Prince’
• 7 The Covetous King
• 8 The Assassination of James I
• 9 Tyrant and Martyr: James I and the Stewart Dynasty
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates