James III

Norman Macdougall

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781904607878
• eBook ISBN: 9781788852425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

James III is the most enigmatic of the Stewart kings of Scotland. Variously characterised as artistic, peace-loving, morbidly suspicious, treacherous, pious, lecherous and lazy, King James was much criticised by contemporaries and later chroniclers for his failure to do his job in the manner expected of him, and particularly for his reliance on low-born favourites to the exclusion of his 'natural' counsellors, the nobility. Specific complaints included debasement of the coinage, royal hoarding of money, failure to staunch feuds and to enforce criminal justice. Yet James III has also been seen as a major patron of the arts, as Scotland's first Renaissance king, and as the architect of an intelligent and forward-looking foreign policy. In this new study, the author explores all these areas and seeks to explain why King James was challenged by a huge rebellion in 1482, which he narrowly survived, and why he succumbed to a further rising in 1488, which placed his eldest son on the throne as James IV.

CHAPTER 1

‘In Adversity Nothing Abashed’
JAMES II, 1452–1455

Towards the end of May 1452, in the sea-girt episcopal castle of St Andrews, Queen Mary of Gueldres brought her third pregnancy to a triumphant conclusion by bearing a son, christened James and rapidly elevated to the dukedom of Rothesay, the title long reserved for heirs to the Scottish throne. Both the queen and her husband, King James II, had cause to celebrate. In around three years of marriage, the queen had already given birth twice. In May 1450 a premature birth had resulted in a child which lived for only six hours; then in the spring or early summer of 1451 a daughter, Mary, was born and survived. However, the birth of a son and heir in May 1452 guaranteed the succession if the infant prince survived, and the happy news was swiftly brought to James II in Edinburgh by Robert Norry. The relieved king rewarded Norry with grants of land in Menteith and Stirlingshire on 1 June; and a fortnight later James Kennedy, bishop of St Andrews, in whose castle the prince had been born, received the ‘golden charter’ confirming all grants and donations made to the church of St Andrews by the king and his predecessors, and creating a regality for the loyalist bishop.¹

James II’s rapid and tangible expressions of gratitude to his supporters tell also of his relief; for the child who, eight years later, would become James III was born during the course of the greatest crisis of the reign. On 22 February 1452, James II had stabbed to death his most powerful subject, William, eighth earl of Douglas, at Stirling castle. The crime was probably the result of long royal frustration boiling up into sudden rage, for the king had been at odds with the Douglas earl for around a year. At issue was the nature of Stewart kingship, very differently interpreted by King James and Earl William, both young and hot-blooded men. Probably in the late 1440s, Douglas had made a bond with the earls of Ross and Crawford, and John MacDonald, earl of Ross from 1449, appears to have renewed it. In a personal meeting at Stirling with James II – significantly under safe-conduct – Earl William refused service to the king against rebels – for both Crawford and Ross were hostile to the Crown’s ambitions in the north-east – on the strength of a pre-existing private bond with these men. The bond itself, probably a bond of friendship, created a link between three powerful earls who were former enemies, and whose united strength must have appeared extremely threatening to the king. On the other hand, such bonds were nothing new, but rather part of the established fabric of Scottish political society, regulating the exercise of lordship in parts of the kingdom since the early fourteenth century. It was James I, as Michael Brown has shown, who had taken the initiative in the 1420s by forbidding such magnate leagues, seeing them as a threat to royal authority; and James II was endeavouring to emulate his formidable father by insisting on his right to rule and demanding loyal service of his magnates irrespective of their private agreements.²

In a sense, then, the eighth earl of Douglas brought his fate upon himself; for though he had long been at court and on the royal council, he showed no respect for royal authority in February 1452, and his refusal to ‘break’ his bond with Crawford and Ross was an act of open defiance. Such defiance had however been provoked by King James when he sent a force into Douglas lands in the Middle March in the spring of 1451. The intention had been to make Earl William submit rather than to start a civil war; but the king had greatly overestimated his own strength, and the outcome was not a submission but a dubious compromise – a full pardon for the earl, a string of charters confirming Douglas’s lands and offices, and a hereditary grant of the Wardenships of the West and Middle Marches. In effect, the king’s position was weakened by his botched pre-emptive strike. Earl William returned to court and council with his power apparently undiminished, arrogantly describing himself as ‘guardian of the kingdom of Scotland’ and ‘prince and lord of Galloway’, but so suspicious of James II that he required a safe-conduct even to meet the king at Stirling in February 1452.³

The crime which followed not only raised the stakes in the Stewart–Black Douglas struggle, but forced James II into a fierce struggle for survival against a powerful coalition of justifiably incensed magnates. Indeed, the three years which followed the killing of the eighth earl at Stirling should be understood as an intermittent civil war in which the king lacked the support to deliver a knockout blow against the Douglas faction, and was initially in danger of losing his throne and his life. That he not only survived but crushed the Douglases and imposed his view of kingship on the remainder of the nobility was due to a combination of political skill, sheer good luck, and total ruthlessness.

In late February 1452, as the sensational news of the eighth earl’s death spread around the country, the king must have taken stock of his situation. He was without a male heir, his vulnerable queen was six months pregnant, he had embarked on a blood feud with the most powerful family in the kingdom, and he faced potential or real enemies in Ross, Moray, the Black Isle, Angus, and the Black Douglas heartlands in central, southern and south-western Scotland. Furthermore, James II was the fourth of the Stewart kings; each of his three predecessors had been removed from office by powerful magnate factions, indeed his father James I had been assassinated in 1437. In every case a sitting monarch had been removed by a faction supporting a different style of government. James II had challenged potentially the most powerful magnate alliance of all by pursuing the political agenda of his murdered father, and by making clear that he would not shrink from unlawful killing if it served his purpose. His task was now to survive a civil war of his own making.⁴

Presumably in the belief that the most effective form of defence is attack, James II moved swiftly south into the heartlands of the murdered earl. At the end of February, less than a week after Douglas’s death, the king was at Jedburgh; he had moved west to Lochmaben by 2 March, and six days later he had reached Dumfries. With him was his Chancellor, William Lord Crichton, long an enemy of the Douglases, and Andrew Lord Gray, one of those who had assisted King James in finishing off the eighth earl of Douglas. The king’s high-risk strategy not only involved showing himself in the territories of the dead earl, but also making grants of lands and offices in the south-west to those prepared to support the Crown. These included former Douglas adherents like Simon Glendinning and William Cranstoun, both of whom had joined the king in killing their lord, and more powerful individuals like Herbert Lord Maxwell and David Scott of Buccleuch; and the Chancellor’s cousin and ally, George Crichton, was recognised as claimant to the lands of Preston and Buittle in Galloway.⁵

On 8 March, already on his way north, the king called at George Crichton’s castle of Morton in Nithsdale. Less than a week later, on 14 March, James was back in Stirling castle, making a grant to David Scott of Buccleuch.⁶ In an aggressive three weeks, the king had sought to capitalise on the killing of the eighth earl by ‘turning’ former Douglas men and carving up the Black Douglas estates in the south-west with the Crichtons. This in spite of a series of royal charters which named Earl William’s brothers as heirs to all his lands. Whatever resolute qualities James II was currently displaying, the exercise of good lordship was not one of them.

His dubious stance was challenged almost at once. On his return to Stirling from the south, King James passed close by Douglasdale; and the royal party was rapidly followed, if not pursued, by a powerful force of 600 men led by James, the new ninth earl of Douglas, and accompanied by his brothers Hugh, earl of Ormond and John Lord Balvenie, together with James Lord Hamilton and Andrew Kerr of Altonburn. By contrast the king’s position at Stirling seems to have been relatively weak; only William Turnbull, bishop of Glasgow, Chancellor Crichton, and three lords of parliament witnessed the royal charter of 14 March. James II’s recognition of his danger was followed by his flight north towards Perth.⁷ Though we do not know whether the pregnant Mary of Gueldres was with her husband at this time, it must have been clear to the king that none of the major royal palaces was a safe place for her confinement; Stirling was under threat, and Linlithgow and Holyrood were too vulnerable to attack from the Douglas strongholds of Abercorn and Inveravon in West Lothian. The queen’s safety was secured by her removal to the episcopal castle of James Kennedy, the loyal bishop of St Andrews, who returned to Scotland about this time after around two years abroad, first at the papal jubilee of 1450 and subsequently in the Low Countries.⁸

Within three days of James II’s grant to Scott of Buccleuch and subsequent hasty departure, the Black Douglases entered Stirling in force. Sounding twenty-four horns, they denounced the king and his council for the ‘foule slauchter’ of the eighth earl. The safe-conduct, bearing the seals or signatures of those who had issued it, was displayed at Stirling market cross, and subsequently dragged through the burgh at the tail of a horse, while the Douglases spoke ‘richt sclanderfully of the king and all that war with him that tyme’. Finally they sacked and burned the burgh.⁹

The ensuing five months were the most crucial of the reign for King James. He did what he could to bolster up his shaky position, writing to Charles VII of France on 12 April to inform the French king of Douglas’s death and to seek his continued support; and he chose a modest military target, the tower house of Hatton in West Lothian, bombarded and taken in early April, its Douglas adherent William Lauder either killed or executed. Otherwise James II was the beneficiary of events largely outwith his control. On 18 May Alexander Gordon, earl of Huntly, defeated the ‘Tiger’ fourth earl of Crawford, one of the makers of the notorious bond, at Brechin. While it is tempting to see this victory as a sign of royal power beginning to reassert itself – the Auchinleck chronicler remarks that Huntly was able to raise a larger force than his opponent because he displayed the king’s banner and claimed to be fighting on James’s behalf – the truth may be that the battle of Brechin was no more than the resolution of a long-standing Huntly–Crawford feud. Undoubtedly, however, the king was the overall gainer, for he was now able to forfeit Crawford and to grant the Douglas earldom of Moray to Huntly’s brother-in-law, James Crichton, in June. And within a few days of the battle of Brechin, Mary of Gueldres gave birth at St Andrews to the boy who would become James III. When the king met parliament at Edinburgh on 12 June, therefore, he must have sensed that his position was steadily improving.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, this was a parliament largely made up of the king’s supporters, and its business included rewarding committed royalists – Kennedy, the Crichtons, and Lord Hay, who became Earl of Erroll – creating new lords of parliament – Hailes, Boyd, Fleming, Borthwick, Lyle and Cathcart – and, above all, absolving the king of his killing of Douglas in February. This last was vital; clearly the royal complaint that ‘certain of [the king’s] enemies and rebels, outwith and within his kingdom, have undertaken rashly to denigrate and blaspheme his reputation’ is a thinly veiled admission that earlier royal explanations seeking to justify the killing of the eighth earl had left many unconvinced. The sticking point may have been the safe-conduct. The royal solution was to appoint a committee of the Three Estates to consider the issue; unsurprisingly this royalist body held that all respites and securities had been cancelled the day before the eighth earl’s death, and that in any case the earl had been guilty of making bonds and conspiracies against James II, as well as ‘public rebellions frequently perpetrated by him, his brothers and accomplices’. In spite of the efforts of king and barons to persuade Douglas to give up his transgressions and bring his strength to the royal side, the earl had refused and had thus brought his death upon himself. As for the royal infringement of securities or respites, James was as innocent as the driven s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Enigma
• 1 ‘In Adversity Nothing Abashed’: James II, 1452–1455
• 2 Ambiguous Legacy: 1455–1460
• 3 The Queen, the Bishop and the Boyds: 1460–1466
• 4 From Adolescence to Imperial Kingship: 1466–1472
• 5 The Years of Success: 1472–1476
• 6 Sibling Rivalry and ‘Sympill Men’: The Politics of the 1470s
• 7 A Bridge Too Far? The Lauder Crisis of 1482
• 8 The Survivor: 1482–1485
• 9 Renaissance Prince? James III and the Arts
• 10 The Second Reign: 1483–1487
• 11 Prophecies Fulfilled: The Field of Stirling, 1488
• Postscript: The Legend and the King
• Map 1 The Crises of 1482–1483
• Glossary
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index
• Picture Section