James IV

Norman Macdougall

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781906566906
• eBook ISBN: 9781788852432
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

James IV is the best-known of all the late medieval Scottish rulers. Widely praised by his contemporaries, he combined the qualities of successful medieval monarch with a wide interest in the arts and sciences, while remaining acutely conscious of the need to enhance the prestige of his dynasty throughout Europe. This excellent study examines all aspects of James IV's sovereignty, explains his popularity and his highly successful kingship and assesses reasons for the disastrous end to the reign when the king and a large population of the Scottish nobility were eliminated in a single afternoon in 1513 at Flodden. This book represents Scottish historical research at its very best. It is meticulously researched and sensitively written.

1

A Family at War, 1473–88

On Friday 14 July 1486, Margaret of Denmark lay dying in Stirling Castle.¹ Thirty years of age, queen of Scots for seventeen of these, she had borne to her husband James III three sons, all of whom had survived infancy and generously fulfilled the queen’s principal function of providing for the succession. On her deathbed, if her biographer is to be believed, Queen Margaret called her three boys to her and exhorted them to pursue virtuous lives. In particular, she singled out her eldest son, James, duke of Rothesay, heir to the throne, and said to him:

‘James, my eldest boy, I am speeding towards death; I pray you, through your obedience as my son, to love and fear God, always doing good, because nothing achieved by violence, be certain, can endure’.²

This admonition may be little more than a conventional literary device by Sabadino, Margaret’s Italian biographer, writing about five years after the queen’s death; but it contains an element of grim prophetic irony. For within two years the Duke of Rothesay would have seized his father’s throne by violence, James III would be dead at the hands of his own subjects, and Margaret of Denmark’s memory would be abused even by her son, who would use the fabricated tale of her death by poison with her husband’s compliance to justify to the Danes his successful rebellion in 1488.³ And the new regime created by the violence of that rebellion, in spite of its assertive self-confidence and some striking successes, would not endure.

The eldest of the three sons of James III and Margaret of Denmark, Prince James, the future king, was born on 17 March 1473.⁴ The absence of any major contemporary chronicle, and indeed of most of the Treasurer’s accounts before 1488, makes it impossible to produce any more than a thumbnail sketch of the prince in his infancy and youth. He probably spent most of his time before 1488 at Stirling in the care of his mother, and latterly in the company of his two younger brothers, James and John. In 1478 Queen Margaret was officially entrusted with the custody and education of the heir to the throne for five years, though this was probably no more than the confirmation of an already existing situation following James III’s general revocation of 1476.⁵ From early infancy Prince James, already Duke of Rothesay, was used in his father’s diplomacy. In October 1474 James III and Edward IV concluded the first firm Anglo-Scottish alliance of the 15th century, the foundation of which was to be a marriage between the infant Rothesay and Edward IV’s daughter Cecilia when both should reach marriageable age — the prospective groom was one year old in 1474, the bride-to-be was aged three. The immediate return for the Scots king was a dowry of 20,000 marks sterling (approximately £40,000 Scots) which would be paid in advance, in annual instalments of 2,000 marks;⁶ in the longer term, the treaty marks the beginning of James III’s obsessive pursuit of friendship with England, a policy which was as unpopular as it was innovatory. For the Duke of Rothesay, his father’s Anglophile stance simply meant a succession of marriage proposals — three prospective English brides between 1474 and 1487⁷ — none of which was realised.

The use of the heir to the throne in this high-powered if unsuccessful diplomacy did not of course impinge on Rothesay’s early life, and his motives for suddenly emerging as the adolescent rebel of 1488 can only be guessed at. The surviving Treasurer’s account for James III’s reign — a mere sixteen months in 1473–4 — provides us with a few names of suppliers to the court and members of Margaret of Denmark’s household, together with a total of £72 7/10d spent during part of this period on the infant Prince James;⁸ but this source, which would have been invaluable in indicating the motives of the adolescent Rothesay in the 1480s, is lost to us until his accession as king in the summer of 1488. From the exchequer records we learn only that Prince James was taken — presumably from Stirling — on visits to Edinburgh in the summers of 1474 and 1479, being lodged in the castle on both occasions. His nurse in the ’seventies was Agnes Turing, wife of an Edinburgh burgess, she and her husband being rewarded with half the farms of Drumcorse, Linlithgowshire, which brought them in £10 per annum. The same source provides us with the name of one servant of the prince, David Balfour, who received as payment the lease of some royal lands in Menteith.⁹

Nor are chronicle accounts much more help. Bishop John Lesley, after recording the prince’s birth, described a marvellous comet which appeared in the south for a month — 17 January to 18 February, anticipating James’s birth in March — and comments that this was ‘ane signe of mony mervellus changes in the warld.’¹⁰ Lesley was writing about a century later, around 1570. However, a contemporary chronicler interpreted the comet’s appearance not as a portent of marvels to come, but of disaster — the wrecking of Bishop Kennedy’s barge, the ‘Salvator’, at Bamburgh in the month of the prince’s birth, and the recent murder of King Henry VI of England in May 1471.¹¹ Giovanni Ferreri, writing in the 1570s, confines himself to conventional praise of the young Duke of Rothesay, remarking that while he and his younger brothers James and John all showed a truly royal nature, the heir to the throne outshone the other two by the beauty of his character and the brilliance of his talents.¹²

Neither such conventional praise nor the circumstantial detail of the surviving exchequer and Treasurer’s accounts takes us any further towards an understanding of Rothesay’s involvement in the successful rebellion of 1488. It would appear that his life in infancy, youth, and early adolescence, spent mainly at Stirling with the queen and the castle’s keeper, James Shaw of Sauchie, was uneventful — or at least that any dramatic events associated with the prince are lost to us together with the records which would reveal them.

There exists, however, one revealing glimpse of Prince James prior to 1488. Surprisingly, it is provided, almost in an aside, by Ferreri. In the late summer of 1482, the chronicler tells us, the prince and his mother were visited at Stirling by James III’s brother Alexander, duke of Albany, who had come direct from Edinburgh accompanied by William Scheves, archbishop of St Andrews, Andrew Lord Avandale, the Chancellor, and Colin Campbell, earl of Argyll. While at Stirling, Albany spent some time discussing at length the proper education for the nine-year-old heir to the throne.¹³ Superficially, this last statement does not appear of great interest; but the political events of 1482 raise it from the ordinary to the extremely remarkable. For the truth was that Albany was struggling for a dominant role in government, and that little over a month before his visit to Stirling, he had come to Scotland to try to overthrow his brother and make himself king as Alexander IV.

The prince’s father, James III, was largely to blame for this state of affairs. We can never be certain exactly what caused him to attack his younger brother Albany in the spring of 1479, for the parliamentary indictment of the duke makes unconvincing reading and indeed failed to convince the estates that his offences were treasonable and that he should be forfeited. In fact, one of the principal charges brought against Albany — the defence of Dunbar castle against the king — simply begs the question, as Dunbar was only garrisoned against James III after his attack on Albany. As there is virtually no other evidence, we are forced to interpret the break between the two brothers in terms of the other main charge brought against Albany in parliament — the abuse of his office of March Warden, violating the peace with England by treasonable ‘slauchteris reffis and hereschippis’.¹⁴ As we have seen, maintenance of the English alliance of 1474 lay at the heart of James III’s very personal foreign policy. It is clear that Albany, only two years the king’s junior, did not share his opinion, that many southern Scots agreed with him, and that both as a royal Stewart and as a March Warden, he was a natural focus for their discontent. There may also have been an element of jealousy in the relationship between the two men. As Professor Donaldson has pointed out, James III was the first fifteenth century Scottish king to have to cope with the problem of having adult brothers;¹⁵ and while the eminently quotable sixteenth century chronicler Lindsay of Pitscottie may have misinterpreted most of the events of this reign, his statements that James III ‘desirit nevir to heir of weiris nor the fame theerof while Albany (and his brother Mar) ‘lovit nothing so weill as abill men and gud horss’¹⁶ reflect surely the king’s determination to preserve peace with England whatever the cost, his brother’s opposition to such an attitude, and their respective popularity and unpopularity with sections of the political community as a result.

The crisis broke in the spring of 1479. Albany may have been arrested by the king, served a brief period of imprisonment in Edinburgh castle, and subsequently escaped, or more likely he anticipated arrest by taking refuge in Dunbar castle, garrisoning it, and fleeing to France. A full-scale royal siege of Dunbar, possibly lasting as long as a month in April/May, followed, with artillery brought into play on both sides, the sound of the bombardment clearly audible to the twelve-year-old John Major, eight miles away at his home at Gleghornie near North Berwick.¹⁷ The castle duly fell or was surrendered, but the sequel was much less satisfying to the king; for Albany had already escaped to France, and the parliament of October 1479, which might have been expected to accede to the king’s wishes and forfeit the duke, simply continued the summons calling on him to appear to answer the charges¹⁸–and indeed did so again and again over the next two-and-a-half years....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1. A Family at War, 1473–88
• 2. The Reluctant Regicide
• 3. 1488–90: Rebels Without a Case?
• 4. Unholy Alliance: Bothwell, Angus and Bishop Elphinstone, 1490–95
• 5. 1495–97: The Watershed
• 6. Money and Power
• 7. The Demise of Parliament
• 8. Piety and Politics
• 9. Royal Obsession: The Navy
• 10. The Four Horsemen
• 11. The Legend and the King
• Appendix: The Itinerary of James IV
• Bibliography
• Index