Political History Part V

In October 1430 was born the prince destined to be James II. The king and the Estates were curtailing the judicial privileges and jurisdiction of the clergy; and the anti-pope, Peter de Luna, quarrelled with the country on this ground. Scotland then deserted his cause for that of Martin V., but quarrels between church and state did not cease, and a legate arrived to settle the dispute a few days before the king's murder. James had already threatened the Benedictines and Augustines for "impudently abandoning religious conduct," and had founded the Carthusian monastery in Perth, that the Carthusians might offer a better example. A reformation by the state seemed at hand, but the religious orders fell deeper in odium and contempt during the next hundred and thirty years. Doctrine, too, was endangered by heretics, one of whom, a Hussite named Paul Crawar, was burned at Perth in 1433.

In 1427 James seized, as a male fee, the earldom of Strathearn, gave the earl by female descent the title of Menteith, and sent him to England as a hostage for his ransom. He was nephew of the Sir Robert Graham whom James had arrested at the beginning of his reign: Graham's anger was thus rekindled. The earls of Mar and March also lost their lands, on one pretext or another: James's policy was plainly to break the power of the nobles.

The English translation (1440) of a lost contemporary Latin history of the events avers that Sir Robert Graham rose in parliament, denounced James as a tyrant and called on the barons to seize their king: Graham was taken, was banished from court, was confiscated and fled to the Atholl hills. He thence intrigued with the old earl of Atholl (heir to the crown if the ancestors of James by Robert II. and Elizabeth Muir were illegitimate), and he drew into the conspiracy the king's chamberlain, Atholl's grandson. By his aid 300 highlanders were brought into the monastery of the Black Friars in Perth, where the king was keeping the Christmas of 1436, and there they slew James, who had fled into a vault.

The conspirators were seized and tortured to death with unheardof cruelties, but lawlessness had won the battle. James had failed, practically, even in his effort (1427-1428) to anglicize parliament, by introducing the representative system; two "wise men" were to be chosen by each sheriffdom, and two Houses were to take the place of the one House in which all Estates were wont to meet. But constituents were averse to paying their members, no Speaker was elected, the reform never came into being. Till the Union, all estates sat in one room during parliament. The court of session was the most valuable and permanent of James's innovations. He had attempted to reform the country too hurriedly; and treachery, by all accounts, was one of his methods. He left a child as king, and the old round of anarchy began again; oppression, murder, feud, faction and private war. History repeats itself, and the evil practices were checked, not by the Reformation, but by the increased resources and entire safety enjoyed by James VI. when he succeeded to the crown of England.

Space forbids a record of the faction fights in the reign of James II. Coming to the crown at the age of seven, he was James used like the Great Seal, as a sanction of authority and passed from one party to another of the nobles, as each chanced to be the more dexterous or powerful (crowned 25th of March 1437). The Crichtons and Livingstones held the king till the earl of Douglas died, being succeeded by his son, a boy. The queen-mother married Sir James Stewart of Lorne, and their sons, Buchan and Atholl, mixed in the confused intrigues of the reign of James III., but the queen was treated with scant courtesy by the rival parties. From them the young earl Douglas and due de Touraine, the most powerful man in Scotland, stood apart, sullenly watching an unprecedented state of anarchy. Livingstone and Crichton, previously foes, invited him and his brother to dine with the child king in Edinburgh castle, and there served to him "the black dinner" bewailed in a fragment of an early ballad. The two young nobles, after a mock trial, were decapitated (November 1440).

Douglas was succeeded in his earldom by his grandfather, Sir James the Gross, an unwieldy veteran. On his death in 1443, his son, Wiffiam, a lad of eighteen, became earl, and waged private war on Crichton, while he allied himself with Livingstone. Crichton lost the chancellorship: and the keys were given to Kennedy, bishop of St Andrews and founder of St Salvator's college in that university. Involved in secular feuds with Douglas, Livingstone and the earl of Crawford, Kennedy destroyed Crawford with a spiritual weapon, his Curse. (23rd of January 1445-1446).

On the 3rd of July 1449 James married Marie of Gueldres, seized and imprisoned the Livingstones, and generally asserted royal power. He relied on Douglas, who (1450) was his constant companion, till the earl visited Rome (November 1450-April 1451). In June 1451 he resigned his lands, in which he was at once reinstated. It appears, however, that he was, or was suspected of being, in treasonable alliance with the new earl of Crawford and the ever-turbulent Celtic lord of the Isles. It is certain, from documents, that Douglas was always in the royal entourage from June 1451 to January 1452, so that stories of insults and crimes committed by him at this period seem legendary. Nevertheless, on the 22nd of February 1452, James, who had invited Douglas, under safe-conduct, to visit him at Stirling, there dirked his guest with his own hand. The king was exonerated by parliament, on the score of Douglas's contemptuous treatment of his safe-conduct, and because of his oppressions, conspiracies and refusal to aid the king against rebels, such as the new " Tiger Earl " of Crawford.

The brother of the slain Douglas defied his king, then made his submission, and visited London, where he probably intrigued with the English government against his sovereign and country. In 1455 James made serious war against the "Black Douglases" of the south; his army being led by the "Red Douglas," the earl of Angus. The royal cause was successful, and the Black Douglas was attainted (10th of June 1455). He fled south and became the pensioner and ally of Edward IV., who reasserted the traditional claim to sovereignty over Scotland-" his rebels of Scotland."

From 1457 to 1459 a truce was made between Scotland and the Lancastrian party, then in power, but in July 1460, Henry VI. was defeated and taken, and his wife and son. sought James's hospitality. Roxburgh castle was in English hands; James besieged it, and on the 3rd of August 1460 was slain by the bursting of one of his own huge siege guns. The castle was taken, but the second James died at the age of thirty, leaving a child to succeed him in his heritage of woe. James II. had overcome his nobles, but left a legacy of feuds to the coming reign.

The period of James III. is filled with the recurrent strife of the nobles among themselves and against law and order. Slowly and obscurely the Renaissance comes to Scotland; James III. its presence is indicated by the artistic tastes of the king, and, later, by the sweet and mournful poetry of Henryson. But the Renaissance, like the religious revivals initiated in Italy, arrived in Scotland weak and weary; hence the church did not share in the new enthusiasms of the faith of St Francis, and art was trampled on by the magnates who hated poetry and painting.

In politics, the queen-mother, who had the private guardianship of her boys, the king and the dukes of Albany and Ross, turned from the Lancastrian to the Yorkist side, while Kennedy and his party (Lancastrians) were accused of endangering Scotland to please France. This was the beginning of that movement away from the Ancient League to partisanship with England, which culminated in the success of the Protestant allies of England at the Reformation. This, then, is an important moment in the long and weary march to union with England.

In 1460, Henry VI. was driven to take sad shelter with Kennedy at St Andrews. In June 1461 Edward IV. was crowned, and at once made pact and alliance with the banished Douglas and the Celts of the west Highlands and the isles. From Ardtornish castle, John, lord of the Isles, sent ambassadors to Westminster, where (1462) a treaty was made for an English alliance and the partition of Scotland between. Douglas and the Celts. A marriage between the mother of James III. and Edward IV. was spoken of, but Kennedy would not meet the English, and in March 1463 the English treaty with Douglas and the Celts was ratified. Douglas invaded Scotland, in advance of an English army, but was defeated by an army under Bishop Kennedy. When France went over to the Yorkists, Kennedy, accepting an English pension, made a long truce between Scotland and England (October 1464). Peace might have been assured, but Kennedy died in 1466. His tomb in his college chapel of St Salvator's at St Andrews, his college and his bridge over the river Eden, have survived as monuments of a good and great man; they passed unscathed through the ruin wrought by the reformers.

On his death the nobles, notably Fleming, Livingstone, Crawford, Hamilton and Boyd, made a band for securing power and place. Boyd, with some borderers, Hepburn and Ker of Cessford, seized the boy king, and Boyd had himself made governor, his son marrying the princess Mary, sister of James.

In July 1469 James, then about eighteen, married Margaret, daughter of King Christian of Norway, who pledged the Orkney and Shetland Isles for her dowry, which remains unpaid. The enemies of the Boyds instantly overthrew them, and the Hamiltons, a race of English origin, arose on their ruins to their perilous place of possible heirs to the crown. The princess Mary was divorced from her Boyd husband and married Lord Hamilton. Their descendants were again and again kept from the royal succession only by the existence of a Stuart child, Mary, queen of Scots, or James VI. This fact, with the consequent feud of the Stewarts of Lennox, themselves claimants, governs the dynastic intrigues during more than two centuries and gave impetus to the Reformation. Never was marriage so fruitful in tragedies as the wedding of Lord Hamilton and the princess Mary.

There followed ecclesiastical feuds, centring round Patrick Graham, the new bishop of St Andrews. These, to the present day, have been misunderstood. It is not possible here to unravel the problem, but documents at St Andrews, now printed, demonstrate the error of the historians who regard Graham as a holy man, persecuted because he was half a premature Protestant. At Rome he procured, without royal or national assent, the archbishopric for St Andrews; he became insane and was succeeded by the learned Schevez. Glasgow also became an archbishopric.

James now followed a policy in which Louis XI. succeeded, but he himself failed utterly. He surrounded himself with men of low birth, such as Ireland, a scholar and diplomatist; Rogers, a great musician; and Cochrane, apparently an architect or sculptor, he is styled a mason or stone-cutter. This aroused the wrath of the nobles and the two princes of the blood, Albany and Mar. Mar was arrested on a charge of magic, and died, whether murdered or from natural causes is uncertain, while his accomplices are said to have been the protomartyrs of witchcraft, scarcely heard of in Scotland till the reformers began to burn old women. Albany was arrested for treason, escaped to France, and was under sentence of forfeiture.

Relations with England were now unfriendly, and parliament, in March 1482, denounced Edward IV. as " the reiver, Edward." By May the Douglases brought Albany from France to England, where he swore fealty to Edward, and was to be given the Scottish crown. The duke of Gloucester (later Richard III.) marched north and took Berwick, while the earl of Angus, with other nobles, hanged Cochrane and other favourites of James over Lauder bridge. The domestic mutiny and the English war ended in a compromise, Albany being restored to office and estates. He took Edinburgh castle, in which James was interned, and he was made lieutenant-general. Yet, aided by Angus, he continued to intrigue with Edward for the gift of the Scottish crown. By March 1483 he was reduced, we know not how; he laid down his office, and was forbidden to approach the court. On the death of Edward IV. he lost his chief supporter (9th of April 1483), and was forfeited while absent in England. He and Douglas entered Scotland with a small force (22nd of July 1484), and were defeated at Lochmaben: Albany escaped, went to France, and was slain in a tournament, leaving issue, but Douglas was captured and interned till his death in the monastery of Lindores.

Our information for this period is so scanty that we do not know how James reached his new position, how he overcame Albany and his other rebels. At peace with England, and allied with France, he quarrelled with the church, and it was decreed that the clergy who obtained benefices from Rome were guilty of treason. He planned a set of royal marriages with England, and this was the ground of his subjects' charge against him of servility to England. "James IV. and James V. are constantly upbraided for not doing the very things which James III. is execrated for having done," namely, securing peace and amity with their powerful neighbour. James III. "died in his enemies day," and such accounts as we have of him are written by the partisans of his unruly nobles, Argyll, Lennox and Angus.

They secured the crown prince, James, now aged fifteen, their motive being that under James III. the guilt of their murders and rebellion still hung over their heads. The Estates refused to give them an amnesty for seven years; and the arch rebel, Angus Bell the Cat, with Argyll, the young prince, Lennox and other malcontents, declared that he was deposed, and proclaimed his son as his successor and Argyll as chancellor. Doing what they falsely accused James of having done, they sent, or obtained from England leave to send, members of their party to intrigue with Henry VII. (1st of May 1488). After a half reconciliation, James marched in force to Stirling, the key of the north, but the treacherous commander of the castle, Shaw of Sauchie, held the castle against him. James and his leaders, Atholl and Huntly, with their Stewarts and Gordons, and the levies of burgesses, and the mounted gentry of Fife, encountered the wild border spearmen of Hepburn and Home and the Galloway men, the whole being led by Angus and the rebel prince at Sauchie burn, near Bannockburn. How it chanced we know not; James's horse seems to have run away and thrown him (he was a bad horseman), and the story goes that he was taken into a cottage and stabbed by a priest. In. fact, as his rebels put it, "he happinit to be slain" at Beaton's mill. He was accused of having accumulated great treasures. They were never found, or, if found, never accounted for by the finders.

His real history remains unknown; we have only Ferrerius, who is vague, and the late and slanderous gossip of the writers of the Reformation. We know that James was clement; that the middle and lower classes stood by him; that he was a great amateur in the arts; that he was betrayed again and again by those of his own house, finally by his own son. A hideous tale is told by Buchanan against his private morals, but it is certainly inaccurate in detail, and is uncorroborated, while it appears to turn on a confusion between an alleged royal mistress, "the Daisy," and Margaret (Daisy), the king's own sister. It is clear to any reader of Ferrerius, Lesley and Buchanan that they all drew from a common source, now unknown, and this source may well have been a chronicle inspired by James's enemies. James III. of Scotland has been almost as much the butt of slanderous charges as the Jacobite James III. of England and VIII. of Scotland, "The Old Pretender."

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