Later medieval Scottish politics must ultimately be seen as a triumph for the Stewart dynasty, although its first two representatives, Robert II (1371-90) and Robert III (1390-1406), have traditionally been seen as amongst the weakest of all Scottish kings: disabled by age and physical infirmity, both were actually deprived of authority and in effect replaced in a renewal of the institution of guardianship (now more often called lieutenancy because the king, although incapacitated, was both adult and present in the kingdom). Recently, however, Robert II has been presented as an effective ruler both at home and abroad, maintaining relative peace and prosperity by effective use of patronage and land grants, until his personal authority was overthrown in 1384 following conflicts between his many sons and their supporters. These family power struggles, with an added ingredient provided by the ambitions of his own son and heir, also fatally undermined the hold of Robert III upon the government of his kingdom. For the first time in nearly 200 years, Scottish kingship was confronted with the problems of many adult male offspring.
A key figure in both reigns was Robert III’s younger brother, the earl of Fife, also called Robert (Robert III was originally named John, a name of ill-omen for a king). Fife was lieutenant to both his father from 1384 and his elder brother from his accession to 1393. Although Fife continued to be influential and was appointed as duke of Albany in 1398, his nephew, the heir to the throne David, duke of Rothesay, became lieutenant when he came of age in 1399. In 1402, however, Rothesay was arrested by Albany and died mysteriously while in prison at Albany’s residence in Falkland; Albany was reappointed lieutenant and in 1406 became guardian, following the capture by the English of Prince James (heir presumptive after Rothesay’s death) and the subsequent death of a stricken Robert III in 1406. The duke was to be guardian, or governor, until his own death in 1420, when he was succeeded by his son Murdoch.
Yet despite all this, the Albanys seem never to have laid claim to the kingship itself in forty years’ close involvement at the head of government; and in 1424 James I was finally able to return to Scotland and to be crowned at Scone. Within a year he was strong enough to command the arrest, trial and execution of Duke Murdoch and his associates: formally for treasonous rebellion, but also no doubt an act of vengeance for the death of the king’s brother in 1402, a means of removing potential rivals for the crown, and a way of bringing their extensive landholdings and revenues under direct royal control. Certainly, whatever their legitimacy, these events manifest the power wielded by a king, even despite an eighteen-year absence from his realm.
Doubt has been cast upon contemporary perceptions of the legitimacy of the Stewart dynasty because the first marriage of Robert II was within the degrees prohibited by canon law and a papal dispensation had not been obtained before the birth of his first child, who became Robert III. However, even if Robert III was born a bastard, the canon law provided for legitimation by valid subsequent marriage of the
Parents, and there does not seem to have been any contemporary perception of a difficulty over his succession other than the need, caused by some physical incapacity of the king, for the lieutenancy of his brother.
The assassination of James I in Perth in 1437 by a group inspired by his half-uncle Walter, earl of Atholl, who was the last surviving son of Robert II’s second and undoubtedly canonical marriage, has been attributed to a long-delayed bid for the crown as legitimate heir; but under the old entails of the crown in favour of Stewart heirs-male he was in any event already second in line after James II (six years old at the time of his father’s death), and given that he had behaved as a loyal king’s man for most of James I’s reign, the involvement of the aged Walter seems more likely to have had its immediate inspiration in vengeance for the death in England in 1434 of his own son as a hostage for the king’s ransom. The others involved, including Atholl’s grandson Robert Stewart, third in line to the throne, probably had similar motives, although the chief actor in the killing, Sir Robert Graham of Kinpunt, may have seen himself as the destroyer of a greedy and rapacious tyrant as well as the avenger of his former patron, Duke Murdoch. But the arrest and frightful executions of the conspirators confirmed the power and support which the established royal house commanded in the Scottish political community, even if the outcome had hung in some doubt for a few weeks after the assassination, so that James II became the first Scottish king to be crowned at Holyrood, the traditional venue of Scone being perhaps too close to the dangerous territories in which his father had died and where Atholl and his adherents had held sway.
A similar pattern can be detected in the relative ease with which both James II and James III assumed control of government upon marriage and the end of their minorities in 1449 and 1469 respectively, and also in the fate of the families who had exercised control of the king’s government immediately beforehand: members of both were forfeited and, like the Albanys under James I, some of them were executed. When in 1488 James III became the first of his house actually to be overthrown, killed and replaced in an armed uprising, the rebels were at least nominally led by his heir, who succeeded him as James IV. Perhaps it was only in such circumstances that rebellion against the lawful government of the king had any real prospect of success, and the subsequent propaganda of the new king and his government was at pains to emphasize the unintended nature of his predecessor’s death and the legitimacy of the new king’s succession. Earlier rebellions, most notably those of the most powerful magnates in Scotland at the relevant times, the ninth earl of Douglas in 1455 and the Macdonald lord of the Isles in 1411-12 and 1429, had been comprehensively crushed. Occasional royal defeats, for example, at the hands of the lord of the Isles in 1431, forced political accommodations but, James III apart, never unseated the king. The Douglases were destroyed after 1455 (the eighth earl having been slain in hot blood by James II in 1452), and the fall of the lordship of the Isles, although long drawn out and not complete until after our period, began with the forfeiture of the fourth lord’s earldom of Ross in 1475, followed by an act of suppression against the lordship itself in 1493. The bonds of manrent by which noble families linked their fortunes and resolved their disputes in the fifteenth century always reserved each party’s loyalty to the king against the obligations of the bond; and repeated evidence shows the reluctance of the king’s subjects to take the field against the hosts which could legitimately unfurl the royal banner. In 1469 parliament declared that the king enjoyed ‘ful jurisdictioune and fre impire’3 within his realm; this can be taken as an indication of the real authority which the Stewart kingship had in fact come to wield over its people and territory.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, then, Scotland and its kings had moved into a respectable position as a recognized second-rank European power, a picture confirmed by the renewed status and international range of royal marriages. Whereas Robert II and III married women from Scottish noble families, James II married a great niece of the duke of Burgundy and James III a daughter of the king of Denmark, who in effect brought with her Orkney and Shetland, mortgaged for her dowry. Although James I had to be content with a love-match to a daughter of the semi-royal English house of Beaufort, his daughters were married to the dauphin of France, the duke of Brittany and the archduke of Tyrol. The 1503 marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England, revived the old idea of bettering Anglo-Scottish relations by linking the royal houses and would bear fruit a century later in the Union of the Crowns.
However, the exercise of royal power was by no means internally unopposed in the fifteenth century. Kings could not rule on their own or without political and institutional support. The machinery of government continued to be simple for most of our period, based upon the royal household and local lordship much as it had been since the twelfth century. In the fourteenth century parliament became an assembly of three estates when the burgesses began to be summoned as well as the lords spiritual and temporal; the impetus for this came from David II’s need to raise taxation to pay for his ransom, but the effect was permanent. While Scotland’s largely ‘amateur’ systems of royal justice and defence did not require the exaction of large sums of money from the people, extraordinary royal expenditure which could not be paid for out of the king’s normal revenues did lead to occasional attempts to persuade parliament to grant taxations, giving that body some opportunity to control royal policy. On the other hand, parliamentary reluctance to impose taxation turned the kings to drive their ordinary revenues (e. g. rents and other payments arising from land rights as a feudal superior) increasingly rigorously, and to look actively for ways to increase them through forfeitures and escheats of others’ land. Activities of this kind go some way to explain the resentment roused by James I and III in particular, and also the transformation of the higher nobility that occurred in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The essence of this transformation was the dissolution of the link between the title of earl and the lands held and supervised as earl, and the rise, in the mid-fifteenth century, of a new higher nobility replacing the previously dominant families of Stewart and Douglas. Much of this can be explained by the kings’ need for the revenue that came from increasing the amount of land under direct royal control. From the reign of David II the title of earl began to become more honorific than territorial, starting perhaps with the earldom of Douglas created in 1358. This did not mean that earls held no land (the Douglas lands were vast by 1400, in particular south of Forth); simply, their titles ceased to have territorial connotations. Accidents of inheritance, marriage and forfeiture also meant that, in the course of the fourteenth century, earldoms and other major lordships became more concentrated in the hands of fewer families, with the power of the Douglases in the south being matched by the accumulation of land by the many children of Robert II in the
Stewart principality
Provincial earldom Lordship of the
Provincial lordship Ijjes
_Approximate boundary of
Provincial earldom or lordship O Baronies in the Stewart principality ¦ Baronies in the eardom of Douglas • Baronies in the earldom of Crawford Likely extent of lands in larger baronies Boundary of sheriffdom
Renfrew Garrick Cunningham Kyle Stewart
1 Cowal (Argl)
2 Knapdale (Argl)
3 Bute (Bute)
4 Arran (Bute)
5 Ratho (Edbr)
6 Innerwick (Hdtn) Douglas Galloway Annandale Lauderdale
1 Douglas (Lnrk)
2 Carmunnock (Lnrk)
3 Drumsargard (Lnrk)
4 Bothwell (Lnrk)
5 Stonehouse (pt)
(Lnrk)
6 Strathaven (Lnrk)
7 Coulter (pt) (Lnrk)
8 Crawfordjohn (pt) (Lnrk)
9 Heriot (Edbr)
10 Romanno (Pbls)
11 Selkirk (Skrk)
12 Sprouston (Rxbr)
13 Bedrule (Rxbr)
14 Hawick (Rxbr)
15 Westerkirk (Dmfs)
16 Staplegorton (Dmfs)
17 Kirkandrews (Dmfs)
18 Lintrathen (Frfr)
19 Rattray (Abdn)
20 Aberdour (Abdn)
21 Boharm (Bnff)
22 Duffus (pt) (Elgn)
23 Petty (Elgn)
24 Brachlie (Invs)
25 Strath Dearn (Invs)
26 Eddirdour (Invs)
27 Avoch (Invs)
Crawford
1 Crawford (Lnrk)
2 Kirkmichael (Dmfs)
3 Megginch (Prth)
4 Baltrody (Prth)
5 Meigle (Prth)
6 Balindoch (Prth)
7 Alyth (Prth)
8 Ethiebeaton (Frfr)
9 Inverarity (Frfr)
10 Earl's Ruthven (Frfr)
11 Guthrie (Frfr)
12 Downie (Frfr)
13 Clova (Frfr)
14 Glenesk (Frfr)
15 Newdosk (Kcdn)
Map 15.2 Scotland: earldoms and lordships about 1405. Based upon a map prepared by A. Grant for P. G. B. McNeill and H. L. MacQueen, eds, Atlas of Scottish History to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1996; revised rpt. 2000).
North. But this position was in turn transformed in the fifteenth century: first, through the ruthless acquisition of Stewart lands and titles by the revenue-hungry James I, and second through the forfeiture of the Douglas territories under James II in 1455. In the reign of James I this process had begun to bring to the fore families which had hitherto been in the second rank of landholders, such as the Erskines, Hamiltons, Hays, Kennedys and many others. Under James II they became, as lords of parliament and, sometimes, later as earls as well, amongst the leading players on the domestic political scene, although none ever acquired the kind of territorial domination which had been enjoyed by the Stewarts and Douglases in earlier times.
The transformation also had its effect in the north and west. The accidents of family extinction and marriage of female heirs meant that Moray and Ross became once more areas of uncertain lordship in the later fourteenth century. Amongst those who sought to fill the resulting power vacuum, usually by force, were a younger son of Robert II, Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan (best known as the ‘Wolf of Badenoch’); his son, also Alexander and by marriage earl of Mar; and, above all, the MacDonald lords of the Isles, descendants of Somerled of Argyll, who looked to develop their influence eastward on the mainland and to make good a claim to the earldom of Ross. The resulting disturbed conditions, the militarization of governance in the region, and the essentially Gaelic culture of the lordship all helped to develop a contemporary perception of a division between the peaceful lowland Scots and the violently disorderly highlanders which was to have a profound long-term effect in later Scottish history. But some kind of stability was achieved in the region by recognition of Alexander, third lord of the Isles as earl of Ross in the late 1430s; it is perhaps a moot point whether his further appointment as justiciar north of Forth reflected his position as now a king’s man or rather royal acceptance of the de facto situation. The gradual collapse of the lordship after 1475 would see the increasing prominence as unmistakably royal agents of the Campbell earls of Argyll in the west, and the Gordon earls of Huntly in the east.
Amongst the many roles of lordship in later medieval Scotland was dealing justice to the men of the lord. In its formal aspect this meant the holding of courts and arbitrations in which disputes could be resolved. Robert I had regularized the fran-chisal jurisdictions of barony and regality under which lords’ courts might deal with cases that would otherwise have fallen to the royal sheriff or justiciar, and these continued as an extremely important aspect of the administration of justice throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Less formal, but just as important, was the lord’s role in settling disputes before they reached his or the king’s courts, reflected most obviously in the bonds of manrent which survive in increasing numbers from the fifteenth century on. It should be stressed, however, that this was all formally subject to royal justice and the common law, which had a real existence and the significance of which has been underestimated. The king’s responsibility for peace and good order, whether in protecting secure tenure and inheritance of land or in preventing and punishing interpersonal violence, was discharged principally through the sheriff courts and justice ayres which had performed this function since the thirteenth century, but was also manifested through the private franchises of barony and regality that could be granted only by the king, were supervised by his courts through appellate procedures, and could be withdrawn if misused. The undoubted reality of private justice, formal and informal, and the recognition of local customs, such as the ‘laws of Galloway’ and the ‘law of Clan MacDuff’ in Fife, did not detract from the generality of the king’s law; indeed, a possible further reflection of the growing aspirations of royal power in the fifteenth century is the legislation which set aside such local customs and asserted that the kingdom was to be ‘reulit be oure soverane lordis ane lawis and commone lawis of the realme and be nain other lawis’.4
One feature of the common law that was beginning to change by 1500, however, was its decentralized administration. The king’s personal role as the fount of justice remained in place and was not discharged simply through local courts. Parliament remained a place at which justice might be done to those with complaints, and the king also heard such complaints in person or through his council. The pressure of other business in parliament meant that even in the fourteenth century private complaints were delegated to a committee appointed for the purpose while parliament was sitting; and in the fifteenth century there were also established sessions of council to deal not only with the unfinished parliamentary judicial business, but also with new cases arising in the interim. By the time of James III, the pressure on council from judicial business was such that further devices for its deflection were being sought; and in the reign of his son a specialist group of councillors was emerging to deal with this work. This was the origin of what would become in the sixteenth century the principal court of the Scottish common law, known to still later generations as the Court of Session. The development was not the outcome of a desire to replace the decentralized medieval system with a centralized one, however, but rather the result of expedients adopted to deal with work which was perhaps increasing in quantity but which none the less had been coming for the king’s attention for some centuries before 1500.
World History
