fifteenth-century Scotland was a very violent society. It was also a very fragmented one. Neither of these things make it particularly unusual. External threats and internal rivalries bedevilled fifteenth-century European monarchs, papal and secular; and the Scottish Highland—Lowland divide, much exaggerated in any case by the rival schools of tartan romanticists and searchers for excessive disorder, did not notably differentiate Scotland from the France of the independent lordships and great appanages or the Empire of multifarious German principalities. Nevertheless, a period which begins in 1406 with the death of a lamentable king, Robert III, and ends in 1513 with the death of one of the most outstandingly successful ones, the ‘glore of princelie governyng’, James IV, does mark Scotland out. For the end of every reign, whether it had been a failure or a success, produced the same outcome: another collapse of royal authority, another dismal decline into faction-ridden minority. Whether at the hands of their subjects, a faulty cannon or the English, the early deaths of the Stewart kings, their consistent inability to survive to see their sons grow up, created a problem which could not be put down to the instability caused by competing claimants — from rival popes to rival kings for the thrones of France, England or Castile — or by power-hungry princes and magnates. It marked a visible and enduring flaw in the senior line of the royal house of Stewart itself.
If one problem about fifteenth-century Scotland, was the recurrent minorities which were unparalleled in any European kingdom, another, which has perplexed historians of late as well as early medieval Scotland, is its paucity of literary remains. One only has to contrast Scotland with Ireland to see in stark terms the difference; even the Welsh in the early period outdid the Scots. The poverty of institutional records, compared to the increasingly lavish outpouring of French and English clerks, is a rather different issue, relating more specifically to the way in which government was expected to work. But the comparatively small corpus of literary works poses a very perplexing problem. As fifteenth-century Scotland was manifestly not a backward and unsuccessful society, there has been a tendency among historians and literary scholars to concentrate on highlighting what there was, rather than asking why there was not more; and anyone ruminating on its poets from James I to Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, or its chroniclers like Andrew of Wyntoun and the great Walter Bower, may wonder about the idea of paucity. Yet after Bower completed his work in the late 1440s, there was nothing but the most patchy of chronicles until the writing of narrative history was taken up again in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Moreover, in seeking to understand the mentalite of fifteenth-century Scotland, historians have naturally emphasised the nationalism of Wyntoun and Bower, and their late fourteenth-century predecessor, Fordun, chroniclers who extolled the courage and valour of the Scots who fought off the threat from their imperialist and mighty neighbour, and the great epic poets, Barbour, writing in the 1370s, and Blind Hary, a century later. And to that apparently determined literary Scottishness can be added the work of William Elphinstone, late fifteenth-century bishop of Aberdeen, and one of the most inspiring and charismatic of them all, who, replacing the Sarum Use with a new Scottish liturgy, and reviving the cult of Scottish saints, raised the number in the calendar from a mere handful to over seventy. At first sight, it appears impressive. But what does it actually amount to?
Surely we are faced here with a very curious phenomenon: the kingdom of Scotland failed profoundly to create a corpus of material which would distinguish and enhance the nation. From the end of the thirteenth century, the Wars of Independence offered wonderful material for patriotic writing — and inspiring employment for the inhabitants of monastic scriptoria. Yet no monastery ever built up a tradition of chronicle writing. Melrose and Holyrood had produced one each before the fourteenth century, but neither was specifically a history of Scotland. We are then faced with the puzzle that success against the English, which was certainly a matter for pride, was not a matter for literary record until the 1370s and the writing of the first of the two great epics, Barbour’s Brus, and the 1380s when John of Fordun, having gone on an extended tour of Britain to find material for his history, established the myth that the wicked Edward I had removed all Scottish chronicle evidence. Edward I was no doubt guilty of a great deal, but not of this particular crime. It was the Scots who were silent about Scottish history.
It is just possible that in the early and mid-fifteenth century, Andrew of Wyntoun, prior of Lochleven, and Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, may have intended to establish a tradition of the writing of national history, building on the work of Barbour; their work, however, was not followed up. There was an abridged version of the Scotichronicon, the LiberPluscardensis written in the 1460s, whose name associates it with the abbey of Pluscarden, but which was more probably produced at Dunfermline. And in the 1470s, the second great epic of the Wars of Independence, the Wallace, was produced by Blind Hary. In their own right, these works are impressive. Barbour’s famous lines, beginning ‘A! Fredome is a noble thing’, ring down to us. Fordun and Wyntoun had a clear sense of their mission to show Scotland’s importance as a free kingdom in the wider context of the history of Christendom. Bower’s memorable colophon ‘Non Scotus est Christe cui liber non placet iste’ certainly gives point to the idea of national history. And Hary’s Wallace, less historical, more mythical than the other works, still extols and raises to a new level of heroic legend one of the great heroes of the Wars of Independence. But can one create, out of five authors spread over a century, a ‘Scottish’ interest in nationhood and national identity?
The problem is only compounded when one considers the patronage of these works; for one certainly cannot identify royal interest. Barbour did receive a pension in 1378 from Robert II, grandson of the great Robert Brus, which may have been for the writing of the Brus. Robert, first of the Stewart kings and one of the most dismal of the line, undoubtedly needed all the help he could get; but that was a personal interest. And the patrons of Wyntoun, Bower and Hary were not kings at all, but members of the lesser nobility: Sir John Wemyss of Kincaldrum, Sir David Stewart of Rosyth and, in the case of Hary, Sir William Wallace of Craigie and Sir James Liddale of Halkerston. In the later fifteenth century, when evidence for the copying of manuscripts begins to pile up, we find a Fifeshire vicar commissioning the Brus, and a group of lairds and clerics buying their Scotichronicon. James III, on the other hand, possessed a splendid copy of Vergil, and commissioned the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. We do not know if he read his Vergil; but he evidently preferred the racy light relief of the Travels to the glories of Scotland’s history. As the first king since Alexander III in the thirteenth century to pursue a policy of firm peace with England, Scottish heroes in the fight against the long-standing enemy and tales of the wicked Edward I were perhaps not entirely to his taste. Nevertheless, it is a little surprising that the hard-won independence and achievements of his kingdom were apparently of so little interest to him, or to his less Anglophile ancestors and successor.
The patronage and purchase of the ‘nationalist’ works therefore show a few writers satisfying some of the members of the lower nobility. But the problem does not end there. Barbour may, at least in part, have been writing to shore up the faltering beginnings of Stewart rule, just as Blind Hary may have composed his work to remind the pro-English James III that England was indeed the enemy. And if Bower is best remembered for extolling his nation’s history, he was in fact as interested in the failures as in the successes of the nation’s kings. It is therefore possible to see in the patriotic works a concern not so much for national achievement as for kingship. This prompts the conclusion that a distinctly curious feature of Scottish society was its casual and confident sense of its success, a sense which required no fuss and panoply, but was, apparently, taken for granted. It also suggests another line of enquiry. Switching the focus from ‘nationhood’ to ‘kingship’ brings us to that focal point of Scottish society, the monarchy. And here, lack of propaganda and image making becomes a very specific issue.
What is striking about the fifteenth-century kings is their almost consistent failure to indulge in any sort of ideological underpinning. They did nothing to encourage a concept of national identity, and certainly nothing to link such a concept to themselves. Nor did they attempt to bind their subjects to a monarchy which was either ancient or divinely ordained. They did nothing for their sacerdotal image: there was no Scottish ‘Royal Touch’. Nor did they invoke ancient ancestry. In the late sixteenth century, George Buchanan boasted with pride that the two oldest monarchies in Europe were those of Denmark and Scotland, but it was not a theme whose value was recognised by the Stewart kings. Barbour apparently composed an ancestry for them, the Stewartis Orygenale, a work now lost, and curious in that it traced them back to the Trojans, when every self-respecting Scotsman knew that his origins lay in ancient Greece and Egypt, the Greeks being the conquerors of the Trojans who had ultimately found their way to England. The problems which beset the Stewart kings might well have encouraged them to underwrite their kingship with stirring and prestigious myth. Instead, they emphasised the fact that their origins were all too recent, and anything but heroic. As one Jacobus Seneschallus (James Stewart) succeeded another, so the reality was restated: that the origins of the royal house of Stewart lay in a family who had been household stewards, initially to the counts of Dol in Brittany. To this day the prince of Wales numbers among his titles ‘Steward of Scotland’, a reminder of the propaganda his ancestors did use; the stewards of the household had become stewards of the kingdom. But even that was casual and sporadic; and it had nothing to do with an ideology of kingship which stressed either antiquity or divinity.
These are not the only examples of the perplexing indifference of the monarchy to the propagandist techniques of more mighty kings. The ‘nationalist’ writers, with their emphasis on kingship, take us into the field of specula principis. Here again, the crown held itself aloof. That may appear to be understandable; do kings want to be lectured? Yet the normal answer seems to be yes, if only for the propaganda value of appearing to aspire to an ideal. Thus the late medieval kings of Scotland stand in marked contrast to their English counterparts, every one of whom, from Edward III to Edward IV, received at least one book of advice to princes. In Scotland, such works were certainly in circulation. But although James I had some fairly lofty things to say about the impartial justice he would offer, as a cloak for the ruthless establishment of his authority after eighteen years’ imprisonment in England, and for the equally ruthless acquisition of his subjects’ lands, it was not he who encouraged Bower to write about the just king, even though Bower was prepared to praise his rule. Gilbert Hay’s mid-fifteenth-century Buke of the governance of princes, a translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretolum, was written for William Sinclair, earl of Orkney. The highly critical Threprestis of Peblis and Lancelot of the laik — both written in the mid-fifteenth century — were not ‘royal’ works. Nor were Robert Henryson’s Morall fabillis, with their comments on kingship. Despite the reference to ‘My soverane Lord, sen thou hes gevin me leif ’ in the anonymous poem The harp, which was attached to Liber Pluscardensis, the most recent discussion rejects the idea that it was in fact a work commissioned by James II. And Book VII of John Ireland’s Meroure of wyssdome, described as 'the closest approximation to a true speculum', being written for James IV, has been shown to borrow so massively from Gerson as to ‘erode somewhat its evidential value . . . for the indigenous history of political ideas in late medieval Scotland’, important though it was. Once again, the monarchy emerges as unusual; not until James VI wrote Basilikon doron for his son Henry did it come into line. Meanwhile other, lesser patrons did their best to show their kings how to rule wisely. There is no evidence that their kings paid much attention.
Strenuous efforts have been made to show that, even if they were not concerned with specula principis as such, there was at least a flourishing and vibrant court culture. Indeed there was — for some of the time. But it is very difficult to show the crown as a literary patron, certainly before 1488; and in any case there was, for long periods, no court, during the years of absentee or minority kingship. When adult kings ruled, they did indeed put up a reasonable show. A major criticism of James I, for example, was that taxation raised for his English ransom went instead on luxuries for the court. In 1448, Jacques de Lalain and two companions came to Scotland from that model of court life, Burgundy, to fight against Sir James Douglas and two other Scottish knights in a tourney in the presence of James II, who knighted them, and presided with pomp and ceremony, even if the actual fighting degenerated into an unchivalric brawl. We know less about James III, since the old legend of his cultural and artistic tastes, exemplified by his ‘low-born favourites’, was laid convincingly to rest; even that architectural glory, the Great Hall of Stirling, was not his work, but that of his son James IV, who followed up the legacy of his great-grand-father and grandfather at Linlithgow and Falklands by building at both Stirling and Holyrood. But James III was no exception to another Stewart enthusiasm: guns, that supreme status symbol which had proved fatal to James II at the siege of Roxburgh in 1460. And to that interest, James IV added another, ships. He spent vast sums on a navy which was not to be used for the benefit of the Scottish crown, being sent to France in 1513. The greatest ship, the Great Michael, was a source of immense pride to its builder, and the envy of his brother of England, Henry VIII, whose Henri Grace a Dieu was constructed to the same scale.
Their courts were naturally a centre for scholars and writers. They were not devoid of literature; indeed, James I himself was almost certainly a poet, author of the Kingis quair. But only James IV clearly emerges as the king who most visibly sought to rival his fellow monarchs in the range of his patronage and court display. His marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503 was made the occasion for all the splendour of a royal entry into the capital, thus enabling the Scottish ruler belatedly to catch up with a fashion already familiar in western Europe, adopted in France and England, for example, by the end of the fourteenth century. And it was in James’s reign that ‘court poetry’ at last clearly emerges, notably in the person of the brilliant William Dunbar. Accident and good luck that may have been; but as with his ships, so with his poetry in this period did the Scottish king and his court outshine England, provoking the embittered and savage anti-Scottish satire of that failed court poet, John Skelton. Before that, we catch only glimpses of the cultural life of the court. And in terms of what kings themselves encouraged, the prevailing impression is of an interest in the symbols of power.
In any event, the obvious criteria for successful kingdoms, a strong monarchy — even if personified by some less than strong monarchs — presiding over a people encouraged by royal propaganda, outside threat, or both, to identify with the nation’s divinely ordained king, do not readily apply to Scotland. Of course no country in fifteenth-century Europe achieved the ideal. The point about the Scots, and particularly the Scottish kings, is how little they tried. It was not that the Scots did not take immense pride in themselves; ‘fier comme un ecossais’ was a phrase bandied about by the early sixteenth century. But the source of that pride was astonishingly prosaic and low-key, significantly lacking any firm ideological concept or base. When pushed, they could produce one. The Scottish origin myth erupted into full-grown form, without any obvious earlier development, under pressure from Edward I; it was simply lifted, when needed, from the Irish Lebor Gabal Erenn, and given enchanting pictorial representation a century and a half later in the delightful illustration in a Fordun manuscript of the 1440s, showing Scota and Gathelos sailing to Scotland, wearing highly fashionable Burgundian hats. The claim that Scotland was an independent kingdom, free from English overlordship, produced one of the most moving of all medieval conceptions of the community of the realm, the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. But these were the crisis moments. In general, both the crown and the ‘nation’ had remarkably little to say about themselves; and even opponents of kings were amazingly casual about self-justification, in each case to a degree which, when compared with England, France, Aragon or Castile, raises perplexing questions about fifteenth-century Scotland, and at the same time offers a clue to understanding.
Inevitably, historians of Scotland have tried to demonstrate the success of the kingdom in terms of contemporary experience. That has involved straining to extract ‘modern’ fashion out of very limited evidence. A better starting-point is a much earlier model, the relationship between centre and periphery in early medieval England. Subjects, as James VI and I was later to remind his exasperated and faithful English Commons, were bound by love to support their monarch. In the seventh century, that meant that they fed him. In the ‘centre’, the area of the normal royal circuit, they did this by hospitality; they killed the necessary cow, and gave the king dinner. In the periphery, the same rule operated, but the king was much less often seen. And in the outlying areas, the subjected kingdoms, they sent the cow to the king. Thus those at the centre actually met the king, great lord and great patron; the dinner was the chance to advise, to bargain and seek reward. Those in the periphery had much less opportunity, but were correspondingly less burdened. And in the outlying areas, grudging acquiescence at best, resentment at worst, were what accompanied the cow which the king took from them; but refusal might bring the king in person — and then not as patron, but in force.
It may seem a little odd to invoke an early medieval model for late medieval Scotland. But to what was becoming an increasingly exceptional degree, effective Scottish kingship was still peripatetic kingship. Every part of that three-tier model does have its parallel in Scotland, with the Highlands and borders representing not only the geographically far-flung, but also the least politically integrated areas of the kingdom, where royal control might indeed mean kings arriving with armies at their backs, as James I did, provocatively, against Alexander Macdonald, lord of the Isles, in 1428, and James IV in a series of expeditions to the western seaboard in the 1490s, in the course of which the lordship itself — sub-kingdom or semi-independent Celtic province, like late medieval Brittany — was suppressed. Such actions did not resolve the ‘Highland problem’. To a very real extent, an overactive crown began to create the ‘Highland problem’ which was to be fully in evidence by the end of the sixteenth century. It started with intermittent military attacks on the structure of Highland society, and went on to attempt to transfer power from the Macdonalds to the rising families of Campbell and Gordon; it established lieutenancies, held by the earls of Argyll in the west and Huntly in the north-east, these increasingly powerful magnates who crossed the boundaries of Highland and Lowland and might therefore bring the Highlands under closer royal control. But even by 1513, despite Fordun’s famous division of Scotland into two peoples, the wild (Highland) and domesticated (Lowland) Scots, and anti-Gaelic jokes, notably by Richard Holland in the mid-fifteenth century Buke of the Howlat, and then Dunbar in the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the differences and antagonism between Highland and Lowland society were by no means as clear-cut as they were later to become. The justice of the feud, for example, was not a barbaric survival among the Gaelic clans, but a workable and effective Scottish system, based as much on obligations of Lowland kinship and lordship as Highland; and the language of that justice drew on both Celtic and English terms. ‘Assythment’, the word for compensation given in settlement of feud, is middle English, but ‘slains’, used to describe the letter given by the aggrieved party acknowledging the assythment, is Celtic slainte, a legal guarantee or indemnification. Similar duality occurs in the language and procedures of the courts. And that perfectly well-known Scots word ‘tocher’ (dowry) was the Gaelic word used in the Middle Ages to translate maritagium. James IV himself, according to the Spanish ambassador Pedro d’Ayala, spoke at least some Gaelic, although we do not know whether this meant more than a few basic phrases. And his lieutenant, Archibald earl of Argyll, and his son Colin, were patrons of Gaelic literature, and may have had bardic training. This is a century before James VI, in his desire to show the English how congenial the Scots were, came to see Highland society per se as a distinct and unwanted embarrassment; even then, not all his contemporaries agreed with him, and historians should be wary of taking his word for it as a general comment on Highland/Lowland relations. The real point, in the fifteenth century, was an expansionist crown bent on extending its control, and using the ancient language of the sword, sometimes wielded personally by the king, and sometimes through royal commissions; for the Scottish crown invoked language as violent as the most violent of its feuding subjects, and issued letters of fire and sword.
Less dramatically, the justice of the eyre, last attempted in England in the 1330s, continued in Scotland in the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth as well; and the really successful eyres were those ‘driven’, in the periphery as well as the remotest areas, by kings. That is a clue to the respective fates of the static James III (1460—88) and the peripatetic James IV (1488—1513). The attempt of the first to remain in Edinburgh and run government from there was a significant reason for his failure. The second travelled his kingdom regularly and restlessly, dragging councillors and justices after him; and there is no doubt of the popularity and success of this energetic and charismatic man. Both kings died violent deaths. James III was killed in battle against rebellious subjects. James IV made the one serious mistake of his life when in 1513 he offered battle to the English; for English armies defeated Scottish ones, except on the one occasion when it really mattered, Bannockburn in 1314, and wise kings usually found other ways of dealing with English imperialists than by fighting them. Yet when this king was hacked down in the rain and mud of Flodden in 1513, he was at the head of an army generally agreed to be unusually large, and drawn from all parts of his kingdom: a testimony — if ultimately a tragic one — to the success of his kingship.
By that time, Edinburgh was the undisputed capital of Scotland. This trite and obvious statement, in terms of London or Paris, or that most spectacularly successful of all medieval centres of centralising power, Rome, becomes neither trite nor obvious in the context of Scotland. Despite the fact that it was undoubtedly the largest town in late medieval Scotland, Edinburgh achieved its position as capital remarkably late. James I, in the thirteen years of his personal rule (1424—37), preferred Perth; all but two of his parliaments and general councils were held there, the exceptions being one at Stirling, the other in Edinburgh. The fact that he was murdered there may have created a certain disenchantment in the mind of his successor; even so, James II’s parliaments were divided between Edinburgh (thirteen), Stirling (nine) and Perth itself (six). Only in the reign of James III did Edinburgh become for the first time the undoubted seat of the king’s government; and although James IV did not reverse the process as far as parliament and the supreme civil court, the Session, were concerned (though the court had been peripatetic for the first half-century after it came into being in 1425), he took personal royal government and criminal justice back into the localities. That is one reason why the early medieval model works for a society flourishing 800 years later. It has nothing to do with being socially or culturally backward. Rather, it is because the most effective of its kings saw a value in thinking of the ‘centre’ in terms of the royal circuit, in their efforts to impose their rule. In Scotland, there had simply not yet developed, to anything like the extent it had done in England, the separation of the person of the king and the king’s government, so that the institutions of government and justice — the exchequer, for example, which remained an event held wherever convenient — were far less tied to the ‘capital’, whether the king was there or not. It was a style of kingship which worked — in this kingdom.
It was not, however, a style which has made it easy for historians. Scholars infinitely prefer monarchs like Henry VII, who kept and signed their account books, to casual kings like James III, who died leaving an unquantified ‘treasure’ stuffed into black boxes, one of which he was careless enough to take on to the battlefield at Sauchieburn, where it was picked up by his victorious opponents who promptly went off to look for more. There is no evidence about how he amassed it, or how much he amassed. But there is surely here another echo from the past. Otto I has been described as doing ‘as much justice as he dared, but it was never cheap’; thus when those in the north heard in 952 that he was returning from Italy, everyone settled with his adversary as soon as possible, so that he would find nothing to judge. In fifteenth-century Scotland, the justice of the feud survived because of its effectiveness in containing violence in the localities, and because the crown, recognising its value, co-operated with the kin and the lord who enforced settlements and compensations by giving remissions where the injured party pronounced itself satisfied. But to leave it there understates the strenuously interventionist power of the Stewart kings. For fifteenth-century Scotsmen could not, like tenth-century Saxons, settle to avoid the king’s justice; they settled — and paid the king. This gives point to the terse little entry in the exchequer rolls for 1435 which records payment for six pounds of wax for sealing remissions — remissions in the reign of James I, that king whose propaganda about impartial justice was believed by later historians to equal reality. In 1473—4, the crown got almost £13,000 for remissions, prompting the question whether it was from this kind of source that James got his treasure, and suggesting why his parliaments were so particularly critical of his sale of remissions, collected by the king who did little else to fulfil his judicial role. Undoubtedly it was a profitable business; compositions — including remissions — brought James IV £29,000 in 1507 and £ 31,000 in 1511. Royal justice was not the justice that is blind or anything like it. It was personal, often violent, and regularly profitable. Small wonder, then, that contemporary writers, like Bower and the author of The Harp, howled for impartial justice. Small wonder that kings on the make did not commission their works.
The subject of the Scottish feud has, however, a wider aspect. The crown did not simply reinforce the justice of the feud and extract its cut. It was also the regular instigator of the great political feuds: James I against his Stewart relatives; James II and the Black Douglases; James III and a good number of the political nation, at one time or another; James IV and the lord of the Isles, and, intermittently, the earl of Angus. And as well as these conflicts, there was also the crown against a series of lesser men, the Erskine claimants to the earldom of Mar in the reigns of James I and II, the Crichtons and the Gordons with their claim to the earldom of Moray in the early 1450s. The Stewart kings were supreme manipulators of the balance of power in the state, creating as well as resolving conflict.
Two ultimately got it badly wrong. James I destroyed his chances of playing off the two sides of the great Stewart kin-group, the descendants of the two marriages of Robert II, when he brought down his closest relatives, Albany Stewarts, in 1425. When he went on to threaten the other side, notably in rendering its head, the aged Walter, earl of Atholl, insecure in his own possessions, he sealed his fate; in 1437 he was the victim of a coup d’etat in which Atholl made common cause with partisans of the Albany Stewarts, clearly intending to seize power for himself, at least as lieutenant for the six-year-old James II. The inefficiency of the conspirators was astonishing. They murdered James I before bothering to secure the person of James II; and they failed to kill the queen, the redoubtable Joan Beaufort, who escaped ‘yn hir kirtell’, to exact terrible revenge. James III consistently attacked and undermined powerful men without ensuring the counterbalancing support of others. His arbitrary dismissal of his long-serving chancellor, Colin, earl of Argyll, in February 1488, was the catalyst for the successful coalition which fought and killed him at Sauchieburn in June. They did not repeat the mistake of Atholl and his associaties; this time the heir to the throne was in the hands of the king’s opponents, and at the nominal head of their army.
Yet these kings had had a long run of arbitrary rule before they were finally brought down, challenged because of their immense strength, not because of weakness. The challenge was political, violent and personal. The Stewart dynasty as such was not threatened. Nor was any real effort made to justify these events. James I was apparently described as a tyrant at the moment of his squalid death in a privy; James III’s opponents felt obliged to fight when the king broke his agreement with them, and the new regime of James IV managed to put together a little propaganda about the dead king threatening to bring in the English. But it was pathetic stuff compared to the ‘vox populi, vox Dei’, which thundered out in justification for what happened to Edward II of England, or the rationale later surrounding the usurpation of Henry IV. Only with the deposition of Mary in 1567 did the Scots produce a political theory to reinforce their action, and then only because they had to justify it to an out sider. They never saw the need, as the English did, to explain to themselves the resolution of that most complex of political problems, rule which had become unacceptable. In its abnormal moments, just as in its normal ones, Scottish political reactions were simpler, more uncluttered and direct.
The same was true the other way round. James II’s destruction of the mighty family of Douglas, whose estates and titles sprawled across Scotland, from the south-west to the north-east, was violent and bloody. He personally killed the eighth earl, William, and defeated his heir, James, in battle; and he did so with comparative ease, because he understood the nature of political faction, the way to appeal to those for whom Douglas power was a frustration or a threat. It was no accident that at the murder in Stirling castle in February 1452, those with the king, taking part in the killing, were a group of southern lairds who had every reason to resent the total domination of the Douglases in that part of the country. Nor is it surprising that the lavish royal patronage of the parliament of 1452 — some of it later withdrawn — persuaded men that a king determined on destruction was a better bet for their support than the object of his vengeance, so that the Douglases were left without allies when the final trial of strength came in 1455, at the battle of Arkinholm. In the law of the political jungle of fifteenth-century Scotland, the Scottish Lion — true to his heraldic device — reigned supreme.
Indeed, the nature of Scottish political society highlights sharply an issue obscured by more ‘developed’ societies: that in the end, successful rule is a political and not a constitutional matter. By comparison with their French and English counterparts (though not, for example, with Scandinavian or German ones), Scottish institutions of government can be, and have often been, regarded as ‘weak’ and ‘backward’. But that moves the debate from the politically effective to the constitutionally and bureaucratically advanced. Even James I showed a certain caution in his demands for parliamentary taxation. It was a Scottish parliament in 1455 which told an acquisitive king, flush with the material benefits of the fall of the Douglases, that certain named lands, lordships and castles must be annexed to the crown, and never alienated by it. In 1473, another parliament bluntly told another king, James III, that he should forget his ideas of gaining glory by foreign military adventuring, but stay at home and win fame by the justice he offered his subjects; they failed on the second point, but won the first. And James IV’s evident desire, after 1495, to do without parliament as far as possible is hardly testimony to its political weakness. Nor can it be claimed that the council, increasingly professionalised in the reigns of James III and IV, lacked political energy and will. These bodies sought to restrain their kings, and sometimes succeeded. Crucially, what they did not do was to hedge Scottish kings and Scottish government about with constitutional constraints.
In a very real sense, therefore, there were no formal limitations on royal power in Scotland. The only one which was utterly unchallengeable was death. Perhaps, therefore, the sombre power of the picture of the death of a Scottish king in James IV’s Book of Hours is a very appropriate image, not in the sense in which older Scottish historians might have used it, to symbolise the weakness of the crown against that outworn concept, overmighty magnates, but as the one thing which actually did curtail the power of a Scottish king. And death came, violently and early, to all the fifteenth-century Scottish kings. There was political irony as well as political consequences in this. For an instinct for survival in a small kingdom, potentially and sometimes actually under threat from its more powerful neighbour, had led the Scots to state, at a very early stage, the concept that the king never died. It was there in the twelfth century, as the monarchy struggled out of the past of the tanist (the selected and named successor to the king) into the future of primogeniture. Doubts over the succession and the huge fright of the Wars of Independence produced the entailing of the crown, in 1281,1284,1318 and 1371 .And from 1329, when the five-year-old David II succeeded his father Robert Bruce, the crown never did die, for the regnal year of each new king was dated from the day of his father’s death — a practice not begun in England until 1483. For immediately political reasons, the political nation of Scotland gave its monarchy a permanence and a dynastic security which the monarchies of late medieval England and France might have envied.
But the ability to go to the political heart of that fundamental matter, succession to the throne, did not save the Scots from having the worst record of minorities in late medieval Europe. This was, indeed, a major factor in determining the nature of Scottish society. Historians have tended to accept the truth of the famous biblical text, ‘Woe unto thee, o land, when thy king is a child.’ In Scotland, the minorities were a saving grace.
Inevitably, they produced faction fighting; the first task for each king, as he came of age, was to get rid of the dominant faction, Albany Stewarts, Livingstones, Boyds. It gave them little trouble. They could tap the resentment created by an imbalance of power, just as James II did, more dramatically, when bringing down the Douglases, themselves beneficiaries of his minority as well as excessively powerful in their own right. And, paradoxically, the minorities enhanced the power of adult kings. If they created faction, they also diminished it; for their lamentable habit of dying young meant the absence of faction round an heir to the throne old enough to provide a serious counterpoise to the king. Whatever the intentions of his murderers, in a conspiracy which happened fast, James I’s heir was not himself a rival; the only king who seriously — and briefly — suffered from the problem of the heir was James III. And if Stewart kings failed to live long, they had the immeasurable advantage of having been kings from youth; most were barely aware of a time when they had not worn the crown. The full significance of this in terms of the confidence it gave them can only be guessed at; not until the reign of James VI did a monarch speak of the profound effect of having been a ‘cradle king’.
Moreover, it only took the experience of one ‘minority’ — the absence of James I, in English hands from 1406 to 1424 — to produce the expedient of the Act of Revocation, which every king passed thereafter when he came of age. Nothing more clearly shows the power of the crown, and the acceptance of that power by the aristocracy, than this amazing ‘deal’ by which kings revoked all grants made in their name during minority. The ‘deal’ certainly included the expectation that they would regrant what they had revoked; but they did not need to do so, and it was therefore the magnates, rather than the crown, who could be rendered insecure by the advent of minority. Yet that potential insecurity was far outweighed by the advantages of recurrent minorities. They, and they alone, provided a breathing-space from royal rule which was always harsh, even if occasionally leavened with the charisma of a James IV.
Thus fifteenth-century Scotland provides us with the paradox of exceedingly tough and effective kings ruling a decentralised kingdom, in which to an increasingly unusual degree local power could be exercised without challenge. It is, therefore, peculiarly appropriate that in European terms there are comparatively few records of central government, but an unrivalled wealth of documentation of local lordship, in the bonds of maintenance and manrent which articulated relationships between lords and their men from the mid-fifteenth century. These bonds clearly restated the concept hidden beneath the complexities of feudal lordship that such relationships depended on personal protection, loyalty and service, and not material reward. They could therefore simply give written expression to existing affinities, and as such became increasingly commonplace. But initially there were two particular motives for committing these agreements to parchment. One was that the families built up by the crown, like the Gordon earls of Huntly and the Hay earls of Erroll, in the shake-up of power after the fall of the Douglases, saw advantage to themselves in asserting their new superiority over former social equals by entering into these bonds. The other was to end feud, by establishing formal relationships between men as a symbol that reconciliation had been achieved. They were not therefore the product of a peaceful society, but of a violent one. Yet their intention was pacific. They were used to enhance established local power. There was no direct material advantage to those who made bonds of manrent and therefore no strong motive to seek more than one lord, even among those who made them under a degree of compulsion. Fifteenth-century Scottish lordship was therefore both simpler and more stable than its ‘bastard feudal’ counterparts. Affinities did indeed support their lords in their feuds. Equally, men could invoke the help of their lord in the resolution of their own. And it was an integral part of the concept of personal justice and arbitration that the feuds and disputes of men of equal status should be resolved by informal tribunals of their peers. The violence endemic in late medieval society, when men pursued their ambitions, their claims to land, by the sword as well as through patronage and the law, was not thereby eradicated. But it was local, and it was contained.
The existence of these bonds tells us much about the working of power in the localities, and the means of control. But it was not only the minorities which explain the survival of decentralisation and the power of lords and heads of kin, which depended far more on their position in their localities than any royal commission. In another way, Scotland was unique: it was not a country at war. In an age dominated by military glory, or humiliation, both of which had a direct connection with domestic success or failure, this again initially appears to be a sign of Scottish weakness. No doubt had fifteenth-century Scotsmen stopped to think about it, the fact that once the English had turned their attention to France, no one else was in the least interested in them, would have seemed humiliating. They did not, of course, think about it. The Hundred Years War gave plenty of opportunity for military adventure, with the additional bonus of allowing them to fight in France against their greatest enemy. In 1421, they won at Bauge. Three years later, the battle of Verneuil showed the full horrors of the risk; the earls of Buchan and Douglas were only the most notable among the heavy Scottish losses. But there were rewards. A grateful Charles VII gave the duchy of Touraine and county of Longueville to the earls of Douglas, and created the prestigious Scots Guard in 1445; ironically, the inhabitants of this nation at peace, not famed for much in Europe, habitually beaten in battle when — and wherever — they fought the English, were highly regarded for their courage and fighting skills. They got, on the cheap, the reputation which other countries sought at enormous cost.
That was not their only gain from this paradox. It led to the supreme achievement of being, unlike so many contemporary kingdoms, a state which never over-reached itself, in terms of overstraining the resources of the kingdom. Endemic warfare produced the regular taxation, the burgeoning administrative growth, of England and France. Scotland was burdened by neither. Scottish kings, during their adult rule, were as able to disturb their subjects, intervene, force their will, as any other monarch — and better at it than some. But they disturbed fewer people. Those closest to the crown might suffer as individuals. But it did not bear down on lesser people in the kingdom at large, or need to send its officials and tax collectors into reluctant and resentful localities, because it was not constantly on the search for men and money to support its wars. The effect of this, combined with the recurrent absence of direct royal rule, was to allow the concept of the community of the realm, called into conscious being by the succession crisis and threat from Edward I in the 1290s, to survive. At its most inspiring, it found expression in the Declaration of Arbroath; it found expression also in the law of treason, for in sharp contrast to the emphasis in the English act of 1352, where treason was defined as an attack on the person of the king, his wife and heir, in Scotland — as in France — treason was against king and ‘kynrik’, king and realm. This gives us a rare insight into a normally unrecorded phenomenon: that awareness of the source of authority was diffused, spreading out from the king to the kingdom, to the benefit of both; political tensions were not exclusively confined within the orbit of the crown. More prosaically, Scotland was, by absolute standards, a poor country. Yet in its own terms, it was a thriving one. It could satisfy its basic needs; the upper echelons of society could afford their luxuries; but the production of backbreaking surplus to meet royal ambition was not required.
Only for a brief moment, in the early 1470s, did James III threaten to disturb the resulting stability and equilibrium by proposing to lead armies into Brittany, Saintonge and Gueldres. He was the one Stewart king to dream the dreams which led Edward III in the 1330s to envisage an empire stretching from the Pentland Firth to the Pyrenees, Henry V to rule France and England, or Charles VIII to show off his artillery train in conquest in the Italian peninsula. But James’s ambition was small scale and unsupported. Intelligent Scottish kings had other ways of making their presence felt.
They were not actually important at the council tables of Europe. This mattered less, however, than their ability to act, for home consumption, as though they were. James II’s intervention in the dispute between Charles VII and his son Louis in 1459, and his efforts to reconcile France and Burgundy; James IV’s role in stage-managing the treaty between France and Denmark in 1499, and his sustained attempt to bring together the great powers of western Europe in a campaign against the Turk, all showed a confidence in their international position far greater than the reality of that position warranted, and had the obvious benefit of adding the aura of strength in Europe to strength at home. Their marriage alliances showed the same purpose. Apart from David II’s first marriage, every king between 1307 and 1406 married into Scottish noble families. No king thereafter stooped so low. In his particular circumstances — which may have included love — James I married an English noblewoman; but his daughters were married to the French dauphin, the duke of Brittany, the duke of Austria and the son of the lord of Campveere, while James II married Mary of Gueldres. This southwards look was balanced, in the case of James III, by his marriage to Margaret of Denmark, for diplomatically and economically Scotland’s links with Scandinavia were as important as those with France and the Low Countries, not least because the full extent of the Scottish kingdom, already enhanced by the annexation of the western isles from Norway, was achieved by the incorporation of Orkney and Shetland as a result of that marriage. Dealings with a Papacy struggling to reassert its prestige and authority after the Great Schism displayed the same aggressive confidence. Indeed, Scotland got its first university, St Andrews, in 1412, by supporting the antiPope Benedict XIII for just long enough, after he had lost all other allies, to get his approval for the foundation before abandoning him. And Scotland was the first kingdom to receive formal recognition of the right of the crown to nominate to the greater benefices; the Indult granted to James III in 1487 anticipated those subsequently given to Ferdinand and Isabel, and Francis I. No doubt Scotland had this distinction because the Papacy was more willing to give to the less important kingdom; but that was hardly a relevant consideration to the Scots.
This, surely, is what success was all about. The duke of Milan might tartly refuse to marry his daughter to James III’s heir, rather than send that daughter ‘so far off as Scotland would be’. Commynes could incorporate a dismissive little section on the violence of Scottish society, exemplified by the downfall of James III, into his much more interesting account of the death-throes of Yorkist kingship. But the Scots’ perception of themselves as Europeans, and important Europeans at that, was very real. An unknown group of visitors left a record of that perception, inscribing on the wall of the catacomb of San Callisto ‘MCCCCLXVII quidam Scoti hic fuerunt’. Rome itself was familiar territory, to clerics seeking benefices and laymen and women divorce, and to the Scottish lawyers who had enough business coming from home to live there; indeed, Scotland’s legal system, based mainly on Roman law, itself tied it into Europe. Two further universities, Glasgow and Aberdeen, were founded in the fifteenth century; but Scottish scholars continued to pour abroad to Paris, Louvain, Cologne, Montpellier and other places, for their higher degrees. Diplomatic negotiations widened trading links. Not only kings but many of their subjects knew a very simple truth: they lived on the fringes of Europe, and their only chance of being taken seriously was to spend time and energy on loud demands for attention. That is why an internalised ideological image of kingship was of so little importance to the Scottish crown. That is why the Scots so significantly failed to beat the nationalist drum. For such drum-beating is essentially inward-looking, even a cover-up for weakness. It was not that which primarily concerned the Scots, nor even their strenuous maintenance of their independence within the British Isles. What did can still be seen today, in the early sixteenth-century heraldic ceiling of St Machar’s cathedral, Aberdeen. Dedicated to a Celtic saint, the cathedral displays the arms of the burgh and university of Aberdeen, the bishops and nobles of Scotland, the king, the principal princes and dukes of Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. It was a very comprehensive vision, and an all-embracing selfimage.