The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain Read Online Free PDF Page A

moribund English claim to overlordship. He invaded Scotland, met little resistance, occupied Edinburgh, and then withdrew, having in truth achieved little of substance, but having demonstrated the inability of young Rothesay to defend the kingdom. Discontent was now rife. Albany seized the chance to make a comeback, and compelled the King to consent to his son’s arrest. Taken in St Andrews, the young Duke was transferred to Falkland Castle – not yet the fine Renaissance palace that would later be constructed, but a grim keep. Within two months he was dead. The death of his nephew and rival was too convenient for Albany to be allowed to pass without comment, but he obliged the Council to issue a proclamation declaring that Rothesay had ‘departed this life through the divine dispensation and not otherwise’. Few can have been convinced, though most kept quiet. A generation later Bower wrote that the Prince had died ‘of dysentery or, as some have it, of starvation’. The same explanation had been offered in England two years previously for the death of the deposed Richard II in Pontefract Castle. In The Fair Maid of Perth , Scott, basing his account on John of Fordoun’s chronicle, has Rothesay murdered by Albany’s agents, though in the manner of the murder, they exceed their instructions. The intention had indeed been to starve the young man to death, but on investigation, ‘the dying hand of the Prince was found to be clenched upon a lock of hair, resembling, in colour and texture, the coal-black bristles of Bonthron. 3 Thus, though famine had begun the work, it would seem that Rothesay’s death had been finally accomplished by violence.’ Hector Boece, writing his history of the Scottish kings more than a hundred years later, was certain of Albany’s guilt. Rothesay was deliberately starved, and ‘brocht, finalie, to sa miserable and hungry appetite that he eit, nocht onlie allegedly, the filth of the toure quhar he wes, bot his awin fingaris: to his gret martyrdome’. The last vivid touch, if not true, is well and horribly invented.
    Scott’s version, based on these chroniclers, is dramatically convincing and politically persuasive. 4 The King was now over sixty and in poor health. Rothesay was his heir. Albany’s power, and perhaps his life, had been threatened by the prospect of his nephew’s succession to the throne. Rothesay was in his hands, and Rothesay did not survive. It requires considerable generosity of mind to acquit Albany of responsibility for his nephew’s death. There can be nothing surprising in his murder, any more than in the murder of Richard II at the command of his cousin and usurper Henry IV. Family feeling may easily be extinguished when power is the prize.
    King Robert, too weak to challenge his dominant brother, had little choice but to accept the official version of his son’s death. He now withdrew to Rothesay Castle on the Isle of Bute, an old Stewart stronghold, and surrendered the government to Albany. But he had a younger son, James, a boy of only eight when Rothesay died or was murdered. Two years later he was made Earl of Carrick, the old title of the Bruces, and it was decided to send him to France, ostensibly to complete his education. It is reasonable to suppose, as men did at the time, that the young heir to the throne was in fact sent away for his own safety. The King’s health was failing fast. What chance would the boy have with Albany as regent?
    This can only be supposition, yet there is some evidence to support it. Instead of taking ship at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, the young Prince was brought with an armed escort, commanded by an old friend of the King’s, Sir David Fleming of Cumbernauld, to the Bass Rock off the East Lothian coast, where he was to wait for a boat on its way from Leith to France. (There was then no Scottish navy.) The elaborate scheme suggests that there was some fear he might be prevented from boarding a vessel in Leith. He had to