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

wait a month on the Rock (more often used throughout Scottish history as a prison) until he was able to embark on a ship trading out of Danzig, which was carrying wool and hides to France. He never arrived there. The boat was intercepted and boarded by English pirates off Flamborough Head. They recognised the value of their catch, handed James over to Henry IV and were rewarded with the ship’s cargo. Did Albany have a hand in this? There is no evidence either to acquit him or prove his guilt. Is it significant that Sir David Fleming, on his way back from the coast, was attacked and killed by Sir James Douglas of Balveny? Albany may have been responsible; or again, not, with Fleming the victim of a private feud. What is certain is that the young Prince’s capture and imprisonment in England suited the Duke very well.
    Robert III survived the news of his son’s misfortune for only a few weeks. He died requesting to be buried in a midden with the epitaph ‘Here lies the worst of kings and most miserable of men’. The cause of death was sympathetically ascribed to that ailment beloved by historians and sentimental romancers but unknown to medical science: a broken heart. But since he was in his seventieth year, the true cause may have been more prosaic.
    The two Roberts had been ineffectual kings. Yet the dynasty was well established. James might be a prisoner in England, but his right of succession was recognised. Two months after Robert’s death, a Council of the Scottish Estates – the name given to the Scottish parliament at the point – named him king and authorised Albany to continue to act as lieutenant-governor of the realm. The Duke may have hoped to be king himself. If so, he lacked sufficient support. His government was therefore limited and provisional. When he died in 1420, at the age of eighty, he was succeeded as governor by his son Murdoch, who had himself spent some years in English captivity. But the rule of father and son was maintained only with the consent of the most powerful nobles, who made it clear that they owed allegiance to James and would not tolerate the usurpation of his throne. Just as when David II had been a prisoner in England, loyalty to the rightful king outweighed the inconvenience of his absence.

Chapter 4
    James I (1406–37): The Poet-King
    The great Cambridge historian F. W. Maitland wrote of ‘the mournful procession of the Jameses’. The judgement was uncharacteristically sweeping, uncharacteristically unfair also. Stewart kingship was far from being a failure. The times were violent. None of the five Jameses lived beyond the age of forty-three – in marked contrast to the ineffectual Roberts – but they were all men of unusual ability, capable of asserting themselves and subduing recalcitrant nobles. It was the misfortune of the dynasty, though not necessarily of Scotland, that the reigns of four of them began with a minority.
    Comparison with England and France serves, however, to put their troubled history in perspective. If two of the Jameses were murdered and two killed in battle, the years between 1399 and 1485 saw three English kings deposed and murdered, one mad, and another – believed to have murdered his own nephews – killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Moreover, for thirty years, 1455–85, England suffered intermittent civil war, on a scale far beyond anything Scotland experienced, and three changes of dynasty. Indeed it is arguable that what many constitutional historians have seen as an advantage enjoyed by England but denied to Scotland – the existence of a strong monarchy and a comparatively centralised state – actually provoked this instability. Since the king possessed bureaucratic machinery that might allow him to impose his will on the great territorial barons, they were more likely, if dissatisfied with the Crown’s policies, to combine to resist them and change the government.
    In France, the fifteenth century was even more terrible than