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

in England. It began with a mad king, Charles VI, and the murder in the streets of Paris of his brother, Louis d’Orléans, by cut-throats in the pay of his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy. Civil war between the Orléanists (or Armagnacs) and the Burgundians followed. Then came an English invasion, supported by the Burgundians, the disaster of Agincourt and utter humiliation before a miraculous saviour appeared in the person of a shepherd girl from Lorraine, Joan of Arc. Thirty years later, a ‘strong’ king, Louis XI, found himself challenged in the ‘War of the Common Weal’ by a group of leading nobles, defending their traditional collective rights and privileges against the centralising policies of the Crown.
    The century to which the Dutch historian Huizinga gave the name ‘the Waning of the Middle Ages’ was disordered, bloody, violent. In Scotland, England and France alike, the penalty of political failure was often death by the dagger, sword or headsman’s axe.
    Nothing in Scotland, however, matched the horrors perpetrated in Paris in the summer of 1418 after the Burgundians seized control of the city and took their revenge on their Armagnac rivals. First, Bernard d’Armagnac, the Orléanists’ leader, and his associates in government were hacked to death. Two months later the fury of the mob was directed, not spontaneously, at foreigners: Bretons and Gascons, Lombards and Genoese, Catalans and Castilians, ‘in the absence’, as one French historian sardonically puts it, ‘of Jews. Stripped, mutilated, profaned, impaled, their bodies were thrown into the middle of the street as if they had been swine.’ The next year the Armagnacs had their revenge. The Duke of Burgundy was murdered by adherents of the Dauphin, the King’s eldest son, on the bridge over the Seine at Montereau; he had come there to negotiate a peace. There were like horrors in England: the murder of Richard II in Pontefract Castle in 1399, the summary execution of Richard, Duke of York, after the Battle of Wakefield; the murders of Henry VI, the Duke of Clarence and (almost certainly) the boy king Edward V and his younger brother Richard. All this should be borne in mind as the story of the five Jameses unfolds.
    When Henry IV was told that his young captive Prince James had been travelling to France only to further his education, he replied that this was unnecessary because ‘I speak good French myself.’ Actually it is probable that James could already speak the language: his mother, Annabelle Drummond, had been accustomed to correspond with his elder brother, David of Rothesay, in French. This need occasion no surprise. The now longstanding French alliance, as a result of which many Scots served in the French army – one of them, James Power or Polwarth, designing Joan of Arc’s banner – meant that the Scottish court and nobility were acquainted with the French tongue and well versed in French culture. Indeed, French influence is evident in many aspects of Scottish life throughout the Stewart period. In church and castle architecture France, not England, supplied the model. Young noblemen were often sent to France to further their education. French words entered the Scots language. The lords’ claret was poured from a ‘gardevin’ (wine jug) into a ‘tassie’ (cup), and their food was served on an ‘ashet’ ( assiette ). Scots law diverged from English common law and the foundations were laid in the fifteenth century of a Franco-Roman legal system, which, despite the vast accretions of statute law passed by the United Kingdom parliament since 1707, survives to this day. When universities were founded – St Andrews in 1412, Glasgow in 1455 and King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1495 – the model was the Sorbonne in Paris, not Oxford or Cambridge.
    Henry’s remark may have been a joke, but he did see to it that the education of the captive Prince was not neglected. James soon learned to read Latin for pleasure, and to write