THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE CROWN AND THE BARONS The Early Stuart Kings.—The War of Independence, and the subsequent warfare with England, deeply affected the relations between the Crown and the great baronial families. The distribu tion of the estates of the "disinherited" among Bruce's supporters was one of the causes of the dangerous greatness of the House of Douglas and of other Scottish families, and, in the course of the English wars, the Crown was frequently weakened by the premature deaths of monarchs and by the recurrence of minori ties. The initial weakness of the Crown, after the death of Robert I., was, however, due not to such accidents, but to the personality of his first three successors. David II. was a futile ruler and a worthless man, and the determination of the Scots to maintain their independence receives additional proof from the circumstance that his reign did not witness its loss. When he died in 1371, the nephew who succeeded him, Robert II. (1371--90), the first mon arch of the House of Stuart, was 55 years of age, and already worn out by a strenuous public life. His reign was largely spent in conflict with England, but he took no part in the warfare. Scot land had been included in truces between England and France, and when the Anglo-French struggle entered on a new phase in 1377, the Scots renewed their efforts to expel the English from the occupied country in the south, and their success provoked invasions by John of Gaunt and by Richard II., which resulted solely in devastations of Scottish soil. The best remembered in cident was the battle of Otterburn (1388), a chivalrous and ro mantic episode, but negligible as a military event. The next king, Robert III. (1390-1406), was a lame old man who with some reason described himself as "the worst of kings and the most wretched of men." His legitimacy was doubtful, and he made no effort to repress the disorders which were rampant in the country. During the early years of his reign the Government was in the hands of his younger brother, the earl of Fife, whom he created duke of Albany, but in 1399 his eldest son, the duke of Rothesay, ousted his uncle from the regency. There was a bitter feud be
tween Rothesay and Albany, the latter of whom recovered power in 1401. In the following year Rothesay died mysteriously at Falkland (the story is told in Scott's Fair Maid of Perth), and rumour, which has crystallized into tradition, ascribed his death to Albany. The old king was alarmed by the fate of his heir, and, early in 1406, he sent his remaining son, Prince James, to be edu cated in France. The boy was captured by the English at sea, and Robert III. died when the news reached him. The reign of James I. nominally covers the years 1406-37, but he was a prisoner in England till 1424, and during this period Scotland was governed by Albany until his death in 1420 and thereafter by his son, Mur doch, 2nd duke. The regency of the elder Albany witnessed the foundation of the first Scottish university (St. Andrews, 1411 ) partly an endeavour to repress the Lollard heresy which had reached Scotland—and the battle of Harlaw, which has frequently been misinterpreted as a decisive struggle between Celt and Saxon in Scotland. It was, in fact, a fiercely fought skirmish between Donald of the Isles, a grandson of Robert II., who claimed the earldom of Ross in right of his wife, a member of a Lowland family, and the burghers of Aberdeen, reinforced by the earl of Mar and other Aberdeenshire lairds. Donald, having defeated the Mackays and the Frasers, Highlanders who opposed his claim, was marching to plunder the town of Aberdeen. Like other dis affected Scottish barons, he had made an alliance with England, and Harlaw was an episode in Anglo-Scottish warfare. Albany made considerable progress in the recovery of southern Scotland from the English, and he also encouraged the recruitment of Scot tish soldiers for the struggle in France. In the year after his death the Scots rendered their most distinguished service to the French in helping to win the victory of Bauge (1421), the first French success since the invasion of France by Henry V. of England.