The Conflict Between the Crown and the Barons

The first two Stuart kings had been feeble rulers, and though the elder Albany was a strong man, his position, and possibly his personal ambitions, prevented him from suppressing the feudal anarchy which threatened the monarchy and paralyzed the central administration. James I., who was released on payment of a ransom in 1424, was fearless and determined, and he resolved to establish order and good government—in his own words, to "make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush the cow." He was merciless in his treatment of the great barons, and he roused many enemies. He tried to find support for his reforms in widening the membership of the Great Council or Parliament by establishing a representative system for the lesser barons whose technical obligation to attend its meetings had never been enforced, but the statute passed in 1428 for this purpose was inoperative. None the less, the parliaments of the reign passed a long series of beneficent legislative measures; the king's diffi culty lay in enforcing them. In 1437 he fell a victim to a con spiracy organized by the earl of Athol, a relative who, if the legitimacy of Robert III. had not been recognized, would have been the rightful occupant of the throne. His son and successor James II. (1437-60) was a child of six, and the advance made by the central government during the personal rule of James I. was lost in the intrigues and factions of a minority. When James II. began his personal rule, the great House of Douglas, in spite of sustaining a severe blow by the murder of its young chief in the course of the royal minority, was a grave danger to the supremacy of the Crown. James found a pretext for invading the Douglas dominions while the 8th earl of Douglas was on a pilgrimage to Rome, and Douglas, on his return, made a league with his three brothers, Archibald, earl of Moray, Hugh, earl of Ormond, and John, lord of Balveny, and with a great northern magnate, the earl of Crawford. The king heard of the league and sent for Douglas to Stirling Castle, giving him a safe-conduct. The earl refused to break the bond into which he had entered, and James, losing his temper, stabbed him and wounded him fatally (Feb. 1452). An obedient parliament found that the Earl was "guilty of his own death by resisting the king's gentle persuasions to aid him against rebellious subjects," but the murder was necessarily the signal for a final conflict between the Crown and the House of Douglas. James defeated the Douglases on the battlefield and captured their strongholds, and the 9th earl fled to England to reappear in Scotland in the next reign.

Recovery of Southern Scotland.

The Douglases had been involved in many intrigues with England, but they had played a notable part in the recovery of southern Scotland, and by the year 1460 this task had been completed except for the town of Berwick-on-Tweed and the castle of Roxburgh; the town of Roxburgh, once one of the leading Scottish burghs, had been entirely destroyed in the course of more than i6o years of almost continuous warfare. The outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in England afforded a suitable opportunity for the recovery of the castle, and James besieged it in the summer of 146o. He himself, interested in the growing use of artillery, was watching the operations of his gunners, when he was hit and killed by "a piece of mis-framed gun that brak in the shooting," and Scotland was again plunged into the woes of a minority. Roxburgh Castle was taken a few days after the king's death, and with the expul sion of the English from Scotland, the real reason for the Franco Scottish alliance had come to an end. While the English held large portions of France and of Scotland alike, an alliance of their two enemies was inevitable, and James I. had repeated the Scottish refusal of English offers of friendship on condition of Scottish neutrality in the French war. The Scots had rendered greater military assistance to the French than they had received from them, but it was the French who bore the brunt of the conflict against the common enemy, and, in negotiations with the English, they never failed to protect Scottish interests. By 146o the alliance had served the purpose for which it was formed; the English held only Calais in France and Berwick in Scotland.

The Reign of James III.

During the minority of James III.

(146o-88), the Scots took advantage of the civil war in England to obtain the cession of Berwick-on-Tweed from Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI., giving in return some help to the Lancastrian cause. Edward IV. retaliated by an intrigue with the Lord of the Isles, but the Scots recognized the accomplished fact of Yorkist supremacy in England and a truce was made in 1463 and converted into a peace in 1464. During the first years of the minority of James III., Scotland was ruled by a states man, Bishop Kennedy of St. Andrews, and though there were troubles after his death, the young king, when he assumed the government in 1469, began his reign in fortunate conditions. There was peace with England ; his father had destroyed the perilous greatness of the Douglases; his marriage with Anne of Denmark led to the recovery of the Orkney and Shetland islands, which had been Scandinavian for centuries ; and the prestige of the kingdom was enhanced by the creation of the metropolitan see of St. Andrews in 1472. Four years later the Lord of the Isles was reduced to submission by an army led by some of the great barons whose ambitions had hitherto been dangerous to the Crown. Yet James III. was one of the most unfortunate of the Stuart kings. His nobles complained that he "delighted mair in music and policy of building than in the government of his realm," and they preferred his brother, the duke of Albany. The brothers quarrelled, Albany fled to France, and James was suffi ciently unwise to break the peace with England, where the 9th earl of Douglas was still in receipt of an English pension. With Douglas as an intermediary, Edward IV. made a treaty with Al bany for his establishment on the Scottish throne as an English vassal, and for the restoration of the House of Douglas. Albany, calling himself Alexander, king of Scots, led an army to the Borders, accompanied by Richard, duke of Gloucester (after wards Richard III.). Gloucester retook the town and castle of Berwick-on-Tweed, which thus passed finally out of Scottish hands (1482), and Albany invaded Scotland. The army which James led to meet him brought about a revolution ; the nobles, under the leadership of the earl of Angus, the head of the Red Douglases who had risen on the ruins of the older or Black Douglases, seized and hanged the musicians and architects who were the king's friends, and made an agreement with Albany. The amusing story of how Angus gained his nick-name, Archi bald-Bell-the Cat, is told in Scott's Tales of a Grandfather. In the following year, Albany was again an exile in England, and in 1484 he and Douglas again invaded Scotland with a small English force, but were defeated. Albany escaped to France, where he was killed in a tournament in 1485, and the 9th and last earl of Douglas died a prisoner in the monastery of Lindores.

Four years later James III. was killed in a civil conflict. The faction of the nobility which conspired against him and defeated him at Sauchieburn, near Stirling (June 1488), had seized the person of his son and heir, the prince of Scotland, and brought him to the field against his father. This circumstance indicates the permanent character of the change in Scottish politics brought about by the victory of James II. over the Douglases. Neither of the two rebellions against James III. was directed against the dynasty, and each of them was the result of widespread political opposition to the king's conduct of public affairs, and not of secret conspiracies inspired by jealousy of the House of Stuart. It is also significant that, in 1488, the rebels made a defence of their action on political grounds; rebellion, for the first time, ad mittedly required an excuse capable of being stated openly. The revolution was followed by indications of a tendency towards constitutional government and an assertion of parliamentary authority, but this tendency did not survive the assumption of power by James IV. (1488-1513) in person. He was an able and strenuous ruler, and he soon acquired complete control over the traditionally amenable Scottish parliament. He humbled rebellious barons, who, either as partisans of the late king, or for other reasons, resisted him, and he annexed to the Crown the title of Lord of the Isles and by personal visits established royal authority in the Hebrides.