The Stewart Dynasty & Medieval Scotland

1. Robert II and the founding of the dynasty (1371–1390)

When David II died childless in February 1371, the crown passed to his nephew Robert Stewart, son of Walter, 6th High Steward of Scotland, and Marjorie Bruce (daughter of Robert I). Robert took his family name as his dynastic name, becoming the first Stewart king. He was already an old man by medieval standards — born 2 March 1316, he was 55 at his accession — having spent more than half a century as heir presumptive and, at times, as regent.

The traditional verdict was harsh: an ageing, ineffective monarch who let power slip to his sons. Modern scholarship, above all Stephen Boardman's The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406 (1996), has substantially revised this. Boardman argues that the early Stewarts should be judged within their political environment rather than against an ideal of forceful absolutism; Robert II inherited entrenched magnate power (the Douglases in the south, the Lordship of the Isles in the west) and governed pragmatically through his large family, placing sons and kinsmen in regional lordships. From 1384 government was exercised by his eldest son John, Earl of Carrick, and from 1388 by another son, Robert, Earl of Fife (the future Duke of Albany) — a delegation that reflected court politics as much as the king's capacity.

Robert's two marriages produced a very large family and sowed decades of succession complications. His marriage to Elizabeth Mure (c. 1348) legitimised four sons and five daughters born beforehand; his second marriage to Euphemia de Ross (1355) produced further sons and daughters. The legitimacy of the Mure children — and therefore the seniority of competing Stewart lines — remained a source of tension.

His reign also saw renewed Anglo-Scottish border warfare after the expiry of truces, culminating in the Battle of Otterburn (5 August 1388). A Scottish raiding army under James, 2nd Earl of Douglas, was intercepted in Northumberland by Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy. In a rare night engagement the Scots won, capturing Percy and his brother Ralph — but Douglas himself was killed. Otterburn passed into Border ballad tradition on both sides ("The Ballad of Chevy Chase"), though the chivalric details (Douglas capturing Hotspur's pennon and inviting him to reclaim it) belong more to Froissart's romance than to secure fact.

The new dynasty also wanted a pedigree. John Barbour, author of The Bruce, wrote a genealogy of the Stewarts for Robert II that is now lost; Wyntoun and Bower both saw it. According to Steve Boardman's reconstruction, it brought the family's ancestor Walter to Scotland from Wales and linked him to Trojan and ancient British kings, at the very time John of Fordun was rejecting Geoffrey of Monmouth's British history. Barbour's "Fleance" is evidently the historical Flaald, whose grandson Walter fitz Alan (d. 1177) arrived under David I. The later story of Fleance as son of Banquo, Macbeth's victim, first appears explicitly in Hector Boece in the early 16th century. It went on to reach Shakespeare, but it is not medieval history.

2. Robert III and a kingdom in crisis (1390–1406)

Robert II's heir was born John Stewart, but on his accession in 1390 he took the regnal name Robert III — conventionally explained as a wish to evoke Robert the Bruce and to avoid association with the deposed John Balliol (and, more loosely, the ill-regarded King John of England). He had been physically incapacitated, reportedly by a horse's kick around 1388, and was widely regarded as unfit to govern actively.

Real power was contested. His brother Robert, Earl of Fife (from 1398 Duke of Albany), governed as Lieutenant; from 1399 the king's ambitious son David, Duke of Rothesay, was made Lieutenant under conciliar supervision. Rothesay's high-handed conduct provoked a rupture with Albany. In 1401–02 Rothesay was arrested and imprisoned in Albany's Falkland, where he died in March 1402. Contemporary suspicion pointed to murder — starvation is the traditional detail — but the general council formally absolved Albany, recording that David had died "by divine providence and not otherwise." Historians treat deliberate killing as probable but not proven; the level of certainty should not be overstated.

With Rothesay dead, the only barrier to an Albany-dominated succession was Robert III's surviving son, the young James. In the winter of 1405–06 the ailing king decided to send James to France for safety. The prince's ship was intercepted by English vessels off Flamborough Head on 22 March 1406 and he was handed to Henry IV of England. Robert III died on 4 April 1406. Tradition holds he died of grief on hearing of his son's capture; this "broken heart" detail is a later, moralising embellishment rather than reliably documented, and should be presented as tradition.

3. The Albany governorship and James I's captivity (1406–1424)

James was now, in theory, king — but a captive in England for 18 years. Scotland was governed by Robert, Duke of Albany, as Governor until his death in 1420, then by his son Murdoch Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany. Albany secured the release of his own son Murdoch (exchanged in 1416) but did not bring the king home.

Whether Albany deliberately prolonged negotiations to preserve his own power is a genuinely debated question. It is easy to assume bad faith — his authority rested on James's absence — but ransom diplomacy was genuinely difficult, expensive and entangled in Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-French politics. This should be presented as a reasonable suspicion rather than a settled fact.

James, meanwhile, received an excellent education at the English court, absorbing a model of centralised, law-based monarchy that shaped his later kingship.

4. James I's return and assassination (1424–1437)

A ransom of 60,000 marks was agreed at Durham in 1424; James, newly married to Joan Beaufort, returned and was crowned at Scone. His kingship was vigorous and often ruthless. In 1425 he moved against the Albany Stewarts: Murdoch, Duke of Albany, two of his sons, and his father-in-law the Earl of Lennox were executed at Stirling. James pursued aggressive financial and legislative policies, curbed magnate customs revenues, attempted to bring the Lordship of the Isles to heel, and stopped ransom payments to England.

James was also a genuine man of letters. The Kingis Quair ("The King's Book"), a 197-stanza dream-vision poem in rhyme royal, heavily influenced by Chaucer and Boethius, is a semi-autobiographical meditation on captivity, fortune and love, and is generally — though not universally — accepted as his work. It survives in a single late-15th-century manuscript (Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B.24), which attributes it to James; the attribution is accepted by most scholars, though a minority (following J.T.T. Brown, 1896) argued for an anonymous author writing a pseudo-biography. It is often called the first great poem of Scotland's literary "golden age."

He was remembered as a musician too, above all as a harper. Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, wrote in the 1440s that James was a master of voice, drum, fiddle, psaltery, organ, flute, harp, trumpet and pipe, and was gifted "especially in handling the harp", like "another Orpheus", surpassing even the Irish on the instrument (as quoted by Keith Sanger and Alison Kinnaird). Sanger and Kinnaird, in Tree of Strings (1992), their history of the harp in Scotland, took this as partly courtly flattery but noted that James had spent his 18 years in England studying the arts. Since he was captured in 1406 as a boy of 11, he probably learned the gut-strung harp of the European courts rather than the wire-strung Gaelic clàrsach, and Bower's use of different Latin words for the king's harp and the Irish harp may reflect that. Shirley's account of his last night describes the court occupied with chess, "syngyng, and pypyng, yn harpyng and other honest solaces".

James's harshness bred a conspiracy among the disaffected. On the night of 20/21 February 1437, at the Dominican friary (Blackfriars) in Perth, a group led by Sir Robert Graham, with the connivance of the king's uncle Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl, and Atholl's grandson Robert Stewart (who had removed the locking bar from the chamber door), broke in and murdered the king. James had tried to escape into a privy vault beneath the chamber, only to find its outlet blocked (reportedly walled up so tennis balls would not be lost in it). The plot failed politically: Queen Joan survived and exacted a savage vengeance on the conspirators, and the six-year-old James II succeeded.

The Catherine Douglas / "Kate Barlass" legend examined. The famous image — a lady-in-waiting thrusting her bare arm through the door's empty staples to bar it, her arm breaking as the assassins forced their way in — is not found in the two near-contemporary accounts. John Shirley's The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis (c. 1440, translated from a lost Latin original close to the queen's household) describes the queen's ladies collectively trying to hold the door; it records one unnamed lady "soore hurte and cruelly wounded in the backe," and names one woman — Elizabeth Douglas — only because she "fell ynto the pryvay to the Kyng." Walter Bower's Scotichronicon (composed 1440–47, by an abbot close to James's regime) likewise gives a detailed narrative with no solo arm-barring heroine. The name "Catherine Douglas" and the broken-arm-as-bar detail first appear in Hector Boece's Scotorum Historiae (1527) — a chronicle notorious for invention — likely a garbled memory of the real Elizabeth Douglas (who married Richard Lovel of Ballumbie near Boece's native Dundee). John Bellenden's 1531 Scots translation spread it; Sir Walter Scott (1827) reconciled the sources by inventing two Douglas women. The epithet "Kate Barlass" is later still, appearing in print first in Rev. George Gilfillan's Specimens (1860) and made internationally famous by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "The King's Tragedy" (1881) — whose opening line, "I Catherine am a Douglas born... And Kate Barlass they've called me now," fixed the modern image. Modern scholars (E.W.M. Balfour-Melville, 1936; Michael Brown, James I, 1994; Richard Oram) treat the arm-barring as later embellishment, not documented fact. The courage of the queen's women in delaying the killers is contemporary; the specific heroine "Kate Barlass" is legend.

5. James II and the destruction of the Black Douglases (1437–1460)

James II ("James of the Fiery Face," from a prominent red birthmark — a nickname attested in later sources and associated with a reputedly fiery temper) came to the throne as a child amid a violent minority in which the Crichton and Livingston families and the Black Douglases vied for control of his person. At the "Black Dinner" (1440) the young 6th Earl of Douglas and his brother were seized and killed at Edinburgh Castle in the boy-king's presence.

Assuming personal rule after his 1449 marriage to Mary of Guelders, James moved decisively against the overmighty Douglases. In the reign's most dramatic episode, he summoned William, 8th Earl of Douglas, to Stirling Castle under a safe conduct and, on 22 February 1452, after Douglas refused to break a bond with the Earls of Ross and Crawford, stabbed him; the earl was finished off by the king's courtiers. The killing under safe conduct is well attested in near-contemporary and 16th-century accounts (and commemorated in the castle's "Douglas Room"), though the exact words exchanged are chronicle colouring. Civil war followed, ending in 1455 with the Douglases' defeat at Arkinholm and forfeiture — a decisive expansion of Crown power.

James was an energetic, war-minded king fascinated by artillery. In August 1460 he besieged the English-held Roxburgh Castle and was killed on 3 August when one of his own siege guns exploded beside him. The 16th-century chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie says his thigh-bone "was dung in two" by a "misframed gun." One tradition names the fatal or accompanying bombard "the Lion"; the specific name rests on later tradition rather than contemporary record, so it should be attributed carefully. He was 29.

6. James III's troubled reign and the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland (1460–1488)

James III succeeded aged eight or nine and, after another factional minority, began personal rule around 1469. His reign is the most contested of the period. He was much criticised — by contemporaries and later chroniclers — for reliance on "low-born" favourites (the chronicle tradition names the mason/architect Cochrane and others), debasement of the coinage, hoarding of money, failure to enforce justice, and unpopular pro-English diplomacy. Norman Macdougall's James III: A Political Study (1982) cautions that much of the lurid "favourites" narrative derives from later 16th-century chroniclers (Pitscottie, Leslie, Buchanan) and cannot be reconciled with contemporary record; even the favourite's first name is uncertain (Thomas vs Robert Cochrane). James was, however, also a patron of the arts sometimes called Scotland's first Renaissance king, and he survived a major rebellion in 1482 before succumbing to another in 1488.

The reign's most lasting legacy was territorial. In 1468–69, as part of the marriage settlement between James III and Margaret of Denmark, her father King Christian I of Denmark-Norway promised a dowry of 60,000 Rhenish florins. Unable to pay, he pledged his royal rights in Orkney (1468) and then Shetland (1469) as security. The money was never paid; the Crown consolidated its hold (exchanging the Sinclair earldom of Orkney for lands at Ravenscraig in Fife), and parliament annexed the Northern Isles in 1472. This — not conquest — is how Orkney and Shetland became Scottish, marking the definitive end of Norse political control (connecting back to Card #5). Notably, the pledge was legally a pledge, with a right of redemption that was raised again in later centuries, but it was never redeemed.

7. James III's death and the disguised-priest legend examined

By 1488 James faced open rebellion by nobles who made his 15-year-old son (the future James IV) their figurehead. The armies met at Sauchieburn, near Stirling, on 11 June 1488 — pointedly close to Bannockburn, and James reportedly carried Bruce's sword. James III was killed; his son was proclaimed king that day.

The manner of his death produced one of Scotland's earliest "conspiracy theories." By the 16th century it was claimed that James, thrown from his horse and fleeing wounded, was carried to a cottage, called for a priest, and was stabbed to death by a man who posed as a priest and cried "I will shrive thee!" Contemporary evidence is thin: the earliest detailed accounts are decades later, the "cottage" was shown to postdate 1488, and no one was ever named or punished. The October 1488 parliament recorded only that the king "happinit to be slane" — that he "happened to be slain." Norman Macdougall discounts the disguised-priest story, and the related tale that James IV wore an iron chain around his waist in lifelong penance is complicated by the fact that the treasurer's accounts record an iron chain only from 1507 — nearly 20 years later — which may reflect conventional Lenten piety rather than guilt. The disguised-priest killing should be flagged as likely legendary embellishment.

8. James IV's Renaissance court and achievements (1488–1513)

James IV is generally regarded as the most successful and impressive of the medieval Stewarts and the fullest embodiment of Renaissance kingship in Scotland. Intelligent, energetic, multilingual and genuinely curious, he presided over a court praised by foreign observers. The Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala, writing to Ferdinand and Isabella on 25 July 1498, reported that James "speaks the following foreign languages: Latin, very well; French, German, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish," adding that "his knowledge of languages is wonderful," and noting that the king's own "Scotch language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian." His achievements deserve emphasis.

Education and learning. In 1495, on James's behalf, Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen petitioned Pope Alexander VI, whose papal bull (Primo Erectio Universitatis) founded King's College, Aberdeen — the first university in Aberdeen, the third in Scotland (after St Andrews and Glasgow) and the fifth in the British Isles. Modelled on Paris and Bologna, it taught arts, theology, canon and civil law and — unusually — medicine. Its first principal was the humanist Hector Boece (c. 1465–1536), who had been a professor at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, where he befriended Erasmus, and was induced to leave Paris for Aberdeen around 1500. The Education Act of 1496, passed by the Scottish Parliament partly at Elphinstone's instance, required the eldest sons and heirs of barons and substantial freeholders to attend grammar school and then study law, so as to professionalise local justice. It is genuinely notable as one of the earliest pieces of national education legislation in Europe, even if its practical enforcement was limited. James also supported the founding of St Leonard's College, St Andrews (1512), and chartered the Surgeons and Barbers of Edinburgh (1505/06), ancestor of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

Printing. On 15 September 1507 James granted a patent to the merchant Walter Chepman and the bookseller-printer Andrew Myllar to establish Scotland's first printing press, in Edinburgh's Southgait (Cowgate). The patent charged them to bring home "ane prent, with all stuff belangand tharto, and expert men to use the samyne." The first dated book appeared on 4 April 1508; the press's most important product was the Aberdeen Breviary (1510), promoted by Elphinstone to give Scotland its own liturgy in place of the English Sarum use — a project with a distinctly national purpose.

Naval power. James invested heavily in a royal navy, its centrepiece the Great Michael, a carrack launched at the purpose-built dock at Newhaven on 12 October 1511 and completed in February 1512. Built under Sir Andrew Wood of Largo and the shipwright Jacques Terrell, she was, when launched, the largest ship afloat, with roughly twice the displacement of England's Mary Rose (launched 1509, completed 1510). The chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie gives her dimensions as about 240 feet (73 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) in the beam; she displaced roughly 1,000 tons and carried 24 broadside guns (bought from Flanders), 3 basilisks and some 30 smaller guns, with a very large complement (traditionally 300 sailors, 120 gunners and up to 1,000 soldiers). Some of these figures are chronicle estimates rather than precise dockyard records and should be read as such. Enormously expensive for a small kingdom, she was hired to France and, after Flodden, sold to Louis XII in 1514. Her construction is celebrated in William Dunbar's verse.

Music and the harp. James II's and James III's Treasurer's accounts are lost, but James IV's survive and record music at court in detail. Alongside French, Italian and English minstrels, the king paid Scottish harpers on wages and on his travels, from an unnamed harper at Linlithgow at Easter 1491 onwards. The clerks usually distinguished the "harp" (probably gut-strung) from the "clarsach", the wire-strung Gaelic harp: on 13 April 1501 "Pate harpar on the harp" and "Pate harper on the clarsach" were paid side by side. A Galloway family of Gaelic harpers, the MacBhreatnaich or Galbraiths, appear at court from 1491 to 1513 and held crown lands near Wigtown. After Flodden harpers almost vanish from the royal accounts, as James V favoured viols and lutes.

Medicine, science and eccentric enthusiasms. James's personal curiosity is exceptionally well documented in the treasurer's accounts. He practised amateur surgery and dentistry, paying subjects to let him pull their teeth and bleed them (one entry records a payment "to Kynnard the barbour for twa teith drawn furth of his hed by the king, 14s"), and dabbled in alchemy with the Italian court physician John Damian, funding furnaces at Stirling and Holyrood in the quest for the "quintessence." Damian's notorious 1507 attempt to fly from Stirling Castle walls with feathered wings — ending in a dunghill and a broken thigh, satirised by Dunbar — is genuinely attested, a memorable illustration of the experimental spirit (and credulity) of the court.

Diplomacy, the Tudor marriage, and its long consequence. James ended the long Anglo-Scottish enmity with the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (signed 24 January 1502), sealed by his marriage in 1503 to Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII — celebrated by Dunbar as "The Thrissil and the Rois" (the Thistle and the Rose). The treaty did not deliver lasting peace, but the marriage had a momentous long-term result: it made the Stewarts heirs to the English throne. A century later, in 1603, James IV and Margaret's great-grandson, James VI of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England — the Union of the Crowns, a direct dynastic consequence of the 1503 match.

Authority over the Highlands and Islands. In May 1493 parliament forfeited the Lordship of the Isles from John MacDonald II, following years of MacDonald insurrection and earlier forfeiture of the earldom of Ross. James sailed west to receive the chiefs' submissions and brought John to court as a pensioner. The forfeiture ended nearly three centuries of the near-sovereign Gaelic-Norse lordship and asserted direct royal authority — though the Crown struggled to fill the resulting power vacuum, and the western seaboard entered a turbulent era known as linn nan creach, "the age of raids."

The road to Flodden. When Henry VIII invaded France in 1513, James honoured the Auld Alliance over the "Perpetual Peace," invaded England, and was killed with much of his nobility at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513 — the last reigning British monarch to die in battle. Flodden is the subject of Card #12 and is not narrated in detail here; it closed the most brilliant reign of the medieval Stewarts and plunged Scotland once more into a royal minority.