History Of Scotland Vol. 1 - Part 16

( Originally Published 1909 )

Accession of John, Earl of Carrick—His Name is changed to Robert III.—The State of his Family—Feuds—Burning of Elgin—Inroad of the Highlanders, and Conflict of Glascune—Battle of Bourtree Church—Combat of the Clan Chattan and Clan Quhele —Prince David of Scotland: created Duke of Rothsay: exposed to the Misrepresentations of his Uncle, who becomes Duke of Albany—Marriage of Rothsay—Scandalous Management of Albany: breaks Faith with the Earl of March, who rebels—War with England—Invasion of Henry IV.—The English obliged to retire—Murder of the Duke of Rothsay—Scots defeated at Homildon—Contest between Henry IV. and the Percies—Siege of Coklawis or Ormiston—Prince James sent to France, but taken by the English—Robert III.'s Death

THE character of John, earl of Carrick, eldest son and successor of Robert IL, has been already noticed. He was lame in body and feeble in mind well-meaning, pious, benevolent, and just; but totally disqualified, from want of personal activity and mental energy, to hold the reigns of government of a -fierce and unmanageable people.

The new king was invested with his sovereignty at Scone in the usual manner, excepting that, instead of his own name, John, he assumed the title of Robert III., to comply with a superstition of his people, who were impressed with a belief that the former name had distinguished monarchs of England, France, and Scotland, all of whom had been unfortunate. The Scots had also a partiality for the name of Robert, in affectionate and grateful remembrance of Robert Bruce.

The. new monarch had been wedded for nigh thirty-three years to Annabella Drummond, daughter of Sir John Drummond of Stobhall, a Scottish lady, whose wisdom and virtues corresponded with her ancient family and exalted station. By this union he had one son, Prince David, a youth of eighteen years old, whose calamitous history and untimely death was doomed to darken his father's reign. Five years after Robert III. had occupied the throne, the queen bore a second son, named James, his father's successor, and the first of that name, afterward so often repeated in the royal line, who swayed the Scottish sceptre.

The new monarch's first attention was to confirm the truce with England, and renew the league with France; so that for eight years the kingdom was freed from the misery of external war, though the indolence of a feeble sovereign left it a prey to domestic feud and the lawless oppression of contending chiefs and nobles : of these we shall only notice one or two marked instances.

In 1390, ere yet the monarch was crowned, the Earl of Buchan, Robert's own brother, in some personal quarrel with the bishop of Murray, assembled a tumultuary army of Highlanders, and burned the stately cathedral of Elgin, without incurring punishment, or even censure, from his feeble-minded sovereign, for an act which combined rebellion and sacrilege.

Two years afterward, three chieftains of the Clan Donnochy (in Lowland speech called Robertsons), instigated or commanded by Duncan Stuart, a natural son of the turbulent Earl of Buchan, came down to ravage the fertile country of Angus. The Grays, Lindsays and Ogilvies marched against them with their followers. A skirmish was fiercely and wildly fought at Glascune in Stormont. An idea of the Highland ferocity may be conceived from one incident. Sir Patrick Lindsay, armed at all points, and well mounted, charged in full career a chief of the Catherans, and pinned him to the earth with his lance. But the savage mountaineer, collecting his strength into a dying effort, thrust himself on the lance, and swayed his two-handed sword with such force as to cut through Lindsay's steel boot, and nearly sever his limb. He was forced to retire from the field, on which the sheriff of Angus and his brother remained slain, with sixty of their followers. Sir Patrick Gray was also wounded; and the mountaineers, rather victorious than beaten, though they had lost many men, retreated to their fastnesses in safety.

The feuds of the Lowland barons were not less distinguished. Robert Keith, the head of that distinguished family, besieged, in Fyvie Castle, his own aunt, the wife of Lindsay of Crawford. Lindsay marched with five hundred men to her rescue. He encountered Keith at Bourtree Church, in the Garioch, and defeated him with the loss of fifty men. To use a scriptural expression, every one did what seemed right in his own eyes, as if there had been no king in Scotland.

The mode by which the government endeavored to stanch these disorders, and indirectly to get rid of the perpetrators of outrages which they dared not punish by course of justice, was equally wild and savage. In 1396, a clan, or rather a confederation of clans, called the Clan Chattan, were at variance with another union of tribes, called the Clan Kay, or Clan Quhele. Their dispute, which the king's direct authority was unable to decide, was put to the arbitrament of a combat between thirty on each side, to be fought before the king, in the North Inch of Perth, a beautiful meadow by the side of the Tay. When they mustered their forces, one of the Clan Chattan was found missing; but so reckless were men then of life that a citizen of Perth undertook to supply his place for half a mark of silver. The combat was fought with infinite fury, until the Clan Quhele were cut off all but one man, who escaped by swimming the Tay. Several of the Clan Chattan survived, but all severely wounded.

The weak-minded king seems to have carried on his government, such as it was, by the assistance of his brother, the Earl of Fife, who had been regent in the latter years of his father's reign. But his heir-apparent, David, being a youth of good abilities, handsome person, young, active, and chivalrous, was too prominent and popular to be altogether laid out of view. He may be supposed indeed to have displayed some of the follies and levities of youth, which were maliciously insisted on by his uncle, who naturally looked on him with an evil eye; yet we find the prince employed as a commissioner, along with the Earl of Fife, in 1399, when they met on the borders with the Duke of Lancaster; and he was shortly afterward raised by his father, after a solemn council, to the title of Duke of Rothsay. At the same time, to maintain some equality, if not an ascendency, over his nephew, Prince David's ambitious uncle Robert contrived to be promoted from being Earl of Fife to Duke of Albany. Under their new titles both the princes again negotiated on the English frontiers, but to little purpose; for though a foundation of a solid peace would have been acceptable to Richard II., who was then bent on his expedition to Ire-land, yet the revolution of 1399 was now at hand, which hurled that sovereign from his throne, and placed there in his stead Henry IV., thus commencing the long series of injuries and wars between York and Lancaster.

Leaving foreign affairs for a short time, we can see that the young heir of the kingdom was for some time trusted by his father in affairs of magnitude. Nay, it is certain that he was at one time declared regent of the kingdom. But Rothsay's youth and precipitate ardor could not compete with the deep craft of Albany, who seems to have possessed the king's ear, by the habitual command which he exercised over him for so many years. It was easy for him to exaggerate every excess of youth of which Rothsay might be guilty, and to stir up against the young prince the suspicions which often lodge in the bosom of an aged and in-capable sovereign against a young and active successor.

It is reasonable to think that the affection of Queen Annabella, who had and deserved the esteem of her husband, endeavored to sustain her son in the tacit struggle between him and Albany. It was by her advice that the marriage of the young prince was determined on, as the most probable means of putting an end to his irregularities. The advice was excellent; but Albany, getting the management of the affair into his own hands, contrived to render it the means of injuring his nephew's honor, and stirring up the nobility to feud and faction against the prince and each other.

He publicly announced that the hand of the Duke of Rothsay should, like a commodity exposed to open auction, be assigned to the daughter of that peer of Scotland who might agree to pay the largest dowry with his bride. Even this base traffic on such a subject Albany contrived to render yet more vile by the dishonest manner in which it was conducted. George, earl of March, proved the highest offerer on this extraordinary occasion, and having paid down a part of the proposed portion, his daughter was affianced to the Duke of Rothsay. The Earl of Douglas, envying the aggrandizement which the House of March must have derived from such a union, interfered, and prevailed upon Albany, who was perhaps not unwilling to mix up the nuptials of his nephew with yet more disgraceful circumstances, to break off the treaty entered into with March, and substitute an alliance with the daughter of Douglas himself. No other apology was offered to March for this breach of contract than that the marriage treaty had not been confirmed by the estates of the kingdom; and, to sum up the injustice with which he was treated, the government refused or delayed to refund the sum of money which had been advanced by him, as part of his daughter's marriage-portion. As the power of the Earl of March lay on the frontiers of both kingdoms, the bonds of allegiance had never sat heavily on that great family, and a less injury than that which the present earl had received might have sufficed to urge him into rebellion. Accordingly, he instantly entered into a secret negotiation with Henry IV., and soon afterward took refuge in England. The acquisition of such a partisan was particularly welcome to the English sovereign at this period, as will appear from the following circumstances.

Very nearly at the precise period (1399) when Henry IV. made himself master of the crown of England, the existing truce between Scotland and that country expired; and the Scottish borderers, instigated by their restless temper, made fierce incursions on the opposite frontier. They sustained, however, a sharp defeat at Fulhope-law, from Sir Robert Umfraville, in which many of their principal chiefs were taken. This did not prevent other enterprises, to which the condition of England, convulsed by the recent change of dynasty, offered but too many temptations. The Scottish borderers took and burned the castle of Wark, and committed great inroads, to which the English frontiers, wasted by a raging pestilence, could scarce offer the usual resistance.

This predatory warfare on the Scottish frontier was instigated by France, although she did not herself enter into hostilities with England, on account of the indisposition of the sovereign, Charles. At this period, therefore, the accession of the Earl of March's assistance was an event of great consequence to England, and proportionally dangerous to Scotland. Henry IV. determined to chastise the Scottish depredators, and to revenge himself on the Duke of Albany, who, in some intercepted letters, had described him as a pre-eminent traitor.

In 1400, Henry therefore summoned the whole military force of England to meet him at York, and published an arrogant manifesto, in which he vindicated the antiquated claim of supremacy, which had been so long in abeyance, and, assuming the tone of lord paramount, commanded the Scottish king, with his prelates and nobles, to meet him at Edinburgh and render homage. Of course no one attended upon that summons, excepting the new proselyte March, who met Henry at Newcastle, and was received to the English fealty. But if Henry's boast of subjecting Scotland was a bravado inconsistent with his usual wisdom, his warfare, on the contrary, was marked by a degree of forbearance and moderation too seldom the characteristic of an English invader. Penetrating as far as Edinburgh, he extended his especial protection to the canons of Holyrood, from whom his father, John of Gaunt, had experienced shelter, and in general spared religious houses.

The castle of Edinburgh was gallantly held out by the Duke of Rothsay, aided by the skill and experience of his father-in-law, the Earl of Douglas. Albany commanded a large army, which, according to the ancient Scottish policy, hovered at some distance from the English host. The Scots had wisely resolved upon the defensive system of war which had so frequently saved Scotland. But they could not forbear some of the bravado of the time. The Duke of Rothsay wrote to Henry that, to avoid the effusion of Christian blood, he was willing to rest the national quarrel upon the event of a combat of one, two, or three nobles on every side. Henry laughed at this sally of youthful vivacity, and, in answer, , expressed his wonder how Rothsay should think of saving Christian blood at the expense of shedding that of the nobility, who, it was to be hoped, were Christians as well as others. Albany also would have his gasconade. He sent a herald to Henry to say that, if he would stay in his position near Edinburgh for six days, he would do battle with him to the extremity. The English king gave his mantle and a chain of gold to the herald, in token that he joyfully accepted the challenge. But Albany had no purpose of keeping his word; and Henry found nothing was to be won by residing in a wasted country to beleaguer an impregnable rock. He raised the siege and retired into England, where the rebellion of Owen Glendower soon after broke out. A truce of twelve months and upward took place between the kingdoms.

In this interval a shocking example, in Scotland, proved how ambition can induce men to overleap all boundaries prescribed by the laws of God and man. We have seen the Duke of Rothsay stoutly defending the castle of Edinburgh in 1400. But when the war was ended he seems to have fallen into the king his father's displeasure. The queen, who might have mediated between them, was dead. Archibald, earl of Douglas, was also deceased; and, notwithstanding their connection by marriage, there was mortal enmity between the prince and a second Archibald, who succeeded to that earldom. Trail, bishop of St. Andrew's, a worthy prelate, who had often mediated in the disputes of the royal family, was also no more. The Duke of Rothsay was there fore open to all the accusations, however exaggerated, with which Albany's creatures could fill his credulous ears. One Sir John de Ramorgny, who had been the prince's tutor, appears to have been the most active in traducing him to his father. This man, it is said, had even offered to the prince to assassinate Albany, and being repulsed by him with abhorrence, took this method to revenge himself. Deceived by malicious reports of his son's wildness and indocility, the simple old king was induced to grant a commission to Albany to arrest his son, and detain him for some time in captivity, to tame the stubborn spirit of profligacy by which he had been taught to believe him possessed.

But the unnatural kinsman was determined on taking the life of his nephew, the heir of his too confiding brother. The Duke of Rothsay was trepanned into Fife, made prisoner, and conducted to Falkland Castle, where he was immured in a dungeon, and starved to death. Old historians affirm that the compassion of two females protracted his life and his miseries, one by supplying him from time to time with thin cakes of barley, another after the manner of the Roman charity. It is not likely that, where so stern a purpose was adopted, any access would be permitted to such means of relief.

The death of the prince was imputed to a dysentery. A simulated inquiry was made into the circumstances by a parliament, which was convened under the management of the authors of the murder. Albany and Douglas acknowledged having arrested the prince, vindicating themselves by the royal mandate for that act of violence, but imputed his death to disease. Yet they showed a consciousness of guilt, by taking out a pardon in terms as broad and comprehensive as might shroud them from any subsequent charge for the murder which they denied, as well as for the arrest which they avowed.

The truce with England was now ended (1402), and Douglas hastened to drown in border warfare, which was his natural element, the recollection of his domestic crimes. But fortune seemed to have abandoned him, or Heaven re-fused to countenance the accomplice of an innocent prince's most inhuman murder. From this time, notwithstanding his valor and military skill, he lost so many of his followers in each action which he fought as to merit the name of Tyne-man; i.e., Lose-man.

The men of the Merse, influenced by the exiled Earl of March, no longer showed their usual alacrity in making incursions on the border; and the Earl of Douglas applied to the landholders of Lothian to discharge this military service. Their first raid was successful; but in the second they were intercepted by the Earl of March and a large body both of English and his own personal followers, at a place called West Nesbit. Hepburn of Hales, the leader of the Scots, was slain; many noble youths of Lothian were also killed or made prisoners.

Douglas, incensed at this loss, requested and obtained a considerable force, under command of Albany's son, Murdach, earl of Fife, with the Earls of Angus, Murray, and Orkney. His own battalions augmented the force to ten thousand men, and spread plunder and devastation as far as the gates of Newcastle. But Sir Henry Percy (the celebrated Hotspur), had assembled a numerous array, and together with his father, the Earl of Northumberland, and their ally March, engaged the Scots at Homildon, a hill within a mile of Wooler, on which Douglas had posted his army. Hotspur was about to rush with his characteristic impetuosity on the Scottish ranks, when the Earl of March, laying hand on his bridle, advised him first to try the effects of the archery. The bowmen of England did their duty with their usual fatal certainty and celerity, and the Scottish army, drawn up on the acclivity, presented a fatal mark to their shafts. A brave knight, Sir John Swinton, like Graham at the battle of Durham, saw the disadvantage in which they were placed, and suggested a remedy.. "Let us not stand here to be shot like a herd of deer," he ex-claimed; "but let us down on these English, engage them hand to hand, and live or die like men." Adam Gordon, a young border nobleman, whose family had been long at feud with that of Swinton, heard this bold exhortation, and throwing himself from his horse, renounced the deadly quarrel, and asked knighthood of his late foe: "For of hand more noble," he exclaimed, "may I never take that honor." Swinton knighted him with the brief ceremony practiced in such urgent circumstances, and they rushed down the hill with their united vassals. But too weak in numbers to make the desired impression, they were both slain with all their followers. Douglas himself now showed an inclination to descend the hill; but encountering a little precipice in the descent which had not been before perceived, the Scottish ranks became confused and broken, their disarray enabling the archers, who had fallen a little back, to continue their fatal volley, which now descended as upon an irregular mob. The rout became general. Very many Scots were slain. Douglas was made captive; five wounds and the loss of an eye showed he had done his duty as a soldier, though not as a general. Murdach, earl of Fife, son of the regent, Albany, with the Earls of Murray and Angus, and about twenty chiefs and men of eminence, became also prisoners.

Great was the joy of Hotspur over this victory, and great the pleasure of Henry IV. when the news reached him. Yet fate had so decreed that the victory of Homildon became the remote cause that the monarch's throne was endangered, and that Percy lost his life in a rebellious conspiracy.

No law of chivalry was more certain than that which placed at the will of the victor the captive of his sword and spear, to ransom or hold him prisoner at pleasure; and so much was this rule established on the borders, that when an English or Scottish prisoner was taken, nothing was more common than for the captor to permit the vanquished to retire from the field of battle, having first promised to meet him upon a day fixed, and settle with him for ransom. Nor was the consent either of the king or general necessary to this kind of practice. Nevertheless, on this occasion, Henry wrote to the victorious Percies, commanding them not to admit the important prisoners made at Homildon to be ransomed or delivered without his special consent. On the other hand, he generously bestowed upon the earl and his son, Sir Henry Percy, the whole earldom of Douglas, with all the territories of that proud family. The father and son regarded the first proposition of the king as an injury; and for the second, being the grant of a martial tract of country which was yet to be conquered, they deemed in their hearts they owed the king no gratitude. At the same time they received them both with seeming satisfaction, resolved to make the conquest of the earldom of Douglas the pretext of assembling forces which they were determined to employ very differently.

Accordingly, in June, 1403, the Percies besieged a tower named Coklawis, or Ormiston, and agreed with the owner that he should surrender if not relieved by the regent of Scotland before Lambmas. Albany upon receiving this intelligence assembled his council, and asked their opinion whether the place should be relieved or no? All the counsellors, who knew the duke's poverty of spirit, conceived they were sure to meet his wishes when they recommended that the border turret should be abandoned to its fate, rather than a battle should be hazarded for its preservation. The regent, well knowing the secret purpose of the Percies, whose forces were about to be directed against England, took the opportunity of swaggering a little. "By Heaven and Saint Fillan," said he, "I will keep the day of appointment before Coklawis, were there none to follow me thither but Peter de Kinbuck, who holds my horse youder." The council heard him with wonder and applause; and it was not until they reached Coklawis with a consider-able army, the Scottish nobles learned that what had given this temporary fit of courage to their regent was the certainty that he could not meet Hotspur, of whose death and defeat at Shrewsbury they were soon after informed. The cowardice of the heart is perhaps better learned from a fanfaronade of this kind, than from an accidental failure of the nerves in a moment of danger. Some proposals made for peace only produced a feverish truce of brief duration.

Meantime Prince James, the only surviving son of the poor infirm old king, being now (1405) in his eleventh year, required better education than Scotland could afford, and protection more efficient than that of his debilitated father. Robert III. could not but suspect the cause and circumstances of his eldest son's death, and be conscious that the ambition which had prompted the removal of Rothsay would not be satisfied without the life of James also. The youthful prince was, therefore, committed to the care of Wardlaw, bishop of Saint Andrew's, and was by his advice sent to France, as the safest means of protecting him from his uncle's schemes of treachery or violence. He was embarked accordingly, Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, being appointed as his governor. A considerable number of Lothian gentlemen, with David Fleming of Cumbernauld, attended him to the ship. But on their return they were attacked, for what reason is unknown, by James Douglas of Balveny, uncle to the earl. A skirmish took place on Hermanston Moor, where Fleming and several of his companions fell.