LANGUAGE IS POWER
‘From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas;
Yet still the blood is strong the heart is Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.’
The Canadian Boat Song
To try to understand part of the story of the rise and fall of the legendary, near-mythical Lordship of the Isles we visited a pub on the Isle of Skye called ‘Eilean Iarmain’.
It was early evening and the place was full of Gaelic-speaking locals. Only one person, a Lewis man, was able to join in the chat without first asking everyone to speak English. It is a strange and vaguely unsettling experience to be in your own country and yet find yourself surrounded by fellow Scots whose language you do not understand. Beyond ‘Ciamar a tha thu?’ - ‘How are you?’ - and a few place names like Buachialle Etive Mor - ‘the Big Shepherd of Etive’, in Glencoe - I am utterly lost among the Gaels. I would stand more chance of understanding and making myself understood in a pub in Paris, or Madrid, and that is saying something.
At one point a man asked, ‘Why did some people want to destroy Gaelic? It’s the first language we all had.’ It is a good question, and one that lies at the heart of an uncomfortable truth.
Scotland is a place of two countries, two languages and two cultures. Most Scots do not speak Gaelic and whether or not they admit it to themselves, they have to view their country through the prism of a language that was once foreign to the land - English.
Scots Gaelic, like Irish and Welsh, hangs like a last apple of autumn from the old, Celtic branch of the Indo-European tree of languages. In the millennium before the birth of Christ, Celtic languages were being spoken right across western Europe. Scots Gaelic seems to be part of the cultural package that arrived with farming; indeed it is possible the hunter-gatherers had to pick up the new language in order to understand the business of farming in the first place.
Whether it came with the farmers themselves - a new population of settlers - or arrived just as new words that had been passed from person to person over great distances, hardly matters. The point is that Gaelic, or a language very similar to Gaelic, was spoken throughout the British Isles long before anyone gave a moment’s thought to anything ‘English’. As the man in the pub on Skye said, it is the first language we all had. The story of how that first language fell from grace is also the story of how modern Scotland became the country it is today, a country divided.
There is an old tale of a medieval Spanish traveller who came to Edinburgh to see the sights. When he got home someone asked him what was the most wonderful thing he had seen. The traveller thought for a moment and then answered: ‘A grand man called MacDonald, with a great train of men after him, called neither duke nor marquis.’
By the time young James Stewart was being captured by English pirates off the Norfolk coast, the MacDonalds thought themselves ‘Righ Innse Gall’ - the kings of the Hebrides. Along with the MacDougalls and the MacRuaries, they were descendants of Somerled, the Viking warlord who in the twelfth century had established a ‘kingdom’ stretching from the Isle of Man to the Butt of Lewis and from Kintyre to Knoydart. Norse-speaking Vikings they may once have been, but for reasons lost to time they had acquired the Gaelic language of their new home, gradually forgetting the tongue they had known before. The island kingdom, with its ancient traditions of seaborne warfare, had become part of the kingdom of Scotland in 1266. But that had not stopped the separate development of the unique culture of the Isles.
The MacDonalds had played the game well. While the MacDougalls backed the Balliol-Comyn camp during the battle for the throne, the MacDonalds backed the Bruces. When King Robert fled mainland Scotland, it is likely the MacDonalds took him in. He certainly led a body of MacDonald Isles men - galloglasses - at the Battle of Bannockburn.
The rise of the Bruces was therefore good news for the MacDonalds, but they remained much more interested in their own affairs than those of any King of Scotland. While they continued to be a source of potential support for the Bruce line, they were less than impressed by how much territory the king was granting to his Stewart relatives - especially when his gift-giving encroached upon western lands they coveted for themselves. (The MacDonald resentment of all things Stewart had its roots with Somerled himself: he had watched with jealous eyes as King David I invited the Fitzalans, ancestors of the Stewarts, into Scotland along with Bruces and Balliols and the rest of the Anglo-Normans. Other immigrants bothered Somerled less, but those Fitzalans - those ‘ Stewards’ - took up lands too close to his own for his liking.)
During the middle years of the fourteenth century, Good John MacDonald of Islay - the first to style himself Dominus Insularum, Lord of the Isles - had used guile and intelligence to return his family’s holdings to something like the glory days enjoyed by Somerled. He had even been prepared to back Balliol claims during the reign of David II whenever he saw it could strengthen the MacDonald position. Duplicity is hardly exclusive to kings, after all.
At the same time, the Gaelic lands of the northern mainland also found themselves distanced from central government influence, but for different reasons. When the Bruce took his revenge on opponents like the Comyns of Badenoch and Buchan, and also upon the earldoms of Strathearn and Atholl, he failed to establish long-term replacements with ties to his crown. The local warlords who filled the vacuum were intent on building their own petty empires and happy to keep the kings at a distance. The Isles men and their galloglasses were also drawn to these areas - first as mercenaries and then as colonists - so that the culture of the Gaelic Hebrides took root in the northern mainland as well.
By the time the Stewarts were building their family firm during the reigns of Robert II and Robert III, a separate, independent world had grown in the untended wilds of the west and the north. Where those lands were held by MacDonalds, there was always an instinctive suspicion about Stewart intent. And while the Stewarts as a whole were bad enough, recent empire-building by Robert, Duke of Albany had been beyond the pale in MacDonald eyes. Albany and his kin had been spreading north for years, but when they turned their attentions to the vast and wealthy territory of Ross, it was too much for Donald MacDonald of Islay, son and successor of Good John, first Lord of the Isles.
On 24 July 1411 this enmity came to its horrifying conclusion at the battle remembered as ‘Reid Harlaw’. Massed armies from both sides clashed on a hillside 20 or so miles north of Aberdeen and spent a day building heaps of slain. In its aftermath - a draw many said - Donald and his MacDonalds retreated all the way to the Isles. In time, only the bards knew the truth of it, but Harlaw stands to this day as the moment when the division - the split between Highland and Lowland - was made clear to the world.
This was the Lordship of the Isles that Alexander had inherited. The powers of his people had been curtailed somewhat, but the feud with Stewart Scotland was left as simmering embers. As the fifteenth century drew on, more and more people in the western Lowlands of Scotland began complaining bitterly about the savage activities of ‘wild, wicked Highlandmen’.
Alexander MacDonald of Islay became Lord of the Isles in 1423. From his father and grandfather he had inherited a private army of perhaps 10,000 men and a fleet of more than 100 ‘birlinns’ - state-of-the-art sea-going galleys descended from the same longships their Viking ancestors had used to terrorise Scotland in centuries past. In fourteenth-century Scotland it was far quicker to move men and materials by sea than by land. By controlling the western seaboard - and Alexander did, unquestionably - he still wielded extraordinary power and influence.
The beating heart of his territory was at Finlaggan, on Islay. A visit to the place now is a sombre experience. What was once the hub of a vast territory is little more than a handful of ruins and barely discernible earthworks. The little island in the loch, which was once the site of the Great Hall where all the important business of the day was conducted, seems too small ever to have been the scene of anything that mattered. But matter it did; and when Alexander, Lord of the Isles summoned his men to his side, they came running.
The most noticeable characteristic of Finlaggan, given its role as the capital of an empire, is the lack of fortifications. There were grand buildings, luxurious and impressive by the standards of the day, but no battlements, no encircling walls. This more than anything testifies to the power of the Lords of the Isles. Such was their unchallenged status within their own territory they had no need to defend themselves. By the time Alexander came to power, the Lordship had enjoyed an unbroken century of internal stability.
With that peace, and under the patronage of the MacDonald lords, there was a flourishing of the arts - of sculpture, music and poetry:
Do Mhac Domnhaill na ndearc mall
Mo an tiodhlagudh na dtugam,
An corn gemadh aisgidh oir,
A n-aisgthir orm ‘n-a onoir.
Ce a-ta I n-aisgidh mar budh eadh
Agam o onchoin Gaoidheal,
Ni liom do-chuaidh an cornsa:
Fuair da chionn mo chumonnsa.
To MacDonald of the stately eyes
Is the gift of what I am giving,
Greater than the cup - though a gift of gold -
In honour of what to me is given.
Though I got this cup free, as it were,
From the wolf of the Gaels,
It doesn’t seem that way to me:
He received my love as payment.
These MacDonalds of the Isles then were a looming, sometimes troubling presence for the kings of Scots. For as long as there were amicable relations between the crown and the men styled King of the Hebrides, there was nothing to fear. But no king of the mainland - and certainly not a Stewart king - could sleep easy in his bed while the MacDonalds roamed the islands and Atlantic seaboard at will with 10,000 men in 100 longships.
Perhaps, more than anything else, they represented the old world, the world of before. Their ties to Ireland were close. They were of the Gaels who had unified the country long ago under the likes of King Constantine II of the House of Alpin. That first kingdom had been called Alba, the Gaelic world for the whole of mainland Britain. In a kingdom where primogeniture counted for so much, were not the Gaels ‘firstborn’?
The Lords of the Isles also maintained the age-old ties to Iona. They carefully solicited the good will of St Columba’s spiritual descendants and for generations had made a point of being buried in the abbey grounds. Alexander MacDonald and his ilk were old-school Scots, the originals. He showered the abbey of Iona with money and treasures, but if these actions were born out of fear for his everlasting soul, then that was pretty much his only fear. For Alexander, Ri Innse Gall, was a king in his own land - a land in which there was no king.
James Stewart - James I - had been born in 1394, the youngest son of Robert III and his wife Annabella. The death of James’s elder brother David, Duke of Rothsay in 1402 at the hands of his uncle Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany, had made him heir to the throne. Robert III’s councillors were David Fleming and Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. Both men initially worked hard to establish a loyal following around the young prince and so raise his stock above that of his uncle’s Albany Stewarts, but in so doing they managed to fall foul of the powerful Douglas family in the Borders.
A disastrous clash with the Douglases in 1406 caused Fleming’s death in battle. It was Sinclair who took young James to the fortress of the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth then, to await his departure into exile - the departure that put him into the hands of King Henry IV of England. Within days of his capture, word reached James of the death of his father. For what it was worth, he was King of Scotland.
King James I would spend the next eighteen years in captivity south of the Border. In his absence, Albany was made Governor of Scotland. Albany’s son Murdoch was also a captive of the English, and the Duke would spend much more time and energy seeking the release of his own son and heir than that of his young king. Henry IV, and then his son Henry V, made it clear to the Scots that if they wanted James back they would have to accept English overlordship. It was the same old game the English always tried to play. Forget the Bruce, they said - give up your independence. But the Scots, with Albany at the helm, refused to adopt the role assigned to them. They were managing without a king and would continue to do so. Why, in any case, would Albany go to any great lengths to secure the return of the king and so end his own time as Governor? Murdoch Stewart was released in 1415 but James was going nowhere.
Left to brood upon his own redundancy, it is hardly surprising that James came to admire the achievements and aspirations of the courts of the Henrys. Although he began his time in England as a prisoner in the Tower of London, and in the castles of Nottingham, Pevensey, Kenilworth and Windsor, he was gradually made welcome in the king’s household. He grew to adulthood as part of English court life and his outlook and attitudes were permanently altered as a result.
For one thing, he came to support the claims Henry V was making in France. Abandoned by his own folk, he may well have felt moved to celebrate his host’s victory at Agincourt in 1415, and he was with the English king when he laid siege to the strategic town of Melun, 30 miles south-east of Paris.
Melun, as it turned out, was an acid test of sorts for the young King of Scotland. His loyal subjects had come to the aid of the French Dauphin, the future Charles VII. Albany was honouring Scotland’s age-old alliance with France and thousands of Scots troops had crossed the Channel under the command of Archibald Douglas, Earl of Wigtown and John Stewart, Earl of Buchan and Albany’s relative. Hundreds of Scots were in Melun when Henry laid siege to the place in November 1420 with 20,000 men. Quite reasonably under the circumstances, the English king told James to order his subjects to surrender - and James obliged. Kings like Henry V expected and received unquestioning obedience. It was the English way.
James had either forgotten - or perhaps had not even had time to learn - that the Scottish way was different. In Scotland the kingdom and the king were two different things; loyalty to one did not necessarily mean loyalty to the other. And after all, the kingdom of Scotland had been functioning for years without a king. The Scots at Melun saw no reason suddenly to defer to orders from a monarch they simply did not know. To a man, the Scots soldiers kept on fighting to defend the town. The 700 French and Scots defenders clung on for four months. The English dug tunnels and mines under the town walls in hope of making them fall down. But the defenders dug counter-mines, breaking through into the English tunnels and engaging their tormentors in desperate hand-to-find fighting in the claustrophobic darkness.
In the end, it was starvation within the walls that made the difference. And when the English finally got inside the town, Henry had his heart set on revenge. The disobedient Scots were singled out, rounded up and executed. Notionally they were being put to death as punishment for betraying their king but for James it was humiliating. King of Scotland he might be, but his title and rank had counted for nothing when it came to trying to get his own way with his own people. He learned from Henry V of England that kings had to make themselves in their own image. It was an active and dynamic business. Rule was a verb not a noun - it was about what you did as much as who you actually were.
Melun 1420 was a lesson King James never forgot. He had been made to act as the puppet of the Auld Enemy and had been openly defied by his subjects in the process. In many ways it was the siege of Melun that made him the kind of king he became - impatient, inflexible and intolerant. Henry knighted James on St George’s Day 1421, further underlining his ‘Englishness’ and during the summer of 1424 he married Joan Beaufort, niece of Cardinal Henry Beaufort and a relative of King Henry VI.
Henry V had died on 31 August 1422 and in his wake James’s position had entered a new phase. As an inheritance the King of Scots was always valuable, both in terms of ransom money and as a bargaining chip. It was money that formed the basis of the negotiations the English happily entered into with the Scots for the return of their king in 1424, but with the powerful and charismatic Henry V replaced on the throne by his much less impressive son, the English had suddenly found a reason to make friends in the north. The last thing they needed, in their weakened state, was any trouble from Scotland and so in March the sum of £40,000 was agreed for James’s return. By April he was on his way back home - a stranger to a strange land.
He had not been entirely cut off from his homeland during his captivity. Henry had allowed him to maintain a household and he had been visited down through the years by those Scots who wished to establish ties with their monarch, exiled or otherwise. But he was still an enigma to the majority of the magnates and nobles who now had to wait and see just what kind of a king they had got for their £40,000.
Put simply, there was nothing in it for the greatest of them. Robert, Duke of Albany and the principal thorn in King James’s side, had died in 1420. His son Murdoch was acting as regent for Scotland and clearly had nothing to gain from the king’s return; and Murdoch’s son Walter had openly opposed James’s release and so had no wish whatsoever to see his rightful monarch north of the Border. Archibald Douglas, Earl of Wigtown, controlled much of southern Scotland and even held the keys to Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Abbey: what would King James have to say about that?
And then of course there was Alexander MacDonald of Islay. As Lord of the Isles he had a kingdom of his own and no wish to have some other monarch throwing his weight around again. He was also eternally watchful of the activities of the mainland nobles - as concerned by any moves any of them might make as he was about the agenda of the homecoming king. And as the son of his father, he was also ever watchful of anyone called Stewart.
James was crowned at Scone on 21 May 1424 and he only had to wait three months until he took delivery of the best coronation gift imaginable. On 17 August the Scots armies of Archibald Douglas and John Stewart were utterly destroyed by the French at Verneuil. It was troops from the same force that had so humiliated James at Melun and the knowledge that the rest of them had been cut to pieces must have gladdened the king’s embittered heart. At a stroke, the power of the Douglases and of the Stewarts loyal to Albany was seriously undermined.
James had had Murdoch’s son Walter imprisoned as soon as he got home, and after Verneuil he felt empowered to go much further. On the one hand he played the other magnates off against one another: in a blatant snub to the Earl of Mar, an Albany Stewart, he gave the earldom of Ross to Alexander MacDonald. For the Lord of the Isles it was sweet revenge for Reid Harlaw. Mostly, though, James indulged himself in the destruction of the Albany line. ‘Bob’s your uncle’ had meant suffering rather than advantage for the young king, but the old man himself was in the ground and out of reach of vengeance. His descendants were in James’s hands, and they would not be long in following him to the same destination.
In March 1425 Murdoch, who was James’s own cousin, was arrested along with his other son and thrown into prison. The Lord of the Isles - no doubt enjoying his role as Earl of Ross, but wary just the same - was in attendance at the parliament in Stirling that year when Murdoch, Walter and Alexander of the Albany Stewarts were put to death. At the same time, James took back the keys of the castles of Stirling and Dumbarton, along with control of the Albany earldoms of Fife, Lennox and Menteith.
Back home in Finlaggan, Alexander MacDonald would have had a great deal to mull over. Perhaps he summoned his warlords to his island hall to talk about what the future might hold for the Gaelic Lordship while there was a Stewart king in the east. While their hunting dogs sniffed out scraps in the fire-lit shadows, the Isles men would have had time to wonder how much of Scotland would be left once the new master had had his fill.
There was more to King James than a taste for revenge. He claimed his kingdom had gone to seed in his absence, that it was a garden run wild and in need of pruning. But as well as displaying his hard edge, he was determined to demonstrate to the magnates that he also had all the bearing of a cultured, sophisticated European monarch. His pet project in this regard was the building of Linlithgow Palace, the like of which had never been seen before in Scotland. Here was no fortress, but a Renaissance-style royal residence instead. Linlithgow made its point not through strength, but through the display of wealth. His aim was nothing less than the elevation of the very idea of kingship.
Before James I, the Scottish nobles and bishops - the Community of the Realm - had been in the habit of regarding the king as first among equals. The thinking of Duns Scotus, revealed in the Declaration of the Clergy of 1309 and the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, made it quite clear that the king depended on his ‘people’ for his power. As long as he scratched their backs, they might scratch his. But James Stewart had learned the craft of kingship not in Scotland, but in England. Standing at the shoulder of rulers like Henry V, he had come to believe that a king’s power was total.
The uplifting wave of the Renaissance had also washed over this Scots king, leaving an educated and accomplished man in its wake. Among his talents was a gift for poetry and in one work, ‘The Kingis Quair’ - ‘The King’s Book’ - he described the moment when he fell in love. Traditionally the words are thought to have been inspired by his queen, Joan Beaufort, but the object of his affections is never named:
And therwith kest I doun myn eye ageyne,
Quhare as I sawe, walking under the tour,
Full secretly new cummyn hir to pleyne,
The fairest or the freschest yong floure,
That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre,
For quhich sodayn abate anon astert,
The blude of all my body to my hert.
Here is James as love-struck young man, but the lines reveal something else, of much greater significance: his mother tongue.
Scotland in the fifteenth century was a blur of different languages and dialects and James Stewart spoke Scots. The dialect of the Lowlands, it was a distinctive vernacular with Anglo-Saxon roots. It was the tongue he would have learned and used for the first twelve years of his life and he must have missed its sweet sound during his long captivity. That he chose to compose his great work in Scots is a measure of how much it meant to him.
Only half of James’s kingdom was Lowland; only half of his people spoke Scots. Those living in the rest of the land, the Highlands and the islands, and Galloway, spoke Gaelic. Gaelic was still dynamic, still culturally powerful. It was the first language we all had. Its sound echoed and reverberated from the rocks themselves. Within Gaelic Scotland there was no stronger voice than that of Alexander, Lord of the Isles.
This latest of the MacDonalds knew all too well what his ‘kingdom’ was - and what it had been during the time of his forefathers. He had Ross now, a gift from the king that gave him a footprint on the mainland stretching all the way from the rocky Atlantic coastline in the west to the rich farmland of the North Sea in the east. It made Alexander one of the most powerful landowners in the kingdom. But as Calgacus had said to his Caledonians fifteen centuries before, a rich foe excites the greed of powerful men.
King James was powerful but, unfortunately for his nobles, no longer rich. All that palace-building had left him short of cash and he was, after all, a king with a price on his head. He still owed his erstwhile captors, the English, for his freedom and money that ought to have been sent south to help meet his ransom payments had gone instead on gold leaf and fine stonework. In 1424 parliament granted James the right to raise taxation to pay for his ransom but even this failed to satisfy his many needs.
He turned instead in the direction of the rich men of his kingdom, and it was upon Alexander MacDonald, and Ross, that his gaze fell most piercingly. James began by trying to stir up trouble within the Lordship, as though to destabilise it. When this tactic failed to produce the desired results, he summoned Alexander to a parliament in Inverness, in 1428. Alexander arrived in good faith, along with his mother, Mariota, and fifty or so of his nobles. As soon as they stepped within the walls of Inverness Castle, however, they were rounded up and made prisoners in the tower. Even Mariota was manhandled and abused, dishonoured in front of her son. James the poet was inspired once more. Having seen the MacDonalds carted off in chains, he is said to have entertained his men with some off-the-cuff verse:
Let us take the chance
To conduct this company
To the tower with care
For by Christ’s death
These men deserve death.
As well as Alexander and his following, James had also imprisoned several others of the most powerful men of the northern territories: Angus Dubh MacKay, of Strathnaver, leader of 4,000 fighting men; Kenneth Mor, John Ross, William Leslie, Angus de Moray - all leaders of 2,000 men each. The king had celebrated his return to his kingdom by destroying the Albany Stewarts; now he was marking the cards of yet more of the influential men of his kingdom. It was a high-handed, absolutist approach to the Community of the Realm that would lead, in the end, to his undoing.
In the short term, he got what he wanted and needed: the wealth of Ross. He executed some of his prisoners but not Alexander, who was set free with a theatrical display of leniency within a few months. The Lord of the Isles showed his gratitude by gathering his fighting men to him and razing most of Inverness to the ground. The king, suitably outraged, raised a huge force of his own and headed north with it to terrorise those loyal to the Lordship. In August 1429, Alexander found himself with no more moves to make and he surrendered to James at Holyrood Abbey. With echoes of the humiliation of Toom Tabard, the Lord of the Isles was stripped to his underclothes in front of the king. He was made to drop to his knees and hand over sword, title and lands. Disgraced, he was led away then into captivity within the mighty East Lothian fortress of Tantallon Castle.
If James thought that was an end to the trouble in the west, he was terribly wrong. The kingdom of Scotland had shown time and again that she could hold herself together while her kings languished in captivity. The same was true it, seemed, of Ri Innse Gall. While Alexander gazed out of the windows of his prison cell towards the slate-grey waves of the Firth of Forth, men of his ilk were gathering on the waterways of his own kingdom. Dispossessed he might have been, but from every corner of his erstwhile realm his supporters gathered. The longships were on the move, under the temporary leadership of his young kinsmen Donald Balloch and Alisdair Carrach, and heading swiftly in the direction of the royal army camp at Inverlochy Castle, an old Comyn family stronghold near the head of the Great Glen.
As their bards would tell them, urging them onwards:
A Chlanna Cuinn, cuimhnichibh,
Cruas an am na h-iorghaile:
Gu h-airneach, gu h-arranta,
Gu h-athlamh, gu h-allanta,
Gu beodha, gu barramhail,
Gu brioghmhor, gu buan-fheargach,
Gu calma, gu curanta,
Gu crodha, gu cath-bhuadhach,
Gu dur is gu dasannach,
Gu dian is gu deagh-fhulang,
Gu h-easgaidh, gu h-eaghnamhach,
Gu h-eidith, gu h-eireachdail …
Children of Conn, recall now,
Courage in time of combat:
Be attentive, audacious,
Agile, ambitious.
Be bold, beautiful,
Brawny, belligerent,
Contemptuous, courageous,
Clever, combative,
Deliberate, destructive,
Deadly, enduring.
Be eager, expert,
Well-equipped, elegant …
A great wrong had been committed against their kin - but more than that, the independence of the Gaelic west had been threatened. Now the Islesmen’s birlinns landed by the score, downriver from Inverlochy Castle near the site of modern Fort William. They made their way silently along the riverbank until they were within sight of the king’s army.
A force of bowmen led by Alisdair Carrach was already in position on high ground overlooking the royalist camp. Seeing the approach of Donald Balloch and his men Carrach gave the order to unleash a hail of arrows. The royal troops, commanded by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar - the same who had fought the MacDonalds to a standstill at Harlaw - were taken completely by surprise. It is said that Mar was in the middle of a game of cards when word first reached him of the enemy’s approach. He dismissed it, saying he ‘knew very well the doings of the big-bellied carles of the Isles’. Maybe he did and maybe he did not - but their arrows seemingly came as a bolt from the blue. With the iron-tipped shafts still in the air, the main body of the Islesmen charged full tilt, bellowing their battle cries into the dark. It only took a few minutes, after which 900 royal troopers lay dead. Their card-playing commander had fled into the mountains behind the camp and so lived to tell his tale.
James was keen to press on with his campaign to bring the Islesmen to heel, and asked parliament for the necessary funds. But reverses like Inverlochy, coupled with the greater, enduring defiance of the Highlands, had damaged the king’s reputation. The Community of the Realm were also all too aware of how much money James was lavishing on his lifestyle of palaces and of patronage of the arts. They made it clear they were disinclined to throw good money after bad and obstructed the king’s attempts to finance yet more adventures in the north. It seemed to the king then that it was as dangerous to have the Lord of the Isles in captivity as it was to have him roaming with his warriors. Alexander was promptly released from his imprisonment and retumed to his hearth at Finlaggan, none the worse for his ordeal. In fact, he was victorious. His lands and titles were given back to him; so too, crucially, his prestige. The Lord of the Isles was back on top and it was the king who was left to look to his laurels.
Fortunately for James, he had succeeded in securing the future of the Stewart dynasty. After a long and worrying period when only the junior, Albany branch of the family had produced male heirs, Queen Joan was finally delivered of twin boys on 16 October 1430. The elder, Alexander, died in infancy, but the other, James, survived as a promise for the years ahead. In the same year, the king betrothed his six-year-old daughter Margaret to the French Dauphin Louis, son of Charles VII. This was a prestigious match for the Stewarts and ushered in a renewed Franco-Scottish alliance.
Soon after the wedding itself, in 1436, James felt bold enough to launch a campaign to try and regain the two Scottish castles that had remained in English hands since the supine reign of Edward Balliol - Roxburgh and Berwick. Despite lavish, almost theatrical preparations the resultant effort was farcical. Far from reducing the walls of Roxburgh, James’s specially commissioned cannons did little more than make a lot of noise. Word of an advancing English army prompted the Scots into a hasty withdrawal. For certain of his magnates this latest expensive - not to mention failed - foray was the last straw. James had been shown to be profligate, and militarily weak. His final release of the Lord of the Isles had left him bleeding respect as well.
The king and his household were lodged in a Dominican friary in Perth when a group of conspirators made their move to rid themselves of their burdensome monarch. Led by Sir Robert Graham, nephew of the Earl of Strathearn, and Sir Robert Stewart, grandson and heir of the Earl of Atholl, they approached the bedroom of the king and queen on the night of 21 February 1437. The alarm was raised and James had time to prise up a floorboard and drop down into a sewer below. The board was put back in place and a first search by the traitors failed to find him. But in a crushing irony, James had had the end of the drain blocked up just days before - because he kept losing tennis balls down it. He therefore had nowhere to go and a second search of the bedroom revealed where he was hiding.
One by one the conspirators dropped down into the stinking dark. James, ageing and out of condition but still a danger when brought to bay, dispatched the first of them with just a knife. Finally Graham himself went down, armed with a sword, and dealt his king a fatal blow. Emboldened, the rest piled into the attack. When the body was hauled back up into the bedroom it was found to have sixteen deadly wounds upon it.
It is likely Graham and the rest had meant to kill the queen too. But in the confusion, and injured though she was, she made good her escape. Most important of all, given the conspirators’ intentions to try and seize some degree of power, she also had little Prince James with her. Together with those of her followers who had escaped Perth, she made it to the security of Edinburgh Castle.
Scotland held its breath. The killing of a king was a shocking, almost sacrilegious act. But the kingdom had learned how to live with absent kings - dead or otherwise - and a royal party did its best to rally to Queen Joan’s side. The conspirators were rounded up. Stewart was flogged before a crowd for three days, with a red-hot iron crown jammed down upon his head. Only the executioner’s axe finally eased his pain. There was more blood besides. The little prince was crowned King James II on 25 March 1437. The coronation took place in Holyrood Abbey - Scone was too dangerous, seated as it was in the heart of territory controlled by the Earl of Atholl, the traitor Stewart’s grandfather. The Earl himself, Walter Stewart, was parted from his head as well, for good measure, and his earldoms of Atholl and Strathearn added to the royal demesne.
Despite the ghoulish savagery of the punishments dealt out to the conspirators, there was no denying that the move against the king had left the Stewarts looking vulnerable. Much of the damage - to his name and to the kingdom as a whole - had been done by James while he still lived. By the time of the king’s murder, the nobility too were a weakened presence. Lords and barons had been bullied and cowed by the king’s attempts to finance his court and his ambitions. Several had died in France fighting the English in the cause of the Auld Alliance and two more were prisoners in England as security for James’s unpaid ransom. As a consequence of the rule of James I the central, royal administration of the country was confused at best and dangerously exposed at worst.
The MacDonalds, by contrast, appeared unassailable. By the time Alexander died in 1449 his empire, stretching from coast to coast, was still intact. He was buried, not on Iona like his forefathers, but in the rich mainland soil of Ross. From beyond the grave the Lord of the Isles was not only reinforcing past claims but also hinting at ambitions for the future.
For the Stewarts, that future lay in the hands of a boy king. Archibald, Earl of Douglas, a grandson of Robert III and James’s closest male relative, was made regent. He died of plague after just two years and was succeeded as Earl by his teenage son William. Still there was no firm, consistent hand on the kingdom’s tiller. While James remained a minor, other families sought positions of power in his shadow. On 24 November 1440, Sir William Crichton, keeper of Edinburgh Castle and Sir Alexander Livingston, keeper of Stirling Castle murdered the young Earl William Douglas, then sixteen, and his younger brother, David, in front of the king.
James had grown close to these Douglases - even idolised the young noble - and in their jealous spite, Crichton and Livingston had kidnapped the boy king and made a macabre spectacle of the killings. Having invited the Douglas boys to a dinner at Edinburgh Castle, they seized the pair and held a kangaroo court at which they were accused of treason. The boys begged on their knees for their lives but were beheaded while the weeping king looked on in horror. James grieved and the event has been remembered to this day as the ‘Black Dinner’. But it was in fact a grim foretaste of the fate awaiting a future Douglas. William and David had suffered the consequences of coming between the king and ambitious men with eyes on their own advancement. In future, it would be the king himself who posed an awful threat to the powerful Borders earldom.
The future of the MacDonalds, meanwhile, depended on the success or otherwise of Alexander’s son, John. He took his father’s place as Lord of the Isles in 1449 after an inauguration ceremony wrapped in all the lyrical mysticism of anything ever witnessed at Dunadd in the days of the ancient Gaelic kings of Dal Riata. Clothed all in white - symbolising his innocence and integrity, that he was a light for his people - John would have stood upon a large rectangular stone. With one naked foot placed into a footprint carved into the rock - ‘denoting that he should walk in the footsteps and uprightness of his predecessors’ - he would have been handed a white rod, demonstrating his right to rule. He would also have received his father’s sword - symbolic of his duty to protect his people.
True my praising of MacDonald, hero I’m bound to, hero of every conflict,
Sun of the Gaels, face of Colla’s descendant, around the Bann’s borders, swift
his galleys,
Meath’s confusion, wolf of Islay, root of bounty, each land’s defender,
None grew up around him but kings and queens, true these judgements, true
my praising.
He was being handed a heavy mantle, and the praise of the Gaelic bards only made it harder to bear. Some said he was more suited to the life of a priest than a leader of men. But leader of men he was, whether he liked it or not. And where should he take them? There were always those around him, within his own family, who wanted to see the continued expansion of the Lordship. John tended to believe there was more to be gained in the short term from consolidating an empire he considered overstretched already. He opted for the status quo.
Just as John took his place as Lord of the Isles, so James II came fully into his kingship. He was no longer the boy who had cowered in tears while the Douglases were murdered in his name. He had been born with a bright red birthmark covering half of his face and by 1449 he had earned a reputation for a fiery temper to go with it. They nicknamed him ‘James of the fiery face’.
His marriage the same year was a glittering triumph for the newly empowered king and for his lineage. His bride was Mary of Gueldres, niece of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the Continent. James stepped up to the altar of Holyrood Abbey with Mary on 3 July, and in so doing took his place at the top table of European power. Mary was a trophy bride, and her uncle’s choice of wedding present underlined the fact. Philip of Burgundy was an international arms dealer and, along with several other impressive pieces of ordnance, he sent James a great cannon he had had made in the town of Mons in the same year the young king had entered his majority.
Mons Meg was a fiftheenth-century weapon of shock and awe capable of firing 20-stone balls the best part of 2 miles. Used in anger against a stone castle, she would have been truly formidable, but her real power was in the prestige she bestowed upon her owner. Given the physical difficulty of moving such a monster any distance, of getting her into position to attack a fortress, Mons Meg was always impractical as a weapon. But for a young king on the make she was the equivalent of owning a space shuttle. By her very existence, she projected the King of Scotland into orbit. And James II was a man in need of every ego-booster he could lay his hands on. He was thin-skinned, prickly and paranoid, apt to rise to any slight, real or imagined. Some of his sensitivities were understandable: to the north and west of his personal seat of power lay the lofty, independent-minded Lordship of the Isles; to the south was the territory of the ‘Black’ Douglases, for long the most powerful family in the Borders. King James felt trapped between them.
When he learned that William, the 8th Earl of Douglas, had signed up to a pact of friendship with John, Lord of the Isles and Alexander, Earl of Crawford, all of his face burned red. The Douglases had for long been the major power in the Borders. The Lords of the Isles were similarly important in the scheme of things and it made sense for both to agree an alliance of mutual support with another powerful magnate, namely Crawford. But the king did not see it as an innocuous handshake between men of influence; he saw it as the first move in a conspiracy to threaten his throne. Like the boy left out of the team, he was hurt and angry. But in the case of James II, there was more to it than that.
In February 1452 he invited William Douglas to dinner at Stirling Castle. William was a fifteenth-century pin-up, a man of the world with an international reputation and the vast family wealth to back it up. He was also shrewd, in the manner taught to his ilk by hard lessons in betrayal. Smelling a rat, thinking the king had more in mind than a conversation about fine Burgundy wine and big guns, he requested and received a letter from James guaranteeing safe conduct for himself and his entourage. Despite the precautions, it was the dinner party from hell. The king was jumpy and volatile and William was understandably edgy himself. The fact that the two men - one a twenty-seven-year-old playboy, the other a twenty-two-year-old king of all he surveyed - had been drinking all day did not help. Only one thing seemed certain, and that was trouble.
Late in the evening and full of drink, James pressed William to break his bond with John MacDonald. When William refused, the king leapt to his feet. He was at boiling point. He called William a traitor and, drawing a knife from his sleeve, plunged it hilt-deep into his foe’s body. As the blood flowed, the king’s courtiers seized the moment and rushed to gather round the mortally wounded earl. Time and again they stabbed and hacked at him. Legend has it that when the frenzy was over, William’s lifeless body was flung from a first-floor window into a garden below. True or false, the place is called the Douglas Garden to this day. When William’s followers recovered their master’s corpse, they found it had twenty-six separate stab wounds. The head had been cleft in two with an axe.
By any standards it was shocking behaviour for a king, a brutal violation of all notions of honour and trust. William’s followers tied a copy of James’s signed letter of safe conduct to a horse’s tail and led the beast through the streets before ransacking the town. But James had shown he was a monarch to be taken seriously.
James wanted the lands and wealth of the Black Douglases and he did not mind getting his hands dirty in the process. Military and political manoeuvrings during the three years that followed the murder ended with William’s brother and heir, James, driven into permanent exile, with the loss of all his lands. Two more Douglas earls, brothers of Earl James, were executed and their lands confiscated by the crown.
Big guns, rich and powerful friends and relations in high places, murder: King James had the will and the clout to get whatever he wanted. For the Lord of the Isles, it was a nightmare scenario: was he to be next on the king’s hit list?
James completed his takeover of the Black Douglas lands by 1455, the same year the English royals and nobility began the business of tearing themselves apart in their War of the Roses. In 1460, the red rose of the ruling House of Lancaster hung its head with the news that King Henry VI had descended into one of his occasional bouts of insanity. He was taken prisoner by the Yorkists and later replaced on the throne by Edward IV.
With his southern neighbour in turmoil and its rightful king deposed, James of Scotland decided the time was right once again to try to retake the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick. The Lord of Isles, desperate to show his loyalty, loudly pledged that he and his men would fight ‘one league mile’ ahead of the main royal army. As it turned out, it was a vow he would never have to keep.
James was at Roxburgh Castle on 3 August 1460, in the middle of a long, hot summer campaign, when word reached him that his wife, Queen Mary, was about to arrive for a visit. Excited by the news, he gave orders to prepare one of his cannons to fire a salute in her honour. He was standing close by the weapon when the gunner put fire to it. A fault in the casting, or maybe over-use that hot day? Who knows. In any case the gun tore itself apart, sending lethal lumps and shards of metal flying in all directions. King James II, just twenty-nine, was dead.
He left a widow and five children - two daughters and three sons. The eldest of the boys was the nine-year-old James, Duke of Rothsay and on 10 August he was crowned at Kelso. Roxburgh Castle had fallen to the Scots two days before.
Once again Scotland had a boy Stewart king on the throne and once again the magnates and other men of influence stepped into the power vacuum in hope of personal gain.
Just a year after the late king’s death, an emissary arrived at Ardtornish Castle, overlooking the Sound of Mull. Resident there was John, Lord of the Isles and the messenger had an exciting and dangerous proposition to make. He had been sent by the exiled Black Douglas, but the puppet master behind the whole enterprise was Edward IV, the Yorkist King of England. The Lancastrian Henry VI was in exile in Scotland, along with his wife and son. Mary of Gueldres was playing power games and had offered sanctuary to the runaway royals.
What Edward IV was proposing, via the mouthpiece of a Black Douglas lackey, was a plot with more potential explosive power than any cannon James II had ever coveted: John MacDonald was to join forces with the Black Douglas and together they would rise in rebellion against James III. Once the takeover was complete, they could share Scotland between them - John would have the north and the Black Douglas the south. For his part, Edward IV would secure his grip on the English throne. There was one condition, however, the condition English kings always had in mind when thinking about Scotland: John and the Black Douglas would need to accept Edward IV and his heirs as overlords.
The Lord of the Isles agreed to the proposal and the condition. It was treason and he knew it. James II must have been spinning in his grave: now his old paranoia looked like prophecy. Never as politically astute as his predecessors, John was anyway under huge pressure from within his own family. The majority view within the MacDonalds seemed to be to return to the business of expanding the family territory - and this offer from the English king seemed like a dream come true. They were subject in theory to the King of Scotland, but look how seriously they had taken that state of affairs. Switching allegiances to another distant king seemed like a small price to pay.
John’s illegitimate son Angus Og, Young Angus, got the bit between his teeth at once. Before the ink was dry on the paper he was out demanding that taxes owed to James III should be paid now to the MacDonalds. Something fruitful might have come of it all, had not James III decided to cancel his family’s support of the House of Lancaster. As it turned out, Edward IV had only ever needed, or wanted, a diversion in the north and now that his rival for the throne had been cut adrift by the Scottish crown, he did not need Scotland, or anything Scottish, any more. The Black Douglases were already in exile in England and out of harm’s way, and John was left alone to face the consequences.
Finally summoned before the king, John was put through a humiliation that echoed his father’s treatment at the hands of James I. Kneeling before his liege lord, he was ritually stripped of his lands and titles. He had wanted only to be like his father and this was the bitter fulfilment of that wish. But John’s humiliation was about more than just a personal failure. The repercussions of that single, irrevocable wrong move would be felt much more widely, rippling down through the centuries to affect Scotland to this day.
Like his father, John kept his head. He also kept some of his lands - but not the mighty earldom of Ross, or territories in Knapdale and Argyll. The loss of such prizes was too much for the rebellious young bloods within the family. They wanted land at any cost. Most strident of all the voices that rose in criticism of the chastened Lord of the Isles was that of Angus Og. James and his parliament had even sought to appease this most bellicose of John’s relatives. Illegitimate though he was - and therefore legally entitled to nothing of his father’s in the event of his death - parliament named him as John’s heir. It was not enough. Angus became the hub around which John’s opponents could gather. They listened while he harked back to the old days: Alexander’s days, when MacDonalds feared no one on earth; when they had put their torches to Inverness and routed a royal army at Inverlochy. Were the sons of those MacDonalds supposed to roll over now?
Folk myth has it that sometime in 1481 Angus turned up at his father’s hall with a troop of armed men. There was a terrible argument and John - Lord of the Isles - was flung unceremoniously out of his own home and forced to spend the night sheltering under an upturned boat. When news spread that Angus was seeking to overthrow his father, the Lordship erupted into full-scale civil war. There were those minded to follow the young pretender, but just as many who stayed by John’s side. The birlinns that had made the Lordship now gathered to tear it apart.
The opposing forces met in the Sound of Mull and amid the disastrous violence could be heard the death knell of a whole ancient world. The place is called ‘Bloody Bay’ now and Angus Og is supposed to have emerged from its carnage as victor. But in truth, there were only losers. Angus won the battle but it was a defeat for the whole of the Lordship. Something more than men died that day: the idea of a strong Gaelic world - a coherent entity that could deal on equal terms with the rest of Scotland - died too.
The rock of Scotland is endlessly on the move, tectonic plates grinding mindlessly past one another on the way from somewhere to elsewhere. From time to time there is a jolt, a judder great enough to be felt through the feet or heard like distant thunder. Bloody Bay was a seismic moment too. The hairline crack between Highlands and Lowlands became a yawning chasm, too wide ever to be bridged again. Once, it was all Gaelic - the first land and the first language we all had. For long after other tongues arrived, giving new names to old places, the Gaelic world had remained part of the centre, the heart. It was a crystalline vein running through the collective identity of all Scots. All in an instant that day in the Sound of Mull, Gaelic Scotland became something else, something different - something threatening and something ‘other’. The future was changed in that same moment.
King James had troubles of his own as his reign drew on. A sixteenth-century chronicler said he ‘lost the hearts of many of his lords’. He certainly seems to have developed a habit of taking advice from men other than of noble birth - astrologers, philosophers, stonemasons and the like - and his leaders felt themselves slighted. He suffered, too, from a general failure to understand the way his kingdom had always worked. Where previous, more popular kings had circulated among their nobles, seeing and being seen, James III preferred to stay at home, in Edinburgh, mixing with his small inner circle of close acquaintances.
He had married Margrethe of Denmark in July 1469. In lieu of her dowry, her father King Kristian had mortgaged Orkney and Shetland. Both sets of islands had come under the Danish flag when Denmark took over control of Norway, which still owned the islands, and it is likely Kristian meant to keep up his repayments. For his own reasons he failed to do so and in 1472 James III claimed them for the Scottish crown. As well as completing the map of Scotland we know today, the union of James and Margrethe also produced three sons to secure the future of the dynasty - two named James and one called John. When the elder James was a year old, he was promised in marriage to the Lady Cecilia, daughter of the Yorkist King of England Edward IV.
It was part of a policy James had, of cultivating good relations with his southern neighbour, that went down badly with some of his nobles - especially those in the Borders for whom fighting the English was a profitable and enjoyable way of life. Part of being Scottish, especially Borders Scottish, was hating and fighting the English. What the king seemed to have in mind was anathema.
In 1480 King Edward demanded that young James be sent south for the marriage, but his father hummed and hawed. At that moment James’s brother, Alexander, Duke of Albany, travelled south instead and presented himself before the English king. He promised to overthrow his brother - with Edward’s help - and replace him on the throne. The job done, he would grant all of southern Scotland to Edward, along with his oath of allegiance. Not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Edward duly gathered a huge English invasion force and sent it north.
Spurred into action, King James led his own army south. He got as far as Lauder, in July 1482, before a farcical coup d’état was attempted by some of his nobles. In the huff about non-nobles in positions of command in the army, they took the law into their own hands, cancelling the invasion and kidnapping the king. James was frog-marched all the way home and shut up in Edinburgh Castle. He must have been livid. After mysterious negotiations that may have involved Queen Margrethe and the elder Prince James, the king was triumphantly released - by his brother Albany! The affair has gone down in history as the ‘Lauder Lynching’ and the alleged involvement of his eldest son may explain the sour relations that existed between the pair for the rest of the reign.
Another rebellion against the crown in 1488 culminated in the confusion of the Battle of Sauchieburn, on 11 June. With the king on one side of the clash - close by the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, outside Stirling - and the son and heir on the other, the scene was set for tragedy. In circumstances that have been lost to history, King James III was cut out from his retinue and murdered, perhaps with the collusion of the future James IV.
The new king was crowned at Scone on 26 June. Whatever the truth of his involvement with his father’s death (it was rumoured that ever after he wore a belt of heavy iron links around his waist as penance for his share of the guilt), he is remembered as the most charismatic and charming of the Stewart kings. He inspired affection as well as respect but he did have one troublesome trait in common with his predecessors - overweening ambition and desperation to make a mark the whole world would notice.
When the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala visited James’s court in 1497, he was struck by the self-assurance of the Scottish king. He was a man who, the Spaniard remarked, ‘esteems himself as much as though he were Lord of the world’. Personal vanity aside, James IV was behaving in a way pioneered to some extent by every James Stewart before him. Whether by politics or by violence - or by display of wealth - this latest of the Stewart kings was in the business of showing the aristocracy that he sat alone on top of the pyramid of power.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the grandest of the grand families of the realm had been able to rival the king when it came to display. Most notable of all, the Douglases had risen to the point where their chivalry, wealth and all-round glamour were talked about and admired even in the courts of western European kings. Back home in Scotland they had established themselves as the kingdom’s principal defenders against aggression from the south. Before James II took his murderous action in 1452, he had watched with envious eyes as William, the 8th Earl of Douglas paraded his wealth before admiring crowds while on an ostentatious pilgrimage to Rome in 1450. By the second half of the century, the picture had changed for ever. Never again would there exist a noble family able to turn on the style with anything like the brio and excess of the royal family.
The business of making knights was not the exclusive preserve of the monarch either. But with the rise of the James boys came the enhanced value of receiving a knighthood from the king rather than from any other member of the aristocracy. It was all part of a steady and insidious process that changed the role of king from first among equals to a position of unassailable, unchallenged dominance over all. There could be only one.
To complete the process, James IV had embraced the ideas and symbolism of the Renaissance more enthusiastically and more intelligently than anyone else. In 1496 he made it compulsory for all landowners to pay for their sons to be educated, and it was also during his reign that the foundations were laid for the creation of the Court of Session. He spent phenomenal sums building a navy, to defend the realm against English ships. When his flagship, the Great Michael, was launched in 1511, she was the largest vessel afloat.
Where his father had been awkward around people, preferring the company of intimates, James IV was a glittering showman who attracted exciting characters to his court. John Damian, Abbot of Tongland, in Galloway, was one of the most fabled. As well as promising to turn base metals to gold, he claimed he had learned how to fly. His one and only demonstration of his command of aeronautics ended in comical disaster. Wearing feather-covered wings, he leapt from the walls of Stirling Castle - landing in a midden that limited his injuries to a broken leg. His patron was much more successful at rising above all other men. His court shone with luminaries from all branches of science and the arts. Almost as a by-product, he created the Stewart ‘brand’.
Falkland Palace was already a royal retreat, having been acquired for the crown from the local landowner in the fourteenth century. It had once been a fortified building - the castle in which the 1st Duke of Albany had left his nephew David, heir to the throne of Robert III , to starve to death. But from the start of the sixteenth century, James IV set about its transformation into an elegant Renaissance hunting lodge. By the time he had finished with it, Falkland Palace was among the finest residences in the country. Visit the place now and you notice that the interior decoration features thistles - everywhere you look, in fact. James had acquired the thistle as the symbol, the logo of the Stewart dynasty. It was a brilliant choice and in time it came to symbolise not just the Stewarts, but Scotland as well. The two - family and crown - had become one.
James was a political visionary. He wanted to create a whole new Scottish identity. But it was a very specific, even limiting identity: no more would Scotland operate as a loose alliance of regional and family loyalties. Loyalty was to be owed, first and foremost, to the king.
As part of the process of unification, James saw to it that one language rose to dominance - and that language was his own Scots. The same Spanish ambassador who had noted the esteem in which the king held himself also reported that he spoke eight languages. The Spaniard referred to one of these as ‘the language of the savages’. The tongue he was describing, in such disparaging terms, was Gaelic, and James IV was the last Scottish king to speak it.
James’s enthusiasm for all things Renaissance inspired him to encourage the introduction of printing to Scotland. Sometime between 1507 and 1508, the first printing press in the kingdom was established in Edinburgh’s Southgait (a part of the city known now as the Cowgate) by Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar. Myllar had learned the skills of printing in Rouen, but had returned to set up a business in his homeland. Edinburgh merchant Walter Chepman had the money and, more importantly, the ear of the king. The surviving copies of Chepman and Myllar’s first books are among the most prized items in the collections of the National Library of Scotland. One published work in particular, the so-called Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, gives an intense flavour of the battle for supremacy between the Gaelic and Scots languages.
William Dunbar was a priest, legal clerk and makar or poet to the royal court of James IV. As such he would have been required at times to see the world through the eyes of his patron and to compose lines that would please him. Walter Kennedy, Dunbar’s opponent in the poetic ‘duel’, or ‘flyting’, hailed from a part of Ayrshire that was still predominantly Gaelic-speaking in the early years of the sixteenth century. Dunbar challenges Kennedy to a war of words by using the most insulting terms he can find in his lexicon. And central to his attack is ridicule of Kennedy’s mother tongue:
Iersch brybour Baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis,
Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kind,
Evill farit and dryit, as Denseman on the rattis,
Lyke as the gleddis had on thy gule snowt dynd;
Mismaid monstour, ilk mone owt of thy mynd,
Renunce, ribald, thy rymyng, thow bot royis,
Thy trechour tung hes tane ane heland strynd,
Ane lawland ers wald mak a better noyis …
Irish [i.e. Gaelic-speaking] rascal bard, vile beggar with your rags,
Pox-ridden craven Kennedy, coward like your kin,
Ugly and dried up, like a Dane on the rack,
As if a buzzard had feasted on your yellow nose;
Misshapen monster, mad every full moon,
Renounce your rhyming, you scoundrel, you just rave,
Your treacherous tongue has taken a Highland strain,
A Lowland arse would make a better noise …
Dunbar was a poet and in the context of this flyting he aimed to win approval, and hopefully financial reward, from his king. He bore no real malice towards his fellow makar Kennedy, another popular face at the court of James IV in any case; he was just delivering words he knew his patron would enjoy.
It was King James who had the cultural, political and social agenda. He was looking to push Lowland Scots forward as the official language of the people and the kingdom of Scotland and to do that he had to popularise his own tongue in the furthest reaches of his kingdom. Under James IV earthy, everyday Scots became the language of literature and law - and therefore of power. Gaelic, meanwhile - the ‘Highland strain’ - grew tainted. The mother tongue of half of James’s subjects it may have been, but as far as Lowlanders were concerned it was the language of traitors and outlaws.
Chepman and Myllar may have pioneered the trade of printing, but they were followed and copied by others. Soon there would be printers turning out books and pamphlets on all manner of subjects - religious texts included - and the steady proliferation of the printed word would soon have huge cultural impact.
While the king and his fellow Lowlanders found ways to come together and celebrate their culture, the folk of the Highlands and Islands made only war upon themselves. Without the glue of a cohesive Lordship to hold everyone together, Gaelic society tore itself to pieces. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy as desperate men turned themselves into the living embodiment of ‘wild, wicked Highlandmen’ - the bogeymen who had already haunted Lowland imaginations for generations.
Everyone in the wild west was out to grab whatever he could. In the bloodletting, old scores were settled: Angus Og, the upstart son who had tried to wrest control of the Lordship from his father, was strangled to death by one of his own followers, an Irish harpist named Dairmaid O’Cairbre. O’Cairbre in turn was tied between two horses and ripped apart. It was a time remembered by the Gaels as Linn nan Creach, or the raiding time. The Highlands and Islands descended into the chaos of lawlessness. James IV must have looked on with grim satisfaction as the territory that had for so long defied the men of his blood now drowned in its own. In the end, the Lordship of the Isles visited upon itself a fate no king could ever have inflicted - it ate itself.
By 1493, even the crown had seen enough disorder and death. James IV was still in his minority but either he or his advisors were astute enough to see that decisive action against the troublesome northerners might help him kill two birds with one stone. For one thing, it might distract or otherwise refocus the nobles, still jittery about the manner of the old king’s death. The killing of a king was always bad news and the whiff of blood was somewhere around the new man on the throne. Secondly, any attempt to ‘daunt’ the Lordship - ringleaders of the troublemakers - would give the rest of Scotland something to unite behind. For James, it was a win-win situation.
The lands of the Lordship were soon declared forfeit to the crown and the title was taken for the king himself. To mark his new-found dominance he organised a tour of his latest acquisitions. It must have been a sweet taste upon the Stewart tongue: the last time a king of Scotland had ventured by ship into the labyrinth of the Hebrides, he was on the run. But, unlike Robert the Bruce nearly 200 years before, James IV arrived in the island kingdom not as a fugitive but as overlord.
Sometime in 1494 Finlaggan itself was abandoned as the administrative centre of the Lordship. John’s failure was complete. For the hundreds of years that the Lord of the Isles was the hub of the Gaelic heartland, the ‘Kingdom of the Hebrides’ was secure. By failing to maintain control, John had let centuries of tradition and certainty slip through his fingers. He lived until 1503, but by then he had withdrawn completely from public life into one of penance and prayer.
1503 was a memorable year for James IV for altogether different reasons: his marriage to Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England. Henry and James had been on reasonably amicable terms for years and the prospect of a lasting peace between their two countries required a celebration. Both monarchs signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1502 and on 8 August the following year the thirteen-year-old princess was married to the thirty-year-old King of Scotland.
James spent a royal fortune on five days of feasting, pageantry and parties at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, as well as three days of tournaments and jousting. According to some accounts, the English guests were unimpressed. As one chronicler had it, they ‘returned into their countrey, gevynge more prayse to the manhoode, than to the good manner and nurture of Scotlande’. It was ever thus but, carping aside, it marked another spectacular advance by the Stewart dynasty. This had been a marriage with a difference.
Henry VII was an old man by the time he attended the event they called ‘the Marriage of the Thistle and the Rose’. He was the first of the Tudor kings of England and his family’s hold upon the crown was less than secure. Richard III, the last Plantagenet, had died on the field of battle, at Bosworth in 1485. It was Shakespeare who was to paint him as a villain and the Tudor claim on the throne was easily disputed. Marriage into the long-established and illustrious Stewart line was therefore a coup for the new English royal family. It was just the kind of good news Henry VII needed as part of a rolling campaign to paper over the cracks and reassure his subjects that he was rightfully in charge. James IV brought the Tudors much-needed legitimacy in the eyes of European royalty as well. It was an extraordinary reversal of fortune. The Stewart dynasty, whose sons had once been hostages and political prisoners of the English, had emerged as major power brokers. It was they who made the reputation of their royal rivals in the south.
An undeniable fondness for the ladies had brought James more than one illegitimate child before his marriage to Margaret. With Marion Boyd he had Alexander, in 1493, who would be educated by the great Humanist scholar Erasmus before being made Archbishop of St Andrews, by his father; with Margaret Kennedy he had James Stewart, in 1499, whom he made Earl of Moray. The first three children from his marriage, two boys and a girl, died in infancy. But on 10 April 1512, another James was born, the future James V. Once more, the dynasty was secure.
While the Stewart court blossomed, the MacDonalds of Islay knew only grief and sorrow. Giolla Coluim Mac an Ollaimh, a friend of Angus Og and poet to the Lordship, wrote:
It is no joy without Clan Donald,
It is no strength to be without them,
The best race in the round world,
To them belongs every goodly man …
Brilliant pillars of green Alba,
A race the hardiest that received baptism,
A race that won fight in every land,
Hawks of Islay for valour,
A race without arrogance, without injustice,
Who seized naught save spoil of war,
Whose nobles were men of spirit,
And whose common men were most steadfast,
It is no joy without Clan Donald.
The bard’s lament was in vain. The original is written in Gaelic, of course, and without a translation would mean nothing to all but a few tens of thousands of Scots. This is James IV’s greatest coup. You do not have to kill people to deny them power, to deny them rights. You have only to take away their words, make them silent. He who remains silent, after all, is deemed to have granted his consent. By now, the rise of Scots - and of English - had made Gaelic an incomprehensible babble to all but a handful.
The Highland Boundary Fault Line cuts through the heart of Scotland. From coast to coast it divides the country into two distinct parts - one that is Highland and one that is Lowland. It is a neat division, perhaps too neat. It is easy to think that the differences between the Gaelic Scots’ identities are somehow set in stone. But that sense of separation is only a few centuries old. It is history, not geography, that divides Scots. Scotland’s split personality is the result of a family struggle that pulled the kingdom apart. From being fully-paid-up members of the Scottish project, the Gaels were made rebels and outsiders. Ironically, they delivered the coup de grâce to their own necks. Scotland could not continue to be diverse. It had to become a single political entity - and maybe a single cultural entity as well.
It was the Stewarts who drove this new vision of the Scottish kingdom. In their eyes, Scotland was now secure in its independence and established on the European stage. But it was only the beginning of what they had set out to achieve. In the years to come, their ambitions would truly take flight.
With the MacDonalds humbled and the Lordship nominally in the hands of the king, there was a power vacuum in the Highlands and Islands. James IV of Scotland might now be Lord of the Isles as well, but the day-to-day running of the place had still to be undertaken by someone on the ground.
Life for the lumpen majority continued as before - in the Highlands and in the Lowlands - lives in both being dictated by the cycle of farming and by the force of law as administered by local landlords via barony courts or something similar. But though families like the Campbells of Argyll and the MacKenzies of Kintail did their best - often with royal sanction - to stamp their authority upon the ‘wild west’, the stubborn ghosts of the MacDonalds still haunted the land. The spectre of lawlessness was not likely to be exorcised by the behaviour of royal lieutenants like Gordon, Earl of Huntly, or Argyll, men more interested in feathering their own nests than establishing a fair and functioning society.
For the people of the Lordship, the central problem was the orientation of the king. Robert I had understood and valued the people of the west; so had Robert II, the first of the Stewarts. But thereafter, men like the 1st Duke of Albany and all the subsequent Stewart kings had tended to sense only strangeness and trouble in the Highlands and Islands. Their preoccupation with, and preference for, the southern half of the kingdom left the ordinary people of the Lordship out on a limb long before the fall of the Lord himself.
James IV spoke Gaelic, and seems to have been interested in the language from an intellectual point of view. But he was a dilettante in matters more serious to his health than linguistics.
The Treaty of Perpetual Peace of 1502 lived up to its name as long as the elderly Henry VII was still breathing. But his death in 1509 ushered in more turbulent times. Where old Henry had been content to spend his last years in peace, his athletic and forceful young son Henry VIII was quickly out of the blocks.
All across western Europe the main political talking point was the rise and rise of France under Louis XII. When Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain joined forces with the city of Venice and with Pope Julius II in a ‘Holy League’ against Louis, Henry VIII was more than happy to engage - leaving his Scottish brother-in-law in a difficult situation. On the one hand the Treaty of Perpetual Peace demanded brotherly love from James. But on the other, his chivalric heart had to consider his kingdom’s much older tie to France. The Auld Alliance had begun during the reign of King John Balliol, and Louis had taken pains to remind James of its obligations as soon as Henry VIII became involved with the Holy League.
James’s hand was finally forced in 1513 when Henry invaded France. Louis demanded help from his auld ally and his wife sent James a ring from her own finger along with a letter begging her ‘champion’ to ‘take but three paces into English ground and break a lance for my sake’. King James handed over at least some responsibility for decision-making to little James, and started preparing to invade Northumberland.
A greater handicap than his chivalric sensibilities, however, was his dilettante’s understanding of war. As long ago as 1497, Don Pedro de Ayala had reported to his master and mistress, Ferdinand and Isabella, that the King of Scotland was ‘courageous, even more so than a king should be. I have seen him often undertake most dangerous things … He is not a good captain because he begins to fight before he has given his orders.’
Louis had sent seasoned advisors to instruct James and his men in the use of the most fashionable new weapon of the day - Swiss pikes measuring well over 20 feet in length. James rounded up the largest Scots army ever to invade England, as well as a truly awe-inspiring and hugely expensive artillery train. He sent forth the navy as well, the Great Michael included.
So far, so impressive, but James was a relatively inexperienced warrior. And as he crossed into Northumberland he approached the man Henry VIII had entrusted with the security of his realm - Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Surrey was seventy years old but a battle-hardened commander who had seen it all and done most of it. James and his thousands were lumbering towards a predator.
The battle that ensued, between Flodden Edge and Branxton Hill on 9 September 1513, was all about hubris and bad tactics. Having arrived first and fortified Flodden Edge with his heavy guns, James allowed himself to be taunted and goaded into leaving his defences to face Surrey in pitched battle on the slopes of Branxton Hill.
Success for the Scots depended on their massed schiltrons of spearmen, armed with their unwieldy pikes, maintaining tight formations. Had they had time to practise properly, their sheer force of numbers might have carried the day. As it was, what should have been tight hedgehogs of men all but fell apart in tragic confusion as they clattered down the slick slope of Branxton Hill. Arriving at the bottom in a shambles, and faltering in soft ground, they were little more than a huge, unruly mob. English troops armed with shorter, but more easily handled bills - large axes perfectly designed for making matchwood of Swiss pikes - stepped into the confused mass of Scots and cut them to pieces.
King James, leading from the front, as was his custom, was easily felled. Dying alongside him were his illegitimate son, Alexander, Archbishop of St Andrews, two bishops, two abbots, nine earls, fourteen lords of parliament, hundreds of knights and thousands of spearmen. James had been a hugely popular king and those who had gathered so eagerly to his side paid dearly for their love of him. Even the head gardener of Stirling Castle lay among the fallen. The English losses were dwarfed by comparison.
It was a military disaster the like of which not even the Scots had ever suffered before. The king himself, their shining Renaissance prince, had been butchered before his men’s eyes.
‘The Flowers of the Forest’, written in the eighteenth century, commemorates it best:
At e ’en in the gloaming, nae swankies are roaming,
’Bout stacks wi’ the lasses at bogle to play,
But each one sits drearie, lamenting her dearie, -
The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.
Once again the kingdom of Scotland was in the hands of an infant. James V was crowned in the Chapel Royal of Stirling Castle on 21 September 1513. Within a year his mother, Margaret Tudor, had met and married Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. But the loss of an adult king, followed by the arrival on the throne of a child, was almost business as usual for a Scotland well used to adversity. The magnates and the Church fell into their familiar roles, vying with one another for control of the young monarch.
In August the dowager queen surrendered her sons, James and his younger brother Alexander, to the newly appointed regent - John Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany (and son of Alexander, who had once promised southern Scotland to Edward IV of England during the reign of his elder brother James III). In October she gave birth to the Lady Margaret Douglas, future Countess of Lennox and eventually the mother of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary Queen of Scots.
James V had a tough act to follow. Not only had his father been glamorous and charismatic, he had also been a successful and effective monarch. His death at Flodden had conferred upon him the legendary status enjoyed by hero kings like Robert the Bruce. For these reasons, James V tends to exist somewhat in the shadow of an icon, who would always be impossible to live up to. Despite all this, he too was a successful ruler, shrewd in his relations with his magnates and often intelligent in his use of power. He was also interested in the lives and conversations of the common folk of his kingdom. By the Castle Rock in Stirling is a district known then and now as Ballengeich. It was the king’s habit to wander incognito among his subjects, sitting with them in their taverns and listening to the craic - so that he earned the nickname ‘the good man of Ballengeich’.
The architectural remodelling of Scotland that had started under James IV was continued and taken to new heights by his son. James IV had seen to the construction of the Great Hall at Stirling Castle, but it was James V who created the magnificent Renaissance palace there, a building unique in all of Britain at the time.
On 1 January 1537 he married Madeleine of Valois, daughter of King François I of France. Henry VIII had been keen for James to marry his own daughter Mary, and by sidestepping the English offer James had forcefully aligned himself and his country with his southern neighbour’s great and implacable rival. After the promise of peaceful union that had grown between the two countries after the Marriage of the Thistle and the Rose, James was choosing instead to keep a distance between himself and England.
Madeleine died within months of arriving in Scotland, and James immediately returned to France for a replacement. In yet another coup - and a further snub to England - he received as his second bride Marie de Guise-Lorraine. Henry VIII himself had sought to add her to his collection of wives (a lucky escape there) and her loss to the King of Scotland must have irked him severely. In contrast to the frail and sickly Madeleine of Valois, Marie was a formidable woman and an able partner. A daughter of one of the most powerful families in Europe, she was also highly intelligent, politically astute and a shrewd operator in a world of men. James had chosen well.
Like all the Stewart men, he was well able to father children. By multiple mistresses before his first marriage he had sired a brood of illegitimate sons and scattered them like cuckoos into the comfortable nests of senior Church jobs around the kingdom. With his queen he fathered two legitimate sons - James, Duke of Rothsay and Arthur, Duke of Albany; but far from securing the dynasty, they brought little more than heartbreak. Both boys died in April 1541, James at just under a year old and Robert within days of his baptism.
King James had had the wit and guile to exploit the weakness of the Church as it began to squirm in the heat of Europe-wide religious dissent. The teachings of Reforming preachers like Martin Luther - and of Humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus - had posed awkward questions for the Church and raised calls for change.
Henry VIII had already severed his own and his kingdom’s relationship with the Pope, but over matters related more to the bedroom than to any questions of faith. Furious at the Holy Father’s refusal to annul his marriage to his first wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon, he had declared himself ‘the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church in England’. He had since begun to apply pressure to his nephew, the King of Scotland, to put a similar distance between himself and the Pope, but James was astute enough to see an opportunity. With the Pope anxious to keep Scotland under his wing, James was able to extract huge financial rewards for his continued fidelity. In Scotland, the plight of the men of the cloth was therefore intensified by James V’s demands for money.
To raise the necessary funds, the great religious houses were forced to ‘feu’ their lands and demand cash rent from their many tenants. For those who could afford the rent - and the up-front payment known as a ‘grassum’ - there were certain advantages. As long as they continued to meet the rent, their land belonged to them and their heirs in perpetuity. But for those unable to get onto the property ladder, as it were, the business of feuing became a massive bone of contention and the cause of unbearable hardship. Of course it had not been the Church’s idea, and it is ironic that a straw that broke the camel’s back and hastened calls for the Reformation in Scotland grew out of James V’s fiscal policies. From a religious standpoint James was not in the least interested in rocking the boat; and yet it was his demands for money to secure his obedience to Rome that forced the Church to behave in a way that alienated too many of its faithful.
Relations with England broke down completely in 1541, the year of his sons’ deaths. Margaret Tudor died in November, severing a familial tie to Henry, and by the following summer the armies were on the move once more. At the Battle of Solway Moss, on 24 November 1542, an invading Scots army was roundly thrashed, with many of the nobles taken as prisoners.
The king, weakened no doubt by the deaths of his heirs and by yet another drubbing from the English, retired to Falkland Palace and took to his bed. He died, either of cholera or dysentery, on 15 December. Just the week before he had received the news that his queen had given birth to a third child, at Linlithgow Palace - but a daughter rather than the son his line so desperately needed.
For the first time since the death of Alexander III in 1286, the throne was in the hands of an infant girl. Little Mary Stewart was the future of Scotland and on his deathbed her father made a gloomy prediction: ‘It came wi’ a lass …’ he said, referring to the way the Stewarts had first got their hands on the throne through Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce, and her marriage to the Steward, ‘… and it’ll gang wi’ a lass.’
Born on 8 December 1542, she was just a baby when she was crowned Queen of Scots in the Chapel Royal of Stirling Castle on 9 September 1543. The date had been chosen deliberately - the thirtieth anniversary of the Battle of Flodden - and the ceremony dripped with moment and significance. She had to be sat upon her mother’s knee to receive the crown and the anointing, and it was said that when the sceptre was held near her, she reached out and clutched it with her tiny hand. The observers were delighted by her seeming enthusiasm for the task ahead.