by R J M Pugh
To reinforce his claim, Donald gathered an army of 10,000 at Morven and marched it to Inverness, then to Bennachie and the moor of Harlaw, about eighteen miles from Aberdeen. Donald intended to plunder Aberdeen and make himself master of all northern Scotland to the river Tay. However, he was met by a smaller but well equipped army of nobles and burghers from Aberdeen led by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, a natural son of Alexander Stewart, known as the Wolf of Badenoch The encounter was one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland’s history. Donald suffered casualties of 1,000 – thought to be on the low side – to Mar’s losses of 500 – also considered low. The carnage was so terrible that the field was known thereafter as the Red Harlaw. Donald effected his escape to his own territory; the following summer, Albany led an expedition against Donald and forced him to make submission and supply hostages for his continuing good behaviour.
In the same year, Gawain, or Gavin, son of the 10th Earl of Dunbar attacked the English in Roxburgh, torching the town as his father had; he then went on to Berwick where he destroyed the wooden bridge over the river Tweed. In 1416 Albany gathered a large army to inflict damage on Henry V by attacking Berwick and Roxburgh; Albany led part of the army against Berwick and Archibald, 4th Earl of Douglas was directed towards Roxburgh. Nothing was achieved, however; the episode is known in Scotland’s history as the Foul Raid as the English retaliated by pillaging and burning Teviotdale, Liddesdale and the towns of Selkirk, Jedburgh and Hawick. The only other hostilities that marked Albany’s regency were the temporary possession of Wark Castle in Northumberland and the burning of Alnwick by the Earl of Douglas in 1420.
During his eighteen years in English captivity, Robert III’s son and heir James fell in love with Joan, daughter of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset and half-brother to Henry IV; the young couple were married in February 1424 and were allowed to return to Scotland on payment of James’s ransom money. The young man came back to a Scotland where much had changed. He resented the fact that his uncle Robert, 1st Duke of Albany, had done nothing to secure his release; furthermore, his son Murdoch, 2nd Duke of Albany, who had succeeded as regent on the death of his father in 1420 had little to gain from James’s return home. On 13 May 1424, a few days before his formal coronation, James arrested Murdoch’s son, Sir Walter Stewart; also taken into custody was James’s brother-in-law, Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld and Thomas Boyd of Kilmarnock, probably because the Boyds and the Flemings had supported the Albany regents. James I was crowned at Scone on 21 May 1424, Murdoch placing the crown on his head. It was said that on the first day of James’s return to Scotland, an unidentified Scottish courtier had commented on the misgovernment of the realm since 1406, with crimes going unpunished, which was malicious gossip. James reputedly responded thus: ‘God granting me life, I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush the cow.’3 James lost no time in stamping his authority; all ranks of people from the high born to the low soon discovered that in their new king, they would find a man of different stamp from his predecessors, Robert II and Robert III. From the outset, James set about playing off one magnate against the other. In a snub to the Earl of Mar, an Albany Stewart, James gave the earldom of Ross to Alexander MacDonald, son of Donald MacDonald, Lord of the Isles; for Alexander MacDonald, it was sweet revenge for his defeat at the battle of Red Harlaw. In the same year as his coronation, James arrested Murdoch’s aged father-in-law Duncan, Earl of Lennox and Sir Robert Graham of Kincardine; the latter would exact a terrible revenge in 1437. The following year, James arrested Murdoch and Murdoch’s other son Alexander; in retaliation, Murdoch’s third son unwisely gathered a small force and descended on Dumbarton, torching the town and slaughtering thirty-two people including the governor of Dumbarton Castle, Sir John Stewart of Dundonald. This ill-advised raid gave James the excuse he needed to draw the Albany Stewarts’ teeth. When parliament met in May 1425, Murdoch, his sons Walter and Alexander and the Earl of Lennox were found guilty of charges which are not recorded. All four were executed at the Heading Hill in Stirling.4
Lochaber
James was not finished by a long chalk. Despite the defeat at Harlaw, the Hebrides and the Highlands were still in a state of unrest. As we saw in Chapter 3, when the Hebrides were ceded to Alexander III in 1266, Scotland was obliged to recompense the King of Norway with a lump sum down payment and an annual sum of 100 merks in perpetuity, money which had not been paid since the fourteenth century. James settled the arrears due to the contemporary Norwegian king in a gesture of friendship. Then, in the spring of 1427, he held a parliament at Inverness, summoning Alexander MacDonald, Earl of Ross and 3rd Lord of the Isles and other leading chiefs in the Highlands. Believing they had nothing to fear, Alexander and the others duly attended Inverness, where forty of them including Alexander were thrown into prison. A peace lasting two years followed until 1429, when Alexander MacDonald, now at liberty, collected a strong force and burnt Inverness, the scene of his humiliation. His triumph was short-lived. James hastily raised an army and totally defeated MacDonald at Lochaber, in the district of Fort William at the west end of the Great Glen; MacDonald was imprisoned in Tantallon Castle, East Lothian. James had dealt with the Albany Stewarts, now he was seeing off any residual challenge to his authority in the Highlands and Islands, a high-handed and despotic approach that would lead to his premature death.
Inverlochy I
In 1431, while Alexander MacDonald was languishing in Tantallon, his kinsmen Donald Balloch and Alasdair Carragh raised a force to confront the royal army camped near Inverlochy Castle at the head of the Great Glen. The Islemen sailed from the Hebrides in their birlinns (galleys), landing downriver from Inverlochy. Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar commanded the King’s army; Mar was the sworn enemy of the MacDonalds of the Isles after Red Harlaw. The Islemen took Mar by surprise; their bowmen stationed on high ground wrought havoc among Mar’s panic-stricken foot soldiers, then the entire force charged downhill to complete their victory. In less than a few minutes 900 of Mar’s men lay dead and he was forced to seek refuge in the mountains. Alexander MacDonald was promptly released from Tantallon, his titles and lands restored. James I accepted that it was as dangerous to imprison the Lord of the Isles as it was to allow him freedom; however, parliament refused to grant him any money to mount further campaigns in the north.
At least James kept the peace with England through a succession of treaties. However, with the expiry of the treaty between Scotland and England in 1433, both countries were free to indulge in hostilities.
Piperdean
In the autumn of 1435, a minor skirmish in Berwickshire sparked off hostilities. More of a raid than a battle, it was in part a retaliatory response for James’s treatment of George, 11th Earl of Dunbar whose estates and titles were forfeited that same year due to his father’s support for Henry IV and winning for him the battle of Homildon Hill. George Dunbar’s son Patrick had formed an association with Sir Robert Ogle, governor of Berwick and Henry Percy of Northumberland. Patrick Dunbar received a safe conduct to visit Henry VI on 12 July 1435, no doubt to inform the English king of his plans. Dunbar, Ogle and Percy broke into the East March of Scotland that summer, plundering the former Dunbar lands now in the possession of James I. On 26 September, James complained to the English Privy Council about Percy’s and Ogle’s foray, which he said was in support of the deposed George Dunbar’s son whom he described as ‘Paton of Dunbar, the king’s rebel’. By this time Ogle and Dunbar had fought a skirmishing action on 10 September5 with the Earl of Angus, Adam Hepburn of Hailes and Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie at Piperdean, near Cockburnspath, Berwickshire. About forty casualties were sustained by both sides.6 Ogle was taken prisoner along with others of his force – mainly renegade Scots – while Patrick Dunbar managed to escape across the Border where he was forced to live in exile, declared a traitor by James I. As for his part, Henry VI did not think it financially worthwhile to support the lost cause of the Dunbars.
Piperdean was not in itself an im
portant battle but it encouraged James I to mount his first and only attempt to recover Berwick and Roxburgh from England. At the head of a large and well-equipped army, James’s fifteen-day siege of Roxburgh Castle came to nought. James’s cannon did little more than deafen both besiegers and defenders. Receiving word of the approach of a large English army, James beat a hasty retreat. This latest adventure proved to James’s nobles that not only was their king avaricious and a profligate spendthrift, he was also weak in military strategy.
James believed that he could rule all Scotland simply by the scrape of his pen. During his short reign he alienated many of his powerful nobles and insulted the families of others. Among the disaffected was Sir Robert Graham whom James had imprisoned in 1424. On 21 February 1437, James and his Queen Joan Beaufort were residing in Blackfriars Convent, outside the walls of Perth. Graham and his associates broke into the Convent and made their way to the royal bedchamber. The alarm was raised and James managed to prise up the floorboards of his bedroom and conceal himself in the sewer below. The conspirators soon found him; Graham delivered the fatal blow with his sword. When James’s body was brought back into the bedchamber, it bore sixteen stab wounds. Queen Joan managed to effect her escape with the young Prince James to Edinburgh Castle.
The teenage Prince was crowned James II (1437 – 60) in Holyrood Abbey. Archibald, 5th Earl of Douglas, grandson of Robert II was appointed regent; he died in 1439 and was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son William, 6th Earl of Douglas. William’s appointment was also short-lived; on 24 November 1440, Sir William Crichton and Sir Alexander Livingston, respectively governors of Edinburgh and Stirling Castles arrested William Douglas and his younger brother David in front of the King dining at Edinburgh Castle. The boy King James II wept as he had grown fond of Willie Douglas. This incident is known to Scotland’s history as the Black Dinner. A few days later, William and David Douglas along with their chief adviser Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld were executed on Edinburgh’s Castle Hill on a charge of treason. It is thought that William Douglas, with his bold and haughty temperament, posed a threat to Livingston’s custody of James II – meaning Livingston’s control and manipulation of the young king. Livingston was supported by Crichton, Chancellor of Scotland, but both could have been easily eclipsed by the Douglas family.
Livingston and Crichton got away with what amounted to the assassination of two members of the most powerful family in Scotland. Why? James ‘the Gross’ Douglas, Earl of Avondale, great-uncle of the murdered William Douglas became head of the family. Not only did Avondale’s failure to avenge his relative surprise the nobles, they were surprised that he acted in concert with Livingston and Crichton over the next few years. When James, 7th Earl of Douglas and Avondale died in 1443 his son William succeeded him; he would prove a different man than his father.
In 1448, a nine-year truce concluded between Scotland and England expired. The long years of inactivity on both sides of the Border had frustrated both Scots and English. Hostilities resumed with the burning in May of Dunbar by Sir Robert Ogle and Henry Percy, the future 3rd Earl of Northumberland. A month later the Earl of Salisbury burnt Dumfries. The Scots retaliated by burning Alnwick and Warkworth in June and July. The stage was set for a major confrontation between Scotland and England.
Sark
The battle of Sark, also known as the battle of Lochmaben Stone was fought in October 1448. In retaliation for the incursions in East Lothian and Dumfries, William, 8th Earl of Douglas supported by his brother Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormond and the Earls of Angus and Orkney gathered an army to meet the expected invasion of Scotland after the destruction of Alnwick and Warkworth. When the Scots advanced into Cumberland, Henry VI ordered the Percies of Northumberland to retaliate.
Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland at the head of 6,000 men crossed the Border into Dumfriesshire in October, making camp on the bank of the river Sark, near Gretna and the Kirtle Water, a tidal waterway. Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormond, mustered a force of about 4,000 recruited from Annandale and Nithsdale to confront him. On 23 October, Ormond engaged a numerically superior English army on the Sark. Northumberland arranged his army in three divisions with archers to protect his flanks; Ormond mirrored Northumberland’s formation. The Scottish spearmen drove the English backwards where they came to grief in the incoming tide. The English suffered 1,500 killed in battle and a further 500 were drowned by the tide.7 The Scottish casualties have been given at as low as twenty-six and as high as 600.
In 1449, James II married Mary of Gueldres, daughter of Arnold, Duke of Gueldres and niece of Philip ‘the Good’ of Burgundy. It is perhaps no coincidence that after this marriage on 3 July 1449, James felt encouraged to remove the reins of power from some of his overweening family factions – the Livingstons, Crichtons and Douglases. Matters came to a head in 1452 when during a somewhat hollow and short-lived reconciliation, James invited the head of the Douglas family, William, 8th Earl of Douglas to dinner at Stirling Castle on 21 February. The following day the pair supped together, when James challenged Douglas about his intriguing with the Earls of Crawford and Ross, two families who with Douglas could have endangered the stability of James’s reign. James urged Douglas to break with the rebellious earls; Douglas refused. In a fit of passion reminiscent of Bruce’s murder of the Red Comyn in 1306, James plunged his dagger into Douglas, the signal for his attendant courtiers to follow suit. The body of Douglas was said to have suffered twenty-six stab wounds.
Arkinholm
The murder of the head of the family could not go unpunished by the House of Douglas. Between 1452 and 1455, James was constantly bedevilled by plots and threats but he bided his time, waiting for an opportune moment to crush the Douglases for good. James, 9th Earl of Douglas sought the help of the English King Henry VI, formally renouncing his allegiance to James. Matters dragged on until March 1455, when James mounted a campaign against the House of Douglas and their supporters. He carried fire and sword into Douglasdale, Avondale and Ettrick Forest. The 9th Earl of Douglas enjoyed considerable power in Scotland; his three brothers, Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormond, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Moray, and James Douglas of Balveny raised a strong force and made destructive raids in the neighbouring countryside. The King’s army, led by George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, caught up with the Douglas brothers at Arkinholm, Langholm on 1 May 1455 and routed them. The Earl of Moray was killed, Ormond was taken into custody and executed for treason, while Balveny escaped to England, joining his brother James, 9th Earl of Douglas who had not been present on the field of Arkinholm. The victory at Arkinholm was crowned by the fall of Threave, the strongest of the Douglas castles.
James’s triumph over the Black Douglases was complete. A parliament held in Edinburgh on 10 June attainted the Earls of Douglas and Moray and Douglas of Balveny; a further parliament in August that year declared the Douglas lands forfeit to the Crown or to those nobles who had supported James against the last of the Black Douglas earls. The suppression of the Black Douglases in 1455 was perhaps the greatest achievement in James II’s reign; of the remaining five years of it, little of importance occurred. It was with England that James encountered most of his problems. During his struggle with the House of Douglas, the Wars of the Roses began in England; James supported the Red Rose House of Lancaster in the person of Henry VI, while the 9th Earl of Douglas received encouragement from the White Rose House of York in a struggle for the English throne that would last until 1497. However, with England distracted by this civil war, James took the opportunity to attempt the recovery of Berwick and Roxburgh, a duty he felt he owed to his kingdom and subjects. James made an unsuccessful attack on Berwick in 1455. No help was forthcoming from France in either money or arms, King Charles VII refusing to support James in open warfare with England. A truce concluded between Scotland and England was negotiated that year; it would last until 1459.
Lochmaben
Despite the truce, in October 1458, a strong force of Yorkist troops entered An
nandale, Douglas territory. James II responded with an army which utterly routed the Yorkists; 600 were slain and 1,500 taken prisoner.8 However, the Yorkist cause was gaining supremacy in England. By 1460 the House of York had taken the Lancastrian Henry VI as prisoner. This drove James to attempt what would be his last campaign – the recovery of Roxburgh Castle. Towards the end of July, James led a large army supported by formidable ordnance which consisted of several bombards or mortars usually loaded with stone rather than iron cannonballs. On 3 August 1460, James was observing one of his cannon bombarding Roxburgh when the piece exploded and a splinter from it mortally wounded him. James II was only twenty-nine; his son and heir was aged nine. Once again Scotland would have a child as king.
James III (1460 – 88) was crowned at Kelso Abbey on 10 August. He inherited a kingdom which enjoyed a prosperity not known since the last years of Robert the Bruce. By the wholesale confiscation of lands from dissident nobles in the previous two Stewart reigns, the Scottish Crown had attained a prominence which no single noble could dream of challenging. However, the overthrow of the great Houses of Dunbar, Douglas and others remained strong in the memories of the nobles who had retained their titles and lands. James’s mother, the formidable and intelligent Mary of Gueldres, was granted guardianship of her young son by parliament in 1461. This caused some ill-feeling among the excluded faction led by James Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews and George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, head of the Red Douglases. (These difficulties would only be resolved by Mary of Gueldres’s death in 1463.)
James III’s reign began well. Under their new King, the Scottish magnates resumed the siege of Roxburgh Castle which was captured and destroyed, leaving only Berwick in English hands. Then events in England during the conflicts between the Houses of York and Lancaster (the Wars of the Roses) brought about the return of Berwick to the Scots in 1461 by the Lancastrian Henry VI as a reward for offering him shelter from the Yorkists who had defeated him in two major battles. The return of Berwick was a source of national pride as it had been in English hands almost continuously since 1296. (It would be retaken by the English in 1482, during the quarrel between James III and his ambitious brother Alexander, 3rd Duke of Albany, who sought the crown for himself.)
