by Linda Porter
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AS INTRACTABLE and unpopular as ever, James III had somehow survived for six years after the Lauder Bridge crisis. He would not give up on the English alliance, causing consternation among the Border families, and he was also quite willing to renew long-standing disputes. The most important of these in 1487–8 was with the influential Hume family, who held the prosperous Benedictine priory of Coldingham on the south-east coast of Scotland. James had been trying since the 1470s to get his hands on Coldingham and its revenues, but the Humes resisted. Now, fortified by the award of the papal Golden Rose by Pope Innocent VIII, the king was determined to have his way. But the Humes, aided by their allies, the Hepburns, refused to back down. As the standoff continued, the king added to his list of enemies by dismissing his chancellor, the powerful earl of Argyll, and turned for help to the very men who had held him captive in 1482, his unreliable and deeply unpopular half-uncles. It evidently never crossed his mind that he might have done better to mend fences with his eldest son or even, on a more practical level, to ensure that he knew where the lad actually was. So scant was his interest in the prince that nearly three weeks elapsed before he found out that James was no longer in Stirling. Whether there were those around him in Edinburgh who knew but kept the information from him is impossible to say. James III had apparently been willing to promote the interests of his second son over those of his immediate heir but neither the king nor his advisers had taken the basic step of ensuring that there was a trustworthy keeper of the prince at Stirling. And James Shaw of Sauchie was certainly not that man. His daughter, Helen, had recently married into the Humes, the very family with which the king was now at loggerheads.
The discovery that Prince James was no longer under his control and had joined those opposing his rule was a serious blow to James III. Later chroniclers claimed that the prince had been coerced, but contemporaries did not speculate on his motives and we do not know what the king himself thought of this defection. For another month, he tried to maintain his position in Edinburgh, hoping that a new parliament summoned for early May 1488 would back him and enable him to re-establish his hold on government. Time, however, was not on his side. Mistrust grew and Prince James remained at large – probably at Linlithgow, though his movements between early February and May 1488 are unclear. By the end of March 1488, James III had gathered sufficient money for the fight that now seemed inevitable. Remaining in the capital was too risky, given that the rebels’ strength was in the south of Scotland. James had learned at least one significant lesson from the Lauder crisis of 1482 and that was to evade his enemies so that when the confrontation came, it could be on his terms as far as possible. So he left Edinburgh on 24 March for the north of Scotland, where loyalty to the king was more certain and where he could hope to gather military support from among the northern lords. He reached Aberdeen by 6 April and that city became the headquarters for his fight to remain on the throne of Scotland.
Safely out of the reach of the rebels for the time being, the king sought help from Henry VII in England and Charles VIII in France. Both monarchs had a keen interest in Scottish affairs and James’s appeal to them, though obviously dictated by circumstances, is a reminder that it is all too easy to lose sight of the international dimension of events in the British Isles in the late fifteenth century. James III’s difficulties were not simply the product of obscure and convoluted rivalries within the kingdom of Scotland itself or the obduracy of a man who could not connect with his subjects. The king’s ambition was to make his country greater in a European context and though his method of achieving such success went against the grain of a deep-seated anti-English sentiment in Scotland, as a goal it was shared by his son and grandson. In 1488, though, James III’s requests for assistance were not met, mainly because the rulers of both France and England had difficulties of their own.
While the king looked to retain control of the kingdom, the rebels’ resolve intensified. Though the situation remained fluid, they established a solid presence in the south of Scotland, where their leaders, the Douglases, the Hepburns and the Humes, were strong. Soon their numbers were swelled by significant defections from the royalist side: Argyll himself and the bishop of Glasgow, Robert Blacader, a man with a grievance against the premier cleric of Scotland, Archbishop Scheves of St Andrews, whose lowly birth and unswerving support of the king made him unpopular. Though diverse as a group and no doubt harbouring a range of individual resentments against their monarch, the rebels presented an increasingly formidable opposition. They were men of substance and experience who knew how to operate on the wider political scene. They, too, made overtures to England for support and began a propaganda campaign against James III, depicting him as the victim of evil counsellors and, more seriously, accusing him of arranging the death of Queen Margaret by poison. There was no truth in this accusation, but the death of his wife at just thirty years old and their separation towards the end of their marriage left the king exposed to such charges in a credulous age. Certainly, the stories were believed in Denmark, where they caused great indignation. Whether Prince James placed any credence in them is impossible to say, but his silence on the matter and his subsequent actions suggest that he did not. What is much more certain is that the prince’s continued involvement with the rebels greatly strengthened their position.
Prince James passed his fifteenth birthday in March 1488. His furtive departure from Stirling Castle the previous month may well have been the response of a peeved and anxious adolescent to his father’s apparent animosity but it was, whatever his intentions, a decisive action and one that could not be undone. The flight and his association with rebels put him on a collision course with his father, a man who, in the words of historian Norman Macdougall, ‘not only had all the prestige of Stewart kingship on his side, but who, in spite of his arbitrary and illegal acts, could still muster armed support within Scotland, who had the friendship of Henry VII and the blessing of the pope.’7 These latter advantages turned out, of course, to be hollow, but the rebellious prince would not have known that at the time. Deprived of any real training in politics or government, young James had to learn fast. His commitment to the rebels’ cause seems to have hardened the longer he stayed with them. It was a mutual dependency, for much as he might personally have longed for a reconciliation with his father, the prince and his supporters had every reason not to trust the king. The prince may have been a figurehead in February 1488. By May, he was as committed to challenging his father as the king was to holding on to the throne by any means. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the dispute could be settled by anything other than military confrontation.
Yet with the underlying misgiving about taking up arms against an anointed king that was felt by most opponents of an incumbent monarch in those days, the rebels did try to reach a negotiated settlement. It was James III, in a response that would be echoed by Henry VIII in his dealings with the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and Charles I in the seventeenth century, who made a mockery of such efforts. The king had no scruples about breaking his word; he would sign anything if it bought him time. But as most of his northern supporters preferred the peaceful solution of a negotiated settlement, James III did put his signature to the nine Aberdeen Articles proposed by the rebels in late April or early May 1488. Though vague (probably deliberately) in specifics, the articles addressed the key issues that underlay the dispute between the monarch and his opponents: the welfare of the king and that of his errant son, and the divisions among the nobility. Those appertaining to the prince are especially interesting for what they reveal of the distance that had grown between young James and his father. The indirect reprimand for the king’s neglect of his son is all too apparent: ‘the king’s highness shall give honourable sustentacion and living to my lord prince his son.’ No longer was the training of the heir to the throne to be neglected: ‘wise lords and honourable persons of wisdom and discretion’ were to be the prince’s mentors ‘for the good governance of his person
in his tender age’, and a major point for further discussion was how to improve the relationship between father and son: ‘how my lord prince shall at all times to come be obedient to his father the king and how that fatherly love and tenderness shall at all times be had betwixt them.’8
While such paternal emotions may have been in short supply, it had by the spring of 1488 become apparent even to as remote a man as James III that he could not solve the crisis without gaining control of his son. Encouraged by his half-uncle Buchan, one of the rebels’ most hard-line enemies, James III decided to break the Aberdeen Articles almost immediately. Now was the moment to move south and seek a decisive outcome to a dispute which had festered throughout the previous autumn and winter. Better weather made campaigning easier and the king may also have felt that he had been absent from Edinburgh and the royal jewel house in the castle, in which much of his ready wealth reposed, for long enough. Moreover, he was hopeful that the overtures of the delegation he had sent to London requesting English military intervention might meet a positive response. Indeed, this must have been a crucial element in his decision to leave the north of Scotland. James III’s cavalier attitude towards the Aberdeen Articles alienated much of his local support, as the northern earls went back to their estates.
It is probable that the king anticipated English military reinforcements landing near Blackness Castle on the Firth of Forth. The castle’s keeper was loyal and it would have been a convenient base for military operations against the rebels, whose main force was probably somewhat to the west, around Linlithgow. But James III’s optimism was misplaced. There were no English troops waiting to support his own army, nor would there be. Once more, the king was compelled to temporize with the rebels, who quickly appeared at the gates of the castle.9 There may have been discussions about renewing a negotiated settlement, but James decided not to wait around and put himself in jeopardy while these took place. Leaving his uncle Buchan and three other prominent men as hostages, he fled by ship across the Forth to Leith and thence to Edinburgh Castle. He was there by 16 May and immediately began preparations to take the fight to the rebels in southern Scotland. He needed to be sure that he could pay an army and there was plenty of money to go around. Boxes of money containing gold coin and jewels were distributed to royalist supporters and considerable amounts were actually taken out with the king’s forces when they left Edinburgh. A box containing £4,000 in gold coins was later discovered ‘when it was in the mire’ by three local men in a field near Stirling.
King James did not stay long in Edinburgh. Early in June 1488, having learned that his son had returned to Stirling Castle and was styling himself ‘Prince of Scotland’, a clear challenge to royal authority, he left the capital. He may have hoped for northern support still, despite his behaviour in Aberdeen, and also to take advantage of the fact that the rebel forces were not all gathered in one place. Some remained at Linlithgow, uncomfortably close to Edinburgh, and the king and his advisers were not keen to engage them. Keeping to the north bank of the river Forth, the king intended to attack Stirling from the east. The campaign went well at first, when the royal forces inflicted huge damage on the estates of one of the prince’s supporters and, more importantly, put the prince and his rebels to flight in a skirmish near Stirling Bridge. This left the king in control of the town of Stirling but not yet of Prince James himself.
This first direct taste of fighting must have been a disconcerting one for the prince. Having issued forth from the stronghold of Stirling Castle itself, he found himself fleeing towards Falkirk. But it was no victory for James III. Once more, his son had evaded him and the prince’s escape would prove to be nearly the last act in the fraught relationship with his father. For as he fled south, Prince James and his supporters encountered the other part of the rebel host coming up to join them. Their numbers now certainly matched, if not exceeded, that of the royal army. On 11 June, the two armies clashed close to the site of the battle of Bannockburn, at what was, for a century and a half afterwards, known simply as ‘the field of Stirling’. Now referred to as the battle of Sauchieburn, it is perhaps one of the least-known battles in British history, though one that shook Scotland greatly at the time. For, in the laconic words of the parliamentary record, ‘our sovereign lord’s father happened to be slain.’10
Exactly how James III met his end will never be known. If there was anyone at the time who knew the truth of it, they kept silent, and with good reason. Prince James had given strict instructions that his father must not be harmed in any way and it would have been a foolish man who admitted being the murderer of James III. Well after the event conspiracy theories abounded but while the sixteenth-century chroniclers no doubt drew on oral accounts, the only written record that the battle even took place is the brief reference in the proceedings of the parliament of October 1488, some four months later. The chroniclers, notably Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, produced a much more dramatic and sinister version of events, full of superstitious echoes of the story of Macbeth. According to Pitscottie, James III found himself facing an army of about eighteen thousand men. This sight, and the memory of a prophecy recently made by a witch, unnerved him and brought about his flight and death: ‘So the king, seeing his own enemies to come with his own banner displayed and his son against him, he remembered the words which the witch had spoken to him many days before, that he should be suddenly destroyed and put down by the nearest of his kin.’ Unnerved by this earlier encounter with the supernatural, the king ‘took such a vain suspicion in his own mind that he took hastily purpose to flee.’ But James’s flight was brutally halted when he was unhorsed ‘before the mill door of Bannockburn and so was bruised with the fall, being heavy in armour, that he fell in a deadly swoon.’ Helped inside the mill by the miller and his wife, who did not know who he was, the injured king asked for a priest to make his confession, saying ‘this day at morn I was your king’. As in the best murder stories, the priest who eventually came to shrive the monarch was an impostor. In reality, he was a servant of Lord Gray, one of the rebels, and he stabbed the king to death.11
This account, particularly the details of the king’s murder by a false priest, is almost certainly fanciful, though it may contain elements of a broader truth. The likelihood is that the royal and rebel forces engaged in combat in open fields near to the confluence of the two watercourses known as Bannockburn and Sauchieburn but the precise location cannot be pinpointed with certainty.12 Indeed, as the fighting unfolded, various skirmishes and pursuits probably took place and may have spread over a wider area. The king himself was eager for a decisive confrontation and went into battle carrying Robert the Bruce’s sword. Both the ground he chose for the fight, so close to Bannockburn, and the weapon he carried would have had strong emotional and symbolic associations for James III. No doubt he hoped to inspire his followers to fight valiantly and bring to an end the long-festering dispute with the rebels that had engulfed his son. What his intentions were for Prince James, should the royalists be victorious and the prince himself survive the fray, we shall never know. There is nothing to suggest that his previous attitude had shifted. But the day did not go as James III had expected and at some point while the fighting still raged the king, realizing that his own safety was compromised if he stayed, made the decision to leave the field. It is very unlikely that he retreated alone, so Pitscottie’s story of an abandoned and injured monarch dying at the point of the assassin’s dagger does not ring true. It is, though, much more plausible that James III and a small group of attendants were involved in further skirmishing somewhere close to Bannockburn mill and that the king was killed by persons unknown. Neither the money he had been carrying (almost a third of his annual income) nor Bruce’s sword could save him in the end. Like Richard III in England three years earlier, he had been determined to repel a rebel force and had lost his throne and his life.
The Stewart dynasty, however, remained. Despite initial confusion over the whereabouts and identification of James III’
s body, his son clearly knew that he was dead. On 12 June, the day after the battle, King James IV issued the first charter of his reign. It nominated to the office of clerk register William Hepburn, a member of a family that would rise steadily over several generations. Like the Humes, the Douglases and other southern Scottish lords, the Hepburns had helped put James IV on the throne. He was barely more than half the age that Henry Tudor had been at Bosworth and, though raised as a prince, for all but the previous eighteen weeks his experience of life outside Stirling Castle was very limited. At fifteen, he was still growing physically and developing intellectually. There are no portraits of the king to tell us what he looked like in his mid-teens but he had already exhibited the bravery and risk-taking that was to characterize his life. He developed into a well-built man of no more than average height but it is his face that is so striking in later pictures. The keenly intelligent eyes and confident gaze show a man who was curious and questioning, good humoured and regal without being unapproachable. Charming and affable, his restlessness found an outlet in the standard outdoor pursuits of kings. In one portrait he holds a falcon, an indication of his love of hunting.
