Meanwhile, the loose floorboards were discovered and the men dropped through in pursuit of the king, who had planned to escape through a culvert into the courtyard. However, at his own request, that opening had been blocked off the day before to prevent his tennis balls from bouncing into the basement vault. He was trapped in the chamber. His only option was to fight.
He had come to Scotland a fit and well-built man of thirty but now he was forty-three and, in the words of one early account of the assassination, ‘oppressed by his excessive corpulence’. Portly he may have been but, when the first two knights attacked him with knives, the king managed to throw them to the floor but he was badly wounded in the process. Sir Robert Graham came at him next, sword raised. The severely weakened king knew there was little hope for him and asked that he be allowed a confessor. But Sir Robert Graham knew a play for time when he heard it and replied, ‘Nae confessor shalt thou hae but this sword.’ And then he struck the first blow through the king's chest. His accomplices joined in and together rained twenty-eight strokes on the king's body. They left the mutilated corpse where it lay on the cold stone floor of the vault.
As they made their escape, they were chased by one of the king's men. Before this loyal noble was himself incapacitated, one of the assassins was killed and another was wounded
Back in her chamber, the queen grieved and ignored her own wounds. It would have been better for the killers if they had finished her off, she vowed. For she was now no longer the king's milk-white dove. The fairest and freshest flower was about to show her thorns.
James may have been unpopular with his nobles but the ordinary people loved him – partly because he was unpopular with his nobles. As soon as word got out that he had been foully done to death in that cold stone chamber, the cry for vengeance rose in the throats of peasants across the land. Sir Robert Graham and his cohorts may have thought they had made a clean getaway but they found there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from the eyes of Queen Joan and her loyal subjects. Within the month the main actors in the conspiracy had been rounded up to face the terrible wrath of the grieving and wounded queen.
The Fourth Chief of the Clan Donnachaidh, Robert of Struan, captured Sir Robert Graham. He brought the assassin to Edinburgh in chains where he was handed into the keeping of Joan and her torturers. Struan – who provided the patronymic for the Robertson family who held lands near Kinloch Rannoch in Perthshire – was made a baron for his service and allowed the right to display a chained man on his coat of arms, as well as a hand supporting the Crown.
All of this mattered little to Sir Robert Graham. The queen ordered a gallows to be set up at Edinburgh's Market Cross. The right hand that had raised the sword against his king was nailed to the gallows’ wood and, thus pinned, he was forced to endure a most fearful punishment. Metal spikes were heated over a flame and then forced into various parts of his body. His tormentors were highly skilled in their art for he was not allowed to die until they had cut him to pieces.
Sir Robert Stewart, was infinitely luckier for he was merely hanged and quartered. His father, though, was not so fortunate. Queen Joan and her advisers had devised a very special death for him – one that placed this particular bout of executions at the top of a roll-call of horror.
The Earl of Atholl was publicly tortured over three days. On the first he was brought from the castle gaol to the Market Cross and there he was bound naked to a huge pulley which dragged him into the air by the feet. As the queen watched, the ropes were loosened and his body plummeted, only to be brought up short when the ropes were tightened again. The bone-jarring shock of this early bungee dislocated his limbs. But they were not yet finished with him this day, for he was dragged – screaming in agony no doubt – to a pillory where, on the orders of the queen, he was finally crowned. However, it was not the sort of crown for which he had hungered. This one was red hot metal and bore the legend ‘King of Traitors’. Then, and only then, was he taken back to his jail to whimper through the night.
On the second day, it was the turn of the people of Edinburgh to torture the man who had plotted the death of their beloved king. He was dragged through the streets, his joints still dislocated and the crown still on his head. No doubt a few choice words and a variety of missiles were thrown his way.
The third day brought about the end of the Earl of Atholl. He was placed on a plank and, as the Edinburgh mob watched and jeered, he was disembowelled, his organs cut from his body and his private parts hacked off and burned. His head was struck from what was left of the body, held up for the crowd to see and then spiked even higher so the rest of the city could see it as well. His body was quartered and each part sent to other towns for the population to understand what fate lay in store for traitors and regicides. (It should be noted that some say only a paper crown was placed on his head on the first day, with the metal crown being mounted after his head was lopped off and spiked.)
Vengeance having been served, the queen and her son, James, now adapted to life without a husband and father. No sooner had the final blow been struck against the dead king's body than the nobles began to jostle for position. The queen, while personally directing the bloody acts of vengeance, was also looking to her own position. She had escaped death only by a whisker and, if history had taught her anything, it was that life was cheap when men began to lust for a throne. They would not balk at killing her – or her young son. James II was crowned within five weeks of his father's death – this time at Holyrood. He was safe for now in Edinburgh Castle. Archibald, the powerful Earl of Douglas, was made co-regent, along with the queen mother, but he was not a strong man. The nobles, who had been held in check while James I was alive, now began to reive and rob and rally against one another. Rule of the country, meanwhile, was left to whoever had care of the young king. The regent rode out the storm for two years before finally dying in June 1439.
During this time, the young king and his mother were in the care of Sir William Crichton, the keeper of Edinburgh Castle. But Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, who controlled Stirling Castle through his son, saw a way to further his own power and contrived to have the boy king brought to his stronghold. Queen Joan may have been part of this plan for it is said that she concealed the young lad in a trunk. Whatever happened, it seems she regretted her decision soon after arriving at Stirling and once again set off back east to Edinburgh, with Livingston and his men not far behind.
Queen Joan decided that she must do something to protect herself and her son in these dangerous and stormy days so, in the summer of 1439, she took herself a husband – Sir James Stewart, known as the Black Knight of Lorn. Her new husband's allegiance lay with the feared Black Douglas family and its leader, the young but dashing William, Sixth Earl of Douglas, who was fiercely loyal to the boy king. However, Livingston was unfazed by this. He forged an alliance with Sir William Crichton and lured the Black Douglas's young leader, William, to a royal banquet in Edinburgh Castle. Earl Douglas had no reason to be suspicious, for his young friend, James II, was to be present.
According to legend, a black bull's head was brought in to the dinner and this was the signal for William Douglas, his brother David and their friend, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, to be taken, charged with treason and beheaded on Castle Hill. The young king, used once again as a pawn, watched and wept. He had never forgotten the nights of terror that had filled his childhood – the kidnappings and the brutal treachery he had been forced to witness.
However, he had also inherited his mother's undoubted courage and single-minded ruthlessness. When he was of an age to take his own throne, James of the Fiery Face – so named for a livid facial birthmark – proved he also had fire in his belly. He wreaked terrible revenge on the Livingstons and others, proving to be as decisive and politically astute as his father.
But all that came later, after his mother's death on 15 July 1445 at Dunbar Castle. She was still seeking to further her own power and was, at the time, besieged by those who wo
uld prevent it. She was buried alongside her beloved first husband at the Charterhouse of Perth she had founded. However, the heady mixture of her strength and the Stewart thirst for power would materialise once again over one hundred years later. Murder and overwhelming ambition would combine in one of the most violent stories in Scottish history.
And at its heart was another beautiful woman.
2
KILLER QUEEN
Mary, Queen of Scots, 1566–7
She could still hear his screams echoing through the hallways and rooms of the sprawling palace.
It had only been a matter of minutes since the group of men had so rudely interrupted her private supper to drag him from her presence. There had been little she could do but protest while a pistol was held at her belly, threatening both her and her unborn child. Now she stood in the small room powerless to help as her friend and confidant was brutally slaughtered.
Screaming, he was. Pleading for mercy. Screeching her name. She could hear the muffled oaths of the armed men as they pursued him through the chambers and, if she listened intently enough, she could perhaps hear the sound of the blades as they were thrust into his flesh time and time again.
Finally all was silent. She spoke no words to the drunken husband at her side because there was nothing she could say to the man who had brought such a bloodbath before her. They stood in the small anteroom and felt what love there had ever been between them die with each dagger stroke.
Then the curtain twitched and one of her ladies returned, ashen-faced and wet-cheeked.
‘They have killed him,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘They have killed Davie.’
The Queen of Scots sank into a chair and asked, ‘Is it so?’ Her head sank as she mourned the little man she had come to trust so implicitly – and, in so doing, had made him a target for the ambitions of men. Then she wiped away the salty tears and straightened up in her chair, her face a stiff mask to conceal her rage and terror. She was a queen, after all, and she would behave like one – even if the lisping boy she had married could not behave like a king.
‘No more tears,’ she told her lady. ‘I will study revenge.’
The question that echoes through the centuries is just what form that revenge took. Was that queen instrumental in the murder of her weak and foppish husband? Or was she herself the victim of a male conspiracy?
Mary Stewart became Queen of Scots at the tender age of six days, following the death of her father James V. Old before his time, the thirty-one-year-old king succumbed, it is said, to a heart that had been broken by his army's defeat at Solway Moss in 1542. He had been wounded during the ill-fated campaign against England's king, Henry VIII, and demoralised by the failure of his own barons to support him. He had returned to Linlithgow, where his French wife, Mary of Guise, was in labour, before proceeding to Falkland Palace in Fife.
On 8 December 1542, the child was born – a girl. On hearing the news, James is said to have remarked, ‘It cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass.’ The Stewart dynasty was founded when Marjorie Bruce, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, married Walter the Steward and gave birth to the boy who would later become Robert II. Perhaps James felt his baby daughter would not survive long, that she would die in infancy, as his previous two sons had done, and so bring the Stewart line to an end. But the dynasty would continue to flourish until the eighteenth century. However, the last Stewart monarch was, indeed, to be a woman – Queen Anne.
When James V died, Scotland was, once again, a prize to be fought over by ambitious nobles who, if they could not have the actual throne, could at least have the regency. In one corner stood the Earl of Arran, who favoured closer ties with the hated English and who embraced the new Protestant religion. In the other was the Archbishop of St Andrews, David Beaton, a staunch defender of Scotland's ancient alliance with France and an adherent to the Church of Rome. In the middle were the infant queen and her strong-willed French mother.
Henry VIII, naturally, favoured Arran for the position and freed nobles who had been captured at Solway Moss in order that they could return to Scotland to offer their support. In the grand tradition of Scottish nobility, they were paid handsomely for their loyalty. Henry, being a canny political mover, also saw a way of bringing Scotland completely under his corpulent thumb. If a marriage could be brokered between the child queen and his own son Edward, then England would, at last, have complete sovereignty over its troublesome northern neighbour. He thought it would be a terrific idea if the infant Mary were placed in his care until she was of an age to wed. He did not want to rush things, so her tenth birthday would be time enough.
The queen mother was none too keen on handing her daughter over to the monster who had broken with her beloved Church and plundered its riches. She believed Scotland – and her child – would be better served with a marriage to Francis, the French Dauphin.
Arran, meanwhile, thought a match between young Mary and his own son would be more suitable although he did not tell Henry this. Instead, he held back from agreeing a formal treaty until the Tudor king, who was as well known for his patience as he was for his monogamy, decided that more direct action was needed. His idea was that, if the Scots would not give up the lass willingly, then he would rape, burn and pillage her out of the accursed country. During the campaign that became known as the Rough Wooing, Edinburgh was attacked, Jedburgh was put to the flame and Border towns felt the full weight of Henry's ire until the English were given a bloody nose at Ancrum Moor. But they would be back. They always came back.
At the age of nine months, Mary had perched on her mother's knee to be crowned queen at Stirling Castle, completely unaware of the storm raging around her. By the time she was five, the English did return – the blood that had seeped into the moorland around Ancrum was only a temporary setback. As the army forced its way northwards, defeating the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh near Musselburgh, fears grew for the little girl's safety. She was first moved to Inchmaholme Priory on the Lake of Menteith, to the west of Stirling, and then to Dumbarton Castle. From there, she was to set sail for a new life in France. It was 7 August 1548 and she would not return for another thirteen years. By that time, she would already be a widow and she would be able to speak French better than she could speak either Scots or English. She would also have changed the spelling of her surname from Stewart to the more Franco-friendly Stuart.
The turbulence of Scottish history continued to bump and grind in her absence. Henry VIII ranted and raved south of the Border but brought his ferocious courtship to a halt in 1549. A French army, dispatched to help the beleaguered Scots, supported the interests of the Roman Church against the growing influence of the religious reformers. In 1546, the fat and cruel David Beaton was murdered in his rooms at St Andrew's Castle by supporters of the new faith, his bloated body draped over the walls like a flag. Mary of Guise, now regent, moved against them and laid siege to the castle. The Protestants – joined by the fiery former priest John Knox – held out for a year but the promised reinforcements never arrived from England. But French ships did arrive and they blasted the Scots out of the castle. Knox found himself stretching and straining under the lash on the French penal galley Notre Dame. He remained at his oar for around eighteen months then took up residence in England. He then fled, however, when Mary Tudor – Bloody Mary – succeeded to the throne following the death of her sickly brother, Edward.
Mary Tudor was a staunch Roman Catholic and she visited terror on the followers of the new faith as fervently as they had on her fellow believers. Knox preferred the fire to be in his oratory and not licking at his flesh so he took himself off to Geneva. But, by 1559, he was back in his own country, stirring up trouble for Mary of Guise's cardinals and archbishops until he was eventually accused of heresy. However, many powerful families had cast off the trappings of Rome. They were embracing the new faith, no doubt with an eye on the rich pickings they might get their hands on should the Catholic Church ever be abolished in Scotland as it had be
en in Henry's England. Knox, with his new friends, staved off the charge. Nobles rushed to be named the Lords of the Congregation, dedicated to upholding the Word of God as approved by the reformers.
Following a riot in Perth sparked by a typically rambunctious sermon by Knox, the queen mother, spurred on by her French relatives and allies, moved against the Presbyterians. Again Scottish nobles felt their interests were better served in siding with Knox and his Lords of the Congregation. Mary of Guise found herself retreating, ultimately finding refuge in Dunbar Castle – where her daughter would more than once seek protection during her dark days. On the arrival of French reinforcements, the queen mother was able to reach out and smite the rebels a terrible blow. The Lords appealed to England and the young Queen Elizabeth who had succeeded to the throne on the death of her half-sister Mary. An army was duly dispatched north and besieged the French force in newly fortified Leith. However, the Scots were none too happy with the idea of fighting side by side with the English so they held back. The result was that most of the casualties were from south of the Border. But Mary of Guise could take no comfort from this – she was in Edinburgh Castle dying of dropsy, a complaint in which fluid gathers in body tissues and cavities, causing agonising swellings. On 11 June 1560, she succumbed to the painful condition – much to the delight of John Knox, who declared it was ‘God's judgment’. Her death took the strength out of the conflict and the English and French reached an agreement to withdraw from Scotland.
The Lords of the Congregation formally cut off all contact with the Pope and declared Scotland a Protestant country. However, there was no wholesale plundering of the old church's lands and riches – much to the disappointment of those nobles who had been eyeing them greedily.
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