From the Bloody Heart E-Book

Oliver Thomson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 455

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

In early medieval Scotland bitter rivalry grew up between two immigrant families from Flanders in their struggle for the crown: the Stewarts and the Douglases.From the Bloody Heart covers the period from 1286 to what may be thought of as the "final" defeat of the Stewarts at Culloden in 1745.

Leseprobe

FROM THE

BLOODY HEART

The embalmed heart of Robert the Bruce, which Lord James Douglas carried into battle against the Moors in Spain, became the badge of the Douglas family and one of the inspirations behind years of plotting to undermine the kings of Scotland.

The Bloody Heart blaz’d in the van,

Announcing Douglas, dreaded name!

Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Wine is strong, the king is stronger,

even stronger are women,

but the truth is strongest of all.

Inscription believed to have been requested by Elizabeth Douglas for the crypt door of Rosslyn Chapel

FROM THE

BLOODY HEART

THE STEWARTS AND THE DOUGLASES

OLIVER THOMSON

First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Oliver Thomson, 2003, 2013

The right of Oliver Thomson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9492 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Genealogical Table

Introduction

Part I: The Black

1. Four Rival Families

2. A Very Savage Douglas

3. The Bloody Heart

4. The Flower of Chivalry

5. The Stewarts Win

6. Dukes and Drakes

7. The Magnificent Loser

8. So Near Yet So Far

9. The Black Dinner

10. Four Stones of Tallow

11. Murder under Trust

12. The Fall of the Black Douglases

Part II: The Red

13. Bell-the-Cat

14. The Road to Flodden

15. To Marry a Queen

16. To Hurt a Queen

17. The Wisest Fool and the Fanatic

18. Wars Civil and Otherwise

Part III: The Queensberrys

19. Red, Black and Orange

20. The Three Dukes

21. Politics and Madness

22. Postscript: Fir Trees and DC-10s

A Tour of the Sites

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

PLATES

1. The ruins of Lesmahagow Priory, with the more modern church behind. Its need for protection led to the founding of the Douglas family (Author)

2. All that remains of Douglas Castle, a single tower (Author)

3. St Bride’s, Douglas, burial place of the Black Douglases (Author)

4. Two of the embalmed hearts at St Bride’s Church, Douglas (Author)

5. Bothwell Collegiate Church, founded by Archibald the Grim (Author)

6. Lincluden Collegiate Church, near Dumfries (Author)

7. The heart and crown carved together on the tomb of the royal princess Margaret Douglas at Lincluden, symbolizing the ambitions of the family (Author)

8. Dalkeith, St Nicholas Collegiate Church, founded by the Douglases of Morton (Author)

9. Bothwell Castle by the Clyde (Author)

10. Strathaven Castle, Lanarkshire (Author)

11. The grassy mound where Abercorn Castle stood by the Firth of Forth (Author)

12. Threave Castle on its island in the River Dee (Author)

13. Tantallon Castle, looking towards the Bass Rock (Author)

14. Morton Castle in Dumfriesshire, with its lake below (Author)

15. Lochleven Castle on its island, looking towards Kinross (Author)

16. Aberdour Castle on the north shore of the Forth (Author)

17. Dalkeith Palace, original family seat of the Morton Douglases, restyled for its later owners (Author)

18. Chatelherault hunting lodge, all that remains of Hamilton Palace built for the Douglas dukes of Hamilton (Author)

19. Drumlanrig Castle, built by Douglas, 1st Duke of Queensberry (Author)

20. Statue at Douglas of the Earl of Angus who founded the Cameronians (Author)

21. David Douglas the plant collector (Author’s collection)

Preface

This book is an examination of the 400-year rivalry between the Stewart and the Douglas families which had such an influence on the fortunes of Scotland. It deals with personalities, violence, inherited power, wealth and arrogance passed on from one generation to the next. It is a remarkable tale. In 1330 Sir James Douglas from Scotland joined a Spanish army near Granada to help drive out the Moors. He had taken with him the embalmed heart of Robert the Bruce, who had been too busy to fulfil his own vow to go to fight the infidels. At Teba de Ardales in Andalucia the Good Lord James went into battle against the Moors. Seeing his friends in trouble, he hurled the casket holding the heart into the midst of the fighting and rode after it to his death. From that moment his family had the bloody heart as their crest and from that moment they became involved in a centuries-long struggle with the Stewarts, who by a fluke of genetics both acquired and kept the prize which the Douglases thought should be theirs: the crown of Scotland.

For a dozen generations as the largest landowners in Scotland the Douglases bullied and intimidated, harassed and murdered, as they sought supreme power.

This epic rivalry between the Royal Stewarts and their most powerful subjects led to a number of extraordinary incidents: the murder of the Black Douglas under safe conduct by James II; the virtual dethronement of James III by the Red Douglas; the abdication of Mary Queen of Scots, enforced by another Red Douglas who had organized the murders both of her favourite and of her husband; the pushing-through of the Act of Union by yet another branch of the Douglases. In more recent years this amazing family provided the adulterous botanist of fir-tree fame and the man who designed the Dakota. Meanwhile, we also look at the superb heritage of buildings left behind by the Douglases, some of Scotland’s largest castles, palaces and some fine churches.

My thanks go to the patient editors at Sutton Publishing and as usual to my long-suffering wife, Jean.

Genealogical Table

BOLD TYPE signifies Black Douglases

Introduction

The Bloody Heart was in the field . . .

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion

In the 1130s, during the reign of King David I, forty or so immigrant families arrived in Scotland roughly at the same time, and four of these in particular were to achieve great power. All four had come originally from the west coast of France or the area that is now called Belgium. All four belonged to the lower fringes of Norman/French aristocracy, had trailed across to England during the Norman Conquest and had not quite fulfilled their desperate greed or ambition south of the border. All four had opted to look for their fortunes in Scotland instead, though they still also clung to properties that they had acquired in the south. None of the four had a surname in the modern sense but each quite soon acquired one. The first took its name from the village in Brittany from which it had first set out sixty years earlier, Brix, Brus or, in Scots, Bruce. The second, though also from a village in Brittany, took its name from the job-title given by the King of Scots: Steward or Stewart. The third, from the village of Bailleul in Normandy, kept that name in a new form, Balliol. The fourth, from Flanders, took its name from one of the rivers in Scotland by which they settled, Douglas Water. All these families were to win power, vast lands and influence. All four were to have members who married into the royal family of Scotland, but only three of the four were to win the Crown.

These Anglo-Norman families were to remain desperately ambitious. The Balliols won the Crown of Scotland first but kept it the shortest time, a little over three years in the case of John and in practice even less for his son Edward. The Bruces were to win it more spectacularly, but even they held it for little over sixty years. The Stewarts not only held the Crown of Scotland for 344 years, but also that of Great Britain and its empire for over a century. The fourth family, the Douglases, were to come extremely close to gaining the Crown on several occasions, but never quite made it.

It is the turbulent relationship of these families, particularly the last two, over some 400 years, the damage their violent rivalry caused to Scotland, and the personal miseries and joys brought to their many members that this book is designed to examine. In the course of our survey we must look at the bitter personal feuds which stood in the way of the development of sound kingship, at the dreadful crimes which the rival families committed against each other and the extraordinary deeds of bravery which they undertook in their quest to better each other. In the aftermath we see the scattering of the Douglases to all corners of the world as they found new outlets for their ambitions and energy.

The tour section at the end of the book reprises in a different form many of the incidents mentioned in the main narrative, so by consulting the index they can be read in parallel. Because the book essentially consists of a succession of short biographies, readers will, I hope, excuse the fact that the overall narrative occasionally backtracks where the generations overlap.

To avoid the distraction of footnotes, whenever another author is quoted the source can be found by referring to the bibliography. Please note that dates quoted beside the key figures in this narrative are for birth and death, not for the period as king, earl, etc. Particularly in the early period, many of these dates should be regarded as approximate.

PART I

The Black

I am the Douglas, fatal to all those

That wear those colours on them.

William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, Act V, sc. iv

So many so good the Douglas have been

Of one surname in Scotland never yet were seen.

Saying quoted by Hume of Godscroft

CHAPTER ONE

Four Rival Families

Douglas a name through all the world renown’d,

A name that rouses like the trumpet sound.

John Home, Douglas

Of the four new immigrant families – the Balliols, the Bruces, the Stewarts and the Douglases – the first to achieve the throne of Scotland and the first to lose it were the Balliols. Of the four they were the most half-hearted in their transfer from England to Scotland. John Balliol senior (d. 1269) had married into the Scottish royal family yet made his main home most decidedly at Barnard Castle in Yorkshire. Previously the family had lived in a village called Bailleul, but there are several of these in France, the most likely being the one in L’Orne near Argentan, though one near Abbeville or one near Hazebruck are possibilities. John Balliol’s marriage was to Devorguilla, a great-great-granddaughter of King David I (1080–1153) who not even the most calculating of bridegrooms could ever have guessed would provide a pathway for his family to the Scottish throne. The odds were far too great. But the Balliols were helped not only by the amazing lack of sons produced by the royal house of Alpin in its final years, but also by their Englishness, for when the old dynasty finally petered out the final choice between the competing applicants for the throne was passed over to the English King Edward I (1239–1307), and he naturally chose the most reliably pro-English of them.

The Bruce family served an apprenticeship of about 170 years before it gained the Crown of Scotland, and even then it was something of a fluke. King Robert the Bruce was in fact the eighth Robert de Brus to make his home in Britain. The first Robert (1040–95) had emigrated as a Norman knight from a village called Brix on the Saire district of the Cotentin peninsula near Cherbourg. He had been given lands in Yorkshire after the Conquest. His son, the second Robert, became friendly with Earl David (1080–1153), a Scottish prince living as an exile in England. David became heir to the throne of Scotland – a surprise in its own right, since he had three older brothers, none of whom produced an heir. Bruce accepted his offer of some extra land near Annan in return for military assistance from himself and his ten knights. But this did not mean another permanent migration for the Bruces. For some time they regarded their English baronies as just as important as – or possibly more important than – their Scottish ones. In fact, the second Robert de Brus was so cautious that when his master King David went to war with the English he first advised against it and then made sure he backed both horses by having one of his sons on each side, one with the Yorkshire holding fighting for England and the other with Annandale on the Scottish side. As it turned out, both sons survived, but even five generations later the Bruces still had their English territory: young King Robert had to make the painful choice between a secure, rich Yorkshire inheritance and a very insecure, rather poor Scottish throne. Meanwhile, the family built a castle near Annan and then one with walls up to 9 feet thick on land jutting into Lochmaben. Nearby at Buittle and Loch Doon Castle were the Scottish homes of that other Norman family – the Balliols – who were briefly to reach royal status a few years ahead of their neighbours.

In the meantime, two marriages had moved the Bruce family almost imperceptibly up the social scale. The first, and the one with the more far-reaching though unexpected results, took place when a spare, English-born granddaughter of King David, Isabel of Huntingdon, married the fifth Robert the Bruce (c. 1200–45?). No one can ever have expected all David’s many other descendants to die without heirs, but they did, some eighty years later. So, despite this somewhat tenuous relationship, the sixth Robert Bruce (1210–95) spent a short time as heir to the throne, until King Alexander II (1198–1241) managed at last to produce a son of his own. Then in his old age the sixth Bruce again became a candidate, albeit unsuccessful, for the Crown: Edward I was called in as arbitrator and he preferred John Balliol (1250–1315), the son of John and Devorguilla. It was the sixth Bruce’s grandson, the eighth and most famous Robert Bruce (1274–1329), who was to go one step further, but only after the dismal failure of Balliol, who briefly held the Scottish throne and is now better remembered for his mother’s foundation of an Oxford college. The sixth Robert had anyway very much kept his options open and was a regular at the court of Edward I, who had supposedly been his father’s companion during the crusades.

The other marriage was that of the seventh Robert Bruce (1253–1304) to Marjorie of Carrick. This aggressive lady was the widow of a crusader, Adam of Kilconquhar, and as Countess of Carrick in her own right she could turn any new bridegroom that she picked into an earl. She seems to have made all the running with the handsome, but for some reason initially reluctant, seventh Robert Bruce. She snared him in her castle at Turnberry until he succumbed to her advances. This increased the family’s power base substantially, and potentially gave their eldest son both an earldom and wide extra tracts of land as a foundation for his own bid for the Crown thirty years later. It may be suspected that it also gave him an inheritance of iron will from his mother, something apparently lacking in his father.

Having become a potential king through a genealogical quirk, the eighth Robert Bruce had of course to overcome huge difficulties before his claim became a reality. Even to accept the challenge meant losing all his inheritance south of the border. It also meant the savage enmity of Edward I of England, who was determined that either he himself or one of his puppets should rule Scotland. William Wallace (1274–1305) had just been savagely executed and three of Robert’s brothers were to suffer a similar fate. It is not within the scope of this book to retell the drama of Bruce’s struggles to establish himself on the throne, but we may simply note that his only son, David II, died childless, so a dynasty which came to power through a genealogical quirk also in effect came to an end through one, and lasted just over sixty years.

The third family at this stage of our saga had a very similar background to the Bruces. Flaald was a Breton baron from the small cathedral town of Dol near Dinan. His family had been hereditary stewards – dapiferi (feast-bearers) – to the archbishops and counts of Dol. He came to England a few years after the Conquest, when Henry (1068–1135), ruler of Brittany and the Conqueror’s youngest son, became King Henry I of England and Normandy. Flaald’s son Alan (d. 1120) was rewarded with land on the Welsh border and built a castle at Oswestry, coincidentally not far from where that other subsequently royal family in Scotland, the Balliols, also had lands. Then this family too met up with Earl David of Scotland, perhaps when he joined King Henry in his attack on the Welsh, and two younger sons were recruited to go to Scotland. Like the Bruces, the family of Alan Fitzflaald, now sheriff of Shrewsbury, kept its eggs in two or three baskets. The eldest son, Jordan, went back to Dol to maintain the family’s position in Brittany. Two other sons stayed in England, taking the name of Fitzalan, and eventually became earls of Arundel. The two youngest boys, Walter and Simon, moved to Scotland. Walter was given land round Renfrew, where he built a castle on an island in the Clyde. Whether King David knew the history of the family as hereditary stewards in Dol or whether it was pure coincidence, Walter was made Steward of Scotland, and from that was to come the family’s new surname. The younger brother, Simon, who was given estates in Kilmarnock, was fair-haired, in Gaelic buidhe, which was anglicized into his new surname as Boyd.

The Stewarts were to serve a much longer apprenticeship than the Balliols or the Bruces before they achieved the Crown, and in their case too it was a bit of a genealogical long shot. For again no one can have seriously expected that the marriage of Bruce’s daughter Marjorie to Walter the young steward would have such consequences sixty years later. Yet, despite two wives and some possible bastards, David II, the second Bruce king, had no legitimate children, and his aged uncle Robert the Steward became heir apparent. It was even more amazing because Robert’s mother had fallen from a horse while riding from Renfrew to Paisley in an advanced state of pregnancy. She died by the River Cart near Knockhill, and her baby survived only thanks to an intelligent forester who had a knife handy. But this was nearly a quarter of a millennium and eight generations after the Stewarts had first arrived in Scotland. Meanwhile, they too had built fine stone castles at Renfrew, Paisley and Dundonald. They had added to their landholdings in East Lothian and the Borders as well as Renfrew and Ayrshire. They had founded a monastery in Paisley dedicated to three saints: St James, their patron back in Dol; St Milburg, their patron in Shropshire; and St Mirren, the local saint of their new home. They had visited the English court as honoured barons, Walter the Steward, for example, going with King Malcolm IV (1141–65) of Scotland to meet Henry II (1133–89) of England at Toulouse. There the Scottish king received the accolade of knighthood, which could only be awarded to a king by another king.

The Stewarts had also participated in at least two significant battles, though it is hard to estimate just how strenuous their participation in them was. The first was at Knockhill, where the islanders’ rebellion under Somerled was defeated near the Clyde in 1164; the second at Largs, when the Vikings were driven back into the sea in 1263. They had also either been, or claimed to have been, on crusades, like the Bruces and indeed the Douglases. Alan may have been on the third crusade; his son Walter Stewart was killed at Damietta in 1249, and certainly they gave an endowment in Ayrshire to send funds to Acre in the Holy Land. They also had a dozen or so knights and their support troops, some of them Flemings in origin like the Douglases. Sir Tancred left his name in Thankerton, Sir Ralph in Ralston, Sir Simon in two Symingtons, Sir Robert de Croc in Crookston, and so on. So they were a significant part of the infrastructure of the Scottish monarchy. What is more, a sister of Alan had married Duncan, the Earl of Carrick, who by another coincidence was to be a grandfather of Robert the Bruce. So there was a precedent for marriage alliances between the two families.

The fourth of our families was the most obscure in origin. Perhaps its founder in Scotland was Berowald the Fleming, who gave his name to Bo’ness, or Erkenbald of Flanders. A number of Flemings had come across from the Ypres area to England as mercenaries during the civil war of Stephen and Matilda. One family from this group known as Freskin (a corruption of Friesian) was given land in Moray round about 1130, and in due course about 1190 William Fitzfreskin changed his name to Moray. Another branch, headed by his brother or cousin Theobald the Fleming (Theobaldo Flammatico), was given land at Poniel on the Douglas Water by the Abbot of Kelso in 1150, probably in return for acting as protectors for the abbey’s outpost at Lesmahagow Priory. In 1202 a Freskin was appointed priest at Douglas, and about this time the family adopted their new surname from their local river, the Douglas Water. At Douglas, Theobald and his son William (1174–1214) built a motte, a large mound of earth with a wooden castle on top surrounded on three sides by the Douglas Water, which several centuries later was diverted into the ornamental lakes that now dominate the landscape.

Of William’s five sons three or four seem to have moved up to Moray among the other Flemish immigrants, their relations, now called Moray. Their joint origin is corroborated by the three silver stars which both families have on their coats of arms. Brice or Brixius Douglas (d. 1222), who had begun his career as prior of the family abbey at Lesmahagow, went on to become the Bishop of Moray, where he first established a new cathedral at Spynie, north of Elgin, but then, after a visit to the Pope in Rome, changed his mind and set in motion the building of Elgin Cathedral. Shortly after his death he was canonized, without question the only Douglas to qualify for sainthood.

Within a couple of generations one of the family, William Longlegs Douglas (c. 1220–74), was appointed by King William I the Lion (1143–1214) to lead a raid into Northumberland, where, as it happened, the Douglases now also held land. Later he was appointed one of the guardians for the young Alexander III. Gradually the Douglas family were to achieve vast landholdings and huge power. The men’s fighting prowess meant that they made reliable husbands for wealthy heiresses, and in 1259 William’s son Hugh married Marjorie of Abernethy, which brought that prestigious little town into the Douglas domain. They often provided regents or guardians of Scotland and intermarried with the royal family, but despite great endeavour and ruthless plotting they never actually seized the Crown. The conflict and violence, however, which their desire for it engendered had a devastating effect on the growth of monarchy in Scotland and on the development of Scotland as a nation.

Our four families were part of a group of at least forty such brought into Scotland at this time, and with them came about another 200 or so Anglo-Norman knights as their liegemen. What they all had in common, apart from chain mail and fighting skills, was a disciplined approach to colonization.

They almost immediately had earthen mottes thrown up, on top of which they built strong wooden castles, replaced soon afterwards by even stronger stone ones. They mostly married local heiresses, which helped them to legitimize and extend their landholdings as they displaced the old Scots baronage. They were also accustomed to working closely with the Church and were followed into Scotland by a wave of Cluniac monks who provided a useful, literate infrastructure. The reign of King David I therefore saw Scotland acquiring large numbers of new castles and a significant number of new monasteries, particularly in the Borders. And three of the families had married members of the royal house of Alpin, Scotland’s dynasty dating back to Kenneth MacAlpin in the ninth century, which now seemed to find it increasingly hard to produce healthy heirs.

Thus Scotland enjoyed – or suffered – a Norman conquest by stealth. There was remarkably little resistance from the old baronage. And the royal dynasty of Scotland which had invited in the Trojan horse allowed intermarriage to such an extent that, when the house of Alpin ran out of male heirs, it was followed by three successive dynasties descended from these Anglo-Norman immigrants. Yet all three were to be faced in turn by a very much stronger dynasty, also of Norman origin, the Plantagenets from Anjou. And they were also to be faced by a very strong dynasty within their own midst, one which deeply resented being so close to the Crown yet never quite able to snatch it – the Douglases.

CHAPTER TWO

A Very Savage Douglas

And in general the account of many deaths

Whose portents which should have undone the sky

Had never come – is now received casually

You and I are careless of these millions of wraiths.

Keith Douglas, ‘Negative Information’

As we have seen, when the Scottish magnates could not agree among one another as to who should be the new king after all the grandchildren of Alexander III (1241–86) had died, they asked Edward I to make the choice for them. So the Anglophile John Balliol was chosen and crowned in 1292. Within three years the magnates very much regretted this, both because John was ineffectual and because Edward I, partly encouraged by his role as mediator, was becoming ever more arrogant in his demands. Balliol was known as Toom Tabard, the Empty Jacket. Naturally he never had the support of the Bruces since they regarded themselves as having a better right to the position than he had, but in the time of the cautious seventh Robert Bruce they had not rebelled against him. Balliol did have general support from the Stewarts so long as the English kept backing him, and from the Douglases even after that had stopped. This was mainly because William Douglas le Hardi (1248–98) had behaved so outrageously that Edward deprived him of all his estates, both north and south of the border. Nothing, however, could save John Balliol once he took his first trembling step towards resisting the will of his master Edward I. In 1296, after a halfhearted attempt at battle at Spott near Dunbar, he was stripped of his crown by the man who had given it to him.

When the Scottish Wars of Independence began in 1296 the heads of our three remaining rival families were men of very different temperament: the seventh Robert Bruce, the crusader and reluctant bridegroom, with his principal bases at Lochmaben and Turnberry; James, the fifth Steward (c. 1250–1309), with his main castles at Renfrew on the River Clyde and Dundonald in Ayrshire; and the troublemaker William le Hardi of Douglas, with his family seat at Douglas. He had fewer lands than the other two, and had no official titles or position, but had been expanding them with rugged ruthlessness. After the death of his first wife, the Steward’s sister Elizabeth, he had abducted a rich English widow while she was on a visit to Scotland, thus acquiring at least her Scottish estates. But the main leader of the opposition to the English under Edward I was none of these three. William Wallace, a man of lower rank and lesser wealth than any of them, had appeared almost from nowhere as a talented and inspiring guerrilla leader.

The seventh Bruce, who was still concerned with his family landholdings in Yorkshire and whose Scottish estates were too close to the border for comfort, was officially Sheriff of Cumberland for Edward I and Governor of Carlisle. He had bitterly resented the elevation of John Balliol and spent some time in voluntary exile in Norway to avoid doing homage to him, marrying his daughter Isabel off to the King of Norway in the process. His heir, the eighth Robert, was ambivalent and was to change allegiance several times before finally committing himself after Wallace’s death in 1305. He had also been influenced by the fact that Wallace supported John Balliol as King of Scotland, a role to which Bruce had some claims himself. Thus in 1296 he was fighting for Edward I and stood in for his father commanding the defence of Carlisle against the Scots. Yet soon afterwards he went over to Wallace’s side, and it was he who dubbed William Wallace a knight in Selkirk forest in 1298, not long before Wallace’s last disastrous battle at Falkirk. Bruce was then appointed joint guardian with John Comyn of Badenoch, but changed sides again back to Edward I in 1302. Edward, however, not surprisingly, still did not trust him. He was reluctant even to give him back all his estates, let alone to support the idea of his becoming King of Scotland. So in the end Bruce had little choice but to try his luck again as a rebel. He changed sides for the last time and claimed the Crown of Scotland himself, soon afterwards murdering his main rival, John Comyn, in a fit of temper at Dumfries.

James the Steward was the local magnate in Wallace’s area – the Wallaces had probably come from the Welsh border (hence the surname) to Scotland at the same time as the Stewarts – but he too vacillated in his support for the self-made leader. He had been one of six regents after the death of Alexander III in 1286, and he was given charge of the vital castle at Roxburgh near the border in 1296. He was now elderly by the standards of his time, an establishment figure. Like Bruce he had a lot of territory to lose, including some in England, and had a track record of backing down realistically when he saw the odds against him were too heavy. The most humiliating example of this he shared with Bruce at Irvine in 1297, after which, like Bruce, he provided the English with a hostage, his eldest son, Andrew, who died in captivity. His brother Sir John Stewart of Bunkle, however, was a Wallace supporter to the last and died fighting at Falkirk.

Of our three family heads William le Hardi of Douglas was the only one who gave himself wholeheartedly to the cause of Wallace and ultimately paid for it with his life. He seems to have had an elder brother Hugh, who was killed or died, for a story survived in a traditional ballad (quoted by Fraser) that he was ambushed by a neighbour but won the contest:

Patton Purdie brach a chaise [ambush]

Upon the Lord Douglas

Hugh Lord Douglas turned again

And there was Patton Purdie slane.

It is certain that by now Douglas was a proper stone-built castle, for a Hugh Abernethy (perhaps a relation) was in its dungeon in 1288, charged with the murder of the Earl of Fife. William himself was an experienced border fighter who also may have been on a crusade, though this was possibly make-believe. Certainly he had been severely wounded when his father’s castle at Fawdon in Northumberland was attacked by a neighbour in 1267 and barely survived. His mother was a Carrick, so his family was later able to argue that they had Bruce or Balliol blood and therefore some entitlement to the throne themselves. Meanwhile, William was far from scrupulous in his methods of increasing the family estates, and among others harried the monks of Melrose. The most notorious example of his brigandry was when he caused scandal by abducting a wealthy English widow who had several useful estates in Scotland as well as England. He could not hope to win approval for absorbing his wife’s English properties, but he did assert his right to the Scottish lands. The lady was apparently most reluctant to marry him and according to Blind Harry’s Wallace:

His wyff was wraith bot it sche shawit nocht

Under cover hyr malice hid perfyt

As a serpent wates hyr tym to byt.

She bore him two sons and after his death went back with them to her estates in England.

As Balliol’s governor of Berwick Castle, William le Hardi put up a stalwart defence against a large English force. He was lucky not to be among the several thousand defenders of Berwick town who were butchered when it was at last captured by trickery, the English marching up to the gate carrying Scottish banners instead of their own. He was taken prisoner and briefly, like so many, changed sides, but was later released. Wallace appointed him as Constable of all castles in the south-west of Scotland. He attacked Sanquhar Castle, later a Douglas seat, and captured it using a trick later copied by his son. He used the services of a local friend to disguise himself as the firewood deliveryman and slipped through the door when it was opened, then held it open long enough for a few of his followers to get in too. However, he soon suffered an English counter-attack until he was rescued by Wallace himself.

In 1297 William le Hardi burned Turnberry Castle, the seat of the Bruces. Young Robert Bruce, whose father had been ordered by Edward I to get rid of Douglas, took his revenge by ravaging Douglasdale and seizing Douglas’s wife and children. But at this point Bruce, who was still not even the head of his own family – for his father did not die until 1304 – came over to the side of Balliol and Wallace, James the Steward following in his wake. So for a brief period three of our families were on the so-called patriotic side. However, this did not last long. At Irvine the army of Scottish nobles, not at this point led by Wallace nor including Douglas, who was elsewhere, met a large English army, could not decide on strategy or choose a leader, and surrendered. Young Bruce agreed to change sides as usual, and allowed his daughter Marjorie to go south as a hostage for his good behaviour. James the Steward also changed sides, yet apparently soon afterwards was fighting in support of Wallace at Stirling Bridge. William Douglas also later surrendered or was recaptured but would not provide his children as hostages, so was sent first to Berwick, where he was reported as ‘very savage and very abusive’. Edward anyway regarded him as beyond redemption since he had broken his vows to him once too often. He was kept in irons and then transferred to the Tower of London, where he died in 1298, presumably executed on the orders of the English king. David Hume of Godscroft, the somewhat biased chronicler of this family, described him as ‘a paterne of true vertue’. He seems to have had four sons, two from each marriage. The eldest, Hugh, died before him; the second was the famous Good Sir James; the third was another Hugh, known as Hugh the Dull, who was brought up in England and became a priest; the fourth was Archibald, who was to die leading the Scottish army at the disastrous battle of Halidon Hill.

After three years in English dungeons John Balliol was released and allowed by Edward I to retire from political life in 1302. He went to live on the family estates back in Normandy, and died thirteen years later at Château Gaillard. The seventh Robert Bruce died after a relatively undistinguished career in 1304, though with his vivacious wife he had fathered the Queen of Norway and two future kings, Robert of Scotland and Edward of Ireland. James, the fifth Steward, had been slightly more distinguished, but played it very safe and died of old age in 1309. William Douglas le Hardi had died in 1298 in the Tower of London. It was now time for a new cast of players.

CHAPTER THREE

The Bloody Heart

The ostrich fortified by common sense

And strong in every tactical resource

When he perceived the enemy in force

Concealed his head behind a bush or fence.

Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘The Ostrich’

Of the three family heads in this generation, Robert the Bruce, the eighth of that name and the first to be king, was the senior in every sense. Sir James Douglas (1286–1330) was just twenty when he first came to support the newly crowned Robert I, himself just thirty-two. Walter Stewart (1293–1326) succeeded his father as Steward in 1309, aged only sixteen. The prospective head of our fourth family, Edward Balliol (1283–1364), was the oldest of the four but was to play no serious part in the events of Robert’s reign. In this generation, apart from the Balliols sulking in exile, there does not seem to have been the jealousy and plotting between the families which were to become such a feature later.

There is no need here to retell the struggles of Bruce to establish a meaningful kingship in the face of his many opponents, both Scottish and English. Our concern is with the relationship and character of Robert, James and Walter in so far as these factors laid the foundations of future tensions.

Having vacillated between the pro-Scottish and pro-English factions while his father was still alive, and to some extent afterwards, Bruce thought his moment had come. After the humiliation of Balliol in 1302, he had expected Edward I to turn to the Bruces as a safe choice for the Crown of Scotland, but Edward snubbed them, preferring to conquer Scotland for himself rather than risk appointing another puppet king. He knew from bitter experience that he simply could not trust the Bruces. So, realizing that he would never be given the Crown by Edward, Bruce eventually burnt his boats in 1306. The stabbing to death of his rival John Comyn, a nephew of Balliol’s and another strong claimant for the vacant throne, made turning back impossible. The Comyns were yet another Anglo-Norman family, originally from Comines near Lille, who had won English lands after the Conquest and then been given even more in Scotland. In fact at one point they had four Scottish earls and thirty-two knights in the family. Two months after Comyn’s murder, the worse for being committed in a church, Bruce underwent a makeshift coronation at Scone, and thereafter suffered a succession of reverses. Two of his brothers were caught and executed by Edward I, Thomas being first dragged round Carlisle tied to a horse’s tail. Badly beaten by the English at Methven and then by the Comyn and Argyll faction at Dalry near Tyndrum, Bruce had to make an undignified escape to Ireland, and it was some months before he had the resources to land again at Turnberry. He then scored his first victory against the English at Loudon in May 1307. He was perhaps helped by the death of his old enemy Edward I, whose successor, Edward II (1284–1327), was not quite so well disciplined, but whose forces nevertheless should not be underrated. From this point onwards Bruce proved his capacity to be an effective guerrilla leader like Wallace, and studiously avoided major pitched battles until his brother Edward made one inevitable by challenging the English to rescue their garrison in Stirling.

Yet, however much it was against Bruce’s policy to risk a major battle with the full English army, the one occasion he had to do so he managed it at Bannockburn with magnificent aplomb. His exhibition of single combat at the outset of the battle when he killed de Bohun was the stuff of legends. The remaining fourteen years of his reign he avoided unnecessary risks and showed substantial maturity in consolidating the fruits of his victory. Military action was confined to carefully targeted border raids to try to extract a long-term settlement from the English. The only risk-taker was again his brother Edward, who had made himself King of Ireland in 1317 and was killed defending his new kingdom at Dundalk a year later.

Little is known about the personality of Walter, the sixth of his family to be hereditary Steward of Scotland. He fought at Bannockburn with nominal command of one of the three schiltrons – huge hedgehogs of pike-carrying infantry which goaded their way into the English cavalry – but as a 21-year-old he had the much more experienced James Douglas as his second in command and the real person in charge. He took part also in the defence of Berwick, and joined Bruce in his naval expedition to the Western Isles when they stopped at Tarbert to supervise the building of a new castle there. In 1316 he was appointed alongside Douglas as joint deputy for the King when Bruce went to help his brother in Ireland. There were few other notable events in his relatively short life – he was only thirty-three when he died – except for the one which turned out in the end to have the greatest effect on his family and nation’s history: his marriage to Marjorie, Bruce’s daughter. As with the similar, rather off-hand royal wedding of the fifth Robert Bruce, there can have been no serious expectation at the time that it would lead to a change of royal dynasty. Bruce had fathered several bastards and, though much of his early married life with his second wife, Elizabeth of Ulster, had been spent away from her, she could still be expected to produce an heir. In fact their son David was not born until 1324, eight years after Walter and Marjorie had produced their son Robert. So the uncle was eight years younger than the nephew, but that was of little consequence. David Bruce was now the heir to the throne and would himself be expected in due course to father his own heirs. Yet, just as the surprising failure of all three brothers to produce heirs had unexpectedly brought David I to the throne in 1124, then the death of all Alexander III’s children and grandchildren had created the vacancy which brought in first Balliol and then Bruce, amazingly it was to happen a third time in 1370 when the Bruce dynasty also ran out of male heirs.

Sadly Walter’s marriage to Marjorie Bruce lasted only a very short time – in fact it was remarkable that it produced any offspring, for in an advanced state of pregnancy Marjorie fell from her horse while riding from Blackhall Castle to King’s Inch (it must have had a different name then). She broke her neck and only the prompt action of a passer-by, reputedly a forester, saved the life of the unborn future King Robert II. Walter remarried but died a few years later.

Sir James Douglas, known later as the Good Lord James, was truly a legend in his own lifetime. He had a lisp, apparently, and was so dark-featured that he was given the nickname ‘Black’, which was applied to his family for the next eight generations. In Barbour’s words:

His visage was he sumdele grey

And had blak har as I herd say

But of limmis he was wel mad

With banis grat and schaldris brad.

He was a teenager learning his trade in France when his father died in captivity, but when he returned to Scotland Edward I totally refused to restore to him any of the forfeited Douglas estates. So, penniless, he had to look elsewhere. By now in his twenties he met Bruce and offered his services at Ericstane, near the Devil’s Beeftub, at the disastrous start of the new reign. The two defeats he shared in at Methven and Dalry were two of the thirteen defeats in his career out a total of seventy battles in which he was believed to have taken part. During Bruce’s flight westward after Methven, Douglas made his reputation with the royal ladies as the best procurer of fish and game for their supper. As Barbour puts it:

For quhile he veneson them brocht

And with his handys quhile he wrocht

Gynnis [traps] to tak geddis [pike] and salmonis

Troutis, elis [eels] and als menounis [minnows].

He stayed with Bruce then through the hair-raising escape down Loch Lomond, where he got the credit for finding a waterlogged boat, then over in an oared galley to Dunaverty Castle, near the Mull of Kintyre, before heading for safety to Rathlin Island off the Irish coast.

James Douglas then commanded the small raid on Arran which gained a foothold back in Scotland and joined in the first Bruce counter-attack on Turnberry. Thereafter he showed himself a brilliant guerrilla fighter, picking off English troops in isolated areas with minimal losses to his own men. Famously he three times attacked his own castle at Douglas and its English garrisons. The first time his men joined in a Palm Sunday church parade and captured the English garrison in the church, killing them all later, for squeamishness in the slaughter of prisoners was not a feature of this war. He then piled the bodies, dead horses and all the stores into the castle cellar and set it alight, the famous Douglas Larder. Then, in Barbour’s words:

That he tumil down the wall

And destroyit the housis all.

The second attack did not result in retaking the newly repaired castle, but he did kill the new governor. Now that two English garrison commanders had been killed in quick succession Douglas became known as Perilous Castle (Castle Dangerous for Sir Walter Scott’s last novel) and a severe test of a knight’s courage to accept its command, for despite its lootings the English kept repairing it. One English knight, Sir John Walton, was egged on by a lady friend to prove his bravery and thus became the third commander to die. This time Douglas had disguised his men as cattle drovers heading for Lanark market and lulled the English into a false sense of security. Having killed poor Walton, the commander, and again destroyed the castle, he for once spared the rest of the garrison, acknowledging their gallantry.

Douglas also played a key role in the battle at the Pass of Brander in 1309 when Bruce got his revenge against the Comyn Argyll faction, the McDougalls of Lorne. It was Douglas who led a group of light archers up the hillside round the flank of the McDougall army, blocking the gorge, so that they could be attacked from two sides at once. The battle was also important in that it secured the future support for Bruce of Angus Og and the Islay MacDonalds.

Three years later Douglas accomplished the daring capture of Roxburgh Castle, the massive English-held fortress a few miles from the border. It was Shrove Tuesday and the garrison had been celebrating. This time Douglas had his men hooded in black so that from the battlements above they would supposedly look like cattle. They brought ladders specially made with hooks by Sym of Ledehouse to push up onto the walls. By this time James Douglas had acquired the image of an ogre among the English, and the story of Roxburgh Castle was embroidered to include a young mother who was soothing her child with the lullaby:

Hush ye, hush ye little pettie

The Black Douglas shall not get ye.

Then the man himself sprang over the wall beside her with the words ‘You are not so sure of that.’ He spared her life, but the rest of the garrison were executed. Stories like this were doubtless embellished by men like Barbour, who wrote his Bruce in 1370 to eulogize the Bruce–Douglas partnership. For Douglas was certainly not always totally chivalrous or even loyal, and he routinely mutilated captured bowmen before letting them return to their own country.

Thomas Randolph, Bruce’s nephew, who had come over from the English side after being captured by Douglas near Peebles, had by this time become the Good Lord James’s most serious rival. He was inspired by the Roxburgh success to mount an attack on Edinburgh Castle, leaving Stirling Castle as the only major outpost still in English hands. This gave rise to Edward Bruce’s rash challenge to the English which forced Edward II to come to the rescue and Robert Bruce into full-scale battle with the English, something he had so far wanted to avoid. Douglas played a key role in the battle of Bannockburn which followed, as effective commander of the schiltron nominally led by Walter the Steward. Both James Douglas and Walter Stewart were dubbed knights by the King before the battle. Afterwards it was Douglas who led the party in pursuit of Edward II as he raced back to the border at Berwick.

In the subsequent period Douglas was rewarded by the King with large further tracts of land, with five extra baronies in the Borders, Jedburgh Forest and the stewardship of the royal Forest of Selkirk. These gifts were granted by King Robert with an emerald ring to symbolize their permanence, hence the concept of the Emerald Charter. Lord James built himself a hunting lodge at Lintalee on the Jed and there were other meeting points at Tinnis and Erncleugh in Ettrick Forest, as well as Craig Douglas in Yarrow and Eddybredshiels by Selkirk. Using tough local men with Jethart axes and Ettrick bows, he continued to take charge of deliberately provocative raids into England to demonstrate to Edward II that he must make peace with the Scots. These also had the advantage of bringing booty, ransom money and blackmail. In 1318 he burnt Scarborough and Skipton, and won a battle against the English at Mitton by burning haystacks to blind them. In 1321 he went with Walter the Steward to maraud round Hartlepool and Durham, partly in support of the rebel Earl of Lancaster, whom they chose to recognize as King Arthur of England, in retaliation for the fact that Edward would not refer to the Bruce as the King of Scotland. In 1325 Douglas burnt Preston and scores of northern villages. On one occasion he came close to capturing Edward II and his queen, Isabella. In these expeditions Froissart tells us that the Scottish troops could march or ride 24 miles without a rest and carried no food but a small bag of oatmeal, simply picking off cattle for meat as they went. This enabled Douglas to have great mobility and speed for his hit-and-run raids over the border. In one of his raids he was challenged by Sir Robert de Nevill, known as the Peacock of the North, but was again successful in an ambush, this time using the small birch trees of the forest plaited together to hem the English into his trap.

Meanwhile, Douglas, among other senior barons, had signed the Declaration of Arbroath which Bruce sent to the Pope in his long-drawn-out effort to obtain official forgiveness for the murder of John Comyn and recognition of himself as king. One of James Douglas’s most daring later raids was the surprise attack near Durham on a much larger English force led by sixteen-year-old King Edward III (1312–77), whose father had just been murdered, impaled on a red-hot poker at Berkeley Castle. Cheekily, according to the chroniclers, Sir James crossed the Wear, rode right into the English camp and, assuming a southern accent, told off the sentries for keeping such a poor watch. Douglas and his troops then cut the guy ropes of the English tents and would have captured young Edward if he had not crawled out through the back. The Scots, however, were still at risk and still had to avoid a pitched battle against heavy odds. Douglas disguised their retreat by leaving large campfires burning. He then led his men back north over a temporary wooden causeway previously laid over an intervening marsh and lifted up again after they had passed. Hence the name of this battle – Shorn Moss. Douglas is quoted by Barbour in his Bruce as justifying the retreat to his colleague Randolph, saying that where the numbers were so disproportionate it was no dishonour to the weaker party to use every advantage they might chance to obtain, and he also quoted the story of the fox trapped by a fisherman who pulled the man’s cloak into the fire and ran away with the fish while the fisherman went to save his cloak.

Douglas, who had by this time acquired the equivalent of superstar status in the world of European chivalry, was also sent by Bruce to France to persuade old John Balliol formally to renounce his family’s claim to the throne, so soon afterwards a treaty with England was at long last signed.

Of James Douglas’s private life very little is known, except that he had an illegitimate son, Archibald, very shortly before he died and may also have had a legitimate son, William, who was killed at Halidon Hill soon after his own death. He also had two surviving half-brothers: Hugh the Dull, a priest, and young Archibald, who also died at Halidon Hill. There is no mention of his wife or mistress.