A battlefield, a priest and the death of King James III

I first wrote about James III’s death almost four years ago, and since then I have been in correspondence with various experts on that dim period in Scottish history – dim because there is so little contemporary evidence about the events of James III’s reign. I have also been asked by readers to examine the king’s murder and try to solve the mystery of who did it.

We do know how he came to be king at the age of just nine. His father James II was besieging Roxburgh Castle, which had been rebuilt by the English after Robert the Bruce’s forces destroyed it during the Wars of Independence.

James II was frankly obsessed with artillery, and his mighty cannon array knocked lumps out of the castle’s defences. In August 1460, James took personal charge of the cannon – and thus was standing beside one of the siege guns, nicknamed the Lion, when it exploded, killing him on the spot.

Writing more than a century later in his book The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland 1435-1565 (the first history of Scotland written in Scots rather than Latin), Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie wrote that the king’s thigh was snapped in two and he was “stricken to the ground and died hastily”. Modern forensic science would probably have found that he suffered a compound fracture of the thigh and quickly bled to death from a ruptured femoral artery.

There is further proof of that tragic event. Also dating from the 16th century, the Asloan Manuscript, now in the National Library of Scotland’s digital collection, stated: “The year of God 1460 the third Sunday of August King James the secund with ane great ost was at the siege of Roxburgh and unhappily was slane with ane gun the quhilk brak in the fyring for which was there great dolour throu all Scotland.” That sadness was genuinely felt by the people as James II had been a popular monarch.

Roxburgh Castle was captured within a few days of James II’s death and his Queen Consort, Mary of Guelders, ordered it to be razed to the ground – what little of it that remains can be seen in the grounds of Floors Castle.

So, James II was dead at the age of 29, and his son and heir, James III, was crowned at nearby Kelso Abbey a week later aged nine. Along with Bishop James Kennedy of St Andrews, his mother acted as regent for the boy king until her death three years later. Kennedy himself died just two years after that, in 1465.

READ MORE: Alister Jack lists Scotland 'transgressions' in committee clash

Kennedy’s death was a great loss for James III as he had managed to keep Scotland’s ever-warring nobles peaceable. But the bishop had also antagonised the English King Edward IV by regaining Berwick-upon-Tweed, which would have repercussions for James III.

The young king was fought over by various factions, of which the most important were the Boyd brothers, Lord Robert and Sir Alexander – the former was Lord Chamberlain, and the latter Keeper of Edinburgh Castle, who instructed James III in the chivalric pursuits including sword fighting.

The Boyds helped to arrange James III’s marriage to Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1469. This eventually brought Orkney and Shetland into Scotland as her father, King Christian of Denmark, failed to pay the princess’s dowry which had been secured on the two archipelagos.

James III began his personal rule in that same year, and though he was a considerable patron of the arts and education, the young king quickly became unpopular, especially with the nobles, who began to form alliances against him – particularly after he promoted and funded non-aristocrats of lower rank, his “familiars”, who were given precedence over the noble families such as the Boyd brothers.

LORD Robert fled to England in 1469 after being attainted for treason and deprived of his titles – though the real reason was that the former regent had arranged the marriage of his son Thomas, made the Earl of Arran, to James III’s elder sister, Mary Stewart. Sir Alexander Boyd was not so lucky and was executed.

The Boyds also had friends among the nobility who were increasingly turning against James. According to the Encyclopaedia of Scotland edited by John and Julia Keay, “tradition dismisses him as ‘inopportune’, ‘irrelevant,’ ‘inactive’, ‘unstable’ and ‘avaricious’” – these words being used by historians about the king.

That he was also ruthless was shown in the death of his younger brother, John Stewart, Earl of Mar, in the summer of 1479. King James had been haunted by a prophecy that he would be betrayed by his next of kin, so he acted against his two brothers, the Earl of Mar and the Duke of Albany. The earl had been accused of associating with witches and warlocks, but most probably had become involved in intrigues against his older brother. He died in a bath at Craigmillar Castle where he was waiting to be bled for an unspecified illness – how convenient for the king.

James III’s other brother, Alexander, the Duke of Albany, fled to France rather than face Mar’s fate. There he made a deal with King Edward IV of England, who promptly sent his navy to burn Blackness Castle on the Forth (then the port for the royal burgh of Linlithgow). Edward also dispatched a huge army to invade Scotland in the summer of 1482.

Prior to that, James had put one of his “familiars”, Robert Cochrane, in charge of the Scottish army – that was too much for the nobles, especially the mighty Douglas family.

READ MORE: Michael Russell: Alister Jack is a 'disgrace to the country'

The Scottish nobles, led by Archibald “Bell the Cat” Douglas, wanted peace, but Cochrane and the other royal familiars were seen as a problem. At Lauder, with the English army only 30 miles away, the rebel nobles pounced and Cochrane and his friends were hanged from Lauder Bridge.

Albany took James into his custody and marched to Edinburgh Castle, where the king was briefly imprisoned. Somehow James wriggled out of his dire situation in negotiations with the English, but it cost him Berwick and Albany was made lieutenant-general with all his lands and titles restored (albeit briefly, as his elder brother used his kingly power to re-exile the Duke. He was killed in a duel with the Duke of Orleans in 1485.)

Far from deterring James III, the rebellion of his nobles spurred him on to confrontations that eventually would lead to outright civil war.

In the meantime, another mysterious death occurred on James III’s watch. James had long been estranged from his wife and mother of his sons, Margaret of Denmark. He stayed in Edinburgh while she lived at Stirling Castle. In 1486, when she was only 30, Margaret took ill and died soon afterwards. There was no evidence to suggest foul play, but rumours soon spread that she had been poisoned by an agent acting for her husband the king.

James III wanted his second son, James, the Earl of Ormonde, to succeed him – possibly because Margaret’s favourite child was his eldest son, also called James, who was Duke of Rothesay as heir apparent. The title is usually conferred on the monarch’s eldest son, which is why the current

holder of the title is the Prince of Wales – the future King William IV of Scotland.

Knowing his father wanted his younger son to succeed him, at the age of 15, the young Duke of Rothesay sided with the rebel nobles – this time led by the powerful Home and Hepburn families – who took him into their growing army. As 1488 wore on it seemed increasingly likely that open battle would be joined, so James III went north to gain the support of the nobility there and raise an army.

ONLY Shakespeare or a storyteller of that ilk could have devised what happened next.

James III was determined to put down the rebellion (and presumably execute his own son for treason), so he rode from Edinburgh to Stirling at the head of his army. Young Prince James was now the figurehead of the rebellion, which was led by the Homes and Hepburns and the earls of Angus and Argyll. They all had tough, battle-hardened troops.

James still had more soldiers. however, On June 11, 1488, the king – supposedly carrying the sword of Robert the Bruce – led his men into battle with the rebels near Stirling. Perhaps amazingly, the exact location of the battle remains unknown, but it was somewhere between the Sauchie and Bannock burns, possibly adjacent to the site of the Battle of Bannockburn itself. It only became known as the Battle of Sauchieburn centuries later.

The crucial point about the battle is that the rebels had much larger numbers of mounted troops, and as Borders reivers, they knew much more about cavalry tactics. These reivers duly scattered the king’s troops, and when a rumour spread that James III had been killed, his army turned tail and fled.

James III was not dead, however, and what happened next is one of the biggest mysteries and most infamous unsolved murders in Scottish history. And it was definitely murder, by a person or persons unknown, not least because at the prompting of his son the Duke of Rothesay, the rebel nobles had sworn an oath to take the king alive if possible.

As I wrote in 2019: “He is supposed to have ridden to Stirling Castle where he was refused entry, and is then said to have tried to cross the River Forth on horseback and been thrown from his mount. The story of a humble miller and his wife then enters the legend.

They supposedly rescued the injured monarch, James saying that he was the “king that morning”, and put him in their stable. As the miller removed James’s heavy armour, the miller’s wife went out to fetch help and a man claiming to be a priest offered to assist them.

It was some priest – as James III apparently asked for confession, the man pulled out a dagger and stabbed him five times in the chest.

After further research, I am more inclined than ever to believe this story, which was first rendered in writing by Lindsay of Pitscottie, but the fact is, we don’t know for certain exactly how James III died or who killed him.

His son was now King James IV – who apparently wore an iron chain for the rest of his life to punish himself for his role in his father’s death. He also arranged for James III to be buried alongside his wife Margaret, James IV’s mother, at Cambuskenneth Abbey, Stirling, where the tomb was smashed during the Reformation – Queen Victoria herself paid for its restoration.

The official inquiry into James III’s death was held by James IV’s first Parliament in October 1488 and was something of a whitewash, merely stating that James III “ happinit to be slayn” and that: “oure soverane lord that now is and the trew lordis and barouns that wes withe him in the samyne feild war innocent, quhyt and fre of the saidis slauchteris feilde and all persute of the occasioune and cause of the samyne’.”

In other words, a bad boy did it and ran away, and I’m afraid that is all we will ever be able to say about this unsolved murder.