Hamish MacPherson: Avarice and the downfall of King James I

I told last week of how he spent 18 years in mostly genteel captivity at the court of Henry IV of England and his successor Henry V. Though a hostage, James was treated mainly as a guest and went to France to fight alongside Henry V, who died of dysentery during his French campaign.

With the new king, Henry VI, being just nine months old, the regency council who took over the ruling of England decided to ransom James back to Scotland, with the Treaty of London in December 1423, making the arrangements so that in early 1424, accompanied by his beautiful wife Joan Beaufort, daughter of an English aristocrat and later regent, James was able to go home.

In this second of two columns on this most turbulent of Scottish monarchs, I will show how he came to be detested by many Scots, and especially the nobility, before meeting an untimely and horrific end.

The key to understanding James is one of the Seven Deadly Sins – avarice, or greed by another name.

Having defeated his enemies within Scotland, mostly by rigged trials and executions, James showed early in his reign that he was motivated by power, land and money. The £29,000 ransom money that was to be paid in instalments to free him was raised from Scotland’s burghs and nobles – 21 families gave hostages to England as security for the ransom. James appropriated almost half of it for his own use, with nothing paid to England after 1429 with the hostages still left to languor in various stages of captivity.

READ MORE: Alan Bissett: What separated Angus Og from his comic peers

James was determined to secure his rule and he needed money to do that, so began a series of taxations and other fundraising activities that made the royal finances much better off. Unfortunately for James, these activities put paid to the practice by some nobles of taking money from the customs income raised in their lands. He had parliament pass many other laws which at least brought stability to the country, but the increasing number of land forfeitures to the Crown made him enemies.

Opinion is split as to whether James wanted the money for himself and his personal projects such as Linlithgow Palace, or if he was just trying to institute better governance in his country. Evidence for the latter is that he appointed his close associate John Cameron as Bishop of Glasgow and chancellor of the realm. As the Encyclopaedia of Scotland by John and Julia Keay states: “With him [the king] reorganised the country’s economy and administration and introduced the principle of representation to Parliament.”

He may have gone too far – one historian called his obsession with laws and finance “a sort of mediaeval totalitarianism“ but others feel he was just trying to be a strong ruler in uncertain times.

In 1428, James began the process of renewing the Auld Alliance with France – that brought him extensive lands in France – and many nobles with strong links to England were alarmed by this obvious snub to the English court where Henry VI was still a minor.

In that same year, James decided to deal with another internal strife by curtailing the power of Alexander MacDonald of Islay, the 3rd Lord of the Isles, the title currently held by the future King William IV of Scotland, V of England – and there will no doubt be an argument about those numbers when King Charles III passes away.

James called an assembly of the Highland chiefs at Inverness in August 1428, and that resulted in the Lord of the Isles being imprisoned. His kinsmen rose against the king, and though the royal forces were successful at first, the lord’s cousin, Donald Balloch, led Clan MacDonald and their allies to victory over the king’s forces led by the Earl of Mar at the Battle of Inverlochy in 1431. The Lord of the Isles was freed in a peace agreement and that seemed to be the end of what had in fact been a civil war.

READ MORE: Review: Maggie & Me reflects on memories of pain and resilience

This reverse undermined James’s rule, and yet after the birth of his son and heir – the future James II – in 1430, he insisted on demanding that Parliament raise taxes to finance his campaigns. They gave him some funds, but there was great resentment when the king – whose daughter Margaret was sent to marry the Dauphin of France in 1436 – decided that the end of the truce with England that year was an opportunity to attack the English enclave at Roxburgh Castle.

That campaign ended miserably and appears to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for a number of nobles, chief among them Walter Stewart, the Earl of Atholl, who himself had a claim to the throne as a son of King Robert II. He had been a strong ally of James but turned against him, especially after the death of his son David in English captivity in 1434 – he had been one of the hostages sent south as collateral for the release of James, who of course never repaid the ransom. Atholl began what can only be described as a rumour campaign to unseat the king on the grounds that his father had been illegitimate – something historians still argue about.

There is no argument that Atholl formed a conspiracy to kill James I. The king called a council meeting at Perth and he and Joan stayed at Blackfriars Priory. On the night of February 20/21, 1437, Atholl’s grandson Robert Stewart, the king’s chamberlain, unlocked the doors to the royal apartments and, led by Atholl and Sir Robert Graham, the plotters poured in.

The king managed to evade them at first by dropping into a passage leading to a drain that was blocked, but Graham pursued him and the king was brutally hacked to death. Queen Joan was also wounded but managed to escape which was bad news for the conspirators who had no real support for their plot. Nobles rallied around the queen, and five conspirators were executed with Atholl being tortured for three days before being drawn and quartered.