The assassination of the 'greedy and vindictive' King James I

Recently one of my regular correspondents urged me to return to one of the subjects I mentioned in that column – the assassination of King James I at Perth on February 21, 1437.

Taking a break from the great Scottish medical men of the 19th and 20th centuries – a subject to which I will return – I am happy to change tack and write about this foul and bloody murder. It is a subject that has long intrigued me, and is also an incident from Scottish history of that era which has that very rare thing – an eyewitness account of the regicide, given by one of the ladies of the court to the writer John Shirley. The National Library of Scotland has the story in its digital files, and I am happy to quote extensively from it.

James I was the son of King Robert III, who throughout most of his reign had to contend with his own brother Robert, Duke of Albany, wanting the throne for himself. Albany was little more than a gangster, but was greatly feared by the council of nobles that was the supposed government of Scotland, so much so that they voted him the lieutenancy of Scotland – in effect he became the country’s ruler.

Having been born John Stewart, Robert succeeded his father, Robert II, and changed his name in 1390. James was born in 1394, and as the younger son was not expected to succeed. His elder brother, David, Duke of Rothesay, challenged

Albany and paid for it with his life – though the council exonerated him, there’s little doubt that Albany had caused the death of 23-year-old Rothesay in Falkland Palace in March 1402.

Albany soon began agitating to take young James into his “security”, especially as Robert III was in failing health. Robert came up with the plan of sending his then 11-year-old son to France in February 1406, only for the royal prince to be captured at sea by English privateers who delivered him to their king, Henry IV.

On hearing of James’s capture, Robert III became mortally ill and died just a few weeks later.

King James I, as he now was, was held prisoner by Henry of England, as Albany refused to pay the ransom and elevated himself to the role of governor while also refusing to recognise that James was indeed king, albeit uncrowned.

James was treated well and learned much at the English court, where he would spend 18 years in exile. Even after Albany’s death in 1420, there was no rush to pay the ransom for James who went with Henry V to fight in France against the Auld Allies.

In a dynastic alliance, James married the impressive Lady Joan Beaufort, cousin of the young Henry VI in February 1424 before he returned to Scotland as king regnant to be properly crowned at Scone on May 21, 1424.

He was soon in trouble, facing open rebellion from the sons of Albany, his own relatives. He solved that problem by putting the then Duke of Albany, Murdoch Stewart, on trial with his sons and beheading them all as traitors outside Stirling Castle on May 25, 1425. It may have seemed a good move at the time, but James was only storing up further trouble for himself.

He also picked a fight with the church, tackling the bishops with laws that stopped them earning too much. A visitor from Rome, the future Pope Pius II, sent a despatch to the Vatican describing the king as “very fat, greedy and vindictive.”

James had been a poet and a charmer as a youth, but soon grew dissolute and helped himself to the wealth of others, while clamping down on the nobles still further. He seized money and property and used it to build Linlithgow Palace, among other excesses.

In short, his reign was descending into serious disarray. In October, 1436, the Scottish army under James’s leadership that was laying siege to Roxburgh Castle was forced into an ignominious retreat, and that was the last straw for some of the nobility. A plot was concocted to kill the King by those nobles who saw James as a tyrant who had executed their peers and relatives and seized their lands.

The names of all those involved have never been completely known, but Walter Stewart, the Earl of Atholl and uncle to James, was the instigator along with Sir Robert Graham – the latter’s family had been much traduced by James and he had shown his hand by trying to have the King arrested after the Roxburgh Castle failure.

The plotters were convinced that if James was removed, the other noble families would back them. They were wrong.

James took his court to Perth for Christmas, 1436, and by February they were still there housed in the Dominican friary known as Blackfriars after the distinctive robes of the order.

Fearing discovery of what they were planning, the conspirators decided to act. Atholl’s grandson, Sir Robert Stewart, was the King’s own chamberlain, and he was vital to the plot. Graham and his accomplices, including his own sons and one Christopher or Robert Chambers, made their way to Blackfriars with as many as 20 armed men around them.

On the night of February 20, 1437, Robert Stewart unbarred the doors to the royal lodgings, and the guards were quickly overpowered by the conspirators who rushed to the king’s apartment.

Lady Catherine Douglas, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, is said to have put her arm through the staples to bar the door. The conspirators supposedly smashed through the door, breaking her arm – Catherine Douglas was known as Kate Barlass from then on, and gained immortality when Dante Gabriel Rossetti featured her in the poem The King’s Tragedy:

Then the Queen cried, Catherine, keep the door,

And I to this will suffice!

At her word I rose all dazed to my feet,

And my heart was fire and ice.

...

Like iron felt my arm, as through

The staple I made it pass:

Alack! it was flesh and bone – no more!

‘Twas Catherine Douglas sprang to the door,

But I fell back Kate Barlass.

The trouble is that the eyewitness account, while mentioning the “gentilwemen hurt and sore wounded” says nothing about Kate Barlass. It does say the women managed to delay the conspirators and after failing to break the windows, James used the delay to jump down into the cellar that was used as a sewer – a privy, as it was called.

He might have escaped but found himself cornered in the drain off a tennis court that he himself had ordered to be blocked as he kept losing balls down it.

Above him the plotters confronted Queen Joan. The eyewitness reported that the traitors “furiously passed forth into the chambers and found the queen so dismayed and abashed of that horribill and fearfull gouvernance that she could neither speak nor withdraw her; and as she stood there so astonished as a creature that had lost her kindly reason, one of the traitours wounded her full villainously and would have slain her, had not one of Sir Robert Grame’s sons, that thus spoke to him and said, ‘What will ye do, for shame of your self! to the queen? She is bot a woman; let us go and fetch the king.”

That bit of chivalry would cost them dear ...

Down in the privy, James lost patience and called up to the women to let down a sheet. One of the courtiers, Lady Elizabeth Douglas, fell down into the privy and the commotion alerted the conspirators.

The account continues: “Therwithall, one of the said tyrants and traitours, called sir John Hall, descended down to the King, with a great knife in his hand; and the King, doubting him sore of his life, caught him mightily by the shoulders and with full great violence cast him under his feet, for the King was of his person and stature a man right manly strong. And seeing [this], another of that Hall’s brethren that the King had the better of him, went down into the privy also for to destroy the King; and anon as he was there descended, the King caught him manly by the neck and cast him above that other, and so he defouled them both under him that all a long month after, men might see how strongly the King had held them by the throats, and greatly the King struggled with them for to have bereaved them [of] their knives, by the which labour his hands were all forkute [cut].

“But and the King had been in any wise armed he might well have escaped their malice by the length of his fighting with those two false traitours; for if the King might any while longer have saved himself, his servants and much other people of the town by some fortune should have had some knowledge thereof, and so have come to his succour [and] help. But, alas the while, it will not be! Fortune was to him adverse as in preserving of his life any long.”

The actual killer was Sir Robert Graham. John Shirley described what happened: “Therwithall that odious and false traitour, Sir Robert Grame, seeing the King laboured so sore with those two false traitours, which he had cast under his feet, and that he wax [grew] faint and weary, and that he was weaponless, the more pity was, descending down also into the privy to the King, with an horribill and mortall weapon in his hand. And then the King cried him mercy, ‘Thou cruel tyrant,’ quoth Grame to him, ‘thou hadest never mercy of lords borne of thy blood, nor of none other gentilman that came in thy danger, therefore no mercy shalt thou have here’.

“Thane (then) said the King, ‘I beseech thee that, for the salvation of my soul, ye will let me have a confessor.’ Quoth the said Grame, ‘Thou shalt never have other confessor but this same sword.’ And therwithall he smote him through the body, and therwithall the good King fell down and lamentably with a piteous voice he cried him oft mercy, and behight [promised] to give him his kingdom and much other good to save his life. And then the said Grame, seeing his King and sovereign lord unfortuned with so much disease [distress], anguish, and sorrow, would have so lived and done him no more harm. The other traitors above, perceiving that, said onto the said Sir Robert, ‘We behote [promise] thee faithfully, but [that] if thou flee him or thou depart, thou shalt die for him on our hands soon doubtless;’ and then the said Sir Robert with the other two that descended first down fell upon that noble prince, and in full horribill

and cruell wise they murdered

him.”

The killers ran away, leaving 28 wounds on the royal corpse. People ran from Perth to help, but the assassins had got clean away. Queen Joan took charge and had her husband’s body displayed for the public to see his wounds before burying him in the nearby Carthusian Charterhouse – as far as I know the recent project to find the lost tomb there is still ongoing.

An enraged Joan went to Stirling Castle with her son, now King James II, and soon gathered loyal forces. The hunt for Atholl, Graham and the rest began.

They were caught and subjected to excruciating torture before being executed, Atholl being hanged, drawn and quartered three days after six-year-old James was crowned King of Scots in Holyrood Abbey.

As we shall see next week, young James and bloody murder would be no strangers ...