The turbulent reign and assassination of Scotland's King James I

Perth was James’s favourite city and if he had lived longer he might well have declared it to be his capital. He and his family spent Christmas at Blackfriars and stayed on afterwards. On the fateful evening, he was taking his ease there with his Queen, Joan, and her ladies. Suddenly they heard a clamour outside, with the clatter of mounted men and the lurid shadows cast by torches.

There was a conspiracy at work. Leading it was the king’s kinsman, Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl, also himself born to a king, as the sixth and youngest child of Robert II, son of Robert Bruce – the national hero and saviour who had preserved Scotland’s freedom from English aggression more than a century before.

This had still not been a formula for tranquillity. It remained a turbulent country with much of its territory held by powerful families. Many were in turn descended from Bruce or had some other close connection with him. It was what made them generally acceptable for supplying monarchs and regents to the whole.

But one result was that, in each generation, they took to struggling violently among themselves for dominance over the others. Somehow, contenders with different kinds of claims were always in ample supply to the tradition of turmoil. Such royal practices, rather than threatening Scottish monarchy with extinction, tended to enhance the European standing of this small nation, not least through marriage into and genetic enhancement of other dynasties.

In the eventual climax, when the Tudors died out in England, the Stewarts were ready and waiting in Scotland to take over from them.

Born in 1394, James I of Scotland grew up with this brutal tradition. He had an elder brother, David, who fell victim to the jealousy of an uncle. As the younger son of Robert III, James faced mortal danger even in his childhood.

Yet he also showed how all this might advance the general fortunes of the House of Stewart. For the sake of the heir’s survival, his father sent him in 1406 to the supposed safety of France, Scotland’s great ally and protector against England.

A subtle plan turned out too optimistic when, during the crossing of the North Sea, pirates captured the royal ship and handed the prince over to the enemy nation. Amid this crisis, Robert III died. The English now had on their hands not just a Scottish heir but a Scottish king. The reign of James I opened with him a hostage to his country’s fiercest foe. He would remain there for 18 years.

In London, King Henry IV (above) at least treated his young prisoner kindly. He got a good education. In this opening phase of the Renaissance, it included reading ancient philosophy, though he remained pious in religion too. It even made him a creative artist, author of one of the earliest long poems in the Scots language, The Kingis Quair. It deals explicitly with the main events of James’s childhood, his capture by the pirates and his years as a hostage at the English court. The reader is finally led up to his marriage in 1420 with a minor royal, Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset. We feel the spirit of a poetic lover.

We also see how James I’s years of exile were in some senses quite agreeable. He lived in royal residences such as Windsor Castle. He was provided with a small household of Scots paid for by the English Treasury. With King Henry V, only a few years older than himself, James struck up a friendship that saw the two of them go off to France to serve together in the Hundred Years’ War. He was allowed visitors from Scotland and conducted correspondence with officials at home.

At the same time, some Scots fighting on the French side were captured and hanged as traitors to their king, when they had thought they were fighting for him. In his poetry, James never ceased to feel sorrow at the course his life had taken.

It must be said, however, that there were people back in Scotland by no means eager for his quick return. One was his uncle, Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany, who took over the king’s lands and the income from them, so that James in London had no money of his own. Perhaps it was a safe idea for the pair to remain apart, as Robert had a big family to provide for at times when James had none.

In fact, the English did most to put the muddle in order. After the death of Henry V and succession of Henry VI, the new infant king’s council opened negotiations in 1424. The aim was the return to Scotland of King James I and Queen Joan.

They went back to a kingdom in disarray. James had his devotees, yet others disputed his version of their respective rights. He saw himself as a man of peace and justice, yet of sensible innovation too.

He first stressed his authority as monarch and his wish to exercise complete power. He was on the one hand a lawmaker, on the other hand a ruler ever ready to enforce his will by violence. He set about imprisoning or even executing cousins who might have a claim to the throne. He ruled with an iron hand for 13 years and made many enemies.

The animosity climaxed in his own murder, but the bare narrative of the medieval chronicles only gives us a distant view of what those involved thought they were fighting for. James won personal loyalty and devotion from certain of his followers while his enemies appealed to wider principles and especially the right to resist tyranny or oppression.

The paradox came out on the night of February 10, 1437, when Queen Joan and her ladies discovered that the locks on the gate of Blackfriars had been put out of action.

Was this a sign of trouble at hand? James asked these worthy women to keep watch while he looked for an escape.

One lady-in-waiting, Catherine Douglas (above, also known by the nickname of Kate Barlass), thrust her arm through the brackets of the door to hold it shut. Intruders arrived and hacked at it with saws, levers and axes, till they broke it down – and broke her arm too.

The king, meanwhile, tested the windows, but they were strongly leaded and would not break.

He grabbed an iron tong from the chimney and prised up floorboards. Beneath was a sort of space, a vault or cellar or privy. Here he hid.

The assassins searched in vain for their victim till he made some noise that attracted their attention. They raised the floorboards and struck at the hapless monarch, who had no weapon to defend himself. He was soon a corpse, soiled and bloody from the 16 wounds his murderers inflicted.

It was a sordid end, but for the future not atypical of the Scottish monarchy and its tendency to be overtaken by unhappy fate.