The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain by Allan Massie Read Free Book Online

where as a boy James had waited for the ship that was to carry him to France. A few weeks later he instituted inquiries into the legal titles to estates that had formerly belonged to the Crown, and arrested Albany’s father-in-law, the Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham, a connection of the descendants of Euphemia Ross, Robert II’s second wife, whose marriage had been undeniably lawful. He then moved against Albany himself. imprisoning him along with his youngest son, Alexander, and seizing his castles – Falkland, where the Duke of Rothesay had been murdered, and Doune in Perthshire. The speed and certainty with which he acted suggests he was carrying out plans long brooded on in his years of exile.
    Alarm spread among the nobility. Here was a king with a strength of will such as Scotland had not known for a long time. James Stewart, the only one of Albany’s sons still at liberty, took up the challenge. He raised a rebellion in the west, burned Dumbarton and killed the governor of its castle, an old Stewart who was the King’s uncle or perhaps great-uncle. James responded quickly and effectively. The rebellion was snuffed out. James Stewart and his ally, the Bishop of Argyll, fled to Ireland. Failure though it was, the rising had sealed the fate of the prisoners. They were tried by an assize of nobles in the presence of the King, and condemned to death. Some may have been horrified, few surprised. Walter Stewart, brought from the Bass Rock, was the first to be executed, in the forecourt of Stirling Castle. The next day his father Albany, brother Alexander and the aged Earl of Lennox followed him to the block. The King took possession of their estates, and the Crown was thereby enriched by the revenues of the earldoms of Fife, Menteith and Lennox. James then dispatched Malise Graham, nephew of Robert Graham and great-grandson of Robert II and Euphemia Ross, to England as one of the hostages for the security of his still unpaid ransom. In a few weeks he had made himself more thoroughly master of Scotland than any king since Robert the Bruce. In doing so, he had cut a swathe through the Stewart cousinship and eliminated a number of possible rivals. There was a price to be paid: the King was now feared but also hated.
    Previous Scottish kings had mostly been content to select wives and husbands for their children from the ranks of the native nobility. The Stewarts themselves owed their throne to such a marriage. James, perhaps on account of the troubles he had endured and the dangers he had run at the hands of his Stewart cousins, had different ideas. He himself had married into the English royal family; his children should also marry out of Scotland. This would elevate their consequence and the King’s also. It would mark him out as being more than ‘the first among equals’ and leave fewer of the Scots nobility with a claim to the throne. So his eldest daughter Margaret was married – at the age of twelve – to the heir to the French throne, the future Louis XI, a man whose contradictions of character have fascinated and disgusted contemporaries and future historians alike, and are memorably brought to life in the best of Scott’s medieval novels, Quentin Durward . 1 Margaret, however, did not live to be his queen. She died at the age of twenty, of what one French historian called ‘ une maladie de langueur ’, murmuring ‘ Fi de la vie de ce monde, et ne m’en parlez plus, et plus qu’autre chose m’ennuie .’ 2 Later Stewarts might fall into melancholy and depression, but Margaret is the only one recorded as dying of boredom.
    Her sisters were married to other European nobles – the Duke of Brittany and an Austrian duke among them. There was a single exception. One daughter, Joan, was married to the Douglas Earl of Morton. But it so happened that she had been born deaf and dumb, and so could not be regarded as an asset in the royal marriage market.
    James was active, enquiring and energetic. He sought