Mishap and mystery: Two Scottish kings who met tragic ends

He did something that a considerable number of his predecessors and descendants – as we shall see – did not do, which was dying in his bed of natural causes, though we do not know the exact nature of his fatal disease.

I cannot mention Bruce and ignore the current controversy over Angus Macfadyen’s film Robert the Bruce. I have not seen it yet, but some friends who have seen it say it’s a good piece of filmmaking and it certainly tells us something about Bruce himself.

What annoys me is those who think the campaign to get the film shown in the Cineworld chain, and Macfadyen’s factual claim that fake reviews were being posted by Unionists, is nationalist victimhood at its worst.

What utter tosh. What happened was that ordinary Scottish people responded to Macfadyen’s appeal for help to get the film shown by Cineworld, and the power of social media did the rest.

It is a very sad day when grassroots’ attempts to get a film about Scottish history shown in Scottish cinemas is seen as some sort of victimhood. As I have written repeatedly, the ignorance of people in this country about Scottish history is completely shameful, and frankly we need many more filmmakers to tackle the vast array of subjects and stories that are legion in our nation’s history.

Over the past few weeks in The National and Sunday National, I have told the stories of bloody murder surrounding the early Stewart kings. Robert the Bruce’s successors David II, Robert II – first king from the House of Stewart – and Robert III all died of natural causes, but as I have explained, the heir of the last-named king, James I, was brutally assassinated in Perth on February 21, 1437.

It is a sad fact that the first four kings called James Stewart all met their ends prematurely, and this week we will look at the deaths of James II and James III.

King James III of Scotland

James II, unlike his father, was a popular and successful king, but his murder of the Earl of Douglas at Stirling Castle in February, 1452, cast a long shadow over his reputation.

The king then entered into what was in effect a civil war with the “Black” – as opposed to the “Red” – Douglas faction, and it was not until the Battle of Arkinholm near Langholm in 1455 that the Black Douglases were defeated. The Douglas family was devastated – Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Moray, was killed during the battle and his head was presented to King James, while his brother Hugh, the Earl of Ormond, was captured and executed for treason. A third brother, John, Lord of Balvenie, escaped to England where the Earl of Douglas himself was staying. It’s an interesting fact that neither leader of the two sides was actually at the battle.

King James acted swiftly to have the Douglases attainted as traitors and their extensive lands and castles were seized. With the opposition gone, James was able to rule his nation in relative peace and calm, helped by his “big guns” – not humans, but actual guns, massive artillery pieces that could destroy any building in Scotland.

James was fascinated by artillery, which he rightly saw as weapons that could end any battle or siege. We know how huge were James’s cannons, mostly from Flanders, as one of them can be found at Edinburgh Castle to this day – Mons Meg.

It was smaller pieces of artillery which James had used in his campaign against the Black Douglases, and so successful were they that the king became convinced that he had the weapons to win any war.

With the Wars of the Roses under way in England, James saw an opportunity to regain for Scotland two strongholds, Roxburgh Castle and Berwick, both of which had been in English hands since the previous century’s Wars of Independence.

Determined to rectify what he no doubt saw as a blot on the family escutcheon, James gathered together a huge army from all over Scotland. The timing was propitious, as the Battle of Northampton on July 10, 1460, preoccupied the rightful King of England, Henry VI of the House of Lancaster, and the man who was about to usurp him, Edward IV of the House of York.

Mopping up the aftermath of Northampton would take the Yorkists weeks if not months, so in a clever strategic move, James made a feint as if to march on Berwick, which the English rushed to defend. Changing tack, James headed instead for Roxburgh Castle and laid siege to the strong edifice which had stood at the junction of the rivers Tweed and Teviot since the days of its founder, King David I, back in the 12th century. It had been in English hands off and on since the capture of William the Lion at Alnwick in 1093, but was brilliantly re-captured and torn down by Sir James Douglas early in 1314 during the guerrilla campaign waged by Robert the Bruce.

The English rebuilt it, and in 1460 it was one of the few castles that had seen the installation of rudimentary anti-artillery defences. They didn’t work, and in late July the Scots laid siege to the castle with all of James’s cannons battering away at it.

On August 3, 1460, James was standing alongside one of his mighty cannons, nicknamed the Lion, when the huge siege gun exploded – a frequent occurrence with artillery being in its early days.

The king fell, mortally wounded, appearing to have suffered a massive compound fracture of the thigh. In his 16th-century history, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie wrote that the king’s thigh was snapped in two and he was “stricken to the ground and died hastily”.

Also dating from the 16th century, the Asloan Manuscript, which is 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. Despite this the lordis that war thar remanit still with the ost and on the Fryday efter Lords richt wysly and manfully wan the forsaid castell and tynt nocht a man.”

That last line is important – Roxburgh was captured within a few days without any more loss of life. James’s Queen Consort Mary of Guelders ordered Roxburgh Castle to be destroyed – its remains can be seen in the grounds of Floors Castle.

James II was dead, possibly of a severed femoral artery, at the age of 29, and his son and heir, James III, was King of Scots at the age of nine. His mother acted as regent until her own death three years later, after which the young king was fought over by various factions until his personal reign began with his marriage to Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1469, which at least brought Orkney and Shetland into the Scottish kingdom, as I detailed in the latest Sunday National.

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Though he is remembered for his patronage of education and the arts, James III was as unpopular as his father had been popular, and he particularly antagonised the nobility, preferring the company of his “familiars” – hangers on, we would call them – and giving them precedence over the noble families. His pro-English policies annoyed the populace generally and when he put one of his chums, Robert Cochrane, in charge of the Scottish army, that was too much for the nobles.

James’s own brother, Alexander, the Duke of Albany, is said to have made a deal with King Edward IV of England, who sent a huge army to invade Scotland in the summer of 1482. The Scottish nobles wanted peace, but Cochrane and other royal “familiars” were seen as a problem, and at Lauder, with the English army only 30 miles away, Cochrane and his friends were hanged in what became known as the Lauder lynchings.

James ended up in Edinburgh Castle as a prisoner of the Albany faction, though he managed to regain control of his country by 1483. You would think such a setback might deter James III from picking any more fights with the nobility, but on the contrary, James seemed hell-bent on confrontation with the nobles, especially those of the Borders, and the country was split in two.

James’s estranged wife Margaret then died in Stirling Castle in 1486. She was only 30, and though there was no evidence of anything untoward, James got the blame and was rumoured to have poisoned her – that is how much he was detested.

Perhaps because he was Margaret’s favourite, James fell out with his eldest son, also called James, who had been made Duke of Rothesay as heir apparent. The king wanted his other son, also called James, the Earl of Ormonde, to succeed him, so at the age of 15, the young duke sided with the openly rebellious nobles, becoming a figurehead rather than a commander.

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What happened next is the stuff of tragedy. King James determined to capture his rebel son and presumably put him to death for treason. He marched from Edinburgh to Stirling with his army, but young Prince James managed to escape and join the nobles – the Homes and Hepburns and the earls of Angus and Argyll – who were marching towards Stirling.

On June 11, 1488, the king, supposedly carrying the sword of Robert the Bruce, joined battle with the rebels at a location somewhere between the Sauchie and Bannock burns, possibly on the location of the Battle of Bannockburn itself. James had many Highlanders in his ranks, but crucially, the rebels had much larger numbers of mounted troops, and as Borders reivers, they knew much more about cavalry tactics.

In what later became known as the Battle of Sauchieburn – much later, the name only dates from 1817 – the better-led rebel army routed King James’s army who eventually turned and fled after a rumour spread that the king had been killed. More likely he saw that after the initial charge by the rebels had been halted, a second charge was breaking through, and realising defeat was imminent and inevitable, James fled the field.

There’s no doubt the king escaped, and the nobles having sworn an oath not to kill him, it seemed that James would get clean away and perhaps live to fight another day. But what happened next is one of the biggest mysteries in Scottish history.

There are numerous legends about the fate of James III, but there is no contemporaneous evidence whatsoever.

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.

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.

The fact is, we don’t know how James died or who killed him, but his son was now King James IV. He would apparently wear a penance chain all his life to remind himself that he had played his part in regicide and parricide. Sadly, we know what happened to him at Flodden in 1513.