Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

491
STUARTS TO JAMES IV.] SCOT
—was even less active than his father. He is briefly but
truly described by an historian as a good man but not a
good king. He scarcely reigned, for the regency of his
brother continued after his accession till it was succeeded
for a few years by that of Robert’s son, on whose death
the earl of Fife again became regent. There was a truce
with England for nine years, during which the irrepres¬
sible love of fighting had to satisfy itself within Scotland.
The king’s younger brother, Alexander, called the Wolf of
Badenoch, who had been created earl of Buchan, quarrelled
with the bishop of Elgin and burnt his cathedral. The
Wolf and his sons were constantly engaged in private wars.
The earl died in 1394, but his son Alexander continued
to defy the law, which the Government was too weak to
enforce in the northern Highlands. Policy was used to
suppress the violence of the clans. Such seems the ex¬
planation of the combat between thirty of the Clan Kay
and as many of the Clan Chattan before the king on the
North Inch of Perth, which ended in the slaughter of
nearly all the combatants on both sides. In the council
or parliament of 1398 a change was made in the Govern¬
ment due to the general distrust of Fife and the rising
spirit of the earl of Garrick, the king’s eldest son. The
form of it was a compromise. The young prince was
made lieutenant for three years, but with the advice of a
council, of whom his uncle Fife was one; they were created
dukes of Rothesay and Albany respectively, the first of
that title in Scotland. Other acts of this council were
designed to restrain the monarchy by constitutional laws.
Parliament was to meet annually. The king, if accused
of misgovernment or breach of law, might, “ to excuse his
defaults,” arraign his officers before the council. No one
was to ride through the country with more followers than
he could pay for. The grant of £11,000 for the common
weal and profit of the kingdom by the three estates—
barons, clergy, and burghs—was made under protest that
it was not to be a precedent, and the burghs stipulated
that in future they were not to pay more than under
Robert II. In the following year the revolution took
place in England which led to the deposition and death
of Richard II. and the accession of Henry IY. An im¬
postor who had assumed the name of Richard took refuge
in the Hebrides and was received at the Scottish court.
The expedition of Henry to Scotland (1400), partly due
to this, was also prompted by the desire to distinguish a
new reign and by the invitation of the earl of March,
indignant at the preference given to the daughter of
Douglas over his own as wife for Rothesay. Reviving the
old claim of feudal superiority, which was now supported
by the forged charters of Hardyng as well as the fictions
of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry cited Robert to do homage
at Newcastle, and, on his failing to appear, marched to
Edinburgh. Rothesay successfully defended the capital,
and Henry was suddenly recalled by the rising of Owen
Glendower and the Percies. Next year (1401) occurred
the death of Rothesay by starvation at Falkland, where
he had been committed by his father at Albany’s instance
on account of his bad government and dissolute conduct.
The declaration of the council at Edinburgh, which acquitted
• Albany of all concern in the death, was enough for the
moment, but in after times, like Bothwell’s acquittal, a
corroboration of guilt. The last years of Robert were
clouded by private and public misfortune. His queen,
Annabella Drummond, his son-in-law, the earl of Douglas,
and Trail, bishop of St Andrews, one of the wisest of his
council, died within a short interval. The son of Douglas,
though brave, was unequal to the task of holding the
border against the Percies and the earl of March, and so
constantly lost battles that he was called Archibald Tyne-
man. The Scots were signally defeated at Nisbet Muir
LAND
(14th September 1402) in Merse and at Homildon Hill 1390-141S.
near Wooler by Percy, where the slain and prisoners equalled
the number at Otterburn. Nor could order be maintained
within Scotland itself, of which the forcible marriage of
the countess of Mar by Alexander, a bastard of the Wolf
of Badenoch, was an example. Afraid of Albany, and
warned by the fate of Rothesay, Robert sent his remaining
son James to France (1405); but the ship in which he
sailed was taken by an English cruiser, and the future king
was a prisoner in England for nineteen years. This last
blow broke the weak heart of Robert, who died at Dun-
donald and was buried at Paisley. Though his reign was
inglorious, the tradition of the War of Independence still
warmed the heart of the nation and produced the earliest
writers in Scottish literature,—Barbour, Fordun, and Wyn-
toun. The Bruce of Barbour became the national epic.
The year after Robert’s death the first martyr in Scot¬
land, James Resby, an English priest, was burnt at Perth
by Albany, who is described by Wyntoun as “ a constant
Catholic.” Resby was condemned at the instance of Laur¬
ence of Lindores, called the Inquisitor of Scotland, for forty
theses from the books of Wickliffe. The Lollard doctrines
continued to be secretly held by a small sect, chiefly in the
west. Knox traces the descent of the first Scottish Re¬
formers—the Lollards of Kyle—from Wickliffe and Hus.
This religious movement was destined to exercise a pro¬
found influence on the history of Scotland. The time
when the church was a civilizing and purifying power was
passing away. Its enormous wealth, a contrast to its early
poverty, its developed so different from its primitive doc¬
trine, celibacy, and the confessional in a lax society, that
was no longer moved by the fervour of a new faith, pro¬
duced a corruption which forced itself on minds of a
reforming tendency. Catholicism allowed no place for
individual reformers, and their protests, often carried to
extremes, were deemed attacks upon the church itself,
which became (unwillingly on the part of its best friends)
the defender of its worst abuses. From first to last in
Scotland the movement was popular, though not at first
democratic. It did not at all or only to a slight extent
change through political causes as in England.
Though he was a captive, the right of James I. (1406-37) James I.
on his father’s death was at once acknowledged by a general
council held at Perth; but the appointment of Albany as
governor boded ill for his return. He held the office Albany’s
thirteen years, administering it till his death so as to con- regency,
ciliate all classes and pave the way to his own accession
to the throne, which Avould have been his by right had
the young king died. The recovery of Jedburgh (1408),
long in the hands of the English, gave the regent an easy
opportunity of popularity. It was decided by a general
council that its walls should be razed and the expense
defrayed by a poll tax, but Albany refused to burden the
people and paid it out of the royal customs. Next year
Albany and Douglas (now released from captivity in Eng¬
land) entered into a bond of alliance. With the earls of
March and Mar and others similar engagements were
made; but Douglas, who had acquired the lands of March,
which, however, were now restored, had to be conciliated
by a grant of Lochmaben and Annandale, the patrimony
of the Bruces. The more independent nobles of the north
could not be so easily gained, and Donald, lord of the
Isles, disappointed in a claim to the earldom of Ross, in¬
vaded Aberdeenshire with a great host, whose defeat by
the earl of Mar at Harlaw (17th May 1412)—the Otter-
burn of northern ballads—was followed by the capture of
Dingwall, his chief castle on the mainland, and his final
defeat at Lochgilphead.
The first Scottish university—St Andrews—was founded
by bulls granted a year later at the instance of James and