An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707)

by Robert S. Rait

CHAPTER VI

SCOTLAND, LANCASTER, AND YORK

1400-1500

When Henry of Lancaster placed himself on his cousin's throne, Scotland was divided between the supporters of the Duke of Rothesay, the eldest son of Robert III and heir to the crown, and the adherents of the Duke of Albany, the brother of the old king. In 1399, Rothesay had just succeeded his uncle as regent, and to him, as to Henry IV, there was a strong temptation to acquire popularity by a spirited foreign policy. The Scots hesitated to acknowledge Henry as King of England, and he, in turn, seems to have resolved upon an invasion of Scotland as the first military event of his reign. He, accordingly, raised the old claim of homage, and marched into Scotland to demand the fealty of Robert III and his barons. As usual, we find in Scotland some malcontents, who form an English party. The leader of the English intrigue on this occasion was the Scots Earl of March,[52] the son of Black Agnes. The Duke of Rothesay had been betrothed to the daughter of March, but had married in February, 1399-1400, a daughter of the Earl of Douglas, the hereditary foe of March. The Dunbar allegiance had always been doubtful, and it was only the influence of the great countess that had brought it to the patriotic side. In August, 1400, Henry marched into Scotland, and besieged for three days the castle of Edinburgh, which was successfully defended by the regent, while Albany was at the head of an army which made no attempt to interfere with Henry's movements. Difficulties in Wales now attracted Henry's attention, and he left Scotland without having accomplished anything, and leaving the record of the mildest and most merciful English invasion of Scotland. The necessities of his position in England may explain his abstaining from spoiling religious houses as his predecessors had done, but the chroniclers tell us that he gave protection to every town that asked it. While Henry was suppressing the Welsh revolt and negotiating with his Parliament, Albany and Rothesay were struggling for the government of Scotland. Rothesay fell from power in 1401, and in March, 1402, he died at Falkland. Contemporary rumour and subsequent legend attributed his death to Albany, and, as in the case of Richard II, the method of death was supposed to be starvation. Sir Walter has told the story in The Fair Maid of Perth. Albany, who had succeeded him as regent or guardian, made no effort to end the meaningless war with England, which went fitfully on. An idiot mendicant, who was represented to be Richard II, gave the Scots their first opportunity of supporting a pretender to the English throne; but the pretence was too ridiculous to be seriously maintained. The French refused to take any part in such a scheme, and the pseudo-Richard served only to annoy Henry IV, and scarcely gave even a semblance of significance to the war, which really degenerated into a series of border raids, one of which was of unusual importance. Henry had no intention of seriously prosecuting the claim of homage, and the continuance of hostilities is really explained by the ill-will between March and Douglas and the old feud between the Douglases and the Percies. In June, 1402, the Scots were defeated in a skirmish at Nesbit in Berwickshire (the scene of a small Scottish victory in 1355), and, in the following September, occurred the disaster of Homildon Hill. Douglas and Murdoch Stewart, the eldest son of Albany, had collected a large army, and the incursion was raised to the level of something like national importance. They marched into England and took up a strong position on Homildon Hill or Heugh. The Percies, under Northumberland and Hotspur, sent against them a body of English archers, who easily outranged the Scottish bowmen, and threw the army into confusion. Then ensued, as at Dupplin and Halidon Hill, a simple massacre. Murdoch Stewart and Douglas were taken captive with several other Scots lords. Close on Homildon Hill followed the rebellion of the Percies, and the result of the English victory at Homildon was merely to create a new difficulty for Henry IV. The sudden nature of the Percy revolt is indicated by the fact that, when Albany marched to relieve a Scottish stronghold which they were besieging, he found that the enemy had entered into an alliance with the House of Douglas, their ancient foes, and were turning their arms against the English king. Percy and Douglas fought together at Shrewsbury, while the Earl of March was in the ranks of King Henry.

The battle of Shrewsbury was fought in July, 1403. In 1405, Northumberland, a traitor for a second time, took refuge in Scotland, and received a dubious protection from Albany, who was ready to sell him should any opportunity arise. A truce which had been arranged between Scotland and England expired in April, 1405, and the two countries were technically in a state of war, although there were no great military operations in progress.[53] In the spring of 1406, Albany sent the heir to the Scottish throne, Prince James, to be educated in France. The vessel in which he sailed was captured by the English off Flamborough Head, and the prince was taken to Henry IV. It has been a tradition in Scotland that James was captured in time of truce, and Wyntoun uses the incident to point a moral with regard to the natural deceitfulness of the English heart:

"It is of English nationn
The common kent conditionn
Of Truth the virtue to forget,
When they do them on winning set,
And of good faith reckless to be
When they do their advantage see."

But it would seem clear that the truce had expired, and that the English king was bound to no treaty of peace. His son's capture was immediately followed by the death of King Robert III, who sank, broken-hearted, into the grave. Albany continued to rule, and maintained a series of truces with England till his death in 1420. The peace was occasionally broken in intervals of truce, and the advantage was usually on the side of the Scots. In 1409 the Earl of March returned to his allegiance and received back his estates. In the same year his son recovered Fast Castle (on St. Abb's Head), and the Scots also recovered Jedburgh.

Albany's attention was now diverted by a danger threatened by the Highland portion of the kingdom. Scotland, south of Forth and Clyde, along with the east coast up to the Moray Firth, had been rapidly affected by the English, French, and Norman influences, of which we have spoken. The inhabitants of the more remote Highland districts and of the western isles had remained uncorrupted by civilization of any kind, and ever since the reign of Malcolm Canmore there had been a militant reaction against the changes of St. Margaret and David I; from the eleventh century to the thirteenth, the Scottish kings were scarcely ever free from Celtic pretenders and Celtic revolts.[54] The inhabitants of the west coast and of the isles were very largely of Scandinavian blood, and it was not till 1266 that the western isles definitely passed from Norway to the Scottish crown. The English had employed several opportunities of allying themselves with these discontented Scotsmen; but Mr. Freeman's general statement, already quoted, that "the true Scots, out of hatred to the Saxons nearest them, leagued with the Saxons farther off", is very far from a fair representation of the facts. We have seen that Highlander and Islesman fought under David I at the battle of the Standard, against the "Saxons farther off", and that although the death of Comyn ranged against Bruce the Highlanders of Argyll, numbers of Highlanders were led to victory at Bannockburn by Earl Randolph; and Angus Og and the Islesmen formed part of the Scottish reserves and stood side by side with the men of Carrick, under the leadership of King Robert. During the troubles which followed King Robert's death, the Lords of the Isles had resumed their general attitude of opposition. It was an opposition very natural in the circumstances, the rebellion of a powerful vassal against a weak central government, a reaction against the forces of civilization. But it has never been shown that it was an opposition in any way racial; the complaint that the Lowlands of Scotland have been "rent by the Saxon from the Gael", in the manner of a racial dispossession, belongs to "The Lady of the Lake", not to sober history. All Scotland, indeed, has now, in one sense, been "rent by the Saxon" from the Celt. "Let no one doubt the civilization of these islands," wrote Dr. Johnson, in Skye, "for Portree possesses a jail." The Highlands and islands have been the last portions of Scotland to succumb to Anglo-Saxon influences; that the Lowlands formed an earlier victim does not prove that their racial complexion is different. The incident of which we have now to speak has frequently been quoted as a crowning proof of the difference between the Lowlanders and the "true Scots". Donald of the Isles had a quarrel with the Regent Albany, and, in 1408, entered into an agreement with Henry IV, to whom he owned allegiance. But this very quarrel arose about the earldom of Ross, which was claimed by Donald (himself a grandson of Robert II) in right of his wife, a member of the Leslie family. The "assertor of Celtic nationality" was thus the son of one Lowland woman and the husband of another. When he entered the Scottish mainland his progress was first opposed, not by the Lowlanders, but by the Mackays of Caithness, who were defeated near Dingwall, and the Frasers immediately afterwards received what the historians of the Clan Donald term a "well-merited chastisement".[55] Donald pursued his victorious march to Aberdeenshire, tempted by the prospect of plundering Aberdeen. It is interesting to note that, while the battle which has given significance to the record of the dispute was fought for the Lowland town of Aberdeen in a Lowland part of Aberdeenshire, the very name of the town is Celtic, and the district in which the battlefield of Harlaw is situated abounds to this day in Celtic place-names, and, not many miles away, the Gaelic tongue may still be heard at Braemar or at Tomintoul. It was not to a racial battle between Celt and Saxon that the Earl of Mar and the Provost of Aberdeen, aided by the Frasers, marched out to Harlaw, in July, 1411, to meet Donald of the Isles. Had the clansmen been victorious there would certainly have been a Celtic revival; but this was not the danger most dreaded by the victorious Lowlanders. The battle of Harlaw was part of the struggle with England. Donald of the Isles was the enemy of Scottish independence, and his success would mean English supremacy. He had taken up the rôle of "the Disinherited" of the preceding century, just as the Earl of March had done some years before. As time passed, and civilization progressed in the Lowlands while the Highlands maintained their integrity, the feeling of separation grew more strongly marked; and as the inhabitants of the Lowlands intermarried with French and English, the differences of blood became more evident and hostility became unavoidable. But any such abrupt racial division as Mr. Freeman drew between the true Scots and the Scottish Lowlanders stands much in need of proof.

Harlaw was an incident in the never-ending struggle with England. It was succeeded, in 1416 or 1417, by an unfortunate expedition into England, known as the "Foul Raid", and after the Foul Raid came the battle of Baugé. They are all part of one and the same story; although Harlaw might seem an internal complication and Baugé an act of unprovoked aggression, both are really as much part of the English war as is the Foul Raid or the battle of Bannockburn itself. The invasion of France by Henry V reminded the Scots that the English could be attacked on French soil as well as in Northumberland. So the Earl of Buchan, a son of Albany, was sent to France at the head of an army, in answer to the dauphin's request for help. In March, 1421, the Scots defeated the English at Baugé and captured the Earl of Somerset. The death of Henry V, in the following year, and the difficulties of the English government led to the return of the young King of Scots. The Regent Albany had been succeeded in 1420 by his son, who was weak and incompetent, and Scotland longed for its rightful king. James had been carefully educated in England, and the dreary years of his captivity have enriched Scottish literature by the King's Quair:

"More sweet than ever a poet's heart
Gave yet to the English tongue".