ABSTRACT
JAMES II WAS ACCEPTED as king on his father’s death, and grew up an active man of light build with a great red birth-mark across his face. His succession showed that the dynastic problem had been settled for a time. The dangers and threats he had to meet did not come, at any rate directly, from claimants to the throne. The possibility of these existed as a sinister undercurrent in other troubles but the kingship was not the cause of recurrent civil strife in Scotland as it was in fifteenth-century England. Instead, like other monarchs of his day, James faced the question of the survival of the national state. Great appanages, territorial lordships, were growing up or being accumulated. They sat very loose to the central monarchies and were ruled by men who exercised power so nearly royal that it was quite possible they would break away altogether. The French king, for instance, in this ‘age of princes’, was virtually excluded from the administration of the greater French principalities, such as Aquitaine, Brittany, or Flanders, and there was a high probability that the greatest of all of these, the Duchy of Burgundy, which included under its duke areas with no allegiance at all to the house of Valois, would successfully become in name the independent power it was already in fact. A modern historian has said of the King of France that outside his domain ‘he could act only on the political not on the administrative plane’:1 the parallel with Scotland is close. Historians rather too often have looked at Scottish history with eyes accustomed to English, and searched for parallels between the primitive administration of Scotland and the most advanced bureacracy of the day, ignoring the rest of Europe. Till the seventeenth century the Scottish exchequer still ran on a system of accounting similar to that of England in the early twelfth century, a few weeks in the year in
which the King’s servants made their statements of charge and discharge. The contrast between this and the elaborate structure of English government finance was not evidence of Scotland’s backwardness, so much as of England’s abnormal forwardness. The Scottish kings faced problems familiar to the kings of France, rather than to the kings of England. The great noblemen, in both countries, looted the customs and other royal revenues, and probably did it better in France in that there was more to loot. At any rate this feature was not caused by the special poverty of Scotland and her king. The Duke of Brittany could declare for neutrality in the Hundred Years’ War and the Duke of Burgundy take up a position that was not even neutral, in a way which is very similar to the actions taken together by the great Border lords, Douglas and Percy, when their respective governments threatened to disturb the status quo on the Border. The Duke of Brittany, who claimed to rule Dei gratia, had an inaugural ceremony for his reign in Rennes Cathedral which was almost a coronation. The Lord of the Isles, the great Macdonald ruler of the Western Highlands, was installed in a ceremony that imitated the ancient installation of the kings of Dalriada. The new Lord, clad in white, put his foot in the hollowed footstep in the special square stone, and received a white rod and a sword to symbolize power and protection. At least one bishop, and if possible two bishops and seven priests, attended, as well as all the leading chieftains under him. Mass was said, the new ruler was blessed, gifts were given to monks and bards, and everyone feasted for a week. The ruler had his own council, meeting at a special stone table, his own records, and even his own weights and measures. The difference in the two lordships, Highland and Breton, was that a prince in France had under him a functioning bureaucracy, whereas in Scotland he had his kin, the men who bore his surname, or the dependent surnames, and perhaps those nearby lords of lesser status who found it best to stand in with him. In so far as he had officials they were hereditary, and this shows the different emphasis of the civilization. They were bards and genealogists. The actual governing machinery of his principality depended on personal influence and force. James’s reign mirrors successively the different types of ‘baronial problem’. First he was beset by the Livingstones, a small house that had risen rapidly by collecting Crown offices. There is no real parallel for this in France because the greater elaboration of landholding and the bonds of society prevented the rise of such fly-by-nights. We know from a hostage price-list of 1424 how the Livingstones rated before their sudden rise; they were well down the list, fourteen great lords being priced above them. Yet by 1449 they had the offices of justiciar, chamberlain, comptroller (the chief financial position), and master of the mint, and held four royal castles. This was too much: James, eighteen and just married, suddenly turned the lot out, executing two of them. This palace revolution may have been instigated by his new queen, Mary of Gueldres, a niece of the Duke of Burgundy, who had been granted the customs of Linlithgow as part of her dower, and found them held by Livingstones. But at no crisis of the reign could the Crown win unless some at least of the great powers among the
nobility were on its side. The greatest of them all at this date, the Black Douglas, seems to have backed the king. It was this house which provided a melodramatic crisis of its own a few years later.
