#roxburgh

August 3rd 1460 saw the death of King James II during the siege of Roxburgh Castle.

Known as ‘James of the fiery face’ for the bright red birthmark that covered a whole side of his face, James II was one of the most forceful of the Stewart rulers.

Just six when his father James I was murdered in 1437, all through his childhood and adolescence the Douglases vied with other nobles for control of him. He was 18 when he married a niece of the Duke of Burgundy, Mary of Gueldres, in 1449 and took charge of matters for himself.

With a temperament as fiery as his face, James loved hunting, tournaments and war. He was fascinated by artillery and the Duke of Burgundy gave him the now famous Mons Meg siege gun, which is still at Edinburgh Castle. Short of money until he killed the Earl of Douglas with his own hands in 1452 and then confiscated the Douglas estates, he used the income to support his own effective government. He also had to deal with the English, whose fingers were in Scotland’s pie. While cultivating alliances abroad and negotiating with both the Yorkists and the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses, James assaulted Berwick in 1455, mounted a sally into Northumberland in 1456, raided the English-held Isle of Man and attacked Berwick again in 1457.

The English had long possessed Roxburgh Castle in the Borders and in 1460 James led an army to besiege it. He was standing close to one of his prized cannon when he ordered it to be fired, possibly to salute the arrival of his Queen Mary. The cannon exploded and James was mortally wounded. According to Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, writing a hundred years later, his thigh was snapped in two and he was ‘stricken to the ground and died hastily’. He was 29 years old.

Roxburgh Castle fell to his forces a few days later, and Scotland had another young King in James III who would make his own enemies and die a violent death himself.

In 1241, Alexander II of Scotland had every reason to be proud of his achievements. One of mediaeval Scotland’s most formidable rulers, over the past three decades he had ruthlessly neutralised all dynastic threats to his crown and extended his authority further than any previous Scottish monarch, leading campaigns and suppressing revolts from Caithness to Galloway. He maintained an aggressive foreign policy towards his powerful neighbours in Norway and England, as well as a host of lesser kings and magnates on the fringes of his realm. From the earliest years of his reign when, at the age of just eighteen, he had marched a Scottish army as far south as Dover, to his death in Kerrara, on the brink of establishing Scottish ascendancy in the Western Isles, Alexander’s career was dramatic and bloody- but it had certainly yielded results. But there was one thing missing: despite being in his early forties and having married twice over the past twenty years, he had no legitimate child to whom he could pass on his kingdom and thereby secure this impressive legacy.

(Remains of Roxburgh Castle in the 1920s. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In 1221, Alexander II had married Joan of England, a sister of Henry III of England. By the time of Joan’s death seventeen years later, however, no children had been born to the couple, who in any case do not appear to have been particularly close. Alexander soon married again, this time choosing Marie de Coucy, daughter of the powerful French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, a match which may have irked the king of England but was advantageous for the king of Scots. The wedding took place in May 1239 at Roxburgh Castle, and by early 1241, Marie had already fallen pregnant. By this point none of Alexander II’s sisters had any living children and his first cousin John, Earl of Huntingdon, the next male heir, had died in 1237. The fragility of the Scottish succession would have been especially brought home by the accidental death of Gilbert Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, the husband of the king’s youngest sister Marjorie, in an illegal tournament in June 1241. Thus the arrival of the long-awaited heir to the Scottish throne in autumn of that year came not a moment too soon. On 4th September 1241 at Roxburgh, Queen Marie gave birth to a healthy male child and the boy was promptly christened Alexander after his father.

Although it is likely that the birth of an heir to the 43-year-old king of Scots would have been a cause for considerable celebration, contemporary sources are largely silent about the reaction to the young Alexander’s birth. Instead, the Chronicle of Lanercost, with its penchant for sensational stories and moralising tales, has furnished us with an anecdote about a strange event which took place during the young prince’s early months. 

King Alexander II was riding out of Edinburgh when he was waylaid by a burgess’ widow, aged and impoverished. She had been ruined by the constant demands of the royal court upon her business, providing the king’s servants which many goods for which she had received no payment. The previous day she had attempted to hold onto a cockerel which she had expected would bring great profit, but eventually this too was extorted from her. Now, her resources completely exhausted, she begged the king for repayment.  Embarrassed, Alexander II attempted to shake her off, promising her that she would be paid in full in due course, but the widow had reached the end of her patience. As he rode away she chased after him, shouting a curse, “May God in heaven give you such joy from your only son as I had yesterday when my cock had its neck broken!” This greatly alarmed the king and he fervently prayed to God not to let her curse come to pass, but, though acknowledging that disaster did not immediately strike the young prince, the chronicler pointedly ends his tale with a meaningful comment about God being “one who pays back after a very long interval”. Richard of Durham, who likely wrote the portion of the Chronicle of Lanercost spanning the years 1201-1297, was in contact with the Scottish court, having possibly resided in Haddington for a while, and being on intimate terms with the earl and countess of Dunbar, as well as counting the confessor of Margaret of England, Alexander III’s queen, among his informants. Due to these contacts it is entirely possible that there are some truthful elements to the above story. However, since Richard probably began writing his chronicle around 1280, and since the story is perhaps too convenient in light of both later history and the chronicler’s moralising aim, it seems much more likely that the tale was exaggerated, altered or created in light of the series of tragedies which famously struck the Scottish royal family in the 1270s and 1280s- which did indeed culminate in King Alexander III breaking his neck.

King Alexander II and Marie de Coucy are not known to have had any further children (although Alexander II had at least one, possibly two illegitimate daughters), so it is fortunate that the younger Alexander survived all the dangers of infancy and childhood to succeed to his father’s throne. This occurred rather sooner than expected, when in July 1249 the apparently indomitable Alexander II succumbed to illness at the age of fifty while on campaign in the Hebrides and left the crown to his young son, who was not yet eight years old. After a somewhat rocky minority, Alexander III nevertheless grew into a capable monarch, who maintained Scotland’s position as an independent, consolidated mediaeval state, and even achieved his father’s ambition of permanently uniting the Western Isles and Mann to his realm. However his abilities have perhaps been somewhat exaggerated over the past seven centuries, because late mediaeval chroniclers portrayed his reign as something of a ‘Golden Age’ in Scottish history. The enduring nature of this ‘Golden Age’ myth is to some extent understandable: these chroniclers were all writing in the wake of the Scottish Wars of Independence, and nostalgically looking back to the reign of Alexander III as a time of peace and prosperity. This however has tended to overshadow both the achievements of his father Alexander II and previous monarchs, who largely created the conditions for the economic prosperity and political stability of late thirteenth century Scotland. The myth also obscures the fact that this so-called ‘Golden Age’ had been won at considerable cost, through many bloody wars and aggressive expansionist policies which were vigorously pursued by the Canmore kings. 

(A fifteenth century depiction of Alexander III’s coronation, from the Scotichronicon. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Nonetheless, for the most part Alexander III can be considered one of Scotland’s ‘greater’ monarchs, though he is perhaps best known for the tragedies which occurred in the last decade of his reign. Having lost his wife, Margaret of England, in 1275, Alexander’s personal losses became very public when in the space of a few short years, all three of his children- two of them adults- died. Now the last of his house, he quickly married again, to Yolande of Dreux, in hopes of securing the succession. This time, there was to be no fortuitous birth of an heir, and in early 1286, within four months of his marriage and not yet 45 years old, Alexander III himself fell from his horse and broke his neck. His sudden death- and the subsequent death of his granddaughter the Maid of Norway- indirectly led to the Wars of Independence. However the strength and cohesion of the Scottish kingdom, as forged under the later Canmore monarchs (though often through ruthless methods), probably helped the country to survive the long and fractious warfare largely intact, as both a state and a nation.

References: 

The Chronicle of Melrose as translated in ‘Early Sources of Scottish History’ by A.O. Anderson. 

‘Chronicon de Lanercost’ ed. Joseph Stevenson (1839)

‘Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland’, by John McGavin

‘The Authorship of the Lanercost Chronicle’, by A.G. Little