A Highland tragedy

 A Highland tragedy

As Wales was paying England's price for Glyndwr's rebellion, Scotland was seeking a different route to peaceful coexistence.
The death in 1371 of David II, the last of the Bruces, left the country under the Stewarts in the mildest of homage to the English crown. When the third Stewart, the twelve-year-old James I (r.1406-37), finally took the Scottish throne in 1424 it was after eighteen years as a hostage in the royal court in London, much as David had been. He was determined to modernise his new domain. But he began with a brutally medieval gesture. He executed his former regent, Duke Murdoch of the Stewart dynasty, as well as Murdoch's two sons and any potential rival on whom he could lay his hands.

James's next priority was to bring unity to a country long divided between the Lowlands and a northern hinterland in which clan rivalries and local wars were still embedded. Here the MacDonalds, the Macleods and the Mackenzies, the 'Spar-tans of the north', ruled the deep lochs and islands of the west Highlands. The Mackays and the Gordons controlled much of the north-east. A chronicler wrote, 'There was no law in Scotland but the great man oppressed the poor man, and the whole country was a den of thieves...justice was sent into banishment.'

Such anarchy was not confined to the Highlands. The border country, the territory of the Armstrongs and Douglases, had long been a no-man's land of scrub and moor. This was inhabited by bandit families known as 'reivers... broken men, clanless loons'. As a defence against smuggling they were informally licensed by both English and Scottish authorities in the sixteenth century to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock ... without any redress to be made for the same'.

All building was banned over a stretch of fifty square miles of the Solway Firth known as the Debatable Land.
In his history of Scotland Fitzroy Maclean argued that the Highland clans were in no sense part of any Scottish nation.
They saw 'kings or parliaments or officers of state from the south... only as potential allies or enemies in their own personal struggles for power'. These struggles regularly turned to civil war. In III at Harlaw, 10,000 Highlanders took to the battlefield as MacDonalds fought Mackays allied to Stewarts.

This was followed by a failed attempt to sack Aberdeen. Later, in 1480, at the Battle of Bloody Bay off Mull, Angus Og set Macleans against each other as well as against MacDonalds and Macleods. The orgy of killing ended only when a harpist laid down his instrument and slit Og's throat. Conflicts even went international. In 1388 the Douglases fought the English Percys across the border at the Battle of Otterburn (or Chevy Chase), leaving 1,800 English dead.

Whatever James had learned in London, it was not diplomacy. He summoned the feuding Highland chiefs to a parliament, arrested forty of them and either executed them or stripped them of office. In retaliation, the survivors marched on Inverness and burned it to the ground. In 1437 James suffered a taste of his own medicine. Three clansmen whom he had offended decided to hack him to pieces in front of his wife. She had them tortured to death. The next king, James II (r.1437-60), was barely an improvement. Learning of a Douglas vendetta against him, he invited the chief of Clan Douglas to meet him under safe conduct and personally stabbed him to death at the dinner table. It was known understandably as the Black Dinner.
Scotland's relations with England remained poor, but they were those of a nuisance neighbour. It failed to pay ransom for aristocratic Scottish hostages, who now crowded London in a novel form of English taxation. Scotland's continued siding with France in the Hundred Years War infuriated the English court, with Scots appearing alongside the French on battlefields against the English. Henry V remarked on his deathbed that the Scots were 'a cursed nation. Wherever I go I find them in my beard.'

Source ~ ‘ Celts’ by Simon Jenkins

Image James I: The Key Will Keep The Lock
James I. Photo: Manuel Harlan