Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/367

 and was associated with him in the foundation of Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. He also left a son, who succeeded him as Sir William Douglas of Nithsdale, but who disappears from record after 1408, while his sister lived at least thirty years later.

[Ferdun à Goodall; Wyntoun's Cronykil; Exchequer Rolls of Scotland; Hume of Godscroft's Houses of Douglas and Angus; Fraser's Douglas Book.] 

DOUGLAS, WILLIAM, second (1398?–1437), was the elder son of George, first earl [q. v.], and Mary Stuart, daughter of Robert III, and succeeded to the earldom on his father's death of the plague in England, where he had remained as a prisoner after his capture at Homildon in 1402. The exact date of his accession to the earldom has not been ascertained. In 1410 he was betrothed to his future wife, Margaret, daughter of Sir W. Hay of Yester, but the marriage does not seem to have taken place till 1425, when a dispensation was obtained from the pope. He was named as one of the hostages to the English king when James I was allowed to return from his captivity in 1424, but he does not appear in the final list, and when James came to Durham he met and accompanied him to Scotland, and received the honour of knighthood. He is said to have been one of the nobles arrested along with Albany and his sons in 1425, but if so he was at once released, for he sat on the assize at Albany's trial. He took part in the king's highland expedition, and had Alexander, the Lord of the Isles, committed to his custody at Tantallon in 1429. In 1430 he was sent on an embassy to England, and three years after he was appointed warden of the middle marches.

When Henry Percy threatened to invade Scotland in 1435, Angus was sent to oppose him, and defeated an English force under Sir Robert Ogle at Piperden on 30 Sept. He died in 1437, leaving a son, James, third earl of Angus, who held the title till 1452, when he died and was succeeded by his uncle, George, fourth earl of Angus and Lord of Douglas [q. v.] He had married Joanna, a daughter of James I, but they had no children, and on his death she married James, earl of Morton. The only event recorded of this earl is the submission to him of Robert Fleming of Cumbernauld, a follower of the Earls of Douglas, who had burnt the corn on his lands of North Berwick, and in order to avoid retaliation entered into a bond for two thousand merks to surrender himself at Tantallon or the Hermitage on eight days' warning. In this bond, dated 24 Sept. 1444, the third earl is designated Earl of Angus, lord of Liddesdale and Jedward Forest. The occasion of its being granted is a sign, as Hume of Godscroft notes, that there was already rivalry between the Earls of Angus and their kinsmen, the Earls of Douglas.

[Fordun's Chronicle; the family histories of Hume of Godscroft and Sir W. Fraser.] 

DOUGLAS, WILLIAM, sixth and third  (1423?–1440), was eldest son of Archibald, fifth earl [q. v.], and Euphemia Graham, daughter of Sir Patrick Graham and Euphemia, countess of Strathearn, the granddaughter of Robert II. If his father's marriage took place, as is most probable, in 1424, he can only have been a youth in his sixteenth year when he succeeded his father on 26 June 1439, but the ‘Short Chronicle of the Reign of James II’ calls him eighteen years of age when he was put to death at Edinburgh in 1440. His execution with its tragic circumstances is all that has been recorded of his short life, but historians, forced to seek some explanation for it, have amplified the narrative in a manner which may have some foundation, but is not consistent with his extreme youth. He is said to have held courts of his vassals, almost parliaments, at which he imitated royalty and even dubbed knights. A claim to the crown itself, through the descent of the Douglases from the sister of the Red Comyn, a daughter of Baliol's sister, who married Archibald, the brother of the ‘Good’ Sir James [q. v.], and the alleged illegitimacy of Robert III and the other descendants of the second marriage of Robert II with Elizabeth More, is suggested as the cause of this ostentation. But the actual possessions and power of the Douglas family seem sufficient to account for the jealousy of its youthful head entertained by the new and ambitious candidates for the rule of the kingdom, Sir William Crichton, governor of Edinburgh, and Sir Alexander Livingstone, governor of Stirling Castle, in whose hands James II, then only a boy of six, was a mere puppet. In his name an invitation is said to have been sent to the earl and his brother David to visit the king in Edinburgh in November 1440. They came, and were entertained at the royal table, from which they were treacherously hurried to their doom, which took place by beheading in the castle yard of Edinburgh on 24 Nov. Three days after Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, their chief adherent, shared the same fate. The bull's head served at the royal banquet, first mentioned by Boece and Pitscottie, and the