Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/31

 tantalising correspondence, of which two letters only have been preserved from her to Richard II. They relate to a proposed marriage between a relation of Richard and one of the royal children of Scotland, whether a son or daughter is uncertain. In the first, dated 28 May, while expressing her desire for the alliance, she says the time for the conference proposed by Richard is too soon, as the king is in a distant part of Scotland, and requests Richard, if the king has appointed a more convenient time, to send some of his councillors to make a good conclusion of the matter. In the second, of 1 Aug., she mentions that she has just borne an infant son, James by name, and that the king, then in the Isles, had named 1 Oct. for the conference. The infant James cannot have been the member of the royal family intended, so it must have been either his elder brother David or one of his sisters, or perhaps another brother Robert, called the steward, who died young, and is only known from entries in the Exchequer Records (1392, iii. 390, 400). Nothing, however, came of the proposed marriage. In a council at Scone in January 1398 David, the heir-apparent, was created Duke of Rothesay, and his uncle, the Earl of Fife, Duke of Albany. The king's ill-health still continuing, Rothesay, now in his twentieth year, was appointed governor of the realm for three years, but with the advice of a council of which the Duke of Albany was principal member. At the same council Queen Annabella complained of the failure to pay her annuity, and letters were directed to the customars of the burghs, and also to the chamberlain, ordering its payment without delay in future. Albany had since 1382 held that office, which gave him the control of the royal revenues.

In the same year as the council of Scone the queen held a great tournament in Edinburgh, in which twelve knights, of whom the chief was her son David, duke of Rothesay, took part. The marriage of Rothesay two years later to Elizabeth Douglas, daughter of Archibald the Grim, earl of Douglas, although he had been before promised to Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of March, led to the revolt of that nobleman and an invasion of Scotland by Henry IV, who in 1399 had dethroned Richard II. Henry advanced as far as Edinburgh, where he besieged the castle, but declining a personal combat offered by Rothesay, and unable to take the castle, he returned home. Albany, it is probable, had supported the Earl of March, while the queen and council favoured the alliance of the heir to the kingdom with the Earl of Douglas. The deaths within one year (1401–2) of the queen, the Earl of Douglas, and Irail, the good bishop of St. Andrews, were a fatal blow to the endeavour to restrain the ascendency of Albany. It became a proverb, says Bower, that then the glory of Scotland fled, its honour retreated, and its honesty departed. Not many months after the queen's death Rothesay was deposed from his office of regent and found first a prison at Falkland, and then an early and obscure tomb at Lindores.

Though doubts have been raised, the suspicion that Albany was his murderer is confirmed by the course of events. At a council in Edinburgh on 16 May 1402 a declaration of the innocence of Albany and the Earl of Douglas in the arrest and death of Rothesay suggests, like a similar remission to Bothwell, the probability of their guilt. In 1403 Sir Malcolm Drummond, brother of the queen, was murdered by Alexander, a natural son of the Wolf of Badenoch.

James, now heir-apparent, was despatched by his father to the court of France, but captured by a vessel of Henry IV in February, and the aged and infirm monarch himself died on 4 April 1406. The whole power of the kingdom was henceforth absorbed by Albany as regent. While other points are doubtful in this period of Scottish history, the character of Annabella Drummond has been praised by all historians. Wyntoun pronounces on her this panegyric: Dame Annabill. qwene off Scotland Faire, honorabil, and plesand, Cunnand, curtays in hir efferis, Luvand, and large to strangeris. She died at Scone in 1402, and was buried at Dunfermline. A small house at Inverkeithing of two stories, both vaulted, is still pointed out by tradition as her residence. When the present writer visited it, it was a lodging-house for navvies, and as Dunfermline was so near it can only have been occasionally, if ever, occupied by the queen, perhaps for bathing.

Besides James, afterwards king, the Duke of Rothesay, and Robert, who died young, the offspring of her marriage were four daughters—Margaret, who married Archibald Tyneman, fourth earl of Douglas, and duke of Touraine in France; Mary, who had four husbands: first in 1397, George Douglas, earl of Angus, second, 1409, Sir James Kennedy of Dunmore, third, William, lord of Graham, and in 1425 Sir William Edmonston of Duntreath; Elizabeth, who married Sir James Douglas of Dalkeith; Egidia, who was not married.

A portrait of Queen Annabella by Jamesin at Taymouth, engraved in Pinkerton's ‘Scottish Gallery,’ vol. ii., who thinks it may have