Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/513

Rh STUARTS TO JAMES IV.] SCOTLAND 491 was even less active than his father. He is briefly but truly described by an historian as a good man but not a good king. He scarcely reigned, for the regency of his brother continued after his accession till it was succeeded for a few years by that of Robert's son, on whose death the earl of Fife again became regent. There was a truce with England for nine years, during which the irrepres- sible love of fighting had to satisfy itself within Scotland. The king's younger brother, Alexander, called the Wolf of Badenoch, who had been created earl of Buchan, quarrelled with the bishop of Elgin and burnt his cathedral. The Wolf and his sons were constantly engaged in private wars. The earl died in 1394, but his son Alexander continued to defy the law, which the Government was too weak to enforce in the northern Highlands. Policy was used to suppress the violence of the clans. Such seems the ex- planation of the combat between thirty of the Clan Kay and as many of the Clan Chattan before the king on the North Inch of Perth, which ended in the slaughter of nearly all the combatants on both sides. In the council or parliament of 1398 a change was made in the Govern- ment due to the general distrust of Fife and the rising spirit of the earl of Carrick, the king's eldest son. The form of it was a compromise. The young prince was made lieutenant for three years, but with the advice of a council, of whom his uncle Fife was one ; they were created dukes of Rothesay and Albany respectively, the first of that title in Scotland. Other acts of this council were designed to restrain the monarchy by constitutional laws. Parliament was to meet annually. The king, if accused of misgovernment or breach of law, might, " to excuse his defaults," arraign his officers before the council. No one was to ride through the country with more followers than he could pay for. The grant of ,11,000 for the common weal and profit of the kingdom by the three estates barons, clergy, and burghs was made under protest that it was not to be a precedent, and the burghs stipulated that in future they were not to pay more than under Robert II. In the following year the revolution took place in England which led to the deposition. and death of Richard II. and the accession of Henry IV. An im- postor who had assumed the name of Richard took refuge in the Hebrides and was received at the Scottish court. The expedition of Henry to Scotland (1400), partly due to this, was also prompted by the desire to distinguish a new reign and by the invitation of the earl of March, indignant at the preference given to the daughter of Douglas over his own as wife for Rothesay. Reviving the old claim of feudal superiority, which was now supported by the forged charters of Hardy ng as well as the fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry cited Robert to do homage at Newcastle, and, on his failing to appear, marched to Edinburgh. Rothesay successfully defended the capital, and Henry was suddenly recalled by the rising of Owen Glendower and the Percies. Next year (1401) occurred the death of Rothesay by starvation at Falkland, where he had been committed by his father at Albany's instance on account of his bad government and dissolute conduct. The declaration of the council at Edinburgh, which acquitted Albany of all concern in the death, was enough for the moment, but in after times, like BothwelPs acquittal, a corroboration of guilt. The last years of Robert were clouded by private and public misfortune. His queen, Annabella Drummond, his son-in-law, the earl of Douglas, and Trail, bishop of St Andrews, one of the wisest of his council, died within a short interval. The son of Douglas, though brave, was unequal to the task of holding the border against the Percies and the earl of March, and so constantly lost battles that he was called Archibald Tyne- man. The Scots were signally defeated at Nisbet Muir (14th September 1402) in Merse and at Homildon Hill 1390-1413. near Wooler by Percy, where the slain and prisoners equalled the number at Otterburn. Nor could order be maintained within Scotland itself, of which the forcible marriage of the countess of Mar by Alexander, a bastard of the Wolf of Badenoch, was an example. Afraid of Albany, and warned by the fate of Rothesay, Robert sent his remaining son James to France (1405) ; but the ship in which he sailed was taken by an English cruiser, and the future king was a prisoner in England for nineteen years. This last blow broke the weak heart of Robert, who died at Dun- donald and was buried at Paisley. Though his reign was inglorious, the tradition of the War of Independence still warmed the heart of the nation and produced the earliest writers in Scottish literature, Barbour, Fordun, and Wyn- toun. The Bruce of Barbour became the national epic. The year after Robert's death the first martyr in Scot- land, James Resby, an English priest, was burnt at Perth by Albany, who is described by Wyntoun as " a constant Catholic." Resby was condemned at the instance of Laur- ence of Lindores, called the Inquisitor of Scotland, for forty theses from the books of Wickliffe. The Lollard doctrines continued to be secretly held by a small sect, chiefly in the west. Knox traces the descent of the first Scottish Re- formers the Lollards of Kyle from Wickliffe and Hus. This religious movement was destined to exercise a pro- found influence on the history of Scotland. The time when the church was a civilizing and purifying power was passing away. Its enormous wealth, a contrast to its early poverty, its developed so different from its primitive doc- trine, celibacy, and the confessional in a la* society, that was no longer moved by the fervour of a new faith, pro- duced a corruption which forced itself on minds of a reforming tendency. Catholicism allowed no place for individual reformers, and their protests, often carried to extremes, were deemed attacks upon the church itself, which became (unwillingly on the part of its best friends) the defender of its worst abuses. From first to last in Scotland the movement was popular, though not at first democratic. It did not at all or only to a slight extent change through political causes as in England. Though he was a captive, the right of James I. (1406-37) James 1. on his father's death was at once acknowledged by a general council held at Perth ; but the appointment of Albany as governor boded ill for his return. He held the office Albany's thirteen years, administering it till his death so as to con- regency, ciliate all classes and pave the way to his own accession to the throne, which would have been his by right had the young king died. The recovery of Jedburgh (1408), long in the hands of the English, gave the regent an easy opportunity of popularity. It was decided by a general council that its walls should be razed and the expense defrayed by a poll tax, but Albany refused to burden the people and paid it out of the royal customs. Next year Albany and Douglas (now released from captivity in Eng- land) entered into a bond of alliance. With the earls of March and Mar and others similar engagements were made ; but Douglas, who had acquired the lands of March, which, however, were now restored, had to be conciliated by a grant of Lochmaben and Annandale, the patrimony of the Bruces. The more independent nobles of the north could not be so easily gained, and Donald, lord of the Isles, disappointed in a claim to the earldom of Ross, in- vaded Aberdeenshire with a great host, whose defeat by the earl of Mar at Harlaw (17th May 1412) the Otter- burn of northern ballads was followed by the capture of Dingwall, his chief castle on the mainland, and his final defeat at Lochgilphead. The first Scottish university St Andrews was founded by bulls granted a year later at the instance of James and