When still in his early teens, the boy was cultivated by some of the leading Scottish nobles, who regarded him as a useful figurehead in their machinations against the king. The future king in turn used these nobles to further his own excessive and premature ambition; and, in 1488, he became involved with what was to prove the most serious and final rebellion of James III’s unhappy reign.
Prince James left Stirling Castle with a small rebel force, mainly from the Borders. The king’s supporters confronted them, and there was a skirmish near Stirling Bridge. There was a second, more serious, engagement at Sauchieburn. King James fled from the fighting – and, some distance away, he was stabbed to death, possibly by a man claiming to be a priest. The Scottish Parliament conducted an inquiry into the king’s death but was only able to conclude, in the blandest of phrases, that the king ‘happened to be slain’. The new king was definitely complicit in his father’s death, if not directly responsible for it. In any event, he was crowned James IV at Scone on 26 June 1488.
James IV is often described as Scotland’s greatest king; cynics might aver that there was not much competition. James IV was seriously, serially ambitious. He was desperate to make his mark, and not just on his own desolate kingdom on the obscure margins of north-west Europe. He wanted to lead the new navy he created – at vast expense – in a grand Christian crusade against the Turks, an idea that was impractical and did not impress those whom he would have needed as allies. (Too often, James was a fantasist, and an impetuous one at that.)
Luckily, Pope Julius II, himself the most warlike of popes, managed eventually to persuade James that his notion of a crusade was wholly inappropriate. Twenty years earlier, Pope Innocent VIII had finally decided that the idea of pushing back Islam by force should be abandoned once and for all. In fact, James was prescient, for the Turks were to become a major menace in Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean; but his timing was awry. Politically, he was ingenuous; his greatest skill was in giving Scotland the confidence which grew from his flamboyant and energetic kingship.
James’s court glittered; he was handsome and amorous, and he fathered many illegitimate children. One of these, his son Alexander, was appointed archbishop of St Andrews in 1504, when the boy was only 11. James did nothing to stem abuse in the Church; rather, he revelled in it. He attended mass frequently; his religion, like so much else about him, was showy. His guilt for his part in his father’s death seems to have been genuine; he wore an iron chain round his waist to show his contrition.
He managed to enhance the international status of Scotland in a way that Henry VII never achieved for England. James was a patron of the arts, an encourager of world-class poets like Blind Harry, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, a great builder of halls and palaces, and the creator of an impressive navy. But this last was typical: the building of splendid naval ships was an enormous extravagance and essentially frivolous, particularly as he was never able to lead his cherished crusade. All the new ships hardly helped James at the Battle of Flodden Field, several miles inland, when he and 10,000 other Scots died in the nation’s most tragic misadventure.
He was a poor judge of men. One of his particular favourites was a charlatan called John Damian, a would-be scientist of doubtful provenance; he might have been French or Italian. Damian seemed for a time to regard himself as Scotland’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci. Among many other claims, Damian persuaded the king that he could transmute base metal into gold – and the gullible James gave Damian considerable funds for his various experiments. The most farcical episode came when Damian, who was nothing if not brave, decided that he had learned how to fly. He took off from the heights of Stirling Castle with artificial wings made from hens’ feathers. He crash-landed in a midden far below and broke his leg. His glib explanation for this debacle was that he had mistakenly used hens’ feathers, which sought the midden, rather than eagles’ feathers, which would have sought the sky.
Despite such preposterous performances, James appointed Damian Abbot of Tongland near Kirkcudbright. This was exactly the kind of appointment which suggested that kings of that time, as well as popes, were mired in Church corruption. After five years at the abbey, Damian had the grace to resign; but, for several years afterwards, he continued to receive a very considerable abbot’s pension.
James IV was very different from his erratic and withdrawn father, James III. He was bold and confident, indubitably regal; he had enormous zest; he travelled the length and breadth of his wild and mountainous kingdom; and he dispensed justice, sometimes harshly. In his rather flashy way, he was far-sighted. He had artistic aspirations, and he understood the importance of education. In 1496, he persuaded his Parliament to pass Scotland’s first obligatory education act, by which all barons and freeholders were required to send their eldest sons to grammar school until they had a reasonable grounding in subjects such as Latin, art and law. He sent two of his own illegitimate sons to study under the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was open to new ideas; though he paid too much attention to a plausible buffoon like Damian, he also could see the significance of a world-class intellectual like Erasmus.
And yet, like so many important and powerful men in the years immediately before the convulsion of the Reformation, he did not seem to be concerned from any point of view – even that of naked self-interest – about the grotesque corruption and rottenness of the Church. Rather, he connived in this corruption and rottenness. He could do so with impunity. Anticlerical dissent, protest and heresy, if not completely unknown during James’s reign, certainly did not loom large. In 1494, the Archbishop of Glasgow arranged for a group of lairds to appear before the king and his great council. They were charged with holding heretical opinions. But, although they refused to recant, the matter was not regarded as serious and they were simply dismissed, their freedom intact.
Henry VII of England, always a great believer in dynastic marriages, had arranged for his first son Arthur to marry Catherine of Aragon in 1501, when both were only 15. Arthur died just four months later, and the question of whether the marriage had been consummated was later to play a key part in the English Reformation. Henry’s wife Elizabeth died in the same year soon afterwards, and for a time Henry flirted with the idea of marrying Catherine himself. But he was persuaded that, in the long term, it would be better for Arthur’s younger brother to do so. Young Henry, always assertive and wilful, disliked the idea, and it was not until after his father died, in 1509, that Henry – now King Henry VIII – married Catherine. Henry VIII was in time to become a key – possibly the key – figure in the English Reformation.
James established a Renaissance court that was admired well beyond Scotland; well and good. He also sought to cut a dash in the chancy theatre of European power politics; not so good. In truth, he was out of his depth. His notion of leading a new crusade was unrealistic. But his major misjudgement came because, despite his marriage into the royal house of Tudor, James IV never really lost his atavistic taste for the Auld Alliance with France.
Around 1510 and 1511, France was emerging as the most powerful state in Europe. Pope Julius II, the warrior pope, had disdained James IV’s idea of a new crusade; but now he showed his warlike side by forming a Holy League, including Spain, Venice and England. In May 1513, Henry VIII invaded France, where he soon won a victory, the so-called Battle of the Spurs. King Louis of France asked James to help him by giving the English trouble on their northern front. He sent money, arms and some of his best soldiers to Scotland. James could not resist. Despite warnings from the pope, he felt an obligation to Louis; and he probably also felt the need to show that he was as big and important a king as his brother-in-law, Henry VIII.
Louis sent money and materials to Scotland; his queen sent James a beautiful ring, telling him to take just a pace into English ground. Was this a subtle hint that James should not do more than create a minor diversion on the Border? If so, it was ignored. Henry was of course engaged with his army in France; but he was sensible enough to have maintained an army in the north. Furthermore, its commander was the Earl of Surrey, a wily military veteran who had fought his first battle before James was born. Surrey had a keener