James III

James III (1452–88), king of Scots (1460–88). Perhaps because he inherited fewer problems than his two immediate predecessors, James III presented to the world a different face of Stewart kingship. There can be little doubt that he had a dangerously exalted view of his kingly role, an attitude which was reflected in his adoption of concepts of imperialism in the first Parliament of his personal rule (1469), and in the minting of the earliest Renaissance coin portrait outside Italy, showing James III wearing an imperial crown, in the very last silver coinage of the reign (1488).

The eldest of the three sons of James II and Mary of Gueldres, James was born at St Andrews late in May 1452. His father's death at the siege of Roxburgh (August 1460) was swiftly followed by the coronation of the 8-year-old James III at nearby Kelso abbey. The ensuing minority (1460–9) had its difficulties, but under the wise guidance of Mary of Gueldres (d. 1463) the Scots secured the cession of Berwick from the refugee Lancastrians (1461), and then swiftly changed horses to back the victorious Yorkists. The late king's marital and territorial schemes finally came to fruition in the 1468 treaty of Copenhagen, by which James III was to marry Margaret, daughter of Christian I of Denmark-Norway. Christian's inability to afford his daughter's dowry resulted in his pawning the earldom of Orkney and the lordship of Shetland; both were annexed to the Scottish crown by 1472. Thus, by the early years of James III's personal rule, the Scottish kingdom had reached its widest territorial extent.

The view of James III which has come down to us is largely that of late 16th-cent. writers. These portray the king as a recluse who ignored or despised the counsel of his nobility in favour of that of low-born familiars; he disliked war (to prove the point, the chronicler Pitscottie has him fall off his horse at the fatal battle of Sauchie Burn); and he was a committed patron of the arts.

This legend is broadly unconvincing. The unwarlike king is difficult to discern in a ruler who proposed annexations or invasions of Brittany, Gueldres, and Saintonge between 1471 and 1473, and this view may derive only from James's alternative policy of peace and alliance with Yorkist England, which he pursued obsessively—excepting one disastrous interlude (1480–2)—from 1474 to the end of the reign. Again, complaints of neglect of his magnates may reflect James's failure to reward support, as in the classic case of the earl of Huntly in 1476, whose invasion of Ross and capture of Dingwall castle for the king merited only a gift of 100 marks' worth of land. This breathtaking royal meanness no doubt weighed heavily with Huntly twelve years later, when his role as a committed neutral may have cost James III his life.

The king's patronage of the arts—excepting the Trinity College, Edinburgh altarpiece, which he may or may not have commissioned—is rather elusive, as is the contribution of his English musician familiar William Roger; and although James III's most exotic friend, Anselm Adornes of Bruges, spread the king's name and fame as far afield as Tunis, James as a Scottish Renaissance patron remains an enigmatic figure. Perhaps significantly, his most despised familiars, William Scheves, archbishop of St Andrews, and Thomas Cochrane, were respectively a powerful court ‘fixer’ and a royal troubleshooter in the north-east. And the elusive royal whore ‘Daesie’ is surely the figment of a later imagination.

In fact, James III's failure may be explained without reference to the later legend. He was a static king, rarely moving out of Edinburgh during his adulthood, and thereby neglecting to travel on justice ayres, visiting far-flung areas of the country to settle feuds and make the royal presence felt. Successive parliaments criticized him repeatedly for this failing, as they did also for his attempts to tax and granting of remissions for serious crimes. Furthermore, James may have been unfortunate to have adult brothers as potential rivals, though his treatment of them was appalling. Alexander, duke of Albany, fled to France in 1479—and significantly an assize of Parliament would not forfeit him—while John, earl of Mar, was arrested later that year and died mysteriously in custody shortly afterwards. The return of Albany in 1482, backed by an English army sent by Edward IV, prompted a great Stewart family crisis, with the seizure of James III at Lauder, the permanent loss of Berwick to the English, Albany's temporary acquisition of the office of lieutenant-general, the king's incarceration in Edinburgh castle, and his subsequent release and recovery of power through the timely intervention of loyal north-eastern nobility.

However, crown–magnate mistrust persisted, and the king's wide-ranging Treasons Act (1484) showed that he had learned nothing from the warning of 1482. When his eldest son James, duke of Rothesay, a youth of 15, moved against him in the spring of 1488, with extensive support from a huge array of disaffected magnates, no armed assistance was forthcoming from the former loyalists of the north; and on 11 June James III, bearing Robert Bruce's sword and a black box full of money and jewels, succumbed to his son's army on the ‘field of Stirling’ (Sauchie Burn).

Norman Macdougall

Bibliography

Donaldson, G. , Scottish Kings (1967);
Macdougall, N. , James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982);
James IV (Edinburgh, 1989);
Nicholson, R. , Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974).