Charming, cold and unreliable

When you consider what a bloody mess the Houses of Lancaster and York made of the business, it is easy to see why, since the death of Edward the Confessor, the English have preferred to be ruled by foreigners. Normans, Angevins, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians, anything to avoid having their own kind in charge. Arguably that great Welsh king, Henry VIII, was the last monarch to have personally directed the affairs of the nation, but Allan Massie has set out to show that Henry’s Scots successors, reigning over the larger realm of Britain, had a more pervasive influence.

Descended from the high stewards of Scotland, the first Stewart (it was Mary Queen of Scots who Frenchified the spelling) to take the throne was Robert II, a grandson of Robert the Bruce, in 1371. What happens next reads like two centuries of The Sopranos. Barely a friendship that doesn’t run to hatred, a hatred that doesn’t come to murder, a murder that doesn’t breed a vendetta. Here, for example, is James II whacking William, eighth earl of Douglas, head of a league of rebel lords, who has been summoned to Stirling Castle in 1452 with a royal safeconduct guaranteeing that no harm will come to him:

The King urged him more imperiously [to give up his opposition], and the Earl returned a haughty and positive refusal, upbraiding the King, at the same time, with maladministration. Then the King burst into a rage at his obstinacy and exclaimed, ‘By Heaven my lord, if you will not break the league, this shall.’ So saying, he stabbed the Earl with his dagger, first in the throat and instantly after in the lower part of the body.

After which the king’s heavies move in with axes and knives to finish off the earl, a fate not unlike those suffered by the sixth earl, and a score of other lesser Douglases.