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Supping with the king John
Cramsie explains the death of the 8th earl of Douglas
Law, Lordship and Tenure: The Fall of the Black Douglases
Alan R. Borthwick & Hector L. MacQueen
The Strathmartine Press, (St Andrews, 2022)
pp.290, illustrated
Paperback, £15
ISBN: 9780995544123
Stirling Castle, 22 February 1452, early evening. James II, at 21 fortifying his hold on the reins of government, met and supped withWilliam, 8th earl of Douglas, a man possessed of unassailable noble standing. Abruptly, the king seized a knife and stabbed Douglas in the collarbone. Patrick Gray split open Douglas’s skull with a pole axe, splattering his brains across the floor.Then the courtiers attacked. Douglas’s body received 26 wounds in total. A dangerous political rival was dispatched by ruthless murder.
James II ascended the throne after the assassination of his father, James I, in 1437.The Douglas earls were in the thick of politics during the king’s minority.The 5th earl acted as regent and lieutenant-general until he succumbed to the plague in 1439. His young heirWilliam was executed for treason in 1440.William’s uncle, the 7th earl, was happy to profit from judicial murder until his own death (of natural causes) in 1443.William, the 8th earl, then made the family’s political running. Only a fool would take their eye off the Douglases. James II, even at 21, was no fool.
But was Douglas’s murder a case of savage yet calculated political violence? Alan Borthwick and Hector MacQueen re-examine this sensational murder from the perspective of the ‘new political history’ that has enriched medieval and early modern British history for three decades. Political history is not a traditional story of rational, goal-seeking actors – even murdering your enemies if it is the logical thing to do. Rather, it is a dynamic amalgam of political action and political culture (ideas and mentalities in conjunction with formal and informal rules). Politics occurs in many venues, institutional and social: parliament and law courts, royal court and noble households, rural communities and burghs, sites of cultural production and consumption such as pageants, theatre and art.
Scottish law contributed to politics a complex set of such rules and
