Ill 



ROBERT II. (OF SCOTLAND). 



ROBERT III. (OF SCOTLAND). 



112 



the rights of his first family, he procured, in 1373, another act expressly 

 entailing the crown upon his heirs mule of both families, and after 

 them upon his heirs whatsoever. It is obvious that, whatever might 

 be the force of this parliamentary settlement in securing the crown to 

 Robert's heirs male by the sons of Elizabeth Mure, who were named 

 in it, as soon as such heirs failed, the question would legally arise, who 

 were his heirs whatsoever, or general ? and if the papal legitimisation 

 of the first family should be set aside, then his heir whatsoever would 

 have to be looked for among the descendants of one of his sons or 

 daughters by Euphemia Ross. Now, it BO happened that such was 

 the case on the death of James V., leaving only a daughter, Mary, in 

 1542. At this moment the heir-general of Robert II., on the supposi- 

 tion of his family by Elizabeth Mure being illegitimate, was the Earl 

 of Menteith, the lineal descendant of Euphemia Ross's eldest son, 

 David earl of Strathearn ; and it is a remarkable fact that in the early 

 part of the 17th century the pretensions put forward on this ground 

 by the then Earl of Meinteith, who was justice-general, and president of 

 the Scottish privy council, occasioned no small uneasiness to Charles I., 

 and brought down ruin upon himself. For the latest and also the 

 most learned and acute discussion of this question, the reader is 

 referred to 'Tracts, Legal and Historical, with other Antiquarian 

 Matter, chiefly relative to Scotland,' by John Riddell, Esq., Advocate, 

 8vo, Edinburgh, 1835; dissertation Hi., entitled 'Remarks upon the 

 Law of Legitimation per Subsequens Matrimonium, the Nature of 

 our Antient Canons, and the Question of the Legitimacy of the 

 Stewarts,' pp. 155-211. 



A truce for fourteen years had been concluded with England two 

 years before the death of the late king; and as long as Edward IIL 

 lived, the two countries remained at peace. In 1377 however, imme- 

 diately after the accession of Richard II., a war arose out of what 

 appears to have been at first a private quarrel between the English 

 garrison at Roxburgh and the Earl of March. Hostilities continued, 

 with a few short interruptions, till November 1380, when a truce for 

 twelve months was arranged, which was afterwards extended to the 

 summer of 1383. In 1384 however, the war broke out again with 

 more violence than ever, the Scots being now assisted by a body of 

 French auxiliaries, who arrived in May 1385, under the command of 

 Jean de Vienne, admiral of France. In the summer of that year, 

 while the young English king led his army in person into the north, 

 laying waste the country and burning every town and village he came 

 to in his progress [RICHARD II.], a force of Scots and French, entering 

 England by the western marches, ravaged Cumberland and laid siege 

 to Carlisle, but withdrew when the enemy returned southwards, with- 

 out having effected an entry into that town. Soon after this, the 

 French, who had found the Scots and everything in Scotland very 

 little to their mind, and had also made themselves greatly disliked 

 by the people they came to assist, returned home, though not till they 

 had agreed to pay the expense of their maintenance, and had been 

 forced to leave their leader Vienne as a hostage for the performance 

 of that engagement a conclusion of the business which has drawn 

 much obloquy upon the Scots, though there is little doubt that the 

 real object of the French in this expedition was certainly much more 

 to annoy the English than to benefit the Scots. A truce for another 

 year followed the departure of the foreigners ; but the fighting was 

 renewed in 1387. That year the town of Carlingford in Ireland was 

 plundered and burned by a force under the command of William 

 Douglas, recently created Lord Nithsdale, and married to one of the 

 king's daughters; and in 1388 the famous battle of Otterbourne, or 

 Chevy Chace, was gamed from the Percies, though at the expense of 

 his own life, by the Earl of Douglas. [RICHARD II.] By this time 

 however the reins of government had nearly dropped from the hands 

 of king Robert. Froissart tells us that, being unfitted by his years 

 and broken health for going out any more to war, he was no longer 

 consulted in public affairs by the nobles, by whom and also by the 

 nation in general the king's second surviving son, Robert, Earl of 

 Fife (afterwards Duke of Albany), was now looked upon as the true 

 ruler of the country. In 1389 the Earl of Fife was formally recog- 

 nised as governor of the kingdom by an assembly of the estates held 

 at Edinburgh. After this the old king appears to have lived almost 

 entirely on his ancestral estate in Ayrshire, where indeed he had been 

 much in the habit of secluding himself for some years previous. It 

 was probably now, in his old age, that his originally engaging per- 

 sonal appearance was deformed by the breaking out of an inflammation 

 in his eyelids, from which he derived his popular designation of 

 Blear-eye. The fable about his birth makes him to have been wounded 

 in one of his eyes by the surgeon who cut him from his mother's 

 side. 



The war with England was prosecuted by the regent for some 

 mouths with considerable vigour ; but before any action of import- 

 ance had taken place, hostilities were terminated for the present, in 

 June 1389, by a truce concluded between France and England for 

 three years, in which the Allies of both powers were comprehended. 

 The country was therefore at peace when Robert II. died, after a short 

 illness, at his castle of Dundonald in Kyle, on the 19th of April, 1390. 



Besides his six SODS and ten daughters by his two wives, this first 

 of the royal Stewarts had a numerous illegitimate progeny by various 

 other women. His six lawfully begotten daughters married into the 

 families of the Earl of March, Lyon of Glamis (now earls of Strath- 



more), Hay of Errol (now earls of Errol and earls of Kinnoul), Mac- 

 donald of the Isles, Douglas of Nithsdale, Lindsay of Glenesk, the 

 Earl of Douglas, Keith earl Marischal, Logan, and Swinton. From 

 six of his illegitimate sons the Stuarts of Bute, Cairney, and other 

 families of that name deduce their descent. Robert II. was succeeded 

 by his eldest son Robert III. 



ROBERT III., King of Scotland, the eldest son of Robert II., relin- 

 quished his original name of John on succeeding to the crown, on 

 account, it is said, of a popular superstition of his countrymen which 

 regarded that name as unlucky or ominous. But if so, it is rather 

 strange that the heir apparent should have ever been so christened. 

 He was known throughout the preceding reign by the title of the Earl 

 of Carrick, a dignity which had been bestowed upon him by King 

 David II. Before acquiring that dignity he appears to have been 

 designated the Lord of Kyle. He was probably born before the year 

 1340, so that he was past fifty when he came to the throne, on the 

 death of his father, in 1390. It is known that he had been married 

 at least since the year 1357, to Annabella Drummoud, a daughter of 

 Sir John Drummond of Stobhall. He had -been lamed in his youth 

 by a kick from a horse; and this accident, combined with his mild and 

 pacific disposition, of which perhaps it was in part the cause, made 

 him be regarded, both before he became king and afterwards, with 

 feelings of something very like contempt by the generality of hia 

 countrymen. 



The coronation of Robert III. took place at Scone on the 14th of 

 August 1390. No events of any note mark the first eight or nine years 

 of the reign, during the whole of which the king's brother, the Earl of 

 Fife (who was in 1398 created Duke of Albany), continued to retain 

 the management of public affairs, aud even, according to some autho- 

 rities, the title of governor or regent. [ROBERT II.] The truce which 

 had been made with England in 1389, was kept up by various con- 

 tinuations throughout the reign of the English king Richard II. But 

 war broke out again on the accession of Henry IV., in 1399 ; France, 

 as usual, exciting the Scots to harass England by predatory expedi- 

 tions across the borders, which could only end in drawing down signal 

 vengeance on themselves. In August of the following year, accordingly, 

 Henry entered Scotland at the head of a powerful army, and advanced 

 as far as Edinburgh, which was however successfully defended by the 

 king's eldest son, the Duke of Rothsay ; and Henry returned home 

 after having received the submission of various towns and villages 

 through which he passed, but without having given the country 

 cause to remember his visit further than by this mere demonstration 

 of his power. In the following year however Henry Percy (Hotspur) 

 made a more destructive inroad as far as to Preston in East Lothian. 

 On this occasion Percy was joined by the Scottish Earl of March, who 

 had recently thrown up his allegiance and gone over to the English 

 king, in a fury of revenge provoked by the ill usage he held himself to 

 have received from the Duke of Rothsay, who, after having been 

 affianced to his daughter, had married a daughter of the Earl of 

 Douglas. The following year, 1402, is memorable for the tragical 

 catastrophe of Rothsay, who, at the instigation of his uncle Albany, 

 the friend of March, was, on the pretence of restraining or punishing 

 his dissoluteness, seized under an order professing to be signed by his 

 father, and confined first in the castle of St. Andrews, and then in 

 that of Falkland, where he is believed to have been left to perish of 

 famine. He was only in his twenty-fourth year when he thus fell a 

 victim, in all probability, to the dark ambition of his kinsman. A 

 few weeks after the prince's death, a pardon or remission in very 

 ample terms for any concern he might have had in this affair was 

 granted by the king to Albany ; and has been published by Lord Hailes 

 in chapter vi. of his ' Remarks on the History of Scotland,' Edinburgh, 

 1772. In this remarkable paper it is stated that Albany admitted the 

 capture and arrest of the prince, but justified what he had done by 

 reasons which the king did not then hold it expedient to publish to 

 the world. No express denial of the fact of the murder is ventured 

 upon ; it is merely recited that the prince departed this life in his 

 prison at Falkland, through divine providence, and not otherwise 

 " ubi ab hac luce, divina providentia, et non aliter, migrasse dignoscitur." 

 " The reader," observes Hailes, " will determine as to the import of 

 this phrase. If by it a natural death was intended, the circumlocution 

 seems strange and affected." It ought to be added that Archibald, 

 the young earl of Douglas, the brother-in-law of Rothsay, who had acted 

 throughout the affair along with Albany, was equally charged by the 

 voice of common fame with the murder, and was included iu the same 

 acquittal or indemnity. It is conjectured that Rothsay had made the 

 proud baron his enemy by his infidelity to or neglect of his sister. 



This same year, on the 22nd of June, the Scots, commanded by 

 Patrick Hepburn of Hales, were defeated with great loss, at West 

 Nisbet in the Merse, by the English under the conduct of the Earl of 

 Northumberland and the Earl of March ; and on the 14th of September 

 following the Earl of Douglas received a still more disastrous discom- 

 fiture from the Lord Henry Percy at Homildon Hill in Northumberland. 

 When immediately after this the Percies rose in rebellion, the Duke 

 of Albany put himself at the head of a numerous force, and set out 

 for the south with the design of taking advantage of the embarrassing 

 circumstances of the English king ; but the news of Henry's victory 

 at Shrewsbury turned him back before he had got across the border. 

 In the course of the two following years several attempts were made 



