A Stubborn Northern People
Civilization rises in the warm, fertile lands of the south; the hardy, stubborn peoples of the cold north repeatedly overcome the soft, careless people of the south and absorb and transform their civilization. The people of the northernmost regions of the world, Scotland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, by struggling with polar conditions, accept civilization and, in spite of a thousand natural obstacles, spread and extend it.
Scotland's barren, forbidding mountains fostered feudalism and drove civilization out, while its fertile, green lowlands were always exposed to English raiders, who could not understand why the Scots would not let them in or obey their kings. The Scots were originally of Celtic stock, mixed in the Middle Ages with Irish, Norse, Angles, Saxons and Normans. The Scots of about 1500, like their narrow peninsula, held narrow feelings and opinions; like the misty air of their country they were superstitious and fond of legend; like the heights of their homeland they were proud and self-regarding; like the land in which they lived they were rough and stubborn; like its rushing torrents they were hot and reckless; both hard and kind, both cruel and brave, and always unbeaten. Life in a barren and stony land had made them poor, and their customs grew from poverty. The stubborn soil had made them thrifty and close-fisted. Peasants, forced to wrestle with unplowed land, had no leisure to learn to read, and the nobles, who had reduced the peasants to bondage, boasted of their own illiteracy, since they needed no letters in feuds and family wars. The people, scattered by mountains and the clan system, felt envy and enmity toward one another; they were ruthless in war and unsteady in peace. The nobles, who had gathered the country's military force in their private armies, dominated king and Parliament. The Douglas family alone had five thousand men in its service, and its income matched the king's.
Before 1500, Scotland's industry was at a primitive, household stage, its trade lacked prosperity and stability, and its towns were few and thinly peopled. The population of all Scotland did not exceed 600,000, half that of present-day Glasgow. Glasgow was a minor fishing port, and Perth was the capital until 1452. Edinburgh had 16,000 inhabitants. The Scots' love of independence showed itself in feudal organizations or in absolute rural or urban rule. The townsmen, who took part in elections, sent representatives to Parliament, the "Estates"; but instead of meeting in a commons house as in England, these members sat in one place with the feudal landholders, and their votes and opinions counted for little against the nobles, who held the majority. Scotland's kings, unlike the rulers of France, could not build up strength against the nobles by allying with merchants and populous towns, and so had to lean on the power and influence of the Church. The nobles, long opposed to the kings, hated the Church and eyed its property with greed, and so they joined the people in opposing the transfer of the nation's wealth to Rome. Unlike England, where the Reformation began with kings and merchants, in Scotland the nobles started the movement and drew political affairs from under the Church's control.
The Church of Scotland
The Scottish Church, despite the country's poverty, had amassed great wealth through the piety of a people who held their happiness in the next world to depend on it. At the end of the fifteenth century the papal envoy reported to the pope that the Church's income in Scotland equaled all other incomes together. Only townsmen and clergy could read. The Scottish clergy of the sixteenth century were famed for learning, and the universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen were founded and kept up by the Church. After 1487 kings "nominated," in fact appointed, bishops and abbots, and used these offices as rewards for political service and as livings for their illegitimate children. James V assigned the Church revenues of Kelso, Melrose, Holyrood and St. Andrews to three of his bastard sons. The decline of the Scottish clergy in the sixteenth century was partly due to the wealth they pocketed from Church revenues. But the moral decay that overtook the Church in the late Middle Ages had shown itself in the Scottish Church long before kings chose its heads.
Hilaire Belloc, a staunch Catholic, wrote that the corruption of the Church, which in the fifteenth century was glaringly common across Europe, had reached in Scotland a point without parallel. For this reason many people, though firm in their religious beliefs, thought Protestant clergy fitter to lead the Church than Catholic clergy. King James I in 1425 rebuked monks for lewdness and license. In 1455 at Linlithgow a judge of the Church, before appointment, was made to promise not to pawn his church's property or keep a "permanent concubine." Cardinal Beaton had eight illegitimate children (I mention this only in passing). Archbishop John Hamilton repeatedly obtained letters from Parliament attesting the legitimacy of his growing family. Scotland's poets, before the Reformation began, did not hold back from satirizing the clergy; and in 1549 the clergy themselves, in the Catholic provincial council, blamed the decay and corruption of the Scottish Church on "the wickedness of Church officers of every rank." In judging the morals of Scotland's clergy we must not forget that their decay reflected the corruption of the people and, even more, the moral corruption of the kings.
The Kings of Scotland, 1314–1554
The most important factor in Scottish history is fear of England. England's kings, to keep an enemy from attacking their country from behind, tried to annex Scotland. Scotland, to stand against England, allied itself with France, England's old enemy.
The Scots beat the English with bow, arrow and spear at Bannockburn (1314). Robert Bruce, who led that fight, ruled Scotland until his death from leprosy (1329). His son David II, as had long been the custom of Scotland's kings, was crowned on the "Stone of Destiny" (the coronation stone) at Scone. Edward III of England, before entering the Hundred Years' War with France, tried to rid his northern border of any possible danger, and for that purpose beat the Scots at Halidon Hill and set his puppet Edward Balliol on the Scottish throne (1333). David II regained his throne by paying the English a ransom of 100,000 marks. Since David left no heir at his death (1371), his nephew Robert Stewart succeeded him, and so the House of Stewart, which was to pass through many adventures, came to rule Scotland.
Before long the fire of war between England and Scotland flared again. The French landed an army in Scotland and together with the Scots plundered England's border counties and took the city of Durham, killing, the book says, all its inhabitants, women, men, children, nuns, monks and priests. The English fought back, marched into Scotland, burned Perth and Dundee and laid waste Melrose Abbey (1385). Robert III kept up the war with the English, but after they captured his son James he died of grief (1406). The English kept James honorably in prison until the Scots agreed to make a "perpetual peace" with England (1423) and promised not to side again with the French.
James I gained learning in prison and married an English girl. In praise of this "white dove" he wrote, in Scots speech, an allegorical poem (the book calls it "Shahnameh," evidently a slip for The Kingis Quair), which shows a king's astonishing gifts. In many things James excelled his countrymen. As he was a capable and well-meaning ruler, he was also counted among Scotland's finest wrestlers, runners, riders, archers, craftsmen and musicians. He made rules to punish dishonest merchants and careless farmers; founded hospitals; ordered all taverns closed after nine in the evening; set young men who spent their energy at football to practicing the arts of war; and worked to reform Church discipline and monastic life. After he had secured his rule (1424), he resolved to end in Scotland the anarchy and crime and the clashes of nobles with their feudal petty states, and said: "Though God grant me but the life of a dog, I will make safe the keys of the castles throughout Scotland and a fence for the cattle." He meant that he would protect people's houses and herds from thieves. A highland thief stole a pair of oxen from a woman. She swore that unless she went to the king and sought justice she would wear no shoes. The thief said to her, "You lie, and I shall put shoes on your feet," and he cruelly shod her bare feet like a horse's. Even so, she reached the king. By the king's order the thief was arrested, paraded through Perth with a picture of his crime painted on canvas, and finally hanged (I soften the account of the thief's cruelty). James I also fought the troublesome barons, destroyed some of them, confiscated surplus property and raised revenue for the state. He admitted small landholders to Parliament and strengthened the small proprietors and middle class against the nobles and clergy. In 1437 James was killed by a band of nobles.
The sons of nobles whom James I had killed or stripped of property, to prevent power from being concentrated in Scotland, fell on his son James II. When James II was seven, his ministers invited the Earl of Douglas and his young brother as guests to the royal palace and, after a shameful trial, beheaded both (1440). Twelve years later James II himself invited William, Earl of Douglas, to his castle at Stirling, entertained him royally, and, though he had given him a safe-conduct, killed him on a charge of exchanging treasonable letters with England. James II took all England's military posts in Scotland but one, and one day was torn to pieces when one of his own cannon burst. James III paid for his father's lawlessness and, after repeated clashes, was seized and killed by the nobles (1488). James IV married Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister; hence Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, later called herself the lawful heir to the English throne. Even so, when Henry VIII, backed by Spain, Austria, Venice and the pope, attacked France (1511), James IV thought it his duty to help Scotland's old ally. At the battle of Flodden Field James fought the English with mad courage, and after many of his soldiers fled, he too fell (1513).
James V, Beaton and the Regency
James V was then one year old. A struggle for the regency broke out among the country's great men. David Beaton, a capable and bold churchman admired by women, overcame his rivals, rose to Archbishop of St. Andrews and then to cardinal, and brought up the young king as a firm supporter of the Church. In 1538 James married Marie de Lorraine (Mary of Guise), sister of François de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic party in France, which was torn by religious division. The nobles of Scotland, whose opposition to the clergy was growing, watched with interest England's break with the pope, envied England's nobles who seized Church property, and took payments from Henry VIII for breaking their bond and alliance with France. When James V declared war on England, the nobles refused to support him. After his defeat at Solway Moss (1542), James fled in shame to Falkland and died there on 14 December. On 8 December his wife had borne a daughter, who six days later became Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
Beaton produced a will by which the dead king had named him regent for the infant Mary. The nobles of Scotland, doubting the will's authenticity, arrested Beaton and made James Stewart, Earl of Arran, regent. But Arran freed Cardinal Beaton from prison and made him his chancellor. After Beaton renewed the alliance with France, Henry VIII resolved to make ruthless war on Scotland and ordered the English forces stationed in the north to burn and destroy everything in their path, "to spare neither men, women nor children wherever they met resistance," and especially in Beaton's diocese of St. Andrews "to leave no one alive." The English soldiers, as ordered, "razed the abbeys and farmhouses, forts and villages;" sacked and burned Edinburgh in two days; destroyed all the villages within ten kilometers of the city; and carried off to England 10,000 cattle, 12,000 sheep and 1,300 horses (1544). Sir James Kirkcaldy, Norman Leslie and a number of other Scottish lords promised to cooperate with the English "in burning places belonging to the extremist party of the Church, arresting prominent opponents of union with England, and killing the cardinal himself." Henry accepted their offer and gave them a thousand pounds. Their plan lay idle for a while until, on the night of 29 May 1546, Kirkcaldy, Leslie and a number of nobles with a band of assassins burst into the cardinal's castle and killed him. According to Knox, the cardinal that night was with his mistress. Knox adds that because the weather was hot, the body was salted so that it would not decay before the cardinal's bishop friends buried him (I leave out Knox's details). The cardinal's killers went back to the castle of St. Andrews, by the sea, to receive English help by sea.
The Earl of Arran again took the regency. To win France's help, he promised Francis I that Mary Stuart, the young Queen of Scots, would be given to his eldest son; and so that she would not fall into English hands, he sent her secretly to France (13 August 1548). Mary Tudor's accession removed for a time the danger of English attack on Scotland, since Scotland and England were now both Catholic.
French influence led the Earl of Arran to resign the regency in favor of Mary of Guise, mother of the absent queen (1554). The new regent was an intelligent, patient and brave woman. Brought up in the French Renaissance, she smiled at the rivalry of dogmatic religious ideas. She freed a number of Protestants who were in prison and gave heretics such freedom that many English Protestants fled Mary Tudor's tyranny to Scotland and set up their own congregations there. She was without doubt the most humane ruler Scotland had seen in several centuries of its history.