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(b) - Scotland: 1406–1513

from 22 - The Celtic world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Jenny Wormald
Edited by
Christopher Allmand
Christopher Allmand
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

fifteenth-century Scotland was a very violent society It was also a very fragmented one. Neither of these things make it particularly unusual. External threats and internal rivalries bedevilled fifteenth-century European monarchs, papal and secular; and the Scottish Highland–Lowland divide, much exaggerated in any case by the rival schools of tartan romanticists and searchers for excessive disorder, did not notably differentiate Scotland from the France of the independent lordships and great appanages or the Empire of multifarious German principalities. Nevertheless, a period which begins in 1406 with the death of a lamentable king, Robert III, and ends in 1513 with the death of one of the most outstandingly successful ones, the ‘glore of princelie governyng’, James IV, does mark Scotland out. For the end of every reign, whether it had been a failure or a success, produced the same outcome: another collapse of royal authority, another dismal decline into faction-ridden minority. Whether at the hands of their subjects, a faulty cannon or the English, the early deaths of the Stewart kings, their consistent inability to survive to see their sons grow up, created a problem which could not be put down to the instability caused by competing claimants – from rival popes to rival kings for the thrones of France, England or Castile – or by power-hungry princes and magnates. It marked a visible and enduring flaw in the senior line of the royal house of Stewart itself.

Keywords

fifteenth-century ScotlandnationhoodEuropean kingdomScottish political societyscottish societypapacy
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge Medieval History , pp. 514 - 531
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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