James I of Scotland

James I of Scotland. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

James I
King of Scots
Reign	4 April 1406 - 21 February 1437
Coronation	21 May 1424
Predecessor	Robert III
Successor	James II
Spouse	Joan Beaufort
Issue
Margaret, Dauphine of France; Isabella, Duchess of Brittany; Eleanor, Archduchess of Austria; Mary, Countess of Buchan; Joan, Countess of Morton; Alexander, Duke of Rothesay; James II of Scotland; Annabella, Countess of Huntly
Father	Robert III of Scotland
Mother	Annabella Drummond
Born	probably late July 1394 Dunfermline Palace, Fife
Died	20 or 21 February 1437 Blackfriars, Perth
Burial	Perth Charterhouse

James I, King of Scots (?July 1394 - February 1437; reign 1406-1437) was king of Scotland and a Scottish poet or makar.

Life

Overview

James, the youngest of 3 sons, was born in Dunfermline Abbey to Annabella (Drummond) and King Robert III. By the time he was 8, both of his elder brothers were dead. In 1406 he was sent for safety and education to France, but on the voyage was taken prisoner by an English ship, and conveyed to England, where until 1424 he remained confined in various places, but chiefly in the Tower of London. He was then ransomed and, after his marriage to Lady Jane or Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and the heroine of The King's Quhair (or Book), crowned at Scone. While in England he had been carefully educated, and on his return to his native country endeavored to reduce its turbulent nobility to due subjection, and to introduce various reforms. His efforts, however, which do not appear to have been always marked by prudence, ended disastrously in his assassination in the monastery of the Black Friars, Perth, in February, 1437. James was a man of great natural capacity both intellectual and practical – an ardent student and a poet of no mean order. In addition to The King's Quhair (1 of the finest love poems in existence) and A Ballad of Good Counsel, which are very generally attributed to him, he has been more doubtfully credited with Peeblis to the Play and Christis Kirke on the Greene.

Youth and captivity

James, the son of King Robert III, was born at Dunfermline in July 1394.

After the death of his mother, Annabella Drummond of Stobhall, in 1402, he was placed under the care of Henry Wardlaw (d. 1440), who became bishop of St Andrews in 1403, but soon his father resolved to send him to France. Robert doubtless decided upon this course owing to the fact that in 1402 his elder son, David, duke of Rothesay, had met his death in a mysterious fashion, being probably murdered by his uncle, Robert, duke of Albany, who, as the king was an invalid, was virtually the ruler of Scotland.

On the way to France, however, James fell into the hands of some English sailors and was sent to Henry IV, who refused to admit him to ransom. Chronicler Thomas Walsingham, says that James’s imprisonment began in 1406, while the future king himself places it in 1404; February 1406 is probably the correct date. On the death of Robert III in April 1406 James became nominally king of Scotland, but he remained a captive in England, the government being conducted by his uncle, Robert of Albany, who showed no anxiety to procure his nephew’s release.

Initially James was confined in the Tower of London, but in June 1407 he was moved to the castle at Nottingham, from which about a month later he was taken to Evesham. His education was continued by capable tutors, and he not only attained excellence in all manly sports, but became perhaps more cultured than any other prince of his age.

In person he was short and stout, but well-proportioned and very strong. His agility was not less remarkable than his strength; he excelled in all athletic feats which demanded suppleness of limb and quickness of eye. As regards his intellectual attainments he is reported to have been acquainted with philosophy, and it is evident from his subsequent career that he had studied jurisprudence; moreover, besides being proficient in vocal and instrumental music, he cultivated the art of poetry with much success.

When Henry V. became king in March 1413, James was again imprisoned in the Tower of London, but soon afterwards he was taken to Windsor and was treated with great consideration by the English king. In 1420, with the intention of detaching the Scottish auxiliaries from the French standard, he was sent to take part in Henry’s campaign in France; this move failed in its immediate object and he returned to England after Henry’s death in 1422.

Dying in 1420, Albany was succeeded as regent by his son, Murdoch. Around 1422, negotiations for the release of James were begun in earnest, and in September 1423 a treaty was signed at York, the Scottish nation undertaking to pay a ransom of 60,000 marks "for his maintenance in England." By the terms of the treaty James was to wed a noble English lady, and on the 12th of February 1424 he was married at Southwark to Jane, daughter of John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, a lady to whom he was faithful through life. 10,000 marks of his ransom were remitted as Jane’s dowry, and in April 1424 James and his bride entered Scotland.

Personal rule

With the reign of James I, whose coronation took place at Scone on the 21st of May 1424, constitutional sovereignty may be said to begin in Scotland. By the introduction of a system of statute law, modelled to some extent on that of England, and by the additional importance assigned to parliament, the leaven was prepared which was to work towards the destruction of the indefinite authority of the king, and of the unbridled licence of the nobles.

During the parliament held at Perth in March 1425 James arrested Murdoch, duke of Albany, and his son, Alexander; together with Albany’s eldest son, Walter, and Duncan, earl of Lennox, who had been seized previously; they were sentenced to death, and the 4 were executed at Stirling.

In a parliament held at Inverness in 1427 the king arrested many turbulent northern chiefs, and his whole policy was directed towards crushing the power of the nobles. In this he was very successful. Expeditions reduced the Highlands to order; earldom after earldom was forfeited; but this vigour aroused the desire for revenge, and at length cost James his life.

During the latter part of James’s reign difficulties arose between Scotland and England and also between Scotland and the papacy. In ecclesiastical matters James showed himself merciless towards heretics, but his desire to reform the Scottish Church and to make it less dependent on Rome brought him into collision with Popes Martin V and Eugenius IV.

Part of the king’s ransom was still owing to England; other causes of discord between the 2 nations existed, and in 1436 these culminated in a short war.

Death

Having been warned that he would never again cross the Forth, the king went to reside in Perth just before Christmas 1436. Among those whom he had angered was Sir Robert Graham (died 1437), who had been banished by his orders. Instigated by the king’s uncle, Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl (died 1437), and aided by the royal chamberlain, Sir Robert Stewart, and by a band of Highlanders, Graham burst into the presence of James on the night of 20 February 1437 and stabbed the king to death. Graham and Atholl were afterwards tortured and executed.

James had 2 sons: Alexander, who died young, and James II, who succeeded to the throne; and 6 daughters, among them being Margaret, the queen of Louis XI. of France. His widow, Jane, married Sir James Stewart, the “black knight of Lorne,” and died on 15 July 1445.

Writing

James was the author of 2 poems, the Kingis Quair and Good Counsel (a short piece of 3 stanzas). The Song of Absence, Peblis to the Play and Christis Kirk on the Greene have been ascribed to him without evidence.

The Kingis Quair (preserved in the Selden MS. B. 24 in the Bodleian) is an allegorical poem of the cours d’amour type, written in seven-lined Chaucerian stanzas and extending to 1379 lines. It was composed during James’s captivity in England and celebrates his courtship of Lady Jane Beaufort. Though in many respects a Chaucerian pastiche, it not rarely equals its model in verbal and metrical felicity. Its language is an artificial blend of northern and southern (Chaucerian) forms, of the type shown in Lancelot of the Laik and the Quair of Jelusy.

The Kingis Quair was originally printed in the Poetical Remains of James the First, edited by William Tytler (1783). Later editions are Morison’s reprint (Perth, 1786); J. Sibbald’s, in his Chronicle of Scottish Poetry (1802, vol. i.); Thomson’s in 1815 and 1824; G. Chalmers’s, in his Poetic Remains of some of the Scottish Kings (1824); Rogers’s Poetical Remains of King James the First (1873); Skeat’s edition published by the Scottish Text Society (1884).

An attempt has been made to dispute James’s authorship of the poem, but the arguments elaborated by J.T.T. Brown (The Authorship of the Kingis Quair, Glasgow, 1896) have been convincingly answered by Jusserand in his Jacques I ^er d’Écosse fut-il poète? Étude sur l’authenticité du cahier du roi (Paris, 1897, reprinted from the Revue historique, vol. lxiv.). See also the full correspondence in the Athenaeum (July-Aug. 1896 and Dec. 1899); W. A. Neilson, Origins and Sources of the Court of Love (Boston, 1899) pp. 152 &c., 235 &c.; and Gregory Smith, Transition Period (1900), 40, 41.

Critical introduction

by Thomas Humphry Ward

James I of Scotland is among the earliest and best of the imitators of Chaucer, and is the beginning of that line of Scottish poets who kept the lamp of poetry burning during the darkness of the 15th century. His chief poem, The King’s Quair, or the King’s Book, seems to have been written in 1423 or 1424, about the time of his marriage; when he was 30 years old and when Chaucer had been in his grave nearly a quarter of a century. The King’s Quair, written in the 7-lined stanza, is about 200 stanzas long, and it tells in a style that is a curious mixture of autobiographical fact and allegorical romance the story of the captive king’s courtship of the lady who became his wife, Lady Jane Beaufort. The royal prisoner, after a sleepless night spent in reading Boethius, rises at the sound of the matins bell and begins to complain of his fortune. Suddenly in the garden beneath he sees a lady, so beautiful that he who has never known love till now is instantly subdued, the nightingale and all the other birds singing in harmony with his passion. The lady disappears, and half-sleeping, half-swooning, he dreams of a strange sequel. He seems to be carried up "fro spere to spere" to the Empire of Venus; he wins her favour, but since his desperate case requires "the help of other mo than one goddesse," he is sent on with Good Hope for guide to the Palace of Minerva. The goddess of Wisdom receives him with a speech on Free Will; and finally, after an interview with the great goddess Fortune herself, he wakes to find a real messenger from Venus, "a turture, quhite as calk," bringing him a flowering branch, joyful evidence that his suit is to succeed:—

  ‘“Awake! awake! I bring, lover, I bring
  The newis glad that blissful ben and sure
Of thy confort; now laugh, and play, and sing,
  That art beside so glad an aventure;
  For in the hevyn decretit is the cure.”
And unto me the flouris did present;
With wyngis spred hir wayis furth sche went.’

With this and with the poet’s song of thankfulness The King’s Quair ends.

No subject could be better fitted than the love-story of the captive king for a poem in the accepted trouvère style. The paganism of romance was fond of representing man as passive material in the hands of two supernatural powers, Fortune and Love; and poetry for two centuries was for ever returning to the theme. James the First was neither original enough to depart from the poetical conventions of his time, nor artist enough to work out his subject without confusion and repetition; and yet the personal interest of his story and its adaptability to the chosen form of treatment would be enough to save The King’s Quair from oblivion, even without the unquestionable beauty of much of the verse. The dress is the common tinsel of the time, but the body beneath is real and human.

We have said that King James was an early and close imitator of Chaucer. His 19 years of captivity allowed him to steep himself in Chaucer’s poetry, and any Chaucerian student who reads The King’s Quair is constantly arrested by a line or a stanza or a whole episode that exactly recalls the master. It is unnecessary to point out, for instance, the close resemblance of the passage which we here quote, the King’s first sight of Lady Jane, to the passage in "The Knightes Tale" where Palamon and Arcite first see Emilye. Not only the general idea but the details are copied; for example, the King, like Palamon, doubts whether the beautiful vision be woman or goddess. The ascent to the Empire of Venus is like an abridgement of The Hous of Fame. Minerva’s discussion of Free Will is imitated from Chaucer’s rendering of the same theme, after Boethius, in Troylus and Creseyde. The catalogue of beasts near the dwelling of Fortune, is an echo of Chaucer’s catalogue of birds in The Parlement of Foules. Isolated instances of imitation abound; thus

  ’Til Phebus endit had his bemës brycht,
And bad go farewel every lefe and floure,
  That is to say, approchen gan the night,’
is a repetition of a well-known passage in The Frankeleynes Tale:—
  ‘For the orizont had left the sonne his liht,
(That is as much to sayn as it was nyht).’
A passage in Troylus is recalled by
  ‘O besy goste, ay flikering to and fro’;

and another by the King’s concluding address to his book — "Go, litel tretis." Outside The King’s Quair, the "gude and godlie ballate" here given (although it would be difficult to prove that it belongs to King James) is obviously modelled on the ‘good counseil of Chaucer’ which we have quoted above. These examples of the influence of Chaucer upon so rich a mind as that of the young King of Scotland are strong evidence of the greatness of the earlier poet and of the instantaneousness with which his genius made itself felt.

Recognition

His poem "Spring Song of the Birds" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

In popular culture

James I has been depicted in historical novels and short stories. They include:

• The Caged Lion (1870) by Charlotte Mary Yonge. The novel depicts the captivity of James I in England, with the main events taking place in 1421-1422. A friendly relationship with Henry V of England is prominently featured. Catherine of Valois and Richard Whittington are the most prominent among the secondary characters.
• A King's Tragedy (1905) by May Wynne. The novel depicts events of the years 1436-1437. The action leads to the assassination of James I. Catherine Douglas is among the characters featured.
• Lion Let Loose (1967) by Nigel Tranter. Covers the life of James I from c. 1405 to his death in 1437.

See also

• List of British poets

References

 Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "volume-15". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 139. . Wikisource, Web, Apr. 4, 2022.

• Barrow, G.W.S. (2003), The Kingdom of the Scots, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0 7486 1802 3 
• Barrow, G.W.S. (2004), Stewart family (per. c.1110–c.1350), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/49411, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49411, retrieved 11 Oct 2010 
• Boardman, Stephen (2007), The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland Series, Edinburgh: John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd, ISBN 1-904607-68-3 
• Broun, Dauvit; Reid, Norman H; Boardman, Steve; Lynch, Michael; Wormald, Jenny (2007), > "Kingship", in Lynch, Michael, The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford Reference Online ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t246.e169-s5> 
• Brown, Michael (1994), James I, East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, ISBN 1-86232-105-1 
• Brown, M. H. (2004), James I, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14587, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14587, retrieved 16 May 2010 
• Brown, M. H. (2004), Stewart, John, third earl of Buchan (c.1380–1424), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14587, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26483, retrieved 30 June 2010 
• Brown, M. H. (2004), Stewart, Murdoch , second duke of Albany (c.1362–1425), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14587, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26499, retrieved 30 June 2010 
• Brown, M. H., "'I have thus slain a tyrant' - The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis and the right to resist in early fifteenth-century Scotland", Innes Review (Glasgow: J.S. Burns & Sons) 47 (SPRING 1996): 24–44, doi:10.3366/inr.1996.47.1.24, ISSN 0020-157x. 
• Boardman, S. I. (2004), Stewart, David, duke of Rothesay (1378–1402), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26468, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26468, retrieved 12 June 2010 
• David, Charles Wendell (1920), Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, London: Humphery Milford 
• Fawcett, Richard & Oram, Richard (2004), Melrose Abbey, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd, ISBN 0-7524-2867-5 
• Lynch, Michael (1992), Scotland: A New History, London: Pimlico, ISBN 0-7126-9893-0 
• McGladdery, Christine (2001), "The House of Stewart, 1371–1625", in Oram, Richard, The Kings & Queens of Scotland, Stroud, Gloustershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd, ISBN 0 7524 1991 9 
• McGladdery, Christine (1990), James II, Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, ISBN 0-85976-304-8 
• MacQuarrie, Alan (2004), Medieval Scotland: Kingship and Nation, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing Limited, ISBN 0-7509-2977-4 
• Munro, R. W.; Munro, Jean (2004), MacDonald family (per. c.1300–c.1500):Earls of Ross, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/54280, retrieved 6 Sept 2010 
• Nield, Jonathan (1968), A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales, Ayer Publishing, ISBN 9780833725097, http://books.google.com/?id=904G29jMdzIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• Penman, Michael (2001), "Robert III in The House of Stewart, 1371–1625", in Oram, Richard, The Kings & Queens of Scotland, Stroud, Gloustershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd, ISBN 0 7524 1991 9 
• Round, J. Horace (1901), Studies in Peerage and Family History, Westminster, London: Archibald Constable & Co Ltd 
• Stevenson, Katie (2006), 'Chivalry and knighthood in Scotland, 1424-1513, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, ISBN 1-84383-192-9 
• Wylie, James Hamilton; Waugh, William Templeton (1914), The Reign of Henry the Fifth, The University Press, ASIN B00086QRQM 
• Educational pamphlet, Investigating Linlithgow Palace, Historic Scotland, http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/educlinlithgow.pdf#xml=http://web1:10700/texis/webinator/pubssearch/pdfhi.txt?pr=publications&prox=page&rorder=500&rprox=500&rdfreq=500&rwfreq=500&rlead=500&rdepth=0&sufs=0&order=r&id=4c858ebb20, retrieved 7 September 2010 

External links

Poems

• "Spring Song of the Birds".
• Selected Poetry of James I, of Scotland (1394-1437) ("The King's Quire") at Representative Poetry Online
• James in The English Poets: An anthology: Extracts from The King's Quair, Poem from The Gude and Godlie Ballates
• James I of Scotland at PoemHunter (3 poems)
• James I of Scotland at Poetry Nook (3 poems)

Books

• James I King of Scotland at Amazon.com

About

• James I King of Scotland in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• James I of Scotland in the Dictionary of National Biography
• James I at NNDB
• James I (1406-1437) at Scottish History

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at James I. of Scotland