James IV

King of Scotland (r. 1488-1513)

• Born: March 17, 1473
• Birthplace: Holyrood, Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: September 9, 1513
• Place of death: Flodden, near Branxton, Northumberland, England

Unifying Scotland with internal peace and financial stability, the popular James IV promoted education, systematic justice, architecture, and literature, and negotiated the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with England. He also improved the standing of the Scottish within European politics through his skill and prestige.

Early Life

The eldest son of James III of Scotland and Margaret of Denmark, James was educated at his mother’s charge in Latin and modern languages, French and Roman history, and the Bible. His interests included hunting, warfare, and surgery. He learned politics at age nine while experiencing the 1482 power struggle between his father and his uncle, Alexander, the duke of Albany.

When James was fifteen, aristocratic rebels fighting in his name defeated and assassinated James III at the Battle of Sauchieburn and crowned the prince King James IV at Scone in 1488. In penance for his part in the regicide, he thereafter wore an iron chain and made annual religious pilgrimages.

In James’s minority, the earl of Bothwell’s faction ruled initially, but soon another rebellion combined disaffected rebels with loyalists of the old regime under the bludy serk (bloody shirt) banner of James III, and James IV rode to battle in 1489. Despite the royal victory under Lord Drummond, a conciliatory parliament appeased rebel demands, and in 1490, leaders of both factions joined Bothwell on James’s new Privy Council. James gained military and diplomatic skills as well as a lifelong adviser, Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen, his keeper of the privy seal for twenty-two years.

In 1493, James’s new chancellor, the earl of Angus, extended crown authority with a show of naval power to enforce forfeiture of the lordship of the Isles, already weakened by internecine feuds. James made a rapid tour to the western Isles and to the south and the northeast, a public assertion of kingship.

Life’s Work

Assuming personal rule in 1495 at age twenty-two, James was a popular and progressive monarch who consolidated his authority by balancing royal patronage among factions, finding income sources other than taxation, and very rarely calling Parliament. He toured his realm on pilgrimages and during hunting trips, and he enforced Crown law especially in the Isles, which were finally secured by 1506.

James seized a pivotal role in European politics in 1495 by supporting Perkin Warbeck, who for four years convincingly masqueraded as Richard, duke of York, pretender to the English throne of Henry VII. Though England and Spain were unconvinced, Warbeck won the support of Charles VIII of France, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, his supposed aunt. James treated Warbeck royally at the Scottish court. In 1496, he arranged and attended Warbeck’s marriage to Lady Catherine Gordon, gave him a generous pension, and assembled artillery to invade England on his behalf. Meanwhile, Spanish ambassadors urged peace. In September, James led Scottish forces into Northumberland. When no English rose to Warbeck’s support, Warbeck returned to Scotland, while James’s army remained for five days of plundering before safely recrossing the Tweed River. Henry VII appropriated funds for a retaliatory strike, but tax revolts in Cornwall and Devonshire distracted him, and after another year of James’s audacious border skirmishes, Henry initiated the process that would lead to the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland in 1502 and James’s marriage to his daughter Margaret.

In August, 1503, the thirteen-year old Margaret, escorted by Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, rode through triumphal arches into Edinburgh and married the king at Holyrood Abbey. Five days of music, dancing, feasts, and tournaments marked what court poet William Dunbar celebrated as the union of “the Thrissill and the Rois.”

Scottish culture flourished during the peace. The education act of 1496, which had mandated literacy in Latin and the law for the eldest sons of nobles in order to professionalize the nation’s judicial system, expanded lay interest in literature, Humanism, and literary patronage. In 1495, in his episcopal see at Aberdeen, Bishop Elphinstone already had founded Scotland’s third university with Kings College. In 1505, James founded the Royal College of Surgeons, the first of its sort in Britain, and, in 1512, Elphinstone, with John Hepburn, founded St. Leonard’s College at St Andrews. James licensed Scotland’s first printing press in 1507. In 1509-1510, Elphinstone created a Scottish liturgy to replace the English Sarum use, or Sarum rite, and to honor more than seventy Scottish saints. Poets flourished during this time, including Robert Henryson named the Scottish Geoffrey Chaucer the aristocrats Sir David Lindsay and Gavin Douglas, and the eloquent and versatile Dunbar.

The king increased royal revenues, filled vacancies in the church with his relatives, enforced a succession tax on aristocratic sons as they succeeded their fathers, and introduced the feudal system to raise and fix rents on royal lands. He undertook elegant architectural projects at Linlithgow, Stirling, Falkland, and Holyrood. As he reformed the currency and standardized measures of weight and volume, guilds developed and merchants prospered in royal burghs, the only cities chartered for international trade.

Meanwhile, James also expanded his navy. With brilliant if occasionally piratical sea captains and the financial and technical assistance of France, he built and armed a fleet, including in 1511 the thousand-ton Great Michael, the largest, most powerful warship afloat. The next year, England’s young King Henry VIII copied it in building the ship Henri Grâce à Dieu.

The English peace lasted only a decade. In 1511, when Pope Julius II drew Henry into the Holy League against France, James assured Louis XII that he would uphold Scotland’s auld alliance with France, and Louis supplied James with munitions and money. Except for Elphinstone and the queen, James’s council was eager for war with England, and James drew forces from the whole of Scotland. The navy sailed for France and, in August of 1513, James led an infantry assault of more than twenty thousand men on Northumberland, achieving his objective, Norham Castle, in five days.

The earl of Surrey, who ten years earlier had escorted the king’s bride, now hurried back north, this time with an English army. On September 9, on rough, marshy ground in a driving rain, he defeated James at Flodden Field, not far from the border. The English artillery, though smaller, was more accurate than the Scots’ cannons, and the English halberds, though shorter, were at close range more deadly than the Scottish pikes. James died surrounded by ten thousand Scots, including nobles and churchmen from all parts of the nation he had unified. Edinburgh, in terror, prepared for an English invasion that never came. At sixteen months, James V inherited the Crown.

Significance

Surrey’s annihilation of the Scottish nobility and their strong, forty-year-old King James IV, was a greater English victory than anything Henry VIII achieved personally in his expensive French campaign. A musical lament composed for the fallen, “The Flowers of the Forest,” is still piped at Scottish military funerals.

The divisive politics of James V’s minority inhibited the diplomatic and cultural progress of his father’s reign. In 1603, however, exactly a century after James’s shrewdly contracted marriage joined the thistle and the rose, the last of Henry VIII’s children Elizabeth I died without issue, and James’s great grandson, James VI, became England’s King James I.

Bibliography

Bevan, Bryan. Henry VII: The First Tudor King. London: Rubicon, 2000. Bevan’s brief and derivative but solid popular biography connects James’s support for Perkin Warbeck to his marriage with Margaret.

Chrimes, S. B. Henry VII. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Chrimes’s standard biography of Henry VII evaluates James’s vacillating early foreign policy from an English perspective.

Macdougall, Norman. James IV. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1997. Balanced, comprehensive, sympathetic, and corrective, Macdougall’s work remains the standard biography.

Macdougall, Norman. “Renewal: 1484-1517.” In An Antidote to the English: The Auld Alliance, 1295-1560. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2001. Macdougall assesses James’s complex manipulation of conflicting French and English alliances within the context of two centuries of Franco-Scottish relations.

Mackie, R. L. King James IV of Scotland. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958. Now superseded by Macdougall’s work, Mackie’s entertaining narrative portrays James as a “Renaissance prince” and a “moonstruck romantic.”

Mason, Roger A. “Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and Political Culture of Early Renaissance Scotland.” In Kingship and the Commonweal. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1998. Mason links Scotland’s advances in education, law, diplomacy, architecture, and literature in James IV’s reign to the king’s imperial designs.

Scarisbrick, J. J. Henry VIII. New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. This revision of Henry VIII’s standard biography represents Flodden as Henry’s first great victory.