[BITList] Steward of Scotland

[John Feltham]

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Robert II  (1316-1390), king of Scots, was the son of Walter Stewart [see under Stewart family  (per. c.1110-c.1350)], hereditary steward of Scotland, and Marjorie Bruce [see under Stewart family  (per. c.1110-c.1350)], daughter of Robert I, after whom Robert was named. Walter and Marjorie were probably married shortly after 27 April 1315 and Robert is likely to have been born early in 1316.

Establishing a position

As Robert I had produced no male heir by 1316, the infant Robert Stewart, the king's only male grandchild, immediately assumed a prominent place in the royal succession. Initially he was not recognized as Robert I's nearest heir because on 27 April 1315, and undoubtedly in anticipation of Marjorie's marriage to Walter the Steward, Robert I had entailed the crown in favour of his brother, Edward Bruce, and his heirs ahead of Marjorie and her heirs. On 14 October 1318, however, Edward died at the battle of Dundalk in Ireland, leaving no legitimate issue, and on 3 December 1318 Robert, the king's grandson, was named as Robert I's successor should he fail to produce any male heirs of his own. By this stage Robert's mother Marjorie had died, probably between 25 March 1317 and 24 March 1318.

On 5 March 1324 Robert I's second wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of the earl of Ulster, gave birth to a son, the future David II. In July 1326 the prelates and magnates attending a parliament at Cambuskenneth offered their homage and fealty to the king's infant son and pledged themselves to support his position as heir to the throne after Robert I's death. The parliament also acknowledged the position of Robert the Steward as heir to the throne should David die without an heir. Robert had probably inherited the title steward of Scotland by then, his father, Walter, having died on 9 April 1326.

In 1329 Robert I died, and the crown passed to the six-year-old David II, with Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, acting as guardian of the kingdom. Randolph also appears to have had responsibility for Robert the Steward, as David's nearest heir under the entail of 1318. Randolph was certainly one of three guardians, the others being Robert's uncle Sir James Stewart of Durrisdeer and William Lindsay, archdeacon of St Andrews, who acted as witnesses to the earliest known act of the young Steward at Tarbert in 1330.

In 1332 the position of the entire Bruce dynasty came under attack from Edward Balliol, the son of the deposed King John, who sought to claim the throne with the help of English and Scottish noblemen disinherited by Robert I and, by 1333, with the open assistance of the English king, Edward III. Balliol's forces inflicted resounding defeats on the Scots at Dupplin Moor (11 August 1332) and Halidon Hill (19 July 1333). Robert was personally present at the latter battle which also saw the death of his uncle and guardian, James Stewart. In the aftermath of Halidon, Edward Balliol granted Robert's lordships in the Stewartry, Bute, and Cowal to one of his own supporters, David Strathbogie, titular earl of Atholl, and Robert was forced to flee to the safety of Dumbarton Castle, still held in the Bruce interest by Sir Malcolm Fleming and already a refuge for David II.

In May 1334 David II fled to France, while the Steward opened a successful campaign to reclaim his ancestral lands from the control of Balliol's representatives. At the time of David's departure Robert and John Randolph, earl of Moray, appear to have been made joint guardians of the kingdom. The relationship between them quickly deteriorated, however. Robert, as David II's nephew and nearest male heir, may well have resented Moray's influence in government. The two men quarrelled during a parliament at Dairsie in April 1335, while their followers seem to have competed for control of royal revenues north of the Forth. In the summer of 1335 the joint guardianship came to an end in the face of renewed campaigns in Scotland by Edward III. In July 1335 Randolph was captured by English forces near the border, and in September of that year the Steward's lordships in the west and the Firth of Clyde came under a concerted military attack by forces which included a fleet from Ireland. As a result, Robert may have come to terms with the English king and Edward Balliol. He had certainly demitted the office of guardian by late September 1335, having been replaced by Sir Andrew Murray, lord of Bothwell, who had married Robert I's sister Christian and thus become David II's uncle by marriage.

Relations with David II

The Steward reappeared as guardian of the kingdom after the death of Murray in the spring of 1338, and remained so until the return of David II from France on 2 June 1341. The relationship between David and the Steward was not particularly friendly, perhaps reflecting Robert's earlier disputes with David's favourite the earl of Moray and the Steward's dealings with the Balliol regime in 1335. Robert received one significant royal grant during this period, a charter of the border lordship of Liddesdale, but he exchanged this in February 1342 for the lordship of Atholl, held by Sir William Douglas.

The Steward's position in Scotland was transformed by the battle of Nevilles Cross on 17 October 1346. In the course of the battle David II was wounded and captured by English forces, while many of the king's principal supporters, most notably Moray, were killed. In contrast, the Steward and Patrick, earl of March, were said to have fled the field and abandoned the king to his fate. Such behaviour was not calculated to endear Robert to his uncle, but the Steward's escape ensured that he became, once again, guardian, and he held the office until David was ransomed from English custody in 1357. His performance as guardian between 1346 and 1357 became the subject of intense political propaganda in the 1360s, and that in turn influenced Scottish chronicle accounts of the period. John of Fordun's Chronica gentis Scotorum incorporates an account, probably written in the early 1360s by someone connected to David II's court, which was consistently hostile to Robert, emphasizing his cowardly flight from the battle of Nevilles Cross and his general incompetence as guardian. The later vernacular verse chronicle of Andrew Wyntoun and the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower, on the other hand, incorporate an anonymous pro-Steward chronicle, written in the 1390s, which gives a very positive gloss to Robert's activities.

There is little doubt that the events of 1346-57 resulted in a distinct worsening of the relationship between Robert and his uncle. The guardian seems to have been notably inactive, and at times downright obstructive, in the attempts to secure David's release. Within Scotland, Robert appears to have presided over the territorial advance of his family and allies, particularly in the north of the kingdom. In response David was by 1350 attempting to achieve his freedom by actively supporting proposals that John of Gaunt, a younger son of Edward III, should be accepted as the heir presumptive to the Scottish throne should David die without producing a male heir. In March 1352 David II was released on parole to present these proposals to a Scottish parliament, which, however, rejected them, thereby forcing the king to return to captivity in London and preserving the Scottish royal succession via the Steward. In his opposition to David's plans the Steward was probably able to harness and exploit a war-generated sensitivity on the issue of independence among the Scots over proposals which might have allowed the English crown to achieve by negotiation what it had failed to do by military conquest. It appears that the Steward and his supporters presented David as a man who was too close personally to Edward III, and who was prepared to bargain with the sovereignty of the Scottish kingdom for his own private, political, and dynastic goals.

Further negotiations for David's release on English terms in 1354-5 seem to have been deliberately neglected by Robert, who instead entered into a military pact with the French crown which saw the arrival of a small French force in Scotland about Easter 1355 and the capture of Berwick by Scottish forces on 1-2 November of the same year. Edward III himself led a devastating retaliatory raid into southern Scotland in January-February 1356 and this, combined with the defeat and capture of King Jean of France at the battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356, left the Scots with little option but to renew negotiations with Edward III. The Steward's guardianship finally came to an end in October 1357, with the return of David II to his kingdom. At first the Steward received some indications of royal favour, being created earl of Strathearn between 6 and 13 November 1357, but this probably did no more than ratify the dominance he had established in the earldom in the period after 1346.

Overall, though, relations between Robert and his uncle remained tense, and by 1363 they had broken down to such an extent that in April of that year the Steward and his two eldest surviving sons took part in a rebellion against the king alongside William, earl of Douglas, and Patrick, earl of March. The grievances of the rebels were varied, but the Steward and Douglas may have been particularly alarmed by the prospect of being sent to England as hostages for the payment of David's ransom since the king had diverted money raised for previous ransom payments to support the expenses of the royal household. The Steward was the first of the rebels to submit to the king, renewing his fealty on 4 May under the explicit sanction of losing his place in the succession if he transgressed again. After defeating the 1363 rebellion David negotiated with the English king for some form of amendment of the terms of the 1357 ransom, and once again seems to have been prepared to offer a change in the succession arrangements. In March 1364 a Scottish parliament discussed but rejected a scheme (apparently favoured by David) which would have seen the waiving of the ransom payments and other English concessions in return for the nomination of Edward III as David II's successor in the event of David's death without legitimate heirs. The Steward's position as heir presumptive thus survived the dangers of 1363-4, but the relationship between him and the king remained poor. David II, however, found a more subtle way of dealing with the increasing likelihood of a Stewart succession by striking an accord with Robert's eldest son, John (the future Robert III). Before 31 May 1367 John was married to the king's stepniece, Annabella (nee Drummond), producing a potential line of succession after David's death which could be expected to be politically sympathetic to the kinsmen and adherents of King David and Queen Margaret. Since the Steward was considerably older than his royal uncle, the contemporary expectation must have been that John was the man most likely to succeed to the throne if David outlived the Steward and remained childless until his death.

In 1368 the Steward was in trouble with the king once more; in a parliament of June he and his sons John, lord of Kyle, and Robert Stewart, lord of Menteith, were required to swear oaths with regard to the behaviour of the inhabitants of their lordships. Later in the same year Robert and another son, Alexander Stewart, later lord of Badenoch, were imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, perhaps as a result of their failure to adhere to these oaths. In 1369 the issue of the succession was again thrown into doubt by David II's decision to annul his childless marriage to Queen Margaret. After the divorce David clearly intended to marry Agnes Dunbar, the sister of George Dunbar, earl of March, in the hope of producing an heir. On 22 February 1371, however, David II died unexpectedly at his castle of Edinburgh before his marriage to Agnes could take place.

Securing throne and dynasty

In the period immediately after David II's demise Robert had to contend with an armed demonstration led by William, earl of Douglas, the aim of which is unclear. The account of the episode provided by Wyntoun, the chronicler writing closest to the event, is decidedly ambiguous. Wyntoun's narrative can be read as suggesting either that Douglas rejected the Steward's claim to the throne or that he was demonstrating against the continued influence of Sir Robert Erskine (one of David II's men of business) as a custodian of royal castles. The chronicler Bower, writing in the 1440s but also using the source which underlay Wyntoun's account, explicitly saw the Douglas protest as being aimed at the Steward, and elaborated on this theme with the highly improbable suggestion that Douglas claimed the throne for himself as the representative of the Balliol and Comyn families. In fact Douglas had no discernible connection to either of these families, but he had a link to the Bruce dynasty as the husband of Margaret of Mar, the daughter and eventual heir of Robert I's nephew Donald, earl of Mar, in 1332 briefly guardian of Scotland for the young David II. Whatever Douglas's ambitions were, the demonstration was brought to an amicable conclusion with the marriage of James Douglas, the eldest son and heir of William and Margaret, to Robert's daughter Isabella, along with the grant to William Douglas of the office of justiciar south of Forth. The earl and his son attended the coronation of Robert II at Scone on 27 March 1371.

Robert's elevation to the throne saw the title steward of Scotland pass to his eldest son, John, and the earldom of Strathearn to David, the eldest son of his second marriage, to Euphemia Ross. At a parliament held at Scone following the coronation the three estates confirmed the position of Robert's eldest son, John, who became earl of Carrick, as the heir to the throne. Such an explicit recognition may have been thought necessary given Robert II's advanced years and the Douglas demonstration of February-March 1371. On 4 April 1373 Robert II secured parliamentary approval for the creation of a male entail to govern the descent of the kingship after his death. By the terms of the entail the right to govern the kingdom was to pass to Robert's eldest son and his male heirs. If John produced no male heirs, then the crown was to pass to his brother Robert, now earl of Fife and Menteith, and his male heirs, and so on; the entail names the five sons of Robert II by his two marriages in order of seniority. As in so many other areas, the formal entailing of the crown seems to reflect Robert's dual concern to make his family's position as Scotland's royal dynasty unassailable and to minimize the opportunities for damaging political conflict.

Years of success, 1371-1384

Robert II was about fifty-five years of age when he came to the throne, and historians have generally viewed this fact as crucial in explaining what used to be regarded as a lacklustre and directionless reign. Recent analysis, however, has produced a much more positive evaluation of Robert's rule, with an emphasis on the financial and political stability of his regime and the relative success of his diplomacy.

Robert's governance of the realm apparently created few of the political tensions which had characterized the reign of his predecessor, and the first decade of his kingship was notably peaceful. A number of factors contributed to this situation. One was Robert's personal approach to government, which may well have been informed by his overriding concern to establish his family as an unchallenged royal dynasty. Coming relatively late to the throne, he seems to have laid little store by the vigorous exploitation of the theoretical rights attached to the kingship. Instead, he used his kinsmen, especially his three adult sons, and the extension of his network of marriage alliances to consolidate his personal power in the localities and to establish the new dynasty. His two eldest surviving sons, John, earl of Carrick, and Robert, earl of Fife, became active figures in the royal administration and custodians of the major royal castles of Edinburgh and Stirling, while his third son, Alexander, lord of Badenoch, acted as the king's lieutenant in the north of the kingdom. The aggrandizement of the Stewart kin in royal government was not as contentious as it might have been because of Robert's conciliatory approach to the local interest and influence of other magnate families. Individuals who lost offices or titles to his sons were normally handsomely compensated from royal resources. Moreover, he made little or no attempt to confront or undermine the power of established magnates in their own localities, preferring instead to harness their power and tie them to the royal dynasty through marriage alliances. Through his daughters' marriages, both before and after he became king, Robert II established personal and political links with many of the most important of the kingdom's noblemen. The 'openness' of his administration was apparent in those who regularly witnessed his charters. Where David II's council had been dominated by court knights and esquires whose power and influence were largely dependent on royal favour, Robert's council seems to have been made up of major regional magnates who exercised authority in their own areas by virtue of their status.

The financial strength of Robert's government during the 1370s also allowed him to distribute his patronage widely and generously. A boom in Scottish wool exports saw a corresponding rise in crown revenues from the great customs, which provided a lucrative source of cash pensions and fees for the king's officers, retainers, and kinsmen. Furthermore, the royal household made fewer demands on the public resources of the kingdom because Robert had brought to the crown the vast array of ancestral Stewart lordships and lands. As the place-dates of Robert's royal charters testify, the new king carried on making extensive use of his lordships in and around Perth and the Firth of Clyde. Finally, the payment of David II's ransom to the English crown, the ramifications of which had had such a destabilizing effect on the politics of the kingdom in the 1360s, was stopped by Robert II in 1377 following the death of Edward III. The financial effectiveness of Robert's administration reflects the one area of obvious continuity from David II's reign, with Robert employing most of the former king's bureaucrats and clerks after 1371. Indeed, some of David's administrators, such as Sir John Lyon, enjoyed spectacularly successful careers under the first Stewart king.

Robert II's role in the conduct of Anglo-Scottish warfare has also been re-evaluated in recent times. Much of the negative imagery surrounding his reign in this regard derives from an account of the fortunes of a French expeditionary force under the command of Jean de Vienne which landed in Scotland in 1385 to assist the Scots in an assault on northern England. The chronicler Froissart's description of the expedition includes a very negative portrayal of Robert II, and this has had a profound effect on the king's historical reputation. According to Froissart, Robert had 'red bleared eyes, of the colour of sandalwood, which clearly showed that he was no valiant man, but one who would rather remain at home than march to the field'  (Froissart, 2.48). Froissart's hostile characterization of Robert II as a weak and cowardly figure, ignored by his own belligerent magnates who conducted border warfare regardless of his wishes, almost certainly reflects political propaganda produced by men sympathetic to the claims of the king's eldest son, the earl of Carrick, to act as guardian of the realm after 1384, and can be contrasted with much more positive accounts of the king's character and achievements preserved in the work of the Scottish chroniclers Wyntoun and Bower. Here, emphasis is placed on the success of the Scots in recovering English-occupied lands in the south of the kingdom during Robert's reign. All the indications are that Robert supported an increasingly aggressive and successful policy aimed at the reclamation of Scottish lands and castles after the death of Edward III in 1377. Furthermore, although Robert may have disagreed with his son Carrick and the more bellicose members of the border aristocracy about the specific conduct of warfare in 1384-5, the general strategy of Franco-Scottish military co-operation had been agreed by him.

Years of decline, 1384-1390

Overall, the combination of financial security and cautious and inclusive politics underpinned a reign which appears to have been both popular and effective until the mid-1380s. For the first ten years of Robert II's rule there had been little indication of significant political tensions within Scotland; in the early 1380s, however, a number of contentious issues began to undermine his hold on power. The activities of his son Alexander as a royal lieutenant in the north of the kingdom may have generated resentment against the king, who did little to respond to complaints about Alexander's behaviour. The king's heir, John, also seems to have grown increasingly impatient with his father's domination of royal government, and to have cultivated the support of barons from the south of Scotland who broadly backed an intensification of war with England. The political balance within the kingdom may have been decisively altered by the death of the most powerful border lord, William, first earl of Douglas, early in 1384. William's successor, James, was Carrick's brother-in-law and ally, and a young man noted for his belligerent attitude towards the English. Late in 1384 Carrick apparently organized a palace coup against his father, which resulted in his being appointed guardian in a general council held at Holyrood in November.

The death or capture of many of the earl of Carrick's principal supporters at the battle of Otterburn on 5 August 1388 allowed a counter-coup to be mounted against him in Robert II's name by the king's second son, Robert, earl of Fife, who replaced Carrick as guardian on 1 December 1388. Fife was a notably active guardian in both military and administrative affairs, and Robert II seems thereafter to have remained in semi-retirement until his death on 19 April 1390 at Dundonald Castle in Ayrshire. According to Wyntoun, Robert was not formally buried until he was interred at Scone on 13 August 1390, the day before the coronation of his successor, John, earl of Carrick, who became king as Robert III.

Royal issue

Robert II was twice married and had numerous sons and daughters. His first wife was Elizabeth Mure, daughter of Adam Mure of Rowallan, an Ayrshire landowner. The relationship was probably at least ten years old and had produced a number of children before the couple applied for a papal dispensation, granted on 22 November 1347, which allowed for the retrospective legitimation of their offspring. The chronicler Fordun suggests that Robert and Elizabeth underwent a formal marriage ceremony in 1349. The confused situation in the mid-1330s, with David II in exile and the young Robert left as the senior representative of the Bruce-Stewart dynasty in Scotland, may well have encouraged a rapid marriage for the young heir to the throne and might have made the lengthy process of applying for a dispensation unattractive at that stage.

Robert and Elizabeth had at least four sons who survived into adulthood: John, the eldest, who was probably born in the late 1330s; Walter, who married Isabella, daughter and heir of Duncan, earl of Fife, between 21 July 1360 and 21 July 1361, by when he was styled lord of Fife, and who died late in 1362 and certainly before 10 January 1363 with no known heirs; Robert, earl of Fife and later (1398) duke of Albany; and Alexander, earl of Buchan and lord of Ross and Badenoch. Robert and Elizabeth also had five daughters, Margaret, Marjory, Elizabeth, Isabella, and Johanna, who played a crucial role in their father's informal style of government through kinship and alliance. Margaret received a papal dispensation for her marriage to John, lord of the Isles, on 18 July 1350. They had at least four sons, the eldest of whom, Donald, succeeded his father as lord of the Isles in preference to the sons of John's first marriage, to Amy MacRuairi. Marjory received a papal dispensation for her marriage to John Dunbar on 11 July 1370, a match perhaps forced on Robert by David II, who at the time was in a relationship with Dunbar's sister Agnes. In 1372 Marjory's husband was made earl of Moray, and her son Thomas succeeded to that title on John Dunbar's death in 1391-2. After John died Marjory married Alexander Keith of Grandown. Elizabeth married Thomas Hay, constable of Scotland, before Robert became king, and their son, William, later succeeded to the constableship. Isabella received a dispensation to marry James Douglas, later second earl of Douglas and Mar, on 24 September 1371. The marriage remained childless up to Douglas's death at the battle of Otterburn on 5 August 1388. By early 1390 the widowed Isabella had married Sir John Edmonston; she died some time before 22 July 1410. Johanna married Sir John Keith, son of Sir William Keith, the marischal, before 17 January 1374. Sir John died shortly before 27 December 1375, and by 2 October 1377 Johanna had married Sir John Lyon, one of her father's favourites, who was made royal chamberlain as a result of the marriage. Lyon was assassinated on 4 November 1382, leaving a son and heir, also John. Johanna went on to marry, between 20 November 1384 and 24 May 1385, Sir James Sandilands of Calder.

The marriage of Elizabeth and Robert seems to have been ended by her death before 1355. In May of that year Robert obtained a dispensation to marry Euphemia, nee Ross, countess of Moray  (d. 1388/9), sister of William, earl of Ross, and widow of John Randolph, earl of Moray, who was killed at the battle of Nevilles Cross in October 1346. Recent research has emphasized that Euphemia's rights as Moray's widow may well have brought the lordship of Badenoch into Robert's control, while the link to William, earl of Ross, proved significant in the politics of the 1360s. Robert and Euphemia had two sons, David Stewart, earl of Strathearn and Caithness, and Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl, and probably more than two daughters. Egidia married William Douglas, the (reputedly illegitimate) son of Archibald Douglas, third earl of Douglas and lord of Galloway, before 26 December 1387. William was killed by English knights in Konigsberg in the summer of 1391 when he was on crusade against the Lithuanians; Elizabeth obtained a dispensation to marry Sir David Lindsay (later first earl of Crawford) in February 1375. In addition, Robert II had a number of illegitimate children. His most favoured mistress was Mariota Cardeny, and they had at least three sons, Alexander, John, and James. Other sons born to unknown mistresses included John Stewart, who became sheriff of Bute, Thomas Stewart, archdeacon of St Andrews, and Alexander Stewart, canon of Glasgow.

S. I. Boardman 

Sources  W. Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt and others, new edn, 9 vols. (1987-98), vols. 6-7 + The 'Original chronicle' of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. F. J. Amours, 5, STS, 1st ser., 56 (1907); 6, STS, 1st ser., 57 (1908) + Johannis de Fordun Chronica gentis Scotorum / John of Fordun's Chronicle of the Scottish nation, ed. W. F. Skene, trans. F. J. H. Skene, 1 (1871) + A. Theiner, Vetera monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum historiam illustrantia (Rome, 1864) + G. W. S. Barrow and others, eds., Regesta regum Scottorum, 5-6, ed. A. A. M. Duncan and B. Webster (1982-8) + J. M. Thomson and others, eds., Registrum magni sigilli regum Scotorum / The register of the great seal of Scotland, 2nd edn, 1, ed. T. Thomson (1912) + G. Burnett and others, eds., The exchequer rolls of Scotland, 1-4 (1878-80) + APS, 1124-1423 + J. Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the adjoining countries, trans. T. Johnes, 2 vols. (1839) + Scalacronica, by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight: a chronical of England and Scotland from AD MLXVI to AD MCCCLXII, ed. J. Stevenson, Maitland Club, 40 (1836) + W. Fraser, The Lennox, 2 vols. (1874) + S. I. Boardman, The early Stewart kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371-1406 (1996) + R. Nicholson, Scotland: the later middle ages (1974), vol. 2 of The Edinburgh history of Scotland, ed. G. Donaldson  (1965-75) + A. Grant, Independence and nationhood: Scotland, 1306-1469 (1984) + A. Grant, 'The Otterburn war from the Scottish point of view', War and border societies in the middle ages, ed. A. Goodman and A. Tuck (1992), 30-65
Archives NA Scot., charters
Likenesses  coinage, NM Scot. · seal, BL; Birch, Seals, 14,812 [see illus.] · Seton Armorial (not contemporary), NL Scot.




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