James I 1394-1437
King of Scotland

Born in Dunfermline, Fife, he was the second son of Robert III. After his elder brother David, Duke of Rothesay, was murdered at Falkland (1402), allegedly by his uncle, the Duke of Albany, James was sent for safety to France, but was captured at sea by the English in 1406 and imprisoned for 18 years. Albany meanwhile ruled Scotland as governor until his death (1420), when his son, Murdoch, assumed the regency and the country rapidly fell into disorder. Negotiations for the return of James were completed with the Treaty of London (1423) and James resumed his reign in 1424. Also in 1424, James married Joan Beaufort (d.1445), a daughter of the Earl of Somerset, niece of Richard II, and they soon came to Scotland, where James dealt ruthlessly with potential rivals to his authority. Murdoch, his two sons and the 80-year-old Earl of Lennox were all beheaded at Stirling, the first state executions since 1320, and others were dealt with almost as severely. By such methods he was able to treble the royal estates. Finance and law and order were the two other main domestic themes of his reign. The series of parliaments called after 1424, while encouraging attendance by lesser landowners, was dominated by the king's need for increased taxation, partly to pay off the ransom extracted for his release, and partly to meet increased expenditure on his court, artillery and building work at Linlithgow. James, described by the chronicler Boece as 'our lawgiver king', for the most part only refined, repeated or extended judicial enactments of previous kings and many of his activities, here as elsewhere, had a fiscal motive. He was the nominal founder and benefactor of St Andrews University. In foreign affairs, he attempted to increase trade by renewing a commercial treaty with the Netherlands, and also concluded treaties with Denmark, Norway and Sweden. His relations with the Church were abrasive and his criticisms of monastic orders pointed. His murder in the Dominican friary at Perth, the first assassination of a Scottish king for 400 years, was the work of a group of dissidents led by descendants of Robert II's second marriage. James left one surviving son (James, the future James II), and six daughters; the eldest, Margaret (1424-45), who married the Dauphin, later Louis XI, of France, was a gifted poet, as was James himself, who wrote the tender, passionate collection of poems, The Kingis Quair (c.1423-24 'king's quire' or book) to celebrate his romance with Joan Beaufort.