JAMES I., king of Scotland from 1406 to 1437, son of Robert III., born at Dunfermline; in 1406, while on a voyage to France, he was captured by the English and detained by Henry IV. for 18 years, during which time, however, he was carefully trained in letters and in all knightly exercises; returning to Scotland in 1424 with his bride, Jane Beaufort, niece of the English king, he took up the reins of government with a firm hand; he avenged himself on the nobles by whose connivance he had been kept so long out of his throne, reduced the turbulent Highlanders to order, and introduced a number of beneficial reforms (e. g. a wider parliamentary franchise, a fixed standard for the coinage, a supreme court of civil jurisdiction, a renovated system of weights and measures), and widened Scotland’s commercial relations with the Continent; he was a man of scholarly tastes, a patron of learning, and exhibits no mean poetic gift in his well-known poem the “King’s Quhair”; his vigorous and sometimes harsh and vindictive efforts to lower the powers of the nobility procured him their inveterate hatred, and in 1437 he was murdered in the Dominican monastery at Perth by a band of conspirators (1394-1437).

JAMES II., king of Scotland from 1437 to 1460, son of preceding; during his minority the country was torn by rival factions amongst the nobility, the chief point of contest being the wardship of the young king; an attempt on the part of the conspirators who had murdered James I. to place their leader, the Earl of Athole, on the throne, was frustrated; in 1449 James assumed the duties of his kingship, and in the same year married Mary, the daughter of the Duke of Gueldres; an English war then being waged on the Borders was brought to a close, and the young king entered vigorously upon administrative reforms; in these efforts he was hampered by the opposition of the nobility, and his fiery temper led him to participate in the murder of the chief obstructionist, the Earl of Douglas; protection given to the exiled Douglases by the Yorkists led James to support the claims of Henry VI. in England; he was killed by the bursting of a cannon at the siege of Roxburgh Castle (1430-1460).

JAMES III., king of Scotland from 1460 to 1488, son of James II.; was during his minority under the care of his mother and Bishop Kennedy of St. Andrews, the Earl of Angus being lieutenant-general of the kingdom; but the bishop and the earl died before he was 14, and the nobility fell into faction and disorder again; the first to gain power was Lord Boyd (whose son married the king’s sister), but a charge of treason brought about his downfall and exile; the king married Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1469, and gave himself up to a life of quiet ease surrounded by men of art and culture, while his brothers Albany and Mar, by their military tastes and achievements, won the affections of the nobles; James, becoming jealous, imprisoned them; Albany, who had intrigued with Edward IV., fled