With Alexander III and his descendants still firmly on the throne, Edward will not be able to play the various Scottish factions off against each other with anything like the same amount of success that he achieved in the 1280s, 90s and 1300s IOTL. If he does intervene he'll not get anywhere near the same degree of success that he actually had in terms of bringing Scotland under English control. This is true even if Alexander were to die leaving a young boy as his heir. That boy, even if he was unable to rule, would still be a focus for unity in the way that an empty throne (or Stone of Scone in this case) is not.
WI Alexander III of Scotland lived?
- Thread starter Joyeux
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Of course while this could be good for Scotland in the short run, I am of the opinion that without the centralistaion that Bruce did Scotland would be in the long run poorer. (Which is why my timeline is on an alomst permanent hiatus as I cannot see a way around that problem).
Is there any particular reason why someone else (perhaps someone later on) can't/won't do it?
And what centralization? Not saying that to be argumentative, just curious.
I'll answer your second question first.
Before the Wars of Independence, Scottish Politics were dominated by two noble families, the Bruces and the Comyns. The Comyns were based in the north-east and the Bruces in the south-west. At the time we are speaking about the Comyns were closely related to the Balliols (a very wealthy family) but the Bruce's power lay in the many titles they had. A map of Scotland at the time is here...
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=3950256&postcount=3335
Now these two families hated each other, and this hatred threatened to spill into civil war many a time. Of course, the Wars of Independence happened and so Bruce's power grew while the Comyns waned, so around 1309(ish) Bruce and his men fought and won against the Comyns at Inverurie and then slaughtered most of the family, salted the fields which caused the area of Buchan (where I come from) to be depopulated for the next 80 years or so.
Now this helped Bruce and any future Kings because it ended the chance of civil war and also consolidted in power in Bruce's hands. However it was a long list of very unlikly events that caused OTL, and so I doubt any King would have the authority to put the nobles in their place, as the chances are he would be spending too much of his time making sure civil war did not happen.
In some ways, but when it come to exerting royal authority, Alexander was busy fighting the Lords of the Isles, and by keeping taxes low he kept the nobility and burghers happy so their was no need to keep the nobles low. Of course, if his son proved to have been weaker than him, the problems start up again... saying that the same happened to England with Edward II, and he lost Scotland and a lot of France because of it (and his life).
The Canmores had lands largly in Fife with also extensive lands in England that were given as a wedding present by Henry III to Alexander.
I see. And interesting.
Problematic indeed. Not insolvable, but problematic.
Very problematic. The main thing there is that Scotland was unified well after England was, and thus had many more problems with rebellions. As the British Scotsman says, the Western Isles, especially Lewis and Harris, were frequently rebellious during this period.
Were the Western Isles particularly unruly (as in more hostile to royal rule) or just harder to make bend the knee when trouble did break out?
The distinction being subtle, but while looking at what a king has to deal with, there's a difference between an area that resents being part of your kingdom and an area that's hard to bring back under control after being pushed "too far".
The problem was that the Lordship of the Isles was almost as powerful as the rest of Scotland combined, to the extent that the Lord of the Isles was still called the King of the Isles at this point. In effect the Lord of the Isles was the near equal of the King of Scots instead of being a clear subordinate. This unclear relationship between the 2 entities was the source of a lot of friction.
It would be entirely possible that with the POD suggested in this thread that the Western Isles would have developed as a separate nation to Scotland with Scotland only having nominal overlordship in much the same way that through significant portions of this period England held a nominal overlordship of Scotland but Scotland remained a separate nation
Exactly, Scotland didn't even have overlordship over the Western Isles untill after the Battle of Largs, before that they had sworn fealty to the King of Norway.
Fletch
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV5mh4SbjWs&feature=related
This discussion has encouraged me to look up this song my grandpa used to play when I was going to the football with him.
This discussion has encouraged me to look up this song my grandpa used to play when I was going to the football with him.
The Lordship of the Isles was very troublesome but it's stretching it a bit to say that the entity was almost as powerful as the rest of Scotland. The difficulties of bringing the Western Isles under Scots control were at least as much due to mountaineous terrain, long distances and lack of other major magnates on the ground and in the area during long periods of the Later Middle Ages as the military and political power of the Lords themselves.
You're thinking in modern terms. The Lordship of the Isles was centred in and around the Isles with extensive access to the sea - the superhighways of that era. It wasn't a remote territory protected from the centre of power by the difficult communications, it was a well connected entity sitting on important lines of communication. This was the very source of its power.
The Lordship was considered for much of it's existence to be the 3rd most powerful entity in the British Isles after the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland. This is historical fact is why one of the subsidiary titles of the Prince of Wales today is Lord of the Isles.
Sea communications aren't much good if you're trying to get an army from Stirling to the Western Highland seaboard - especially since Scots kings didn't tend to have much of a navy. From the centres of Scottish royal power the Western Isles were remote and difficult to access, which was why central government had so much difficulty asserting control over that particular region.
That may be true but it doesn't mean that the Lordship of the Isles was on a par with Scotland. The fact that it wasn't recognised as a kingdom by the rest of Europe is evidence for that. The Anglo-Norman/European definition of 'king' is very different to the Gaelic/Irish version, which essentially applied to any powerful potentate.
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They worked pretty well in the opposite direction. Don't forget that the Lordship was at least as powerful as the Kingdom of the Scots.
In military terms, Scotland was not on a par with the Lordship. In terms of the area under it's control,the Lordship was far bigger than the Scotland of the time.
In both cases, it meant the best-protected blood-thirsty thieving bastard around.
The Lords of the Isles were quite able to raid the western seaboard of Scotland. They never however managed to penetrate the heartlands of the realm, whereas the Scottish Crown did on a couple of occasions get to the heart of the Lordship, albeit with some difficulty. In 1411 they did manage to break through to Aberdeenshire, but they were stopped at Harlaw by local levies which hardly suggests that the Lordship was more powerful than the Kingdom of Scots. Indeed the following year the Regent, the Duke of Albany, brought an army into the earldom of Ross, which the Lords of the Isles sought to claim, and forced the then lord to submit to his authority. No Scots king was ever forced to bend the knee to a Lord of the Isles. And in 1475 the King of Scots, James III - by all accounts a weak character - forfeited John of the Isles of the earldom of Ross and made him a Lord of Parliament, which is the lowest rank of the Scottish peerage - would a ruler as powerful as the King of Scots feel obliged to accept such humiliating terms?
What proof do you have for the first assertion? The Lords of the Isles might have been better at hit-and-run warfare but they could be and in the end were ground down by a sustained royal campaign. They had no access to artillery, for example, or heavy cavalry. That's the equivalent of saying that the Viet Cong had greater military capacity than the US - yes the former may have been better able to fight in some forms of terrain than the US Army but it's nonsensical to assert that the United States were not at the very least on a par with the Viet Cong or North Vietnam on military terms.
As for the size of territory, while the Lordship of the Isles was large, even at its greatest extent - including the earldom of Ross in the fifteenth century - it did not come close to matching the size of the Kingdom of Scots. And the earldom of Ross was very firmly within the Kingdom of Scots. In fact the Lords of the Isles sought to integrate themselves into the Scottish nobility during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although eventually without success - they married into the Stewart royal family and sought places on the king's council.
That is an oversimplification. In Gaelic terms a king was anyone with control over a large geographical unit - hence why you had Kings of Man and various parts of Ireland. In European terms kings were only the top rank of sovereign rulers. Hence why England, Scotland, France, Castile and so on had kings which were recognised internationally or at least within Christendom. The claim of the Lord of the Isles to kingship was never recognised outside of the Irish seaboard and was in fact effectively dropped by the middle of the fourteenth century.
What this goes to show is that while the Lords of the Isles were very powerful magnates they were not anything like as powerful as the Kings of Scots - they had neither the wealth, the resources, the manpower or the diplomatic recognition.
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I don't get your point about artillery or heavy cavalry as the Lordship was a maritime power. As far as Vietnam goes the Americans weren't on a par with the Viet Cong. The Americans were far better armed, had far more training, and not the slightest clue how to deal with the VC.
Maybe so, but it's accurate.
Ah but they did. They had better resources and manpower (ever wondered why Council Isle had no defences?), they negotiated on equal terms with the Kings of England and representatives of the "Holy See".
They weren't. Not anymore than the Kings of Scots were vassals of the Kings of England, or the Kings of England were vassals of the Kings of France.