The Black Dinner

A great house is rarely undone in open battle. More often it is undone at a table, by men smaller than itself, who have calculated that a knife between courses costs less than an army in the field. The Black Douglas, for two generations the largest private power in Scotland, was extinguished in the time it takes to carry a covered platter the length of a hall.

THE HOUSE AT ITS HEIGHT

William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, was sixteen years old in the autumn of 1440 and held more of Scotland in his own hand than the Crown did. The earldom had come to him the year before, when his father the fifth Earl died of plague at Restalrig; with it came Galloway, Annandale, Lauderdale, Bothwell, Selkirk, Eskdale, Wigtown, and a private muster of two thousand five hundred lances that had ridden out that summer in livery of the bloody heart. The boy-king James II was ten, marked since birth with the port-wine stain that would earn him the by-name the Fiery Face. Between them stood two men who had made themselves the kingdom: William Crichton, Lord High Chancellor, keeper of Edinburgh Castle; and Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, custodian of the king's person. They had watched the summer muster and counted lances, and they had drawn their conclusion.

THE INVITATION

The letter went out in the first week of November under the king's own seal, in the king's own hand so far as the boy could form the letters. It was an invitation to dine in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle on the twenty-fourth, in the king's presence, with his younger brother David, who was twelve. The Douglas household at Threave read it for traps and found none. To refuse a summons under the royal seal was itself a treason. To accept with a full retinue was to insult the host. The earl rode in with his brother, his man Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, and a small honour-guard who were quartered, on arrival, in the lower town.

THE PRIVY CHAMBER, CANDLELIGHT

It is the late afternoon of the twenty-fourth of November 1440. The light has gone off the limewash by four. Candles are lit along the trestle in the privy chamber off the Great Hall. There has been a course of fish, dressed in the French manner. There has been wine of Bordeaux, which has come up the Forth that month under licence. The boy-king sits at the centre with his small hands flat on the cloth; he has asked the elder Douglas, with formal courtesy, whether he hunts in the Pentlands. The earl has answered that he does, and that the stags this year are heavy. Crichton sits at the upper end of the table, Livingston at the lower. David Douglas, twelve, eats slowly and watches his brother for the rhythm of when to lift his cup.

THE BLACK BULL'S HEAD

The seneschal at the door makes the small bow that announces the next dish. Two servants come down the hall carrying between them a great silver charger. On the charger is the head of a black bull, the eyes still open, the tongue still pink, the cut at the neck fresh enough that the salver beneath it has begun to pool. They set it down at the upper end of the table, in front of the earl. In the noble households of fifteenth-century Scotland the bull's head was not a course. It was a sign, recorded by Hector Boece in 1527 and by John Major before him, and every man at that table knew what it meant. The host was going to kill the principal guest before he rose. The bull's head means the host has already decided. He looks at the boy-king, who has gone white to the hairline and is staring at the platter as if it has spoken. He looks at his brother. David is twelve. David is twelve, and the small private arithmetic of a head of a house is that David does not ride out of this castle. He looks at his sword, which is with the porter at the outer door, twenty paces and a guarded passage away. He counts the halberdiers he passed in the close: he makes them two hundred. He has six men in the lower town. The arithmetic closes. There is no version of the next quarter-hour that ends with two Douglases on horses going down the High Street. There is only the version in which a sixteen-year-old earl stands up at a table with the dignity of his house intact, and the version in which he is dragged from his chair. He stands. He takes his brother by the elbow. He says, by the tradition that Boece set down eighty-seven years later, that this is the worst dish that ever was served at any table. Crichton stands also. The boy-king begins to weep at the high seat and says, by the same tradition, my lord Chancellor, no, my lord Chancellor, no. The Chancellor takes the king by the shoulder and turns him toward the wall, so that the child shall not see what the kingdom has decided to do in his name.

THE UPPER BAILEY

They were taken from the privy chamber into the upper bailey within the quarter-hour. A trial in form was held: an indictment of treason was read out, unspecified as to act, before Crichton and Livingston sitting as judges in their own cause. No plea was recorded. The earl asked, by the chronicle, only that his brother be spared on grounds of his age, and was refused. The axe was set on a block of pine brought up from the wood-store. William Douglas was beheaded first, by his own request, so that the younger boy should not have to watch his brother taken from him a second time. David Douglas was beheaded after. Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, who had ridden in at the earl's elbow, was held over until the third day and beheaded then, on the same block, in the same bailey. The bodies were given back to the Douglas household for burial at St Bride's, Douglas, where the tombs are still visible behind the choir screen.

THE KING IN THE CORNER

The boy-king was, by every contemporary report, hysterical. He was ten. He had signed the letter. He understood, by the end of that night, what a seal on a piece of vellum was capable of doing in another man's hand. Twelve years later, on the twenty-second of February 1452, in a privy chamber at Stirling Castle, James II would put a dagger into the throat of the eighth Earl of Douglas with his own hand, and would throw the body out of the window into the garden below. The men who watched him do it said that he did not look surprised at himself. He had been taught at sixteen what the table could do; he had been the child weeping at the high seat; he had grown up into the man who held the knife. The Crichton-Livingston regency was finished within five years. Crichton kept his chancellorship into the next reign; Livingston was attainted in 1450 and his son hanged. The kingdom remembered who had set the platter down.

THE LONG ECHO

The Black Douglas estates passed by Crichton's arrangement to a more pliant cousin, the eighth Earl, whom James II would in turn murder at Stirling. The line was extinguished by 1455, when the Crown took Galloway and the earldom into its own hand. The Red Douglas, the cadet earls of Angus, survived and carried the name forward; the present dukedom is the Duke of Hamilton, descended from the Red branch by marriage. Two children's rhymes outlived the house. One was sung in the eastern Borders into the 1950s: Edinburgh Castle, town and tower, God grant thou sink for sin, and that even for the Black Dinner Earl Douglas got therein. The other, in Aberdeenshire, was shorter and crueller and named no one. In 1996, in the writing of A Storm of Swords, an American novelist took the structure of the evening, the table, the host's promise of safety, the boy at the centre, the slaughter between courses, and gave it back to the world under another name. He has said, in interviews, that he took it from the Black Dinner. The reader of Westeros does not, for the most part, know where the shape was first cut.

A great house is rarely undone in open battle. The Black Douglas was undone in a privy chamber, in candlelight, in the time between the fish course and what should have been the meat, by the carriage of a covered platter the length of a hall. Edinburgh Castle still holds, by the tradition of the warders, that the bull's-head dish was set down at the head of the Great Hall on a flat granite slab. The slab is still in the floor, six feet inside the eastern door of the hall, with a small bronze plaque set into it. The plaque says nothing. The warders explain.