Clan Douglas · 1440
The Black Dinner
On the twenty-fourth of November 1440, the sixteen-year-old William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the Black Douglas line and the most powerful subject in Scotland, was invited with his younger brother David to dine in the great hall of Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the ten-year-old King James II. The dinner was hosted by William Crichton (the Lord Chancellor) and Sir Alexander Livingston (the Custodian of the Castle and the King's tutor), the two regents who effectively ruled Scotland during the king's minority and who had been alarmed for two years at the rising power of the Douglas earl. By the tradition of the next century, told in the chronicles of John Major and Hector Boece, a black bull's head was brought in on a silver platter as the principal dish, the symbol in fifteenth-century Scotland of imminent execution. The two Douglas brothers were seized at the table, given a hasty trial in the courtyard, and beheaded on the spot. The political effect was immediate: the Black Douglas eclipse, the rise of a new (and deliberately diminished) Douglas line under the eighth Earl. The Black Dinner is the most consistently remembered episode of medieval Scottish political violence, has produced two surviving children's rhymes (one in the eastern Border tradition, one Aberdeenshire), and was deliberately referenced by George R. R. Martin as the structural model for the Red Wedding in *A Storm of Swords*.
It is the late afternoon of the twenty-fourth of November 1440, in the privy chamber off the Great Hall at Edinburgh Castle, in candlelight off the limewashed walls. He is sixteen years old. He is William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the or Black branch of the Douglas line, holder of the lordship of Galloway and a half-dozen other earldoms by inheritance from his father (the fifth Earl, who had died of plague in 1439), at the head of a host of two thousand five hundred men-at-arms whose private musters in the past summer have set the regents at Edinburgh into a state of confidential alarm. He is in his velvet coat with the Douglas heart on the breast, his younger brother David, who is twelve, beside him. His servant Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld is at his elbow.
Across the table, in the half-light, are the two regents who govern Scotland through the minority of the boy-king. William Crichton, Lord High Chancellor, is at the upper end. Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, custodian of the king and his tutor, is at the lower. The boy-king James II, ten years old, with the port-wine birthmark across his face that has been with him since birth and that gave him the by-name the Fiery Face in the next decade, is at the centre.
The dinner has been served politely. There has been wine. There has been a course of fish. The boy-king has, with formal courtesy, asked the elder Douglas if he hunts in the Pentlands.
And then the seneschal at the door says, by Boece's chronicle of 1527 (the literary source) that the next dish is to be brought in. Two servants come down the hall with a great silver platter on which is laid the head of a black bull, the eyes still open, fresh from the slaughter on the upper yard.
He thinks, by the reading of the symbol in the noble households of fifteenth-century Scotland: the bull's head is the death-token. The bull's head means the host is going to kill us at this table.
He thinks: I have my sword at the door. There are six of my men in the courtyard. There are two hundred of Crichton's halberdiers in the close beyond.
He thinks, looking at his younger brother who is twelve: David is twelve.
He thinks: the boy-king is ten. The boy-king is white in the face. The boy-king has not been told.
He stands up at the table. He takes his brother by the elbow. He says, in a voice that is as steady as he can make it: my Lord Chancellor, this is the worst dish I have been served at any table in my life.
Crichton stands. The boy-king begins, by the tradition, to weep at the high seat. The Chancellor says: my Lord Earl of Douglas, I am sorry. The kingdom requires that you be put to trial in the next hour. The boy-king says, by the same tradition: my lord Chancellor, no. The Chancellor takes the king by the shoulder and turns him toward the wall.
The two Douglas brothers were taken from the privy chamber into the upper bailey of the castle within the next quarter-hour, given a brief trial in form before Crichton and Livingston for an unspecified treason, and were beheaded with an axe in the upper bailey before sunset. Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld was beheaded with them. The boy-king was, by every contemporary report, hysterical. The rhyme that grew up in the eastern Borders the next year and that was still being sung in Lothian primary schools in the 1950s ran: Edinburgh Castle, town and tower / God grant thou sink for sin, / and that even for the Black Dinner / Earl Douglas got therein.
The Black Douglas estates passed by Crichton's manipulation to a more pliant cousin, the eighth Earl of Douglas, who would in turn be murdered by the Fiery Face king himself at Stirling Castle in February 1452. The Black Douglas line was extinguished by 1455, when James II personally led an army against the eighth Earl's brother and forfeited the entire palatinate of Galloway and the earldom of Douglas to the Crown. The Red Douglas line, the cadet earls of Angus, survived; the Douglas dukedom in the present is the Duke of Hamilton (descended from the Red branch through marriage). Edinburgh Castle still holds, by the tradition of the warders, that the bull's-head dish in the silver platter was set up as a centrepiece on a flat granite slab at the head of the Great Hall on the night of the twenty-fourth of November 1440. The slab is still in the floor, six feet inside the eastern door, with a bronze plaque set into it. The plaque says nothing. The warders explain.