on the resignation of Elizabeth de Moravia. This series of charters probably indicates the settlement of this cadet of the powerful border earl in the northern districts of Scotland, where the family had not hitherto taken root, and was possibly due to the policy which James I in other cases pursued, of separating such families by removing them from the localities where their vicinity to each other made them as a clan more formidable to the crown. In 1437 he was created Earl of Avondale, and a conveyance of the lands of Glenquhar in Peeblesshire to him by William Frisel, lord of Overtoun, in 1439, was confirmed by royal charter on 20 Sept. 1440. The murder of his grandnephew, William, the sixth earl, and his brother David at Edinburgh, at the instigation of Crichton the chancellor, took place in the following month. As he did nothing to avenge it, and immediately succeeded to the title and Douglas estates other than those in Galloway, the conjecture that he may have connived at it, and was at all events on good terms with Crichton the chancellor, who was its chief author, has probability, though it cannot be said to be proved. He held the earldom of Douglas only for three years, and died on 24 March 1443 at Abercorn. The ‘Short Chronicle of the Reign of James II’ states in the rude but pithy vernacular a fact which accounts for his byname of the ‘Fat’ or ‘Gross,’ ‘Thai said he had in him four stane of taulch [tallow] and mair.’ The same physical peculiarity is commemorated in a Latin epigram preserved by Hume of Godscroft:—
Duglasii Crassique mihi cognomina soli
Conveniunt: O quam nomina juncta male!
To be a Douglas and be gross withall
You shall not find another amongst them all.
He was buried at Douglas, where the inscription on his tomb records that besides his own estates he held the office of warden of the marches. He was married to Beatrix Sinclair, daughter of Henry, lord Sinclair, and left by her six, perhaps seven sons, of whom the two eldest, William [q. v.] and James [q. v.], were successively eighth and ninth Earls of Douglas, and Archibald, the third, became Earl of Moray, Hugh, the fourth, Earl of Ormonde, and John, the fifth, Lord of Balvenie.
[Bower's Continuation of Fordun; a Short Chronicle of the Reign of James II; Major, Boece, and Lindsay of Pitscottie's Histories of Scotland; the Charters in favour of this earl in the Registrum Magni Sigilli give important facts in his life; the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, vol. v.; Mr. Burnett's Preface to this volume of the Exchequer Rolls; Fraser's Douglas Book.]
DOUGLAS, JAMES, ninth Earl of Douglas (1426–1488), second son of James, ‘the Gross,’ seventh earl [q. v.], and Beatrix Sinclair, daughter of Henry, earl of Orkney, succeeded to the earldom on the death of his brother William, the eighth earl [q. v.], at Stirling on 22 Feb. 1452. During his brother's life a singular question was raised, whether James Douglas or his brother Archibald, earl of Moray, was the elder twin of the marriage between James ‘the Gross’ and Beatrix Sinclair, daughter of the Earl of Orkney. After an inquiry before the official of Lothian, who took the evidence of their mother, the countess dowager, and other worthy women, the priority of James was declared and ratified by a writ under the great seal on 9 Jan. 1450. The year before Douglas took part in a famous tournament at Stirling between two knights of Flanders, James and Simon de Lalain, and a squire of Burgundy, Hervé de Meriadêc, lord of Longueville. Douglas, twice unhorsed by the squire, who went to help his friends against the other Scottish champions, was on the point of resuming the fight, but the king gave the order to cease fighting. One account of the contest states that some followers of Douglas, who had come to the tournament with three thousand men, had threatened to interfere and turn the duel into a general medley. In the year of jubilee, 1450, Douglas accompanied his brother to Rome, being, according to Pitscottie, ‘a man of singular erudition, and well versed in divine letters, brought up long time in Paris at the schools, and looked for the bishopric of Dunkeld, and thereafter for the earldom of Dunkeld,’ but this account is little consistent with the other facts of his life. Douglas next appears in 1451 as a prominent actor in the intrigues of the family with the English court. According to an obscure and fragmentary passage in the ‘Short Chronicle of James II,’ as soon as he heard of a truce between the two countries being made, ‘he posted till London in-continent and quharfor men wist nocht redlye bot he was thar with the king of Yngland lang tyme and was meekle made of.’ He returned towards the close of this or beginning of the next year, and, after his brother's treacherous assassination, February 1452, put himself at the head of a small force of a hundred men, and with his brother Hugh, earl of Ormonde, and Lord Hamilton, denounced the king as a traitor by a blast of twenty-four horns at Stirling, and dragged in derision the safe-conduct given the late earl at a horse's tail through the streets. Two other powerful members of the Douglas clan, the Earl of Angus and Douglas of Dalkeith, had sided with the king, and James Douglas and his followers
