_The Lady of the Lake_ deals with a distinct epoch in the life of King
James V of Scotland, and has lying back of it a considerable amount of
historical fact, an understanding of which will help in the appreciation
of the poem. During his minority the King was under the tutelage of
Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, who had married the King's
mother. The young monarch chafed for a long time under this authority,
but the Douglases were so powerful that he was unable to shake it off,
in spite of several desperate attempts on the part of his sympathizers
to rescue him. In 1528 the King, then sixteen years of age, escaped from
his own castle of Falkland to Stirling Castle. The governor of Stirling,
an enemy of the Douglas family, received him joyfully. There soon
gathered about his standard a sufficient number of powerful peers to
enable him to depose the Earl of Angus from the regency and to banish
him and all his family to England. The Douglas who figures in the poem
is an imaginary uncle of the banished regent, and himself under the ban,
compelled to hide away in the shelter provided for him by Roderick Dhu
on the lonely island in Loch Katrine. He is represented as having been
loved and trusted by King James during the boyhood of the latter, before
the enmity sprang up between the house of Angus and the throne. This
enmity, to quote from the _History of the House of Douglas_, published
at Edinburgh in 1743, "was so inveterate, that numerous as their allies
were, their nearest friends, even in the most remote parts of Scotland,
durst not entertain them, unless under the strictest and closest
disguise."
The outlawed border chieftain, Roderick Dhu, who gives shelter to the
persecuted Douglas, is a fictitious character, but one entirely typical
of the time and place. The expedition undertaken by the young King
against the Border clans, under the guise of a hunting party, is in
part, at least, historic. Pitscottie's History says: "In 1529 James V
made a convention at Edinburgh for the purpose of considering the best
mode of quelling the Border robbers, who, during the license of his
minority and the troubles which followed, had committed many
exorbitances. Accordingly, he assembled a flying army of ten thousand
men, consisting of his principal nobility and their followers, who were
directed to bring their hawks and dogs with them, that the monarch might
refresh himself with sport during the intervals of military execution.
With this array he swept through Ettrick forest, where he hanged over
the gate of his own castle Piers Cockburn of Henderland, who had
prepared, according to tradition, a feast for his reception."