Templars and Hospitallers: the military-religious orders in Scotland, 1128-1564
Scotland is often overlooked in the story of Europe’s medieval military-religious orders. But after forging the first links in the early 12th century, the orders played a notable role in Scottish history for upwards of 400 years. Dr Rory MacLellan explain
Aletter of Andrew Forman, archbishop of St Andrews from 1514 to 1521, addresses the case of a rash layman:
N., lay reader of our diocese, has shown by his petition that he has incautiously and frivolously sworn a certain vow, which was made in the presence of many people, of going abroad to the house of Saint John of Jerusalem at Rhodes in support of the Holy Land and in the aid and defence of those Christians fighting for God in that place.
‘N’ had vowed to join the Knights Hospitaller, an order of soldiermonks then based on Rhodes and fighting a naval war against the Ottomans. On account of ‘N’s’ poverty and old age, Forman released him from his vow in return for alms, prayer and fasting. The archbishop’s letter survives in the St Andrews Formulare. Scribes and notaries copied documents into these formularies to serve as models should they ever need to write such a document themselves. That a scribe chose to copy this letter suggests it was not so uncommon for men to pledge to join the Hospitallers in early 16th-century Scotland, or to want a way out of their vow. In fact, since the 12th century, Scotland had been home to outposts of military-religious orders like the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar, and many Scots had joined their ranks.
The military orders originated in the Levant after the First
Crusade. The crusader states of Palestine and Syria that emerged following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 suffered from a chronic shortage of manpower. Many of the crusaders quickly returned home and there were not enough troops to defend these new territories and guard the pilgrimage routes from bandits. This need for soldiers, coupled with the new doctrine of holy violence that the crusade had brought, allowed for the creation of military orders, men who swore vows of poverty, chastity and obedience like monks, but also fought like knights.
The Templars were the first of these orders, founded primarily to guard the pilgrim routes by Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de SaintOmer in 1120. The Hospitallers had begun their history as a hospital in Jerusalem that had been founded by merchants from the Italian city of Amalfi in the 1070s. The brethren initially only cared for pilgrims but by the 1130s had also taken on a military
The Templars acquired their first Scottish preceptory at Balantrodoch, now Temple in Midlothian, by the late 12th century
role. The Order of St Lazarus developed out of a leper hospital outside Jerusalem’s walls. The earliest documentary evidence for the Lazarites is from the 1130s, but a patent roll of Edward III in 1347 says they were part of the ‘first army against the Saracens’, suggesting they were formed shortly after the First Crusade. The Hospital of St Thomas of Acre, founded around the time of the Third Crusade and militarised by the 1230s, was the only English military order.
These foundations soon spread to Europe, receiving donations of lands and property and establishing farming estates called preceptories to fund their campaigns in the East. Many
other orders were created, such as the Knights of Santiago in Spain and the Teutonic Order in Germany and the Baltic, but it was these four, the Templars, Hospitallers, Lazarites and the Order of St Thomas, that settled in Scotland. Their Scottish history is a microcosm of the experience of the military orders in the West. Like elsewhere in Europe, in Scotland the brethren were introduced by kings and nobles, drawn into political service, fought in secular wars, and were eventually disrupted by the reformation. Last subject to detailed study over 30 years ago, this article offers a new history of the military orders in Scotland from the 12th to 16th centuries, and their role in Scottish war and politics.
Arrival of the orders in Scotland
The military orders first reached Scotland in the reign of David I, who became a major patron of the orders. In 1128, according to the Peterborough Chronicle, Hugh de Payens, founder and master of the Templars, travelled to England and then Scotland as part of a recruiting tour of western Europe. No details of this visit survive, but it is likely that he met with the king, who, according to Ailred of Rievaulx, later retained Templar brethren at his court as ‘guardians of his morals’. David also awarded the brethren a charter of liberties. The Templars acquired their first Scottish preceptory at Balantrodoch, now Temple in Midlothian, by the late 12th century.Though this foundation has often been attributed to William the Lion or David I, no evidence exists to identify the donor of Balantrodoch. Walter Bisset, lord of Aboyne, established a second preceptory at Culter, now Maryculter in Aberdeenshire, by 1239. The Templars also acquired lands elsewhere, including in Glasgow and Lanarkshire. By the late 13th century, a tradition had arisen that saw the Templars serve the kings of Scots as almoner, the royal official responsible for distributing charity to the poor.
According to John Stillingflete, an English Hospitaller writing in the early 15th century, the Hospitallers were first settled in Scotland by David I, who gave them the site which became Torphichen Preceptory in West Lothian. Later, David’s grandson Malcolm IV gave the order a house in every burgh. The Lazarites were probably also settled in Scotland by David I. Their largest Scottish estate was St Giles’ church in Edinburgh, which they held by at least 1181. No record survives of how or when the Order of St Thomas reached Scotland. A single medieval charter records that the brethren had a hospital in Ayrshire, southwest of Kilmarnock, probably near the modern site of Spittalhill Farm.
Each order quickly set about expanding their holdings, winning donations throughout Scotland. The Lazarites had lands in Fife, Elgin, Dunbar, Linlithgow and Edinburgh. The Hospitallers and Templars had property everywhere except the islands and highlands. Unlike the monastic orders, the military orders in the West were not concerned primarily with prayer, but fundraising and recruitment. Their preceptories in Europe were required to send a third of their income to the Levant to support their order’s charitable works and participation in the crusades.
All four of the military orders in Scotland were subordinate to a regional leadership in England and most of their brethren appear to have hailed from there as well. The two Templars put on trial in 1309 both testified that they were from England and it is only from the 14th century that Hospitallers with identifiably Scottish names like Lindsay, Fordoun and Seton, appear. No names of the brethren
Unlike the monastic orders, the military orders in the West were not concerned primarily with prayer, but fundraising and recruitment
of the Order of St Thomas in Scotland survive, nor do any for the Order of St Lazarus before 1349. This subordination to English chapters would then cause significant problems for the military orders when war broke out between England and Scotland at the end of the 13th century.
The military orders in war and politics
Though originally founded to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land and to fight nonChristians, the brethren of the military orders in the West often found themselves participating in wars between Christians.
The Hospitaller prior of France died fighting the English at Crécy in 1346; the order’s priors of Ireland regularly led English expeditions against the Gaelic Irish in the 14th century. In Scotland, the military orders’ earliest appearance on the battlefield was in the First War of Independence. When Edward I invaded Scotland to depose John Balliol in 1296, his army included Odo de Nevet, commander of the Hospitallers in north Wales. When war broke out again the following year with the uprisings of William Wallace and Andrew Murray, the military orders were once more drawn into the conflict. In 1298, Wallace occupied Torphichen, holding a parliament there. The master of the English Templars, Brian le Jay, was among the English knights killed at the battle of Falkirk that year, as was John le Sautre, master of the Scottish Templars, and Alexander de Welles, master of the Scottish Hospitallers.
The Hospitallers continued to support the English after this date as, in 1304/5, their brethren at Torphichen wrote to Edward I asking that they could seek shelter in Linlithgow Castle should the
preceptory be attacked by the Scots. There is no record of the Lazarites or the Order of St Thomas participating in the war, but both likely supported the English. The Lazarite preceptor responsible for their Scottish lands, William Corbet, preceptor of Harehope in Northumberland, pledged fealty to Edward on the Ragman Roll (1296). For all that the military orders were supposed to be free from any authority but the Pope’s, their branches in the West were still bound by secular rulers. Their officials in Europe were both representatives of a military order and feudal lords of their respective kingdom and so were bound to offer some military service to the local ruler.
The Hospitallers after Bannockburn
By 1314, the Hospitallers and the Order of St Lazarus were the only two military orders still active in Scotland. In 1307, the Knights Templar in France had been arrested by the French king Philip IV, supposedly on charges of heresy. Further arrests followed throughout Europe, with two brethren, Walter of Clifton and William of Middleton, being put on trial at Holyrood Abbey by the English administration of Scotland in 1309.The trial was adjourned because of the war with the Scots.
In 1312, Pope Clement V suppressed the Templars. Though he did not deem them guilty of heresy, he declared that the damage to the order’s reputation was too great for it to continue to exist. Those brethren who had survived the imprisonment, torture and burnings of the
previous five years were sent to live in other monasteries. There is no surviving record of Walter of Clifton’s fate, but William of Middleton was eventually sent to live in the Cistercian monastery of Roche in Yorkshire. Despite what many popular histories claim, there is no evidence of the order’s survival after 1312. The Temple’s former lands were assigned to the Hospitallers. It is unknown how successful the transfer was in Scotland, but the Hospitallers did acquire what seems to have been most of the major Templar estates, including Balantrodoch and Maryculter.
The Order of St Thomas does not reappear in the record after its single appearance in the 13th century, though as late as the 14th century their leaders in London were still proclaiming themselves the masters of ‘the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland’. Most likely, the Hospital of St Thomas had, like the Templars and Hospitallers, backed Edward I and so had been expelled from Scotland by Robert I.
Though the Hospitallers’ survived their choice to support England, there were still consequences for the order. In 1314, Robert I confirmed their rights and properties in Scotland as they had them in the reign of Alexander III, rehabilitating the order in an attempt to restore the pre-Wars of Independence status quo. From 1314 to 1388, the Hospitaller preceptory of Torphichen was controlled almost exclusively by Scots, many of whom had ties to the royal court. The three preceptors in this period included Ralph Lindsay (c.1304-18), Alexander Seton (1345-46) and Thomas Lindsay (1351-57). The two Lindsays may have been related to the Lindsays of Barnwell and Crawford, a family of Bruce loyalists, whilst Seton had fought on the Scottish side at Bannockburn, was steward to Robert I from 1317 and to David II from 1328, and was a signatory to the Declaration of Arbroath.
There were also several laymen who gained custody of the preceptory and were referred to as guardians of Torphichen. These were Reginald More (c.132225), his son William (c.1335-45), David de Mar (c.1357-86), Robert Erskine (1374-82), Robert Mercer (1374-79), lord of Innerpeffray, Robert Grant (1379-83), who held only Maryculter, and Thomas Erskine (1386-87). These men also had ties to the royal court. Reginald More was Robert I’s justiciar of Lothian and was David II’s chamberlain until 1341. David de Mar and Robert Erskine were both close to David II: the former presided over his divorce in 1369 whilst the latter was his chamberlain and ambassador. Robert’s son Thomas Erskine was also a royal servant. He was probably entrusted with the keepership of Edinburgh Castle by David II and he also received a pension from the earl of Carrick for his services to Carrick and his father, Robert II.
Robert Grant acted as ambassador for both Robert
II and Robert III, serving in embassies to France in 1389 and 1391, for which he was awarded a pension from the great customs of Edinburgh. Robert Mercer was a member of Robert II’s household and the king lobbied for his candidacy to manage Torphichen. In 1373/4, Pope Gregory XI wrote to the Hospitaller grandmaster asking that Mercer take charge of the preceptory.The Pope said that this was on the petition of Charles V of France, himself
Despite what many popular histories claim, there is no evidence of the order’s survival after 1312
acting for Robert II of Scotland. This sudden and almost complete turn towards Scottish masters of Torphichen was likely a condition of Robert I’s pardon of the Hospitallers.
At first sight, it may seem that these laymen were most interested in the money they could raise from Torphichen’s estates, rather than helping the Hospitallers by sending their dues to the order’s then headquarters of Rhodes. A summary of Torphichen’s accounts from 1379-84 lists no payments to Rhodes in 1379, 1381, 1383 or 1384. When Alexander Seton became preceptor in 1345, he complained to the bishop of St Andrews that William and Reginald More had failed to pay anything to Rhodes for over eight years. Their reluctance to do so was probably down to a lack of incentive. A Hospitaller preceptor could best achieve promotion by expanding a preceptory’s estates and sending their dues to the East, but these guardians were not themselves Hospitallers and so likely used most of the preceptory’s income for their own ends, hence their failure to regularly send funds to Rhodes. The income of the Hospitallers’ estates was clearly of some value to these laymen as they repeatedly fought with each other for control. In 1379 Robert Mercer complained that he was unable to pay his dues to Rhodes because David de Mar and Robert Erskine were occupying some of the order’s estates.
However, the careers and connections of these men suggest that their interest in Torphichen went beyond mere financial gain. The Hospitallers’ ties to the crusade and chivalric culture also played a role. Four of these seven men were crusaders themselves. David de Mar joined the Alexandrian Crusade in 1365 and Robert Erskine crusaded in
Prussia in 1389. Erskine’s son, Nicholas, also went to Alexandria. Thomas Erskine was not only the son and brother of crusaders, but he also crusaded alongside his father in 1389. One of the earlier guardians, Reginald More, may have gone on crusade. In 1320, he and a James of Cunningham were given safe conduct by Edward II for passing through England as they went abroad on a ‘pilgrimage’.
A man variously described as Ranulph or Ranekyn More, perhaps the same man as Reginald More, was travelling ‘overseas’ again in 1340, with a retinue of 40 men. The destination of each journey is unknown, but going on ‘pilgrimage’ and going ‘overseas’ were common euphemisms for crusading and 40 men would be a sufficient contribution for one captain to a 14th-century crusade expedition. Reginald’s son, William, also managed Torphichen and while there is no record of his participation in crusading, his father may have been a crusader and he himself was an associate of Robert Erskine, agreeing an indenture with in 1363. Robert Mercer does not appear to have crusaded, but did participate in tournaments, another aspect of chivalric culture.
A licence of 1381 gave permission for the Lord Lyon to take a suit of armour from London to Scotland in order to outfit Mercer for his fight in the lists against John Gille. Robert Grant also took part in chivalric combats. In 1380 he was given safe conduct by Richard II to visit Lilliot Cross in Roxburghshire where he would fight a duel with Thomas de la Strother. Whilst some guardians did fail to pay their dues to Rhodes, others tried to honour their debts. In 1383 Robert Grant was pursuing David de Mar for money owed to the order. The ties of this chivalric network with Torphichen shows that these lay guardians were not just armchair crusaders.Whilst financial interest may have played a role in these laymen taking on Torphichen, enthusiasm for the crusade waged by the Hospitallers and the prestige of association with the oldest and largest crusading order were also major motives.
Expulsion of the Lazarites
Whilst the Hospitallers were rehabilitated after the First War of Independence, the Order of St Lazarus was not so lucky. Sometime between 1340 and 1346, David II expelled the Lazarites on suspicion of being English agents. The king had only returned from exile in France in 1340 and had immediately set about raiding England, a campaign which ended with his capture at Neville’s Cross in 1346. Expelling the Lazarites was an easy way to demonstrate opposition to the English and confiscate potentially valuable property, like St Giles’ church. The Scottish Hospitallers, answerable to a regional leadership in London, escaped such treatment as until 1345 Torphichen was controlled by William More, son of David II’s chamberlain, and from 1345 to 1346, Alexander Seton was preceptor. He was a war hero who had fought at Bannockburn and signed the Declaration of Arbroath. The lack of these royal ties was what left the Lazarites vulnerable. It was probably because of this expulsion that a Scottish Lazarite, Robert Halliday, arrived at the order’s English headquarters of Burton Lazars in 1349, with letters from the grandmaster appointing him to take command there. He is the only Scot known to have led a military order in the British Isles.
The Hospitallers in Scottish politics
Brethren of the military orders, like the abbots and priors of the non-military religious orders, were often used as administrators or diplomats for Europe’s rulers.
In England and Ireland, the Hospitallers had served the English crown since the late 13th century, yet in Scotland the military orders were much less prominent royal servants. There is no surviving evidence of the Lazarites or Order of St Thomas holding royal offices or performing duties for the Scottish crown. The Templars did have a traditional role as royal almoners, but this was only a minor position compared to the offices of their brethren elsewhere in Europe.
Only the Scottish Hospitallers enjoyed a significant career in government, and this was largely due to one preceptor, William Knollis (1466-1510). Before 1466 the preceptors of Torphichen were almost non-entities, rarely appearing in royal records. From 1306 to 1466, Hospitaller brethren were recorded only twice in the register of the great seal, once as a beneficiary of a grant of Robert I and then as a witness to a grant of James I. In this time the brethren held no royal offices or seat in parliament, and seemingly performed no royal duties. In contrast, the Hospitaller priors of England and of Ireland had maintained a prominent political role from the late 13th century, holding high offices like chancellor of Ireland or treasurer of England, and regularly sat in parliament. This late development was probably due to the fallout of the Wars of Independence, which likely eroded royal trust in the Hospitallers.
This changed under Preceptor William Knollis. Knollis came from an Aberdeenshire merchant family. He may have had family ties with England as his coat of arms recorded in the Lindsay Armorial is very similar to that of Thomas Knollys, mayor of London in 1399 and 1410. It is unknown when Knollis joined the order, but he was on Rhodes by 1466, when he complained to the Hospitaller grandmaster that Torphichen was without a preceptor since Henry Livingston had died three years before. Since then, the preceptory had been controlled by Brother Patrick
Scougal, whom Knollis accused of mismanagement.
Knollis was awarded the preceptorship, despite not having fulfilled the requisite three years of service at Rhodes. It is possible that Knollis was a royal candidate for the preceptory, explaining how he was promoted to Torphichen without having completed his tour on Rhodes, but there is no evidence of Knollis having any contact with the Scottish crown before becoming preceptor. The new preceptor soon began building a political career. He was appointed treasurer of Scotland for James III in 1469, but lost the post in late 1470. He also began appearing in parliament from 1471 and sat on committees drafting legislation and hearing appeals. In 1483 he was assigned to audit the royal accounts, but it was under James IV that his career reached its height.
Knollis seems to have either remained neutral or sided with the rebels in the rebellion which overthrew James III in 1488 and placed his son upon the throne. The king had sent the preceptor a letter granting respite for all misdeeds and penalties for nineteen years for him and his kin and servants if he offered his support. Knollis appears to have ignored this plea and, just four days after James III’s death after the battle of Sauchieburn in June 1488, the new regime ruling on behalf of James IV made him treasurer of Scotland again, a post he held until 1492. The preceptor was also appointed sheriff of Linlithgow, keeper of Blackness Castle, and chamberlain of Linlithgowshire. By September 1489 he had been created Lord St John, guaranteeing himself and future preceptors a seat in parliament. In 1491 he was master of the royal household. Knollis also seems to have developed a personal relationship with the king, gambling with him when he visited Torphichen in 1490. This career largely ended when the earl of Angus seized power in 1492 to 1493 and Knollis lost most of his offices, though he remained chamberlain of Linlithgowshire until at least 1495 and continued to sit in parliament.
William Knollis died in 1510 after serving 44 years as preceptor. His successors never achieved the same prominence. The next preceptor, George Dundas, was barred from the preceptory until 1518 due to a dispute that began with James IV trying to enforce his own candidate as preceptor, his secretary Patrick Paniter. After securing Torphichen, Dundas continued to hold the order’s seat in parliament but had no major royal offices or duties. His successor, Walter Lindsay, who was preceptor from 1532, led Scottish troops against the English in the 1540s during the ‘Rough Wooing’.
His cousin, David Lindsay, Lyon King of Arms, mentioned the preceptor in his ballad the Testament of Squire Meldrum, in which the dying man chooses Walter Lindsay as an executor to his will, describing him as ‘by sea and land a valiant Captain.’ James Sandilands, the last preceptor, was one of the lords supporting the removal of James Hamilton as regent for Mary, Queen of Scots in 1554 and later participated in the 1559-1560 overthrow of Mary of Guise’s regency, but he still held no major royal offices as Knollis had.
Decline and fall
By the 16th century, the military orders were declining in Britain and Ireland. Crusading participation had fallen in the 15th century. In the 1300s the Baltic was a popular destination for Scottish crusaders to join the Teutonic Knights on their raids into the territory of pagan Lithuania, but the defeat of the Teutonic order by a combined Polish-Lithuanian army at Tannenburg in 1410 brought this to an end. In the West, Moorish Spain had been conquered, ending another crusade front. James IV had entertained crusade plans and even had ships built for this purpose, but these schemes ended with his death at Flodden in 1513.
The military orders, so tied to
the crusade, also began to falter. In Scotland, new Hospitallers were still being recruited, as shown by Archbishop Forman’s letter regarding ‘N’s’ vow in the St Andrews Formulare, but Torphichen’s lands were coming under attack. In 1533, the grandmaster and council on Rhodes authorised Walter Lindsay to sell off lands too remote from Torphichen, as too much Christian blood had been shed by the order’s attempts to retain control of them by force. The Scottish reformation hastened this decline.
In Scotland from 1559 to 1560, an uprising led by Protestant nobles calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation deposed the queen mother and regent, Mary of Guise, and instituted a Protestant system. By this time, the Hospitallers at Torphichen were the last outpost of any military order left in the British Isles. The order in England, Wales and Ireland had been dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540. The Order of St Lazarus had long ago been expelled from Scotland and was suppressed in England in 1544. The Hospital of St Thomas was also a casualty of the English reformation.
A few English Hospitallers remained on Malta, where the order had been based since 1530, after losing Rhodes to the
Ottomans in 1522, but Scotland was the last branch of what had been known as the Priory of England, the order’s lands in England, Wales and Scotland. The last preceptor of Torphichen was James Sandilands, who succeeded to the post in 1547 on the death of Preceptor Walter Lindsay. A second son of a Protestant family, Sandilands had joined the order by 1540. His brother, also called John, was an ally of George Wishart and John Knox stayed at the Sandilands family home of Calder House upon his return to Scotland in 1555. By the late 1550s, the preceptor’s Protestant sympathies were public. In 1559 he married Janet Murray, breaking the vow of celibacy he had sworn upon becoming a Hospitaller. That same year Sandilands was one of the Lords of the Congregation which overthrew Mary of Guise’s Catholic regime and instituted a Protestant one. The preceptor himself fought against her troops in the battle of Cupar Muir in June 1559. In January 1564, Sandilands sold the order’s lands to Mary, Queen of Scots in return for cash, a pension and keeping Torphichen for himself.This ended the Hospitallers’ fourcentury-long history in Scotland.
Yet 1564 was not Sandilands’ first attempt to leave his order and take Torphichen with him.
The preceptor first tried to break with the Hospitallers four years earlier. One of the acts passed by the reformation parliament of 1560 ordered that the preceptor ‘should have his lordship heritably and have no more to do with the pope’. Considering Sandilands’ marriage and evident Protestant sympathies, this act presumably reflected his own wishes.
The preceptor was appointed to go to France to secure Queen Mary and her husband King Francis’ agreement to parliament’s legislation, but he failed to persuade them. Mary was hostile to the preceptor, saying that
‘I do not take him for Great Prior, for he is married’. The news of Sandilands’ attempt to seize Torphichen from the order must have reached Malta soon after. A record of the acts of the reformation parliament was sent to Spain and another copy was preserved in a manuscript at the Scots College in Paris.
Considering the close ties that France and Spain had with the Hospitallers in this period, in addition to Sandilands’ public demonstrations of Protestant leanings through his marriage and participation in the overthrow of a Catholic regime, it is very unlikely that the Hospitaller leadership on Malta was unaware of this renegade preceptor. The lack of reaction to not only Sandilands’ marriage but, worse, his membership of the Lords of the Congregation and his attempt to steal the order’s entire Scottish estate, suggests that by 1560 Scotland was seen as a lost cause.
By 1560, the order had lost most of its properties in northern Europe.Their lands in Scandinavia had been lost in the Reformation, their English, Welsh and Irish holdings had been suppressed by Henry VIII and then briefly resurrected under Mary before being suppressed again by Elizabeth. In the Mediterranean, the Turks raided Malta in 1551 and in 1560 the Barbary corsairs had caused such destruction that Spain and the order attacked Tunisia in response,
a campaign which ended in the loss of the Christian fleet. A rogue preceptor in Scotland was just one of many issues pressing the Hospitallers, who found themselves either unwilling or unable to replace Sandilands and enforce a new preceptor upon Torphichen.
At least one more Scot was still on Malta in the early 1560s, John James Sandilands, a relative of the preceptor who repeatedly got into fights with his brethren. In May 1557 he brawled with Preceptor James Sandilands and in November 1558 he fought with a brother Elias de Cugnac over a game of cards and was wounded in the hand and ear. In September 1563 he was imprisoned for two months for fighting in a church with a Brother John da Pozzi in an argument over a slave and later that month he was expelled from the order for insulting Brother Oliver Starkey, a senior English Hospitaller. In July the following year he stole from a church and was executed. The Latin inscription he carved into his prison wall in September 1563 still survives:
Only two more Scottish Hospitallers are known. The first was James Irving. He left Scotland in the late 1560s and went to Malta to join the Hospitallers. He then left Malta in 1569 to return home and in 1572 went to Rome and then France, offering to act as a papal spy in Scotland. He was probably betrayed by English agents at the French court as he was captured and tortured upon landing in Scotland. He was released after a year of imprisonment but kept under watch. In 1612, William Lithgow, a pilgrim from Lanark, laid over on Malta on his return from the Levant, and there he encountered a fellow Scot, William Douglas, who had fought for the
Hospitallers in their naval war against the Turks, eventually being admitted to the order himself.
The military orders were part of Scotland’s history for a little over four centuries. In that time they acquired property all over the south and east of the country, participated in disputes and wars, and, in the case of the Hospitallers, eventually took on a prominent role in royal government.This experience broadly mirrors the history of the orders in Europe. Like elsewhere in Protestant northern Europe, the orders where then decimated by the reformation, but, as the examples of James Irving and William Douglas show, the fervour expressed by Archbishop Forman’s ‘N’ in pledging to join the Hospitallers, though short-lived in the lay reader’s case, did not die out with the Scottish reformation. More than 50 years after the reformation parliament, there were still Scots pledging themselves to join the military orders.
Rory MacLellan is a historian of the military orders and late medieval Britain and Ireland. He is a postdoctoral researcher at Historic Royal Palaces researching Jewish prisoners at the Tower of London. His book ‘Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400’ is out now with Routledge.