My Books
The Afterlife of King James IV, Otherworld Legends of The Scottish King
Chronos Books, 2019.
My first book explores the fascinating legends and folklore surrounding the Scottish king James IV, who reigned from 1488 until his untimely demise fighting the English at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. An exceptionally accomplished king, his personality, ability and intelligence afforded a popularity which contrasted hugely with other monarchs.
Beloved by his subjects, he led a huge army to a crushing defeat in which thousands of Scots were lost, and personally led his men into battle. The scale of that defeat and the fact that ,many could not credit he had been lost, led to stories that he had somehow escaped that mortal fate. One story said he had been kidnapped, and later killed, by a rebel Scottish noble. Another tale had him setting out as an incognito pilgrim to the Holy Land, and a more elusive, wilder tradition states that he was kidnapped as a punishment for deliving too deeply into forbidden knowledge and remains trapped forever in Fairyland.
Áedán of the Gaels: King of the Scots
Pen & Sword Military, 2022.
Áedán mac Gabráin, 6th century king of Dál Riata in Scotland and Ireland, was one of the most enegmatic rulers of the Early Medieval period in the British Isles. Already a hardened middle-aged warrior when he ascended to power in the fragile Irish settler lands of what later became Scotland, he had to combat rival septs in his own realm, as well as contend with the ferocious rival dynasties of the Britons, Picts and later the Northumbrian England.
His geographical reach and success in battle are almost without comparison in the insular Dark Ages and yet we know very little about the man himself beyond a skeletal few surviving entries in annals and other sources. Yet he was known to all his rival nations and was the most conspicuous Irish figure in early Welsh history.
Áedán’s success was due, in no small measure, to his strategic alliance with the powerhouse cleric Colum Cille (St Columba), was established a monastery on the Scottish island of Iona.
James I, The King Who United Scotland and England
Pen & Sword History, 2023.
Scotland’s King James VI, who became James I of England after the death of Elizabeth I, has polarised opinion ever since he began to rule. To some a hopeless, arrogant though well-educated pedant, to others he was a keen political strategist who learned much from the deadly machinations of the Scottish kingdom, combatting not only his violently ambitious nobility but also managing the reformed Scottisj kirk which did not see itself as secondary to the monarchy.
This book attemptes to see the man behind the distorting machinery of kingship, focussing on the struggles of his childhood when he was tutored by the fearsome demagogue George Buchanan, to the Scottish crises of being targeting by a witchcraft plot and nearly losing his life in the Gowrie Conspiracy.
The man of the throne, as weak as he was, constantly craved human affection, which he found in a succession of male favourites whom he elevated to high positions within his realms, sometimes to positions which endangered the whole structure of his rule.
The Last Jacobites: Heroes, History and Culture After the Battle of Culloden
Pen & Sword History, 2024.
For most people the history of the Jacobites and the aspirations of the deposed Stuart dynasty died at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. But the direct line of the royal Stuarts lingered into the early 19th century and the strange allure of Jacobitism remained as an undercurrent in British culture far longer. Scotland possessed a love-hate relationship with Jacobitism, but even those who deplored its association with nostalgic romanticism could not deny it was a touchstone to something significant in Scottish culture.
Queen Victoria was perhaps the most surprising Jacobite after the political side of Jacobitism, a threat to her own family, comfortably receded. In this she followed the ardent love of King George IV for all things Scottish. Outside the royal family, there were a strange array of artistic and political upholders of the Jacobite flame which flickered for at least another century.
Even in the 20th century and beyond there were those who attached themselves, sometimes dubiously, to the most alluring lost cause in British history.