Douglas, William, 8th Earl of Douglas

William Douglas was the son of James Douglas, 7th Earl of Douglas and 1st Earl of Avondale , and Beatrice Sinclair, daughter of Henry, Earl of Orkney . The marriage of the young Earl in 1443 to Margarita Douglas, the Beautiful Virgin of Galloway, the heiress of the county of Galloway in southwestern Scotland, led to the consolidation of all the ancestral lands of Douglas under the rule of William, as a result of which Earl Douglas became the country's largest magnate. This allowed him to seize power in Scotland: the combined forces of Count Douglas and Livingston defeated Chancellor William Crichton in 1444 and established dominance over the royal administration. William Douglas was appointed Regent of Scotland during the minority of King James II.

By 1448, Douglas, having quarreled with the Livingstones, stepped down from ruling the country and, when in 1450 the twenty-year-old Jacob II removed Livingstones from power, supported the king’s actions. However, the wealth and influence of the Earl of Douglas displeased the young king. In 1449, when Jacob's wedding was celebrated, Douglas came to the court with his five thousand retinue, overshadowing the king, whose treasury was in chronic shortage due to a decade of anarchy in the country.

In 1450, William Douglas went on a pilgrimage to Rome . The pomp of his retinue and the apparent power of the count made a splash at the court of the pope . On the way back, Douglas was warmly received in England . During his absence in Scotland, a conspiracy of the old opponents of Douglas, the Kraitons , was supported by the king James II himself. The royal forces captured Galloway and a number of other Douglas possessions in 1451. However, the return of the count forced the king to retreat.

In order to provide guarantees against the king’s claim to possessions of large magnates, Douglas entered into an alliance with and the Lord of the Islands . This caused outrage of James II. On February 21, 1452, Douglas arrived in Sterling to negotiate with the king, who gave the Earl written security guarantees. During dinner on February 22, Jacob II demanded that Douglas break his alliance with the tycoons. William replied that he "cannot and does not want." The enraged king stabbed the count, and the courtiers completed the murder: 26 wounds were later discovered on Count Douglas’s body.

The assassination of Count Douglas by King James II led to the civil war in Scotland. Royal resistance was led by William's brother James, 9th Earl of Douglas .

• Brown, Michael, The Black Douglases , Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 1998
• MacDougall, Norman, An Antidote to the English - the Auld Alliance 1295-1560 , Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 2001
• Maxwell, Sir Herbert. A History of the House of Douglas (2 vols), Freemantle & Co., London 1902
• Smith, J Stewart-, The Grange of St Giles . Edinburgh, 1898
• Crawfurd's Peerage , 1776

• William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas, at The Peerage.com