to Sir William, includes Douglasdale, Lauderdale, Eskdale, the forest of Selkirk, Yarrow, and Tweed, the town castle and forest of Jedburgh, the barony of Buittle in Galloway, and Polbuthy in Moffatdale, all of which had been held by his uncle Sir James, and also Liddesdale with its castle, the baronies of Kirkandrews in Dumfries, Cairns, Drumlanrig, West Calder, and certain lands in Aberdeenshire, with the leadership of the men of Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, and the upper ward of Clyde, which are described as lately held by his father Sir Archibald. Liddesdale had been possessed by the Knight of Liddesdale, and a dispute with reference to it may have been the cause of the family feud which led to the death of that gallant warrior. The ‘Chronicle’ of Pluscarden expressly assigns the desire to possess Liddesdale as one of the causes of the murder of the Knight of Liddesdale. But the story that the Knight of Liddesdale had starved Sir Andrew Moray, his rival for the office of sheriff of Dumfries, to death in the castle of the Hermitage, seems to be unsubstantiated. Douglas took part in the raid on the English border, incited by the French king, and, along with Eugene de Garancières, defeated Sir Thomas Gray at the skirmish of Nisbet in 1355. In January 1356 Edward III recovered Berwick, which the Earls of Angus and March had seized the previous year, but when he advanced on Lothian Douglas succeeded in delaying him by negotiations until the Scotch had removed their goods in the line of his march, so that his retaliatory raid, which resulted chiefly in the destruction of abbeys and churches, got the name of the Burnt Candlemas. In April Douglas made a six months' truce with the Earl of Northampton, the English warden, and took advantage of it to visit France, where he was present and narrowly escaped capture at Poictiers. After the peace concluded in consequence of that battle, Douglas was appointed, along with the Earl of March, warden of the east marches, and on 26 Jan. 1357–8 he was created by David II, at last released from his long captivity, Earl of Douglas. Between 1358 and 1361 he made frequent visits to England, which were probably due to his being one of the hostages for the king's ransom, and the negotiations for a more permanent peace between the two countries. At other times he appears to have been in attendance on the king, from whom he received a grant of the office of sheriff of Lanark, and possibly also of justiciary of Lothian, an office he certainly held in the next reign. In 1363 a dispute arose between the king and Douglas, who was supported by the Steward and the Earl of March, relative to the application of the money raised for payment of the king's ransom, which these nobles accused David of appropriating. Douglas took up arms against the king, but after a skirmish at Inverkeithing he was defeated at Lanark, and obliged in May 1363 to submit. In Nov. 1363 Douglas went to London with King David, who with Douglas's assent negotiated with Edward III arrangements, whereby on certain terms the English king or his son Lionel should eventually succeed to the Scottish throne. Douglas was not at Scone in March 1364, when David's plan was laid before the Scottish parliament and rejected (LANG, Hist. of Scotland, 1899). A statement of Bower, amplified by Hume of Godscroft, that a claim was a few years later, in the beginning of Robert II's reign, put forward to the crown by Douglas for himself, through an alleged descent from Dornagilla, daughter of the Red Comyn, and niece of Baliol, is refuted by his genealogy, for his mother was Beatrice, daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Crawford, and not Dornagilla (Burnett, Preface to Exchequer Records, iii. lxxxviii).
During the remainder of David II's reign Douglas, though frequently absent from parliaments and councils held with reference to raising the money for the king's ransom, took part with the patriotic nobles who, by great personal sacrifices, insisted that the ransom should be paid, and counteracted David's intrigues with England by stringent provisions for the control of the king. He also opposed David's imprudent second marriage to Margaret Drummond of Logie; and although a letter dated 26 July 1366 was signed by him as well as the Steward and the Earl of March consenting to the gift of Annandale to her stepson, John of Logie, this must have been a reluctant or nominal approval merely. In 1369 he accompanied the king in an expedition against John of the Isles, who submitted at Inverness on 15 Nov. On the death of David II in 1371 Douglas was present at the coronation of Robert II at Scone, to whom he swore homage on 27 March, and he also joined in the settlement of the succession on the king's eldest son, John, earl of Carrick, afterwards Robert III. About this time he was made justiciary south of the Forth, and shortly after acquired the castle of Tantallon and the port of North Berwick, which had formerly belonged to the Earl of Fife. His son James, who succeeded him, was, soon after Robert's accession, betrothed to Isabel, the king's daughter, and the marriage followed in 1373. In the following year we find traces of the earl's activity in a dispute with the abbey of Melrose as to
