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Historical person
Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, was a son of King Robert II of Scotland and a powerful late-fourteenth-century lord in the Highlands. Known as the Wolf of Badenoch, he became notorious for violent feuds and for the burning of Forres and Elgin in 1390.
His career illustrates the difficulty of extending royal and ecclesiastical authority into regions dominated by kinship, lordship and armed followings. Later tradition turned him into a symbol of aristocratic lawlessness in medieval Scotland.
Nigel Tranter’s The Captive Crown uses Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan—the feared Wolf of Badenoch—as part of the troubled Stewart inheritance facing Scotland at the beginning of the fifteenth century. His power and reputation hang over the younger generation, particularly his illegitimate son Alex Stewart, as the novel follows a monarchy weakened by Robert III, rival magnates and the struggle to protect the child who will become James I.
Series
Beginning in the later fourteenth century and continuing into the troubled reign of Robert III, the House of Stewart Trilogy follows Scotland’s first Stewart kings as they struggle to turn a disputed inheritance into a durable dynasty. The crown has come through Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the…
All books in this series
