PRESENTING: His Lordship, Roland MacAllister, the thirty-nine year old Earl of Douglas. It is said that whilst he is charismatic and resolute, he is known to be manipulative and tempestuous. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Eric Bana. [Thomas, 22, EDT, He/Him]
INFORMATION: Bastard. Husband. Earl. Murderer. Father. Warrior.
Titles hold varying degrees of truth — being a Lord does not inherently endow a man with any sense of nobility, nor does ignoble blood equate to an ignoble soul. His mother, the daughter of Douglas Castle’s stablemaster, was a woman of nobility and virtue; his father, the Earl of Douglas, was man lacking in such gentle virtues. The Earl would always profess that his illegitimate son was borne of an act of passion when the stablemaster’s temptress of a daughter snuck into his chambers and plied him with goblets of spiced wine before he relented and took her to bed. Every other soul in the keep knew of a far darker truth: that the Earl had forcibly taken the girl in the heat of a drunken fit, leaving her on the cold stone of the castle corridor when the act was done. Yet, it had never stopped Roland MacAllister’s mother for caring for him as if he had been conceived of love on her marriage bed. It was only when the castle’s lord realized that his very name was threatened with extinction when he began to dote upon the boy in the same way. With no brothers or legitimate sons to speak of, the Earl of Douglas welcomed Roland back into the castle’s inner keep when he was eleven. He would become Earl one day, he was promised. He would forsake his mother’s name and adopt the surname of Douglas, to rule as his lord father’s legitimate successor.
He hated his father, Roland did, but this arrangement was only a means to an end. He would accept the conditions, allow himself to be groomed as the future Earl of Douglas, and elevate himself and his mother to a status of power and luxury as recompense for the hardships visited upon them by the castle’s callous ruler.
But there were other sons, and when the Earl died in 1430 — allegedly of natural causes, though rumors of foul play at the hands of a resentful bastard still persist — those who were allegedly sired by the late ruler crawled forth from the woodwork to claim the earldom as their own. Roland was not the oldest of these boys, nor was he the wealthiest, but he possessed the cunning and political aptitude necessary to emerge victorious. After a short war and a petition to Scotland’s king, Roland became the rightful Earl of Douglas at the age of seventeen.
A bastard had become a nobleman. A Scottish Earl.
The next order of business was to become a husband and a father. He would not make the same mistake as his father, whoring his way across the Highlands and leaving a smattering of bastard sons to spill blood for a castle and its surrounding lands. He would marry a proper wife and sire legitimate sons, all of which would bear the MacAllister name and forsake any lingering vestiges of the cruel Earl that had borne him.
By his nineteenth year he was wed to the young Countess of Sutherland, and by his twentieth he was the father of a healthy, fair-haired son. More children followed in quick succession, all products of a happy marriage within a happy home. For five years laughter and peace replaced the tumult that had so typified the life of young Roland MacAllister; his family blossomed, hostilities between the Scottish and English crowns had abated, and mild summers reaped plentiful harvests.
Such bliss and prosperity was not meant to last; the pestilence which had ravaged the world for so long finally found its way to Douglas Castle. After ravaging the nearby villages in South Lanarkshire, the disease effortlessly breached the fortress walls and set upon its inhabitants. Within weeks Lady MacAllister and her four small children were dead; Roland lay on his deathbed, seemingly teetering upon the precipice of oblivion itself. A priest was called to administer Last Rites, but it was unnecessary; Roland was spared the fate of his family, and while his mother passed shortly thereafter, he himself recovered.
Rather, he recovered as much as a man who had suffered such devastating losses could; broken and bereft, the Earl cloistered himself in his castle for a full year, so deep was his state of mourning. When he emerged it was as an individual tortured by loss and hypocrisy, set loose upon a Scotland ravaged by the Black Death. His extreme piety was offset by his indulgence in all manner of sin; his demands for respect and loyalty were undermined by his crass tongue and disregard for propriety; his abhorrence of bloodshed seemed incompatible with his love of war and violence. He had, it seemed, begun to emulate the traits he hated most in his highborn father.
To his subjects, Earl Roland has never been an outstanding leader. He is a tyrant, but no more so than any other Scottish lord. His hatred of the English is a hallmark of any medieval Scotsman, and in the autumn of 1448 he had the opportunity to indulge fully in his loathing. In the Southern Uplands near the mouth of the River Esk, Roland and his cousin — also an Earl, also a Douglas — did battle with the English, driving from the field the Earl of Northumberland and six thousand of his soldiers, cutting down three thousand while only losing six hundred themselves.
The Battle of Lochmaben Stone was a stunning victory, and for God’s favor Roland has taken it upon himself to dispense proper thanks. He has traveled hundreds of miles in a pilgrimage to Rome, to bestow upon the Holy Church a generous offering and show his gratitude to the Almighty for such a glorious victory by traveling to the city’s most holy sites. Yet, vices are nearly impossible to leave behind, and while he comes as a pilgrim, his heart — and intentions — are rarely ever pure.
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