On 25 or 26 March 1402 David, duke of Rothesay, the eldest son and heir of the Scottish king Robert III, died in Falkland castle in Fife while in the custody of his uncle Robert, duke of Albany. David's imprisonment and death were part of an intermittent but long-running struggle for control of the kingdom between the senior line of the royal dynasty represented by Robert III and his sons David and James (the future James I), and the cadet branch of the royal house headed by the duke of Albany. The rivalry between the royal house and the Albany Stewarts in the early fifteenth century goes some way to explain the dramatically divergent accounts of Rothesay's life, arrest and death that appeared after 1402. Men keen to inconvenience and embarrass the duke of Albany depicted Rothesay as a ‘martyr’, a young prince brutally and unjustly killed, starved to death on his uncle's orders in the dungeons of Falkland. Rothesay's supposedly cruel and lingering demise evidently provoked interest beyond the narrow circle of those actively involved in the arena of high politics, for the duke's tomb at Lindores Abbey seems to have become the centre of a miracle-working cult and a (perhaps short-lived) focus for popular pilgrimage in the early decades of the fifteenth century. However, the celebration of Rothesay as a saintly figure was hardly straightforward or universal, for a powerful counter-narrative existed, preserved in a series of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, that characterised Duke David as an immoral, womanising degenerate who had had to be removed from power by his uncle in order to save the kingdom from the baleful effects of his rule.