This is one of my favourite anecdotes from medieval Scotland!

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The person to whom you're referring is Catherine Douglas, daughter of David Lindsay, first earl of Crawford and Elizabeth Stewart, one of Robert II's two daughters by his second wife, Euphemia de Ross. The king in question was James I of Scotland, who was assassinated at the instigation of his uncle, Walter Stewart, first earl of Atholl.

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For some background to contextualize the anecdote, the early Stewart monarchy was a little bit of a shit show, but the important points to know are basically this:

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• Robert II came to the throne when his uncle, David II died without heirs in 1371. Robert II was the grandson of Robert Bruce by his daughter, Marjorie Bruce, who had married Walter Stewart, sixth High Steward of Scotland.
• Robert II was considered to be a fairly weak king by his nobles and magnates because he was not a particularly warlike monarch and preferred to use marriage and diplomacy to cement his position and quell disputes amongst his nobility. For more discussion of this, see Steve Boardman's The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371-1406.
• Robert II was a fecund monarch, producing five legitimate sons who survived to adulthood (we will ignore the illegitimate sons as they were mostly well behaved and left little trace in the historical record).
• Of the five legitimate sons that Robert II fathered, one was a bit of an idiot (unfortunately, this was his eldest and heir, who eventually succeeded his father as Robert III); one was a very capable politician and governor (the second son, Robert Stewart, duke of Albany); one was capable but...complicated - history has remembered him as a violent bully for his ongoing disputes with the Bishop of Moray, which eventually resulted in his burning down Elgin Cathedral in 1390 (this was the third son, Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan A.K.A. "The Wolf of Badenoch"); one is known mostly for fighting with Alexander over land holdings (David Stewart, earl of Strathearn); and one has been remembered for organizing the assassination of his nephew, James I, the episode this question has addressed (Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl).
• Robert III, who was born John Stewart, but who changed his name upon succeeding the throne (John tends to be viewed as an unlucky name for kings in the British Isles with John I of England and John Balliol of Scotland being opposed and deposed by their nobles respectively), was badly kicked by a horse two years before he became king, leaving him crippled and leading, eventually to his complete political exclusion by 1402-3, following a period of lieutenancy by his eldest son and heir, David, duke of Rothsay, and then, his brother, Robert Stewart, duke of Albany.
• Rothsay and Albany were at political odds with one another and historians generally agree that Albany was responsible for murdering Rothsay, though whether he intended to murder his nephew when he took him into custody is debatable (see Shayna Devlin's forthcoming PhD dissertation, University of Guelph, for a full review of Albany's political career).
• In order to protect James, his younger son, and now heir, following the murder of Rothsay, Robert III tried to send the child to France and away from Albany's control, however, the ship was intercepted by English pirates off of Flamborough Head, and they delivered James to King Henry IV of England. Upon hearing of his son's capture, Robert III died at Rothsay Castle in 1406. According to Walter Bower, Robert III is said to have told his queen that he should be buried under a midden (dung heap) with the epitaph, "Here likes the worst of Kings and the most miserable of men".
• Following the death of Robert III, Albany stepped up to rule Scotland as governor, since the king, James I, was held in captivity by the English. It took eighteen years to ransom James I back from the English, during which time Albany died and the English used James as a pawn in the Hundred Years' War to force the Scottish forces to abandon their support of the French, as mandated by the Treaty of Paris in 1295 and the Treaty of Corbell in 1326 (collectively known as the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France). As James was unknown to the Scots, the Scottish soldiers refused to surrender, which was a humiliation that James I apparently remembered for the rest of his life.
• When James was eventually ransomed and returned to Scotland with his English wife, Joan Beaufort, with whom he was genuinely in love (he wrote a love poem for her that is viewed as one of the finest pieces of medieval Scots poetry), one of the first actions he took was to try his cousin, Murdoch, (Albany's son) and Murdoch's sons on trumped up charges of treason as a means of breaking the power and prestige of the Albany Stewarts and to ensure that he would have no political rivals the way that his father had.
• James was not a particularly popular king in that he was said to have been ruthless and acquisitive, but, perhaps it is understandable that James would have little love for nobles who had left him languishing in England for eighteen years. He was a good legislator, though, and he updated and enacted many laws during his brief personal reign.
• It was James's acquisitiveness that led to his quarrel with Walter Stewart - James had revoked Walter's holdings of certain lands in Perthshire and given these as gifts (for the sake of income) to his queen, Joan Beaufort. Though Walter had apparently supported his nephew's return from England, he nonetheless grew disenchanted with James as king and conspired with his grandson, Robert Stewart, the master of Atholl (also the king's chamberlain), and Sir Robert Graham, a former Albany supporter, to murder the king and queen while they slept at the Dominican monastery in Perth on 20 February 1437.

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So, now we come to the actual episode in question!

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Catherine Douglas was one of Queen Joan's ladies-in-waiting, and would have slept in the king and queen's chambers on a small trundle or floor pallet to be on hand should the queen require her services. Robert Stewart, the king's chamberlain, had removed the bolt from the door of the king and queen's chamber to permit the entry of the assassins, however, the occupants of the room heard their approach and Catherine Douglas is said to have slid her arm through the staples of the door to bar the way, giving the queen and her other ladies enough time to attempt to hide the king beneath the floorboards in the sewers beneath the chamber before the attackers forced the door, breaking Catherine's arm in the process, and locating the king anyway. It is said that Sir Robert Graham personally killed the king upon discovering his hiding place. The queen was also attacked but managed to escape and the assassins were all hunted down, tried, and executed.

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Catherine Douglas is said to have changed her surname to 'Barlass' after the incident, and is recorded in the Scots Peerage as having married Alexander Lovell of Balumbie: "She afterwards married Richard Lovel of Ballumby, with whom, on 24 August 1438, she had a charter from Alexander Lindsay, second Earl of Crawford, of the lands of Muirhouse, co. Inverness. In this charter she is styled neptis of the Earl, which shows that the commonly accepted marriage of her father to a daughter of Sir David Lindsay, first Earl of Crawford, is correct." [SP VI:366[1], cites Reg. Mag. Sig., 29 October 1463]

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It's definitely an interesting and fun little story, though few sources remain that address Catherine directly. It is worth checking out the Scottish chronicles by Bower (Scotichronicon) and Buchanan (History of Scotland) for treatments of James's assassination though. For interest more than historical credibility, you can also check out Rosetti's poem, "The King's Tragedy".

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Also, for general reading, I'd suggest:

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Steve Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371-1406 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007).

M.H. Brown, "'I Have Thus Slain a Tyrant': The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis and the Right to Resist in Early Fifteenth-Century Scotland," Innes Review 47 (Spring 1996): 24-44.

Michael Brown, James I (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1994).

Alastair Campbell, A History of Clan Campbell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Rosalind Marshall, Scottish Queens (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003).