An heir to the Crown, James, was born in October 1430, while the King was at strife with the Pope, and asserting for King and Parliament power over the Provincial Councils of the Church. An interdict was threatened, James menaced the rich and lax religious orders with secular reformation; settled the Carthusians at Perth, to show an example of holy living; and pursued his severities against many of his nobles.

His treatment of the Earl of Strathearn (despoiled and sent as a hostage to England) aroused the wrath of the Earl's uncle, Robert Graham, who bearded James in Parliament, was confiscated, fled across the Highland line, and, on February 20, 1437, aided, it is said by the old Earl of Atholl (a grandson of Robert II. by his second marriage), led a force against the King in the monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, surprised him, and butchered him. The energy of his Queen brought the murderers, and Atholl himself, to die under unspeakable torments.

James's reforms were hurried, violent, and, as a rule, incapable of surviving the anarchy of his son's minority: his new Court of Session, sitting in judgment thrice a-year, was his most fortunate innovation.



CHAPTER XII. JAMES II.

Scone, with its sacred stone, being so near Perth and the Highlands, was perilous, and the coronation of James II. was therefore held at Holyrood (March 25, 1437). The child, who was but seven years of age, was bandied to and fro like a shuttlecock between rival adventurers. The Earl of Douglas (Archibald, fifth Earl, died 1439) took no leading part in the strife of factions: one of them led by Sir William Crichton, who held the important post of Commander of Edinburgh Castle; the other by Sir Alexander Livingstone of Callendar.

The great old Houses had been shaken by the severities of James I., at least for the time. In a Government of factions influenced by private greed, there was no important difference in policy, and we need not follow the transference of the royal person from Crichton in Edinburgh to Livingstone in Stirling Castle; the coalitions between these worthies, the battles between the Boyds of Kilmarnock and the Stewarts, who had to avenge Stewart of Derneley, Constable of the Scottish contingent in France, who was slain by Sir Thomas Boyd. The queen-mother married Sir James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorne, and (August 3, 1439) she was captured by Livingstone, while her husband, in the mysterious words of the chronicler, was "put in a pitt and bollit." In a month Jane Beaufort gave Livingstone an amnesty; he, not the Stewart family, not the queen- mother, now held James.

To all this the new young Earl of Douglas, a boy of eighteen, tacitly assented. He was the most powerful and wealthiest subject in Scotland; in France he was Duc de Touraine; he was descended in lawful wedlock from Robert II.; "he micht ha'e been the king," as the ballad says of the bonny Earl of Moray. But he held proudly aloof from both Livingstone and Crichton, who were stealing the king alternately: they then combined, invited Douglas to Edinburgh Castle, with his brother David, and served up the ominous bull's head at that "black dinner" recorded in a ballad fragment. {61} They decapitated the two Douglas boys; the earldom fell to their granduncle, James the Fat, and presently, on his death (1443), to young William Douglas, after which "bands," or illegal covenants, between the various leaders of factions, led to private wars of shifting fortune. Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews, opposed the Douglas party, now strong both in lands newly acquired, till (July 3, 1449) James married Mary of Gueldres, imprisoned the Livingstones, and relied on the Bishop of St Andrews and the clergy. While Douglas was visiting Rome in 1450, the Livingstones had been forfeited, and Crichton became Chancellor.



FALL OF THE BLACK DOUGLASES.

The Douglases, through a royal marriage of an ancestor to a daughter of the more legitimate marriage of Robert II., had a kind of claim to the throne which they never put forward. The country was thus spared dynastic wars, like those of the White and Red Roses in England; but, none the less, the Douglases were too rich and powerful for subjects.

The Earl at the moment held Galloway and Annandale, two of his brothers were Earls of Moray and Ormond; in October 1448, Ormond had distinguished himself by defeating and taking Percy, urging a raid into Scotland, at a bloody battle on the Water of Sark, near Gretna.

During the Earl of Douglas's absence in Rome, James had put down some of his unruly retainers, and even after his return (1451) had persevered in this course. Later in the year Douglas resigned, and received back his lands, a not uncommon formula showing submission on the vassal's favour on the lord's part, as when Charles VII., at the request of Jeanne d'Arc, made this resignation to God!

Douglas, however, was suspected of intriguing with England and with the Lord of the Isles, while he had a secret covenant or "band" with the Earls of Crawford and Ross. If all this were true, he was planning a most dangerous enterprise.

He was invited to Stirling to meet the king under a safe-conduct, and there (February 22, 1452) was dirked by his king at the sacred table of hospitality.

Whether this crime was premeditated or merely passionate is unknown, as in the case of Bruce's murder of the Red Comyn before the high altar. Parliament absolved James on slender grounds. James, the brother of the slain earl, publicly defied his king, gave his allegiance to Henry VI. of England, withdrew it, intrigued, and, after his brothers had been routed at Arkinholm, near Langholm (May 18, 1455), fled to England. His House was proclaimed traitorous; their wide lands in southern and south-western Scotland were forfeited and redistributed, the Scotts of Buccleuch profiting largely in the long-run. The leader of the Royal forces at Arkinholm, near Langholm, was another Douglas, one of "the Red Douglases," the Earl of Angus; and till the execution of the Earl of Morton, under James VI., the Red Douglases were as powerful, turbulent, and treacherous as the Black Douglases had been in their day. When attacked and defeated, these Douglases, red or black, always allied themselves with England and with the Lords of the Isles, the hereditary foes of the royal authority.

Meanwhile Edward IV. wrote of the Scots as "his rebels of Scotland," and in the alternations of fortune between the Houses of York and Lancaster, James held with Henry VI. When Henry was defeated and taken at Northampton (July 10, 1460), James besieged Roxburgh Castle, an English hold on the Border, and (August 3, 1460) was slain by the explosion of a great bombard.

James was but thirty years of age at his death. By the dagger, by the law, and by the aid of the Red Douglases, he had ruined his most powerful nobles—and his own reputation. His early training, like that of James VI., was received while he was in the hands of the most treacherous, bloody, and unscrupulous of mankind; later, he met them with their own weapons. The foundation of the University of Glasgow (1451), and the building and endowment of St Salvator's College in St Andrews, by Bishop Kennedy, are the most permanent proofs of advancing culture in the reign of James.

Many laws of excellent tendency, including sumptuary laws, which suggest the existence of unexpected wealth and luxury, were passed; but such laws were never firmly and regularly enforced. By one rule, which does seem to have been carried out, no poisons were to be imported: Scottish chemical science was incapable of manufacturing them. Much later, under James VI., we find a parcel of arsenic, to be used for political purposes, successfully stopped at Leith.



CHAPTER XIII. JAMES III.

James II. left three sons; the eldest, James III., aged nine, was crowned at Kelso (August 10, 1460); his brothers, bearing the titles of Albany and Mar, were not to be his supports. His mother, Mary of Gueldres, had the charge of the boys, and, as she was won over by her uncle, Philip of Burgundy, to the cause of the House of York, while Kennedy and the Earl of Angus stood for the House of Lancaster, there was strife between them and the queen-mother and nobles. Kennedy relied on France (Louis XL), and his opponents on England.

The battle of Towton (March 30, 1461) drove Henry VI. and his queen across the Border, where Kennedy entertained the melancholy exile in the Castle of St Andrews. The grateful Henry restored Berwick to the Scots, who could not hold it long. In June 1461, while the Scots were failing to take Carlisle, Edward IV. was crowned, and sent his adherent, the exiled Earl of Douglas, to treat for an alliance with the Celts, under John, Lord of the Isles, and that Donald Balloch who was falsely believed to have long before been slain in Ireland.

It is curious to think of the Lord of the Isles dealing as an independent prince, through a renegade Douglas, with the English king. A treaty was made at John's Castle of Ardtornish—now a shell of crumbling stone on the sea-shore of the Morvern side of the Sound of Mull—with the English monarch at Westminster. The Highland chiefs promise allegiance to Edward, and, if successful, the Celts are to recover the ancient kingdom from Caithness to the Forth, while Douglas is to be all-powerful from the Forth to the Border!

But other intrigues prevailed. The queen-mother and her son, in the most friendly manner, met the kingmaker Warwick at Dumfries, and again at Carlisle, and Douglas was disgraced by Edward, though restored to favour when Bishop Kennedy declined to treat with Edward's commissioners. The Treaty of England with Douglas and the Celts was then ratified; but Douglas, advancing in front of Edward's army to the Border, met old Bishop Kennedy in helmet and corslet, and was defeated. Louis XI., however, now deserted the Red for the White Rose. Kennedy followed his example; and peace was made between England and Scotland in October 1464. Kennedy died in the summer of 1465.

There followed the usual struggles between confederations of the nobles, and, in July 1466, James was seized, being then aged fourteen, by the party of the Boyds, Flemings, and Kennedys, aided by Hepburn of Hailes (ancestor of the turbulent Earl of Bothwell), and by the head of the Border House of Cessford, Andrew Ker.

It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history. Boyd made himself Governor to the king, his son married the king's eldest sister, Mary, and became Earl of Arran. But brief was the triumph of the Boyds. In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of his house was arranged. Boyd fled the country; the king's sister, divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal Stewarts, if that family were extinct. The Hamiltons, the wealthiest house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy's successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian. Graham dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country, always jealous of interference from Rome. But he was reported on as more or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed. Had he been defending (as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an unfavourable view of his intellect. In any case, whether the clergy, backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the universal rule. Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance, were attaining their lowest level. {67} By 1476 the Lord of the Isles, the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross, which was attached to the Crown (1476). His treaty of Ardtornish had come to light. But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James's devotion to the arts—a thing intolerable—and to the society of low-born favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, "a stone-cutter," prepared the sorrows and the end of his reign.

The intrigues which follow, and the truth about the character of James, are exceedingly obscure. We have no Scottish chronicle written at the time; the later histories, by Ferrerius, an Italian, and, much later, by Queen Mary's Bishop Lesley, and by George Buchanan, are full of rumours and contradictions, while the State Papers and Treaties of England merely prove the extreme treachery of James's brother Albany, and no evidence tells us how James contrived to get the better of the traitor. James's brothers Albany and Mar were popular; were good horsemen, men of their hands, and Cochrane is accused of persuading James to arrest Mar on a charge of treason and black magic. Many witches are said to have been burned: perhaps the only such case before the Reformation. However it fell out—all is obscure—Mar died in prison; while Albany, also a prisoner on charges of treasonable intrigues with the inveterate Earl of Douglas, in the English interest, escaped to France.

Douglas (1482) brought him to England, where he swore allegiance to Edward IV., under whom, like Edward Balliol, he would hold Scotland if crowned. He was advancing on the Border with Edward's support and with the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and James had gone to Lauder to encounter him, when the Earl of Angus headed a conspiracy of nobles, such as Huntly, Lennox, and Buchan, seized Cochrane and other favourites of James, and hanged them over Lauder Bridge. The most tangible grievance was the increasing debasement of the coinage. James was immured at Edinburgh, but, by a compromise, Albany was restored to rank and estates. Meanwhile Gloucester captured Berwick, never to be recovered by Scotland. In 1483 Albany renewed, with many of the nobles, his intrigues with Edward for the betrayal of Scotland. In some unknown way James separated Albany from his confederates Atholl, Buchan, and Angus; Albany went to England, betrayed the Castle of Dunbar to England, and was only checked in his treasons by the death of Edward IV. (April 9, 1483), after which a full Parliament (July 7, 1483) condemned him and forfeited him in his absence. On July 22, 1484, he invaded Scotland with his ally, Douglas; they were routed at Lochmaben, Douglas was taken, and, by singular clemency, was merely placed in seclusion in the Monastery of Lindores, while Albany, escaping to France, perished in a tournament, leaving a descendant, who later, in the minority of James V., makes a figure in history.

The death of Richard III. (August 18, 1485) and the accession of the prudent Henry VII. gave James a moment of safety. He turned his attention to the Church, and determined to prosecute for treason such Scottish clerics as purchased benefices through Rome. He negotiated for three English marriages, including that of his son James, Duke of Rothesay, to a daughter of Edward IV.; he also negotiated for the recovery of Berwick, taken by Gloucester during Albany's invasion of 1482. After his death, and before it, James was accused, for these reasons, of disloyal dealings with England; and such nobles as Angus, up to the neck as they were in treason and rebellion, raised a party against him on the score that he was acting as they did. The almost aimless treachery of the Douglases, Red or Black, endured for centuries from the reign of David II. to that of James VI. Many nobles had received no amnesty for the outrage of Lauder Bridge; their hopes turned to the heir of the Crown, James, Duke of Rothesay. We see them offering peace for an indemnity in a Parliament of October 1487; the Estates refused all such pardons for a space of seven years; the king's party was manifestly the stronger. He was not to be intimidated; he offended Home and the Humes by annexing the Priory of Coldingham (which they regarded as their own) to the Royal Chapel at Stirling. The inveterate Angus, with others, induced Prince James to join them under arms. James took the Chancellorship from Argyll and sent envoys to England.

The rebels, proclaiming the prince as king, intrigued with Henry VII.; James was driven across the Forth, and was supported in the north by his uncle, Atholl, and by Huntly, Crawford, and Lord Lindsay of the Byres, Errol, Glamis, Forbes, and Tullibardine, and the chivalry of Angus and Strathtay. Attempts at pacification failed; Stirling Castle was betrayed to the rebels, and James's host, swollen by the loyal burgesses of the towns, met the Border spears of Home and Hepburn, the Galloway men, and the levies of Angus at Sauchie Burn, near Bannockburn.

In some way not understood, James, riding without a single knight or squire, fell from his horse, which had apparently run away with him, at Beaton's Mill, and was slain in bed, it was rumoured, by a priest, feigned or false, who heard his confession. The obscurity of his reign hangs darkest over his death, and the virulent Buchanan slandered him in his grave. Under his reign, Henryson, the greatest of the Chaucerian school in Scotland, produced his admirable poems. Many other poets whose works are lost were flourishing; and The Wallace, that elaborate plagiarism from Barbour's 'The Brus,' was composed, and attributed to Blind Harry, a paid minstrel about the Court. {71}



CHAPTER XIV. JAMES IV.

The new king, with Angus for his Governor, Argyll for his Chancellor, and with the Kers and Hepburns in office, was crowned at Scone about June 25, 1488. He was nearly seventeen, no child, but energetic in business as in pleasure, though lifelong remorse for his rebellion gnawed at his heart. He promptly put down a rebellion of the late king's friends and of the late king's foe, Lennox, then strong in the possession of Dumbarton Castle, which, as it commands the sea-entrance by Clyde, is of great importance in the reign of Mary and James VI. James III. must have paid attention to the navy, which, under Sir Andrew Wood, already faced English pirates triumphantly. James IV. spent much money on his fleet, buying timber from France, for he was determined to make Scotland a power of weight in Europe. But at the pinch his navy vanished like a mist.

Spanish envoys and envoys from the Duchess of Burgundy visited James in 1488-1489; he was in close relations with France and Denmark, and caused anxieties to the first Tudor king, Henry VII., who kept up the Douglas alliance with Angus, and bought over Scottish politicians. While James, as his account-books show, was playing cards with Angus, that traitor was also negotiating the sale of Hermitage Castle, the main hold of the Middle Border, to England. He was detected, and the castle was intrusted to a Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell; it was still held by Queen Mary's Bothwell in 1567. The Hepburns rose to the earldom of Bothwell on the death of Ramsay, a favourite of James III., who (1491) had arranged to kidnap James IV. with his brother, and hand them over to Henry VII., for 277 pounds, 13s. 4d.! Nothing came of this, and a truce with England was arranged in 1491. Through four reigns, till James VI. came to the English throne, the Tudor policy was to buy Scottish traitors, and attempt to secure the person of the Scottish monarch.

Meanwhile, the Church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the newly-created Archbishop of Glasgow (1491) and the Archbishop of St Andrews, and disturbed by the Lollards, in the region which was later the centre of the fiercest Covenanters,—Kyle in Ayrshire. But James laughed away the charges against the heretics (1494), whose views were, on many points, those of John Knox. In 1493-1495 James dealt in the usual way with the Highlanders and "the wicked blood of the Isles": some were hanged, some imprisoned, some became sureties for the peacefulness of their clans. In 1495, by way of tit-for-tat against English schemes, James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard III. Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between Ireland and Burgundy since 1488. He was welcomed by James at Stirling in November 1495, and was wedded to the king's cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, now supreme in the north. Rejecting a daughter of England, and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared to invade England in Perkin's cause; the scheme was sold by Ramsay, the would-be kidnapper, and came to no more than a useless raid of September 1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497. The Spanish envoy, de Ayala, negotiated a seven-years' truce in September, after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton.

The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the Border; he put them down, and made Argyll Lieutenant of the Isles. Between the Campbells and the Huntly Gordons, as custodians of the peace, the fighting clans were expected to be more orderly. On the other hand, a son of Angus Og, himself usually reckoned a bastard of the Lord of the Isles, gave much trouble. Angus had married a daughter of the Argyll of his day; their son, Donald Dubh, was kidnapped (or, rather, his mother was kidnapped before his birth) for Argyll; he now escaped, and in 1503, found allies among the chiefs, did much scathe, was taken in 1506, but was as active as ever forty years later.

The central source of these endless Highland feuds was the family of the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, claiming the earldom of Ross, resisting the Lowland influences and those of the Gordons and Campbells (Huntly and Argyll), and seeking aid from England. With the capture of Donald Dubh (1506) the Highlanders became for the while comparatively quiescent; under Lennox and Argyll they suffered in the defeat of Flodden.

From 1497 to 1503 Henry VII. was negotiating for the marriage of James to his daughter Margaret Tudor; the marriage was celebrated on August 8, 1503, and a century later the great grandson of Margaret, James VI. came to the English throne. But marriage does not make friendship. There had existed since 1491 a secret alliance by which Scotland was bound to defend France if attacked by England. Henry's negotiations for the kidnapping of James were of April of the same year. Margaret, the young queen, after her marriage, was soon involved in bitter quarrels over her dowry with her own family; the slaying of a Sir Robert Ker, Warden of the Marches, by a Heron in a Border fray (1508), left an unhealed sore, as England would not give up Heron and his accomplice. Henry VII. had been pacific, but his death, in 1509, left James to face his hostile brother- in-law, the fiery young Henry VIII.

In 1511 the Holy League under the Pope, against France, imperilled James's French ally. He began to build great ships of war; his sea-captain, Barton, pirating about, was defeated and slain by ships under two of the Howards, sons of the Earl of Surrey (August 1511). James remonstrated, Henry was firm, and the Border feud of Ker and Heron was festering; moreover, Henry was a party to the League against France, and France was urging James to attack England. He saw, and wrote to the King of Denmark, that, if France were down, the turn of Scotland to fall would follow. In March 1513, an English diplomatist, West, found James in a wild mood, distraught "like a fey man."

Chivalry, and even national safety, called him to war; while his old remorse drove him into a religious retreat, and he was on hostile terms with the Pope. On May 24th, in a letter to Henry, he made a last attempt to obtain a truce, but on June 30th Henry invaded France. The French queen despatched to James, as to her true knight, a letter and a ring. He sent his fleet to sea; it vanished like a dream. He challenged Henry through a herald on July 26th, and, in face of strange and evil omens, summoned the whole force of his kingdom, crossed the Border on August 22nd, took Norham Castle on Tweed, with the holds of Eital, Chillingham, and Ford, which he made his headquarters, and awaited the approach of Surrey and the levies of the Stanleys. On September 5th he demolished Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the deep and sluggish water of Till at its feet. Surrey, commanding an army all but destitute of supplies, outmanoeuvred James, led his men unseen behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and thence marched against him to Branxton Ridge, under Flodden Edge.

James was ignorant of Surrey's movement till he saw the approach of his standards. In place of retaining his position, he hurled his force down to Branxton, his gunners could not manage their new French ordnance, and though Home with the Border spears and Huntly had a success on the right, the Borderers made no more efforts, and, on the left, the Celts fled swiftly after the fall of Lennox and Argyll. In the centre Crawford and Rothes were slain, and James, with the steady spearmen of his command, drove straight at Surrey. James, as the Spaniard Ayala said, "was no general: he was a fighting man." He was outflanked by the Admiral (Howard) and Dacre; his force was surrounded by charging horse and foot, and rained on by arrows. But

"The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood,"

when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance's length of Surrey (so Surrey writes), and died, riddled with arrows, his neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his body. Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phalanx, but when dawn arrived only a force of Border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field. Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master; there too lay his natural son, the young Archbishop of St Andrews, and the Bishops of Caithness and the Isles. Scarce a noble or gentle house of the Lowlands but reckons an ancestor slain at Flodden.

Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of supplies, by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men, by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish king. It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James's adherence to the French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry. But he had passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter. If he rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew well that the turn of Scotland would come soon. The ambitions and the claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards. England was bent on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the entire Tudor period England was the home and her monarch the ally of every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish Crown.

Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort. Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attests the great increase in comfort and in wealth.

In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while (1496) Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of barons and freeholders of competent estate. Prior Hepburn founded the College of St Leonard's in the University of St Andrews; and in 1507 Chepman received a royal patent as a printer. Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad example. But with Dunbar, Henryson, and others, Scotland had a school of poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of Chaucer. Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the Revival of Learning; and James, like Charles II., fostered the early movements of chemistry and physical science. But Flodden ruined all, and the country, under the long minority of James V., was robbed and distracted by English intrigues; by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor; by actual warfare between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place; by the ambitions and treasons of the Douglases and other nobles; and by the arrival from France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III.

The truth of the saying, "Woe to the kingdom whose king is a child," was never more bitterly proved than in Scotland between the day of Flodden and the day of the return of Mary Stuart from France (1513-1561). James V. was not only a child and fatherless; he had a mother whose passions and passionate changes in love resembled those of her brother Henry VIII. Consequently, when the inevitable problem arose, was Scotland during the minority to side with England or with France? the queen-mother wavered ceaselessly between the party of her brother, the English king, and the party of France; while Henry VIII. could not be trusted, and the policy of France in regard to England did not permit her to offer any stable support to the cause of Scottish independence. The great nobles changed sides constantly, each "fighting for his own hand," and for the spoils of a Church in which benefices were struggled for and sold like stocks in the Exchange.

The question, Was Scotland to ally herself with England or with France? later came to mean, Was Scotland to break with Rome or to cling to Rome? Owing mainly to the selfish and unscrupulous perfidy of Henry VIII., James V. was condemned, as the least of two evils, to adopt the Catholic side in the great religious revolution; while the statesmanship of the Beatons, Archbishops of St Andrews, preserved Scotland from English domination, thereby preventing the country from adopting Henry's Church, the Anglican, and giving Calvinism and Presbyterianism the opportunity which was resolutely taken and held.

The real issue of the complex faction fight during James's minority was thus of the most essential importance; but the constant shiftings of parties and persons cannot be dealt with fully in our space. James's mother had a natural claim to the guardianship of her son, and was left Regent by the will of James IV., but she was the sister of Scotland's enemy, Henry VIII. Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow (later of St Andrews), with the Earl of Arran (now the title of the Hamiltons), Huntly, and Angus were to advise the queen till the arrival of Albany (son of the brother of James III.), who was summoned from France. Albany, of course, stood for the French alliance, but when the queen-mother (August 6, 1514) married the new young Earl of Angus, the grandson and successor of the aged traitor, "Bell the Cat," the earl began to carry on the usual unpatriotic policy of his house. The appointment to the see of St Andrews was competed for by the Poet Gawain Douglas, uncle of the new Earl of Angus; and himself of the English party; by Hepburn, Prior of St Andrews, who fortified the Abbey; and by Forman, Bishop of Moray, a partisan of France, and a man accused of having induced James IV. to declare war against England.

After long and scandalous intrigues, Forman obtained the see. Albany was Regent for a while, and at intervals he repaired to France; he was in the favour of the queen-mother when later she quarrelled with her husband, Angus. At one moment, Margaret and Angus fled to England where was born her daughter Margaret, later Lady Lennox and mother of Henry Darnley.

Angus, with Home, now recrossed the Border (1516), and was reconciled to Albany; against all unity in Scotland Henry intrigued, bribing with a free hand, his main object being to get Albany sent out of the country. In early autumn, 1516, Home, the leader of the Borderers at Flodden, and his brother were executed for treason; in June, 1517, Albany went to seek aid and counsel in France; when the queen-mother returned from England to Scotland, where, if she retained any influence, she might be useful to her brother's schemes. But, contrary to Henry's interests, in this year Albany renewed the old alliance with France; while, in 1518, the queen- mother desired to divorce Angus. But Angus was a serviceable tool of Henry, who prevented his sister from having her way; and now the heads of the parties in the distracted country were Arran, chief of the Hamiltons, and Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, standing for France; and Angus representing the English party.

Their forces met at Edinburgh in the street battle of "Cleanse the Causeway," wherein the Archbishop of Glasgow wore armour, and the Douglases beat the Hamiltons out of the town (April 30, 1520). Albany returned (1521), but the nobles would not join with him in an English war (1522). Again he went to France, while Surrey devastated the Scottish Border (1523). Albany returned while Surrey was burning Jedburgh, was once more deserted by the Scottish forces on the Tweed, and left the country for ever in 1524. Angus now returned from England; but the queen- mother cast her affections on young Henry Stewart (Lord Methven), while Angus got possession of the boy king (June 1526) and held him, a reluctant ward, in the English interest.

Lennox was now the chief foe of Arran, and Angus, with whom Arran had coalesced; and Lennox desired to deliver James out of Angus's hands. On July 26, 1526, not far from Melrose, Walter Scott of Buccleuch attacked the forces guarding the prince; among them was Ker of Cessford, who was slain by an Elliot when Buccleuch's men rallied at the rock called "Turn Again." Hence sprang a long-enduring blood-feud of Scotts and Kers; but Angus retained the prince, and in a later fight in the cause of James's delivery, Lennox was slain by the Hamiltons, near Linlithgow. The spring of 1528 was marked by the burning of a Hamilton, Patrick, Abbot of Ferne, at St Andrews, for his Lutheran opinions. Angus had been making futile attacks on the Border thieves, mainly the Armstrongs, who now became very prominent and picturesque robbers. He meant to carry James with him on one of these expeditions; but in June 1528 the young king escaped from Edinburgh Castle, and rode to Stirling, where he was welcomed by his mother and her partisans. Among them were Arran, Argyll, Moray, Bothwell, and other nobles, with Maxwell and the Laird of Buccleuch, Sir Walter Scott. Angus and his kin were forfeited; he was driven across the Border in November, to work what mischief he might against his country; he did not return till the death of James V. Meanwhile James was at peace with his uncle, Henry VIII. He (1529-1530) attempted to bring the Border into his peace, and hanged Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, with circumstances of treachery, says the ballad,—as a ballad-maker was certain to say.

Campbells, Macleans, and Macdonalds had all this while been burning each other's lands, and cutting each other's throats. James visited them, and partly quieted them, incarcerating the Earl of Argyll.

Bothwell and Angus now conspired together to crown Henry VIII. in Edinburgh; but, in May 1534, a treaty of peace was made, to last till the death of either monarch and a year longer.



CHAPTER XV. JAMES V. AND THE REFORMATION.

The new times were at the door. In 1425 the Scottish Parliament had forbidden Lutheran books to be imported. But they were, of course, smuggled in; and the seed of religious revolution fell on minds disgusted by the greed and anarchy of the clerical fighters and jobbers of benefices.

James V., after he had shaken off the Douglases and become "a free king," had to deal with a political and religious situation, out of which we may say in the Scots phrase, "there was no outgait." His was the dilemma of his father before Flodden. How, against the perfidious ambition, the force in war, and the purchasing powers of Henry VIII., was James to preserve the national independence of Scotland? His problem was even harder than that of his father, because when Henry broke with Rome and robbed the religious houses a large minority, at least, of the Scottish nobles, gentry, and middle classes were, so far, heartily on the anti- Roman side. They were tired of Rome, tired of the profligacy, ignorance, and insatiable greed of the ecclesiastical dignitaries who, too often, were reckless cadets of the noble families. Many Scots had read the Lutheran books and disbelieved in transubstantiation; thought that money paid for prayers to the dead was money wasted; preferred a married and preaching to a celibate and licentious clergy who celebrated Mass; were convinced that saintly images were idols, that saintly miracles were impostures. Above all, the nobles coveted the lands of the Church, the spoils of the religious houses.

In Scotland, as elsewhere, the causes of the religious revolution were many. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy, and of the dwellers in the abbeys, had long been the butt of satire and of the fiercer indignation of the people. Benefices, great and small, were jobbed on every side between the popes, the kings, and the great nobles. Ignorant and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionising the study of the sacred books. The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce; and they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for their bastards. The kings set the worst example: both James IV. and James V. secured the richest abbeys, and, in the case of James IV., the Primacy, for their bastard sons. All these abuses were of old standing. "Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh, supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap. xix. Mac- Lehose, 1910.) Oppressive customs by which "the upmost claith," or a pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy, were sanctioned by excommunication: no grievance was more bitterly felt by the poor. The once-dreaded curses on evil-doers became a popular jest: purgatory was a mere excuse for getting money for masses.

In short, the whole mediaeval system was morally rotten; the statements drawn up by councils which made vain attempts to check the stereotyped abuses are as candid and copious concerning all these things as the satires of Sir David Lyndsay.

Then came disbelief in mediaeval dogmas: the Lutheran and other heretical books were secretly purchased and their contents assimilated. Intercession of saints, images, pilgrimages, the doctrine of the Eucharist, all fell into contempt.

As early as February 1428, as we have seen, the first Scottish martyr for evangelical religion, Patrick Hamilton, was burned at St Andrews. This sufferer was the son of a bastard of that Lord Hamilton who married the sister of James III. As was usual, he obtained, when a little boy, an abbey, that of Ferne in Ross-shire. He drew the revenues, but did not wear the costume of his place; in fact, he was an example of the ordinary abuses. Educated at Paris and Louvain, he came in contact with the criticism of Erasmus and the Lutheran controversy. He next read at St Andrews, and he married. Suspected of heresy in 1427, he retired to Germany; he wrote theses called 'Patrick's Places,' which were reckoned heretical; he was arrested, was offered by Archbishop Beaton a chance to escape, disdained it, and was burned with unusual cruelty,—as a rule, heretics in Scotland were strangled before burning. There were other similar cases, nor could James interfere—he was bound by his Coronation Oath; again, he found in the bishops his best diplomatists, and they, of course, were all for the French alliance, in the cause of the independence of their country and Church as against Henry VIII.

Thus James, in justifiable dread of the unscrupulous ambition of Henry VIII., could not run the English course, could not accept the varying creeds which Henry, who was his own Pope, put forward as his spirit moved him. James was thus inevitably committed to the losing cause—the cause of Catholicism and of France—while the intelligence no less than the avarice of his nobles and gentry ran the English course.

James had practically no choice. In 1536 Henry proposed a meeting with James "as far within England as possible." Knowing, as we do, that Henry was making repeated attempts to have James kidnapped and Archbishop Beaton also, we are surprised that James was apparently delighted at the hope of an interview with his uncle—in England. Henry declined to explain why he desired a meeting when James put the question to his envoy. James said, in effect, that he must act by advice of his Council, which, so far as it was clerical, opposed the scheme. Henry justified the views of the Council, later, when James, returning from a visit to France, asked permission to pass through England. "It is the king's honour not to receive the King of Scots in his realm except as a vassal, for there never came King of Scots into England in peaceful manner otherwise." Certain it is that, however James might enter England, he would leave it only as a vassal. Nevertheless his Council, especially his clergy, are blamed for embroiling James with Henry by dissuading him from meeting his uncle in England. Manifestly they had no choice. Henry had shown his hand too often.

At this time James, by Margaret Erskine, became the father of James, later the Regent Moray. Strange tragedies would never have occurred had the king first married Margaret Erskine, who, by 1536, was the wife of Douglas of Loch Leven. He is said to have wished for her a divorce that he might marry her; this could not be: he visited France, and on New Year's Day, 1537, wedded Madeline, daughter of Francis I. Six months later she died in Scotland.

Marriage for the king was necessary, and David Beaton, later Cardinal Beaton and Archbishop of St Andrews, obtained for his lord a lady coveted by Henry VIII., Mary, of the great Catholic house of Lorraine, widow of the Duc de Longueville, and sister of the popular and ambitious Guises. The pair were wedded on June 10, 1538; there was fresh offence to Henry and a closer tie to the Catholic cause. The appointment of Cardinal Beaton (1539) to the see of St Andrews, in succession to his uncle, gave James a servant of high ecclesiastical rank, great subtlety, and indomitable resolution, but remote from chastity of life and from clemency to heretics. Martyrdoms became more frequent, and George Buchanan, who had been tutor of James's son by Margaret Erskine, thought well to open a window in a house where he was confined, walk out, and depart to the Continent. Meanwhile Henry, no less than Beaton, was busily burning his own martyrs. In 1539 Henry renewed his intercourse with James, attempting to shake his faith in David Beaton, and to make him rob his Church. James replied that he preferred to try to reform it; and he enjoyed, in 1540, Sir David Lyndsay's satirical play on the vices of the clergy, and, indeed, of all orders of men. In 1540 James ratified the College of Justice, the fifteen Lords of Session, sitting as judges in Edinburgh.

In 1541 the idea of a meeting between James and Henry was again mooted, and Henry actually went to York, where James did not appear. Henry, who had expected him, was furious. In August 1542, on a futile pretext, he sent Norfolk with a great force to harry the Border. The English had the worse at the battle of Hadden Rig; negotiations followed; Henry proclaimed that Scottish kings had always been vassals of England, and horrified his Council by openly proposing to kidnap James. Henry's forces were now wrecking an abbey and killing women on the Border. James tried to retaliate, but his levies (October 31) at Fala Moor declined to follow him across the Border: they remembered Flodden, moreover they could not risk the person of a childless king. James prepared, however, for a raid on a great scale on the western Border, but the fact had been divulged by Sir George Douglas, Angus's brother, and had also been sold to Dacre, cheap, by another Scot. The English despatches prove that Wharton had full time for preparation, and led a competent force of horse, which, near Arthuret, charged on the right flank of the Scots, who slowly retreated, till they were entangled between the Esk and a morass, and lost their formation and their artillery, with 1200 men: a few were slain, most were drowned or were taken prisoners. The raid was no secret of the king and the priests, as Knox absurdly states; nobles of the Reforming no less than of the Catholic party were engaged; the English had full warning and a force of 3000 men, not of 400 farmers; the Scots were beaten through their own ignorance of the ground in which they had been burning and plundering. As to confusion caused by the claim of Oliver Sinclair to be commander, it is not corroborated by contemporary despatches, though Sir George Douglas reports James's lament for the conduct of his favourite, "Fled Oliver! fled Oliver!" The misfortune broke the heart of James. He went to Edinburgh, did some business, retired for a week to Linlithgow, {89} where his queen was awaiting her delivery, and thence went to Falkland, and died of nothing more specific than shame, grief, and despair. He lived to hear of the birth of his daughter, Mary (December 8, 1542). "It came with a lass and it will go with a lass," he is said to have muttered.

On December 14th James passed away, broken by his impossible task, lost in the bewildering paths from which there was no outgait.

James was personally popular for his gaiety and his adventures while he wandered in disguise. Humorous poems are attributed to him. A man of greater genius than his might have failed when confronted by a tyrant so wealthy, ambitious, cruel, and destitute of honour as Henry VIII.; constantly engaged with James's traitors in efforts to seize or slay him and his advisers. It is an easy thing to attack James because he would not trust Henry, a man who ruined all that did trust to his seeming favour.



CHAPTER XVI. THE MINORITY OF MARY STUART.

When James died, Henry VIII. seemed to hold in his hand all the winning cards in the game of which Scotland was the stake. He held Angus and his brother George Douglas; when he slipped them they would again wield the whole force of their House in the interests of England and of Henry's religion. Moreover, he held many noble prisoners taken at Solway—Glencairn, Maxwell, Cassilis, Fleming, Grey, and others,—and all of these, save Sir George Douglas, "have not sticked," says Henry himself, "to take upon them to set the crown of Scotland on our head." Henry's object was to get "the child, the person of the Cardinal, and of such as be chief hindrances to our purpose, and also the chief holds and fortresses into our hands." By sheer brigandage the Reformer king hoped to succeed where the Edwards had failed. He took the oaths of his prisoners, making them swear to secure for him the child, Beaton, and the castles, and later released them to do his bidding.

Henry's failure was due to the genius and resolution of Cardinal Beaton, heading the Catholic party.

What occurred in Scotland on James's death is obscure. Later, Beaton was said to have made the dying king's hand subscribe a blank paper filled up by appointment of Beaton himself as one of a Regency Council of four or five. There is no evidence for the tale. What actually occurred was the proclamation of the Earls of Arran, Argyll, Huntly, Moray, and of Beaton as Regents (December 19, 1542). Arran, the chief of the Hamiltons, was, we know, unless ousted by Henry VIII., the next heir to the throne after the new-born Mary. He was a good-hearted man, but the weakest of mortals, and his constant veerings from the Catholic and national to the English and reforming side were probably caused by his knowledge of his very doubtful legitimacy. Either party could bring up the doubt; Beaton, having the ear of the Pope, could be specially dangerous, but so could the opposite party if once firmly seated in office. Arran, in any case, presently ousted the Archbishop of Glasgow from the Chancellorship and gave the seals to Beaton—the man whom he presently accused of a shameless forgery of James's will. {91}

The Regency soon came into Arran's own hands: the Solway Moss prisoners, learning this as they journeyed north, began to repent of their oaths of treachery, especially as their oaths were known or suspected in Scotland. George Douglas prevailed on Arran to seize and imprison Beaton till he answered certain charges; but no charges were ever made public, none were produced. The clergy refused to christen or bury during his captivity. Parliament met (March 12, 1543), and still there was silence as to the nature of the accusations against Beaton; and by March 22 George Douglas himself released the Cardinal (of course for a consideration) and carried him to his own strong castle of St Andrews.

Parliament permitted the reading but forbade the discussion of the Bible in English. Arran was posing as a kind of Protestant. Ambassadors were sent to Henry to negotiate a marriage between his son Edward and the baby Queen; but Scotland would not give up a fortress, would never resign her independence, would not place Mary in Henry's hands, would never submit to any but a native ruler.

The airy castle of Henry's hopes fell into dust, built as it was on the oaths of traitors. Love of such a religion as Henry professed, retaining the Mass and making free use of the stake and the gibbet, was not, even to Protestants, so attractive as to make them run the English course and submit to the English Lord Paramount. Some time was needed to make Scots, whatever their religious opinions, lick the English rod. But the scale was soon to turn; for every reforming sermon was apt to produce the harrying of religious houses, and every punishment of the robbers was persecution intolerable against which men sought English protection.

Henry VIII. now turned to Arran for support. To Arran he offered the hand of his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, who should later marry the heir of the Hamiltons. But by mid-April Arran was under the influence of his bastard brother, the Abbot of Paisley (later Archbishop Hamilton). The Earl of Lennox, a Stuart, and Keeper of Dumbarton Castle, arrived from France. He was hostile to Arran; for, if Arran were illegitimate, Lennox was next heir to the crown after Mary: he was thus, for the moment, the ally of Beaton against Arran. George Douglas visited Henry, and returned with his terms—Mary to be handed over to England at the age of ten, and to marry Prince Edward at twelve; Arran (by a prior arrangement) was to receive Scotland north of Forth, an auxiliary English army, and the hand of Elizabeth for his son. To the English contingent Arran preferred 5000 pounds in ready money—that was his price.

Sadleyr, Henry's envoy, saw Mary of Guise, and saw her little daughter unclothed; he admired the child, but could not disentangle the cross-webs of intrigue. The national party—the Catholic party—was strongest, because least disunited. When the Scottish ambassadors who went to Henry in spring returned (July 21), the national party seized Mary and carried her to Stirling, where they offered Arran a meeting, and (he said) the child queen's hand for his son. But Arran's own partisans, Glencairn and Cassilis, told Sadleyr that he fabled freely. Representatives of both parties accepted Henry's terms, but delayed the ratification. Henry insisted that it should be ratified by August 24, but on August 16 he seized six Scottish merchant ships. Though the Treaty was ratified on August 25, Arran was compelled to insist on compensation for the ships, but on August 28 he proclaimed Beaton a traitor. In the beginning of September Arran favoured the wrecking of the Franciscan monastery in Edinburgh; and at Dundee the mob, moved by sermons from the celebrated martyr George Wishart, did sack the houses of the Franciscans and the Dominicans; Beaton's Abbey of Arbroath and the Abbey of Lindores were also plundered. Clearly it was believed that Beaton was down, and that church-pillage was authorised by Arran. Yet on September 3 Arran joined hands with Beaton! The Cardinal, by threatening to disprove Arran's legitimacy and ruin his hopes of the crown, or in some other way, had dominated the waverer, while Henry (August 29) was mobilising an army of 20,000 men for the invasion of Scotland. On September 9 Mary was crowned at Stirling. But Beaton could not hold both Arran and his rival Lennox, who committed an act of disgraceful treachery. With Glencairn he seized large supplies of money and stores sent by France to Dumbarton Castle. In 1544 he fled to England and to the protection of Henry, and married Margaret, daughter of Angus and Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. He became the father of Darnley, Mary's husband in later years, and the fortunes of Scotland were fatally involved in the feud between the Lennox Stewarts and the House of Hamilton.

Meanwhile (November 1543) Arran and Beaton together broke and persecuted the abbey robbers of Perthshire and Angus, making "martyrs" and incurring, on Beaton's part, fatal feuds with Leslies, Greys, Learmonths, and Kirkcaldys. Parliament (December 11) declared the treaty with England void; the party of the Douglases, equally suspected by Henry and by Beaton, was crushed, and George Douglas was held a hostage, still betraying his country in letters to England. Martyrs were burned in Perth and Dundee, which merely infuriated the populace. In April 1544, while Henry was giving the most cruel orders to his army of invasion, one Wishart visited him with offers, which were accepted, for the murder of the Cardinal. {94} Early in May the English army under Hertford took Leith, "raised a jolly fire," says Hertford, in Edinburgh; he burned the towns on his line of march, and retired.

On May 17 Lennox and Glencairn sold themselves to Henry; for ample rewards they were to secure the teaching of God's word "as the mere and only foundation whence proceeds all truth and honour"! Arran defeated Glencairn when he attempted his godly task, and Lennox was driven back into England.

In June Mary of Guise fell into the hands of nobles led by Angus, while the Fife, Perthshire, and Angus lairds, lately Beaton's deadly foes, came into the Cardinal's party. With him and Arran, in November, were banded the Protestants who were to be his murderers, while the Douglases, in December, were cleared by Parliament of all their offences, and Henry offered 3000 crowns for their "trapping." Angus, in February 1545, protested that he loved Henry "best of all men," and would make Lennox Governor of Scotland, while Wharton, for Henry, was trying to kidnap Angus. Enraged by the English desecration of his ancestors' graves at Melrose Abbey, Angus united with Arran, Norman Leslie, and Buccleuch to annihilate an English force at Ancrum Moor, where Henry's men lost 800 slain and 2000 prisoners. The loyalty of Angus to his country was now, by innocents like Arran, thought assured. The plot for Beaton's murder was in 1545 negotiated between Henry and Cassilis, backed by George Douglas; and Crichton of Brunston, as before, was engaged, a godly laird in Lothian. In August the Douglases boast that, as Henry's friends, they have frustrated an invasion of England with a large French contingent, which they pretended to lead, while they secured its failure. Meanwhile, after forty years, Donald Dubh, and all the great western chiefs, none of whom could write, renewed the alliance of 1463 with England, calling themselves "auld enemies of Scotland." Their religious predilections, however, were not Protestant. They promised to destroy or reduce half of Scotland, and hailed Lennox as Governor, as in Angus's offer to Henry in spring 1545. Lennox did make an attempt against Dumbarton in November with Donald Dubh. They failed, and Donald died, without legitimate issue, at Drogheda. The Macleans, Macleods, and Macneils then came into the national party.

In September 1545 Hertford, with an English force, destroyed the religious houses at Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh, and Jedburgh. {96} Meanwhile the two Douglases skulked with the murderous traitor Cassilis in Ayrshire, and Henry tried to induce French deserters from the Scottish flag to murder Beaton and Arran.

Beaton could scarcely escape for ever from so many plots. His capture, in January 1546, of George Wishart, an eminently learned and virtuous Protestant preacher, and an intimate associate of the murderous, double- dyed traitor Brunston and of other Lothian pietists of the English party; and his burning of Wishart at St Andrews, on March 1, 1546, sealed the Cardinal's doom. On May 29th he was surprised in his castle of St Andrews and slain by his former ally, Norman Leslie, Master of Rothes, with Kirkcaldy of Grange, and James Melville who seems to have dealt the final stab after preaching at his powerless victim. They insulted the corpse, and held St Andrews Castle against all comers.

How gallant a fight Beaton had waged against adversaries how many and multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical, we have seen. He maintained the independence of Scotland against the most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather bent on defending the lost cause of a Church entirely and intolerably corrupt.

The two causes were at the moment inseparable, and, whatever we may think of the Church of Rome, it was not more bloodily inclined than the Church of which Henry was Pope, while it was less illogical, not being the creature of a secular tyrant. If Henry and his party had won their game, the Church of Scotland would have been Henry's Church—would have been Anglican. Thus it was Beaton who, by defeating Henry, made Presbyterian Calvinism possible in Scotland.



CHAPTER XVII. REGENCY OF ARRAN.

The death of Cardinal Beaton left Scotland and the Church without a skilled and resolute defender. His successor in the see, Archbishop Hamilton, a half-brother of the Regent, was more licentious than the Cardinal (who seems to have been constant to Mariotte Ogilvy), and had little of his political genius. The murderers, with others of their party, held St Andrews Castle, strong in its new fortifications, which the queen-mother and Arran, the Regent, were unable to reduce. Receiving supplies from England by sea, and abetted by Henry VIII., the murderers were in treaty with him to work all his will, while some nobles, like Argyll and Huntly, wavered; though the Douglases now renounced their compact with England, and their promise to give the child queen in marriage to Henry's son. At the end of November, despairing of success in the siege, Arran asked France to send men and ships to take St Andrews Castle from the assassins, who, in December, obtained an armistice. They would surrender, they said, when they got a pardon for their guilt from the Pope; but they begged Henry VIII. to move the Emperor to move the Pope to give no pardon! The remission, none the less, arrived early in April 1547, but was mocked at by the garrison of the castle. {99}

The garrison and inmates of the castle presently welcomed the arrival of John Knox and some of his pupils. Knox (born in Haddington, 1513-1515?), a priest and notary, had borne a two-handed sword and been of the body- guard of Wishart. He was now invited by John Rough, the chaplain, to take on him the office of preacher, which he did, weeping, so strong was his sense of the solemnity of his duties. He also preached and disputed with feeble clerical opponents in the town. The congregation in the castle, though devout, were ruffianly in their lives, nor did he spare rebukes to his flock.

Before Knox arrived, Henry VIII. and Francis II. had died; the successor of Francis, Henri II., sent to Scotland Monsieur d'Oysel, who became the right-hand man of Mary of Guise in the Government. Meanwhile the advance of an English force against the Border, where they occupied Langholm, caused Arran to lead thither the national levies. But this gave no great relief to the besieged in the castle of St Andrews. In mid-July a well- equipped French fleet swept up the east coast; men were landed with guns; French artillery was planted on the cathedral roof and the steeple of St Salvator's College, and poured a plunging fire into the castle. In a day or two, on the last of July, the garrison surrendered. Knox, with many of his associates, was placed in the galleys and carried captive to France. On one occasion the galleys were within sight of St Andrews, and the Reformer predicted (so he says) that he would again preach there—as he did, to some purpose.

But the castle had not fallen before the English party among the nobles had arranged to betray Scottish fortresses to England; and to lead 2000 Scottish "favourers of the Word of God" to fight under the flag of St George against their country. An English host of 15,000 was assembled, and marched north accompanied by a fleet. On the 9th of September 1547 the leader, Somerset, found the Scottish army occupying a well-chosen position near Musselburgh: on their left lay the Firth, on their front a marsh and the river Esk. But next day the Scots, as when Cromwell defeated them at Dunbar, left an impregnable position in their eagerness to cut Somerset off from his ships, and were routed with great slaughter in the battle of Pinkie. Somerset made no great use of his victory: he took and held Broughty Castle on Tay, fortified Inchcolme in the Firth of Forth, and devastated Holyrood. Mischief he did, to little purpose.

The child queen was conveyed to an isle in the loch of Menteith, where she was safe, and her marriage with the Dauphin was negotiated. In June 1548 a large French force under the Sieur d'Esse arrived, and later captured Haddington, held by the English, while, despite some Franco-Scottish successes in the field, Mary was sent with her Four Maries to France, where she landed in August, the only passenger who had not been sea-sick! By April 1550 the English made peace, abandoning all their holds in Scotland. The great essential prize, the child queen, had escaped them.

The clergy burned a martyr in 1550; in 1549 they had passed measures for their own reformation: too late and futile was the scheme. Early in 1549 Knox returned from France to England, where he was minister at Berwick and at Newcastle, a chaplain of the child Edward VI., and a successful opponent of Cranmer as regards kneeling at the celebration of the Holy Communion. He refused a bishopric, foreseeing trouble under Mary Tudor, from whom he fled to the Continent. In 1550-51 Mary of Guise, visiting France, procured for Arran the Duchy of Chatelherault, and for his eldest son the command of the Scottish Archer Guard, and, by way of exchange, in 1554 took from him the Regency, surrounding herself with French advisers, notably De Roubay and d'Oysel.



CHAPTER XVIII. REGENCY OF MARY OF GUISE.

In England, on the death of Edward VI., Catholicism rejoiced in the accession of Mary Tudor, which, by driving Scottish Protestant refugees back into their own country, strengthened there the party of revolt against the Church, while the queen-mother's preference of French over Scottish advisers, and her small force of trained French soldiers in garrisons, caused even the Scottish Catholics to hold France in fear and suspicion. The French counsellors (1556) urged increased taxation for purposes of national defence against England; but the nobles would rather be invaded every year than tolerate a standing army in place of their old irregular feudal levies. Their own independence of the Crown was dearer to the nobles and gentry than safety from their old enemy. They might have reflected that a standing army of Scots, officered by themselves, would be a check on the French soldiers in garrison.

Perplexed and opposed by the great clan of Hamilton, whose chief, Arran, was nearest heir to the crown, Mary of Guise was now anxious to conciliate the Protestants, and there was a "blink," as the Covenanters later said,—a lull in persecution.

After Knox's release from the French galleys in 1549, he had played, as we saw, a considerable part in the affairs of the English Church, and in the making of the second Prayer-Book of Edward VI., but had fled abroad on the accession of Mary Tudor. From Dieppe he had sent a tract to England, praying God to stir up some Phineas or Jehu to shed the blood of "abominable idolaters,"—obviously of Mary of England and Philip of Spain. On earlier occasions he had followed Calvin in deprecating such sanguinary measures. The Scot, after a stormy period of quarrels with Anglican refugees in Frankfort, moved to Geneva, where the city was under a despotism of preachers and of Calvin. Here Knox found the model of Church government which, in a form if possible more extreme, he later planted in Scotland.

There, in 1549-52, the Church, under Archbishop Hamilton, Beaton's successor, had been confessing her iniquities in Provincial Councils, and attempting to purify herself on the lines of the tolerant and charitable Catechism issued by the Archbishop in 1552. Apparently a modus vivendi was being sought, and Protestants were inclined to think that they might be "occasional conformists" and attend Mass without being false to their convictions. But in this brief lull Knox came over to Scotland at the end of harvest, in 1555. On this point of occasional conformity he was fixed. The Mass was idolatry, and idolatry, by the law of God, was a capital offence. Idolaters must be converted or exterminated; they were no better than Amalekites.

This was the central rock of Knox's position: tolerance was impossible. He remained in Scotland, preaching and administering the Sacrament in the Genevan way, till June 1556. He associated with the future leaders of the religious revolution: Erskine of Dun, Lord Lorne (in 1558, fifth Earl of Argyll), James Stewart, bastard of James V., and lay Prior of St Andrews, and of Macon in France; and the Earl of Glencairn. William Maitland of Lethington, "the flower of the wits of Scotland," was to Knox a less congenial acquaintance. Not till May 1556 was Knox summoned to trial in Edinburgh, but he had a strong backing of the laity, as was the custom in Scotland, where justice was overawed by armed gatherings, and no trial was held. By July 1556 he was in France, on his way to Geneva.

The fruits of Knox's labours followed him, in March 1557, in the shape of a letter, signed by Glencairn, Lorne, Lord Erskine, and James Stewart, Mary's bastard brother. They prayed Knox to return. They were ready "to jeopardy lives and goods in the forward setting of the glory of God." This has all the air of risking civil war. Knox was not eager. It was October before he reached Dieppe on his homeward way. Meanwhile there had been hostilities between England and Scotland (as ally of France, then at odds with Philip of Spain, consort King of England), and there were Protestant tumults in Edinburgh. Knox had scruples as to raising civil war by preaching at home. The Scottish nobles had no zeal for the English war; but Knox, who received at Dieppe discouraging letters from unknown correspondents, did not cross the sea. He remained at Dieppe, preaching, till the spring of 1558.

In Knox's absence even James Stewart and Erskine of Dun agreed to hurry on the marriage between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Francis, Dauphin of France, a feeble boy, younger than herself. Their faces are pitiably young as represented in their coronation medal.

While negotiations for the marriage were begun in October, on December 3, 1557, a godly "band" or covenant for mutual aid was signed by Argyll (then near his death, in 1558); his son, Lorne; the Earl of Morton (son of the traitor, Sir George Douglas); Glencairn; and Erskine of Dun, one of the commissioners who were to visit France for the Royal marriage. They vow to risk their lives against "the Congregation of Satan" (the Church), and in defence of faithful Protestant preachers. They will establish "the blessed Word of God and His Congregation," and henceforth the Protestant party was commonly styled "The Congregation."

Parliament (November 29, 1557) had accepted the French marriage, all the ancient liberties of Scotland being secured, and the right to the throne, if Mary died without issue, being confirmed to the House of Hamilton, not to the Dauphin. The marriage-contract (April 19, 1558) did ratify these just demands; but, on April 4, Mary had been induced to sign them all away to France, leaving Scotland and her own claims to the English crown to the French king.

The marriage was celebrated on April 24, 1558. In that week the last Protestant martyr, Walter Milne, an aged priest and a married man, was burned for heresy at St Andrews. This only increased the zeal of the Congregation.

Among the Protestant preachers then in Scotland, of whom Willock, an Englishman, seems to have been the most reasonable, a certain Paul Methuen, a baker, was prominent. He had been summoned (July 28) to stand his trial for heresy, but his backing of friends was considerable, and they came before Mary of Guise in armour and with a bullying demeanour. She tried to temporise, and on September 3 a great riot broke out in Edinburgh, the image of St Giles was broken, and the mob violently assaulted a procession of priests. The country was seething with discontent, and the death of Mary Tudor (November 17, 1558), with the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, encouraged the Congregation. Mary of Guise made large concessions: only she desired that there should be no public meetings in the capital. On January 1, 1559, church doors were placarded with "The Beggars' Warning." The Beggars (really the Brethren in their name) claimed the wealth of the religious orders. Threats were pronounced, revolution was menaced at a given date, Whitsunday, and the threats were fulfilled.

All this was the result of a plan, not of accident. Mary of Guise was intending to visit France, not longing to burn heretics. But she fell into the worst of health, and her recovery was doubted, in April 1559. Willock and Methuen had been summoned to trial (February 2, 1559), for their preachings were always apt to lead to violence on the part of their hearers. The summons was again postponed in deference to renewed menaces: a Convention had met at Edinburgh to seek for some remedy, and the last Provincial Council of the Scottish Church (March 1559) had considered vainly some proposals by moderate Catholics for internal reform. {106}

Again the preachers were summoned to Stirling for May 10, but just a week earlier Knox arrived in Scotland. The leader of the French Protestant preachers, Morel, expressed to Calvin his fear that Knox "may fill Scotland with his madness." Now was his opportunity: the Regent was weak and ill; the Congregation was in great force; England was at least not unfavourable to its cause. From Dundee Knox marched with many gentlemen—unarmed, he says—accompanying the preachers to Perth: Erskine of Dun went as an envoy to the Regent at Stirling; she is accused by Knox of treacherous dealing (other contemporary Protestant evidence says nothing of treachery); at all events, on May 10 the preachers were outlawed for non-appearance to stand their trial. The Brethren, "the whole multitude with their preachers," says Knox, who were in Perth were infuriated, and, after a sermon from the Reformer, wrecked the church, sacked the monasteries, and, says Knox, denounced death against any priest who celebrated Mass (a circumstance usually ignored by our historians), at the same time protesting, "We require nothing but liberty of conscience"!

On May 31 a composition was made between the Regent and the insurgents, whom Argyll and James Stewart promised to join if the Regent broke the conditions. Henceforth the pretext that she had broken faith was made whenever it seemed convenient, while the Congregation permitted itself a godly liberty in construing the terms of treaties. A "band" was signed for "the destruction of idolatry" by Argyll, James Stewart, Glencairn, and others; and the Brethren scattered from Perth, breaking down altars and "idols" on their way home. Mary of Guise had promised not to leave a French garrison in Perth. She did leave some Scots in French pay, and on this slim pretext of her treachery, Argyll and James Stewart proclaimed the Regent perfidious, deserted her cause, and joined the crusade against "idolatry."



NOTE.

It is far from my purpose to represent Mary of Guise as a kind of stainless Una with a milk-white lamb. I am apt to believe that she caused to be forged a letter, which she attributed to Arran. See my 'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 280, 281, where the evidence is discussed. But the critical student of Knox's chapters on these events, generally accepted as historical evidence, cannot but perceive his personal hatred of Mary of Guise, whether shown in thinly veiled hints that Cardinal Beaton was her paramour; or in charges of treacherous breach of promise, which rest primarily on his word. Again, that "the Brethren" wrecked the religious houses of Perth is what he reports to a lady, Mrs Locke; that "the rascal multitude" was guilty is the tale he tells "to all Europe" in his History. I have done my best to compare Knox's stories with contemporary documents, including his own letters. These documents throw a lurid light on his versions of events, as given in this part of his History, which is merely a partisan pamphlet of autumn 1559. The evidence is criticised in my 'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 107-157 (1905). Unhappily the letter of Mary of Guise to Henri II., after the outbreak at Perth, is missing from the archives of France.



CHAPTER XIX. THE GREAT PILLAGE.

The revolution was now under weigh, and as it had begun so it continued. There was practically no resistance by the Catholic nobility and gentry: in the Lowlands, apparently, almost all were of the new persuasion. The Duc de Chatelherault might hesitate while his son, the Protestant Earl of Arran, who had been in France as Captain of the Scots Guard, was escaping into Switzerland, and thence to England; but, on Arran's arrival there, the Hamiltons saw their chance of succeeding to the crown in place of the Catholic Mary. The Regent had but a small body of professional French soldiers. But the other side could not keep their feudal levies in the field, and they could not coin the supplies of church plate which must have fallen into their hands, until they had seized the Mint at Edinburgh, so money was scarce with them. It was plain to Knox and Kirkcaldy of Grange, and it soon became obvious to Maitland of Lethington, who, of course, forsook the Regent, that aid from England must be sought,—aid in money, and if possible in men and ships.

Meanwhile the reformers dealt with the ecclesiastical buildings of St Andrews as they had done at Perth, Knox urging them on by his sermons. We may presume that the boys broke the windows and images with a sanctified joy. A mutilated head of the Redeemer has been found in a latrine of the monastic buildings. As Commendator, or lay Prior, James Stewart may have secured the golden sheath of the arm-bone of the Apostle, presented by Edward I., and the other precious things, the sacred plate of the Church in a fane which had been the Delphi of Scotland. Lethington appears to have obtained most of the portable property of St Salvator's College except that beautiful monument of idolatry, the great silver mace presented by Kennedy, the Founder, work of a Parisian silversmith, in 1461: this, with maces of rude native work, escaped the spoilers. The monastery of the Franciscans is now levelled with the earth; of the Dominicans' chapel a small fragment remains. Of the residential part of the abbey a house was left: when the lead had been stripped from the roof of the church it became a quarry.

"All churchmen's goods were spoiled and reft from them . . . for every man for the most part that could get anything pertaining to any churchmen thought the same well-won gear," says a contemporary Diary. Arran himself, when he arrived in Scotland, robbed a priest of all that he had, for which Chatelherault made compensation.

By the middle of June the Regent was compelled to remove almost all her French soldiers out of Fife. Perth was evacuated. The abbey of Scone and the palace were sacked. The Congregation entered Edinburgh: they seem to have found the monasteries already swept bare, but they seized Holyrood, and the stamps at the Mint. The Regent proclaimed that this was flat rebellion, and that the rebels were intriguing with England.

Knox denied it, in the first part of his History (in origin a contemporary tract written in the autumn), but the charge was true, and Knox and Kirkcaldy were, since June, the negotiators. Already his party were offering Arran (the heir of the crown after Mary) as a husband for Elizabeth, who saw him but rejected his suit. Arran's father, Chatelherault, later openly deserted the Regent (July 1). The death of Henri II., wounded in a tournament, did not accelerate the arrival of French reinforcements for the Regent. The weaker Brethren, however, waxed weary; money was scarce, and on July 24, the Congregation evacuated Edinburgh and Leith, after a treaty which they misrepresented, broke, and accused the Regent of breaking. {111a}

Knox visited England, about August 1, but felt dissatisfied with his qualification for diplomacy. Nothing, so far, was gained from Elizabeth, save a secret supply of 3000 pounds. On the other hand, fresh French forces arrived at Leith: the place was fortified; the Regent was again accused of perfidy by the perfidious; and on October 21 the Congregation proclaimed her deposition on the alleged authority of her daughter, now Queen of France, whose seal they forged and used in their documents. One Cokky was the forger; he saw Arran use the seal on public papers. {111b} Cokky had made a die for the coins of the Congregation—a crown of thorns, with the words Verbum Dei. Leith, manned by French soldiers, was, till in the summer of 1560 it surrendered to the Congregation and their English allies, the centre of Catholic resistance.

In November the Congregation, after a severe defeat, fled in grief from Edinburgh to Stirling, where Knox reanimated them, and they sent Lethington to England to crave assistance. Lethington, who had been in the service of the Regent, is henceforth the central figure of every intrigue. Witty, eloquent, subtle, he was indispensable, and he had one great ruling motive, to unite the crowns and peoples of England and Scotland. Unfortunately he loved the crafty exercise of his dominion over men's minds for its own sake, and when, in some inscrutable way, he entered the clumsy plot to murder Darnley, and knew that Mary could prove his guilt, his shiftings and changes puzzle historians. In Scotland he was called Michael Wily, that is, Macchiavelli, and "the necessary evil."

In his mission to England Lethington was successful. By December 21 the English diplomatist, Sadleyr, informed Arran that a fleet was on its way to aid the Congregation, who were sacking Paisley Abbey, and issuing proclamations in the names of Francis and Mary. The fleet arrived while the French were about to seize St Andrews (January 23, 1560), and the French plans were ruined. The Regent, who was dying, found shelter in Edinburgh Castle, which stood neutral. On February 27, 1560, at Berwick, the Congregation entered into a regular league with England, Elizabeth appearing as Protectress of Scotland, while the marriage of Mary and Francis endured.

Meanwhile, owing to the Huguenot disturbances in France (such as the Tumult of Amboise, directed against the lives of Mary's uncles the Cardinal and Duc de Guise), Mary and Francis could not help the Regent, and Huntly, a Catholic, presently, as if in fear of the western clans, joined the Congregation. Mary of Guise had found the great northern chief treacherous, and had disgraced him, and untrustworthy he continued to be. On May 7 the garrison of Leith defeated with heavy loss an Anglo- Scottish attack on the walls; but on June 16 the Regent made a good end, in peace with all men. She saw Chatelherault, James Stewart, and the Earl Marischal; she listened patiently to the preacher Willock; she bade farewell to all, and died, a notable woman, crushed by an impossible task. The garrison of Leith, meanwhile, was starving on rats and horseflesh: negotiations began, and ended in the Treaty of Edinburgh (July 6, 1560).

This Treaty, as between Mary, Queen of France and Scotland, on one hand, and England on the other, was never ratified by Mary Stuart: she appears to have thought that one clause implied her abandonment of all her claims to the English succession, typified by her quartering of the Royal English arms on her own shield. Thus there never was nor could be amity between her and her sister and her foe, Elizabeth, who was justly aggrieved by her assumption of the English arms, while Elizabeth quartered the arms of France. Again, the ratification of the Treaty as regarded Mary's rebels depended on their fulfilling certain clauses which, in fact, they instantly violated.

Preachers were planted in the larger town, some of which had already secured their services; Knox took Edinburgh. "Superintendents,"—by no means bishops—were appointed, an order which soon ceased to exist in the Kirk: their duties were to wander about in their provinces, superintending and preaching. By request of the Convention (which was crowded by persons not used to attend), some preachers drew up, in four days, a Confession of Faith, on the lines of Calvin's rule at Geneva: this was approved and passed on August 17. The makers of the document profess their readiness to satisfy any critic of any point "from the mouth of God" (out of the Bible), but the pace was so good that either no criticism was offered or it was very rapidly "satisfied." On August 24 four acts were passed in which the authority of "The Bishop of Rome" was repudiated. All previous legislation, not consistent with the new Confession, was rescinded. Against celebrants and attendants of the Mass were threatened (1) confiscation and corporal punishment; (2) exile; and (3) for the third offence, Death. The death sentence is not known to have been carried out in more than one or two cases. (Prof. Hume-Brown writes that "the penalties attached to the breach of these enactments" (namely, the abjuration of Papal jurisdiction, the condemnation of all practices and doctrines contrary to the new creed, and of the celebration of Mass in Scotland) "were those approved and sanctioned by the example of every country in Christendom." But not, surely, for the same offences, such as "the saying or hearing of Mass"?—' History of Scotland,' ii. 71, 72: 1902.) Suits in ecclesiastical were removed into secular courts (August 29).

In the Confession the theology was that of Calvin. Civil rulers were admitted to be of divine institution, their duty is to "suppress idolatry," and they are not to be resisted "when doing that which pertains to their charge." But a Catholic ruler, like Mary, or a tolerant ruler, as James VI. would fain have been, apparently may be resisted for his tolerance. Resisted James was, as we shall see, whenever he attempted to be lenient to Catholics.

The Book of Discipline, by Knox and other preachers, never was ratified by the Estates, as the Confession of Faith had been. It made admirable provisions for the payment of preachers and teachers, for the Universities, and for the poor; but somebody, probably Lethington, spoke of the proposals as "devout imaginations." The Book of Discipline approved of what was later accepted by the General Assembly, The Book of Common Order in Public Worship. This book was not a stereotyped Liturgy, but it was a kind of guide to the ministers in public prayers: the minister may repeat the prayers, or "say something like in effect." On the whole, he prayed "as the Spirit moved him," and he really seems to have been regarded as inspired; his prayers were frequently political addresses. To silence these the infatuated policy of Charles I. thrust the Laudian Liturgy on the nation.

The preachers were to be chosen by popular election, after examination in knowledge and as to morals. There was to be no ordination "by laying on of hands." "Seeing the miracle is ceased, the using of the ceremony we deem not necessary"; but, if the preachers were inspired, the miracle had not ceased, and the ceremony was soon reinstated. Contrary to Genevan practice, such festivals as Christmas and Easter were abolished. The Scottish Sabbath was established in great majesty. One "rag of Rome" was retained, clerical excommunication—the Sword of Church Discipline. It was the cutting off from Christ of the excommunicated, who were handed over to the devil, and it was attended by civil penalties equivalent to universal boycotting, practical outlawry, and followed by hell fire: "which sentence, lawfully pronounced on earth, is ratified in heaven." The strength of the preachers lay in this terrible weapon, borrowed from the armoury of Rome.

Private morals were watched by the elders, and offenders were judged in kirk-sessions. Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were the most prominent and popular sins. The mainstay of the system is the idea that the Bible is literally inspired; that the preachers are the perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must imitate the old Hebrew persecution of "idolaters," that is, mainly Catholics. All this meant a theocracy of preachers elected by the populace, and governing the nation by their General Assembly in which nobles and other laymen sat as elders. These peculiar institutions came hot from Geneva, and the country could never have been blessed with them, as we have observed, but for that instrument of Providence, Cardinal Beaton. Had he disposed of himself and Scotland to Henry VIII. (who would not have tolerated Presbyterian claims for an hour), Scotland would not have received the Genevan discipline, and the Kirk would have groaned under bishops.

The Reformation supplied Scotland with a class of preachers who were pure in their lives, who were not accessible to bribes (a virtue in which they stood almost alone), who were firm in their faith, and soon had learning enough to defend it; who were constant in their parish work, and of whom many were credited with prophetic and healing powers. They could exorcise ghosts from houses, devils from men possessed.

The baldness of the services, the stern nature of the creed, were congenial to the people. The drawbacks were the intolerance, the spiritual pretensions of the preachers to interference in secular affairs, and the superstition which credited men like Knox, and later, Bruce, with the gifts of prophecy and other miraculous workings, and insisted on the burning of witches and warlocks, whereof the writer knows scarcely an instance in Scotland before the Reformation.

The pulpit may be said to have discharged the functions of the press (a press which was all on one side). When, in 1562, Ninian Winzet, a Catholic priest and ex-schoolmaster, was printing a controversial tractate addressed to Knox, the magistrates seized the manuscript at the printer's house, and the author was fortunate in making his escape. The nature of the Confession of Faith, and of the claims of the ministers to interfere in secular affairs, with divine authority, was certain to cause war between the Crown and the Kirk. That war, whether open and armed, or a conflict in words, endured till, in 1690, the weapon of excommunication with civil penalties was quietly removed from the ecclesiastical armoury. Such were the results of a religious revolution hurriedly effected.

The Lords now sent an embassy to Elizabeth about the time of the death of Amy Robsart, and while Amy's husband, Robert Dudley, was very dear to the English queen, to urge, vainly, her marriage with Arran. On December 5, 1560, Francis II. died, leaving Mary Stuart a mere dowager; while her kinsmen, the Guises, lost power, which fell into the unfriendly hands of Catherine de Medici. At once Arran, who made Knox his confidant, began to woo Mary with a letter and a ring. Her reply perhaps increased his tendency to madness, which soon became open and incurable by the science of the day.

Here we must try to sketch Mary, la, Reine blanche, in her white royal mourning. Her education had been that of the learned ladies of her age; she had some knowledge of Latin, and knew French and Italian. French was to her almost a mother-tongue, but not quite; she had retained her Scots, and her attempts to write English are, at first, curiously imperfect. She had lived in a profligate Court, but she was not the wanton of hostile slanders. She had all the guile of statesmanship, said the English envoy, Randolph; and she long exercised great patience under daily insults to her religion and provocations from Elizabeth. She was generous, pitiful, naturally honourable, and most loyal to all who served her. But her passions, whether of love or hate, once roused, were tyrannical. In person she was tall, like her mother, and graceful, with beautiful hands. Her face was somewhat long, the nose long and straight, the lips and chin beautifully moulded, the eyebrows very slender, the eyes of a reddish brown, long and narrow. Her hair was russet, drawn back from a lofty brow; her smile was captivating; she was rather fascinating than beautiful; her courage and her love of courage in others were universally confessed. {118}

In January, 1561, the Estates of Scotland ordered James Stuart, Mary's natural brother, to visit her in France. In spring she met him, and an envoy from Huntly (Lesley, later Bishop of Ross), who represented the Catholic party, and asked Mary to land in Aberdeen, and march south at the head of the Gordons and certain northern clans. The proposal came from noblemen of Perthshire, Angus, and the north, whose forces could not have faced a Lowland army. Mary, who had learned from her mother that Huntly was treacherous, preferred to take her chance with her brother, who, returning by way of England, moved Elizabeth to recognise the Scottish queen as her heir. But Elizabeth would never settle the succession, and, as Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, forbade her to travel home through England.



CHAPTER XX. MARY IN SCOTLAND.

On August 19, 1561, in a dense fog, and almost unexpected and unwelcomed, Mary landed in Leith. She had told the English ambassador to France that she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hoped to be unconstrained. Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure for a Robin Hood frolic: her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that they had acted "in despite of religion."