← catalogue

A Short History of Scotland

by Andrew Lang · English · Gutenberg #15955 · 498,329 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Short History of Scotland
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: A Short History of Scotland

Author: Andrew Lang


        
Release date: May 31, 2005 [eBook #15955]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15955

Credits: Transcribed from the 1911 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHORT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND ***





Transcribed from the 1911 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





A SHORT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND


CHAPTER I.  SCOTLAND AND THE ROMANS.


If we could see in a magic mirror the country now called Scotland as it
was when the Romans under Agricola (81 A.D.) crossed the Border, we
should recognise little but the familiar hills and mountains.  The
rivers, in the plains, overflowed their present banks; dense forests of
oak and pine, haunted by great red deer, elks, and boars, covered land
that has long been arable.  There were lakes and lagoons where for
centuries there have been fields of corn.  On the oldest sites of our
towns were groups of huts made of clay and wattle, and dominated,
perhaps, by the large stockaded house of the tribal prince.  In the
lochs, natural islands, or artificial islets made of piles (crannogs),
afforded standing-ground and protection to villages, if indeed these lake-
dwellings are earlier in Scotland than the age of war that followed the
withdrawal of the Romans.

The natives were far beyond the savage stage of culture.  They lived in
an age of iron tools and weapons and of wheeled vehicles; and were in
what is called the Late Celtic condition of art and culture, familiar to
us from beautiful objects in bronze work, more commonly found in Ireland
than in Scotland, and from the oldest Irish romances and poems.

In these "epics" the manners much resemble those described by Homer.  Like
his heroes, the men in the Cuchullain sagas fight from light chariots,
drawn by two ponies, and we know that so fought the tribes in Scotland
encountered by Agricola the Roman General (81-85 A.D.)  It is even said
in the Irish epics that Cuchullain learned his chariotry in _Alba_--that
is, in our Scotland. {2}  The warriors had "mighty limbs and flaming
hair," says Tacitus.  Their weapons were heavy iron swords, in bronze
sheaths beautifully decorated, and iron-headed spears; they had large
round bronze-studded shields, and battle-axes.  The dress consisted of
two upper garments: first, the smock, of linen or other fabric--in
battle, often of tanned hides of animals,--and the mantle, or plaid, with
its brooch.  Golden torques and heavy gold bracelets were worn by the
chiefs; the women had bronze ornaments with brightly coloured enamelled
decoration.

Agriculture was practised, and corn was ground in the circular querns of
stone, of which the use so long survived.  The women span and wove the
gay smocks and darker cloaks of the warriors.

Of the religion, we only know that it was a form of polytheism; that
sacrifices were made, and that Druids existed; they were soothsayers,
magicians, perhaps priests, and were attendant on kings.

Such were the people in Alba whom we can dimly descry around Agricola's
fortified frontier between the firths of Forth and Clyde, about 81-82
A.D.  When Agricola pushed north of the Forth and Tay he still met men
who had considerable knowledge of the art of war.  In his battle at Mons
Graupius (perhaps at the junction of Isla and Tay), his cavalry had the
better of the native chariotry in the plain; and the native infantry,
descending from their position on the heights, were attacked by his
horsemen in their attempt to assail his rear.  But they were swift of
foot, the woods sheltered and the hills defended them.  He made no more
effectual pursuit than Cumberland did at Culloden.

Agricola was recalled by Domitian after seven years' warfare, and his
garrisons did not long hold their forts on his lines or frontier, which
stretched across the country from Forth to Clyde; roughly speaking, from
Graham's Dyke, east of Borrowstounnis on the Firth of Forth, to Old
Kilpatrick on Clyde.  The region is now full of coal-mines, foundries,
and villages; but excavations at Bar Hill, Castlecary, and Roughcastle
disclose traces of Agricola's works, with their earthen ramparts.  The
Roman station at Camelon, north-west of Falkirk, was connected with the
southern passes of the Highland hills by a road with a chain of forts.
The remains of Roman pottery at Camelon are of the first century.

Two generations after Agricola, about 140-145, the Roman Governor,
Lollius Urbicus, refortified the line of Forth to Clyde with a wall of
sods and a ditch, and forts much larger than those constructed by
Agricola.  His line, "the Antonine Vallum," had its works on commanding
ridges; and fire-signals, in case of attack by the natives, flashed the
news "from one sea to the other sea," while the troops of occupation
could be provisioned from the Roman fleet.  Judging by the coins found by
the excavators, the line was abandoned about 190, and the forts were
wrecked and dismantled, perhaps by the retreating Romans.

After the retreat from the Antonine Vallum, about 190, we hear of the
vigorous "unrest" of the Meatae and Caledonians; the latter people are
said, on very poor authority, to have been little better than savages.
Against them Severus (208) made an expedition indefinitely far to the
north, but the enemy shunned a general engagement, cut off small
detachments, and caused the Romans terrible losses in this march to a non-
existent Moscow.

Not till 306 do we hear of the Picts, about whom there is infinite
learning but little knowledge.  They must have spoken Gaelic by Severus's
time (208), whatever their original language; and were long recognised in
Galloway, where the hill and river names are Gaelic.

The later years of the Romans, who abandoned Britain in 410, were
perturbed by attacks of the Scoti (Scots) from Ireland, and it is to a
settlement in Argyll of "Dalriadic" Scots from Ireland about 500 A.D.
that our country owes the name of Scotland.

Rome has left traces of her presence on Scottish soil--vestiges of the
forts and vallum wall between the firths; a station rich in antiquities
under the Eildons at Newstead; another, Ardoch, near Sheriffmuir; a third
near Solway Moss (Birrenswark); and others less extensive, with some
roads extending towards the Moray Firth; and a villa at Musselburgh,
found in the reign of James VI. {4}




CHAPTER II.  CHRISTIANITY--THE RIVAL KINGDOMS.


To the Scots, through St Columba, who, about 563, settled in Iona, and
converted the Picts as far north as Inverness, we owe the introduction of
Christianity, for though the Roman Church of St Ninian (397), at Whithern
in Galloway, left embers of the faith not extinct near Glasgow, St
Kentigern's country, till Columba's time, the rites of Christian Scotland
were partly of the Celtic Irish type, even after St Wilfrid's victory at
the Synod of Whitby (664).

St Columba himself was of the royal line in Ulster, was learned, as
learning was then reckoned, and, if he had previously been turbulent, he
now desired to spread the Gospel.  With twelve companions he settled in
Iona, established his cloister of cells, and journeyed to Inverness, the
capital of Pictland.  Here his miracles overcame the magic of the King's
druids; and his Majesty, Brude, came into the fold, his people following
him.  Columba was no less of a diplomatist than of an evangelist.  In a
crystal he saw revealed the name of the rightful king of the Dalriad
Scots in Argyll--namely, Aidan--and in 575, at Drumceat in North Ireland,
he procured the recognition of Aidan, and brought the King of the Picts
also to confess Aidan's independent royalty.

In the 'Life of Columba,' by Adamnan, we get a clear and complete view of
everyday existence in the Highlands during that age.  We are among the
red deer, and the salmon, and the cattle in the hills, among the second-
sighted men, too, of whom Columba was far the foremost.  We see the
saint's inkpot upset by a clumsy but enthusiastic convert; we even make
acquaintance with the old white pony of the monastery, who mourned when
St Columba was dying; while among secular men we observe the differences
in rank, measured by degrees of wealth in cattle.  Many centuries elapse
before, in Froissart, we find a picture of Scotland so distinct as that
painted by Adamnan.

The discipline of St Columba was of the monastic model.  There were
settlements of clerics in fortified villages; the clerics were a kind of
monks, with more regard for abbots than for their many bishops, and with
peculiar tonsures, and a peculiar way of reckoning the date of Easter.
Each missionary was popularly called a Saint, and the _Kil_, or cell, of
many a Celtic missionary survives in hundreds of place-names.

The salt-water Loch Leven in Argyll was on the west the south frontier of
"Pictland," which, on the east, included all the country north of the
Firth of Forth.  From Loch Leven south to Kintyre, a large cantle,
including the isles, was the land of the Scots from Ireland, the
Dalriadic kingdom.  The south-west, from Dumbarton, including our modern
Cumberland and Westmorland, was named Strathclyde, and was peopled by
British folk, speaking an ancient form of Welsh.  On the east, from
Ettrick forest into Lothian, the land was part of the early English
kingdom of Bernicia; here the invading Angles were already settled--though
river-names here remain Gaelic, and hill-names are often either Gaelic or
Welsh.  The great Northern Pictland was divided into seven provinces, or
sub-kingdoms, while there was an over-King, or Ardrigh, with his capital
at Inverness and, later, in Angus or Forfarshire.  The country about
Edinburgh was partly English, partly Cymric or Welsh.  The south-west
corner, Galloway, was called Pictish, and was peopled by Gaelic-speaking
tribes.

In the course of time and events the dynasty of the Argyll Scoti from
Ireland gave its name to Scotland, while the English element gave its
language to the Lowlands; it was adopted by the Celtic kings of the whole
country and became dominant, while the Celtic speech withdrew into the
hills of the north and northwest.

The nation was thus evolved out of alien and hostile elements, Irish,
Pictish, Gaelic, Cymric, English, and on the northern and western shores,
Scandinavian.




CHAPTER III.  EARLY WARS OF RACES.


In a work of this scope, it is impossible to describe all the wars
between the petty kingdoms peopled by races of various languages, which
occupied Scotland.  In 603, in the wild moors at Degsastane, between the
Liddel burn and the passes of the Upper Tyne, the English Aethelfrith of
Deira, with an army of the still pagan ancestors of the Borderers,
utterly defeated Aidan, King of Argyll, with the Christian converted
Scots.  Henceforth, for more than a century, the English between Forth
and Humber feared neither Scot of the west nor Pict of the north.

On the death of Aethelfrith (617), the Christian west and north exercised
their influences; one of Aethelfrith's exiled sons married a Pictish
princess, and became father of a Pictish king, another, Oswald, was
baptised at Iona; and the new king of the northern English of Lothian,
Edwin, was converted by Paullinus (627), and held Edinburgh as his
capital.  Later, after an age of war and ruin, Oswald, the convert of
Iona, restored Christianity in northern England; and, after his fall, his
brother, Oswiu, consolidated the north English.  In 685 Oswiu's son
Egfrith crossed the Forth and invaded Pictland with a Northumbrian army,
but was routed with great loss, and was slain at Nectan's Mere, in
Forfarshire.  Thenceforth, till 761, the Picts were dominant, as against
Scots and north English, Angus MacFergus being then their leader (731-
761).

Now the invaders and settlers from Scandinavia, the Northmen on the west
coast, ravaged the Christian Scots of the west, and burned Iona: finally,
in 844-860, Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, a Scot of Dalriada on the
paternal, a Pict on the mother's side, defeated the Picts and obtained
their throne.  By Pictish law the crown descended in the maternal line,
which probably facilitated the coronation of Kenneth.  To the Scots and
"to all Europe" he was a Scot; to the Picts, as son of a royal Pictish
mother, he was a Pict.  With him, at all events, Scots and Picts were
interfused, and there began the _Scottish_ dynasty, supplanting the
Pictish, though it is only in popular tales that the Picts were
exterminated.

Owing to pressure from the Northmen sea-rovers in the west, the capital
and the seat of the chief bishop, under Kenneth MacAlpine (844-860), were
moved eastwards from Iona to Scone, near Perth, and after an interval at
Dunkeld, to St Andrews in Fife.

The line of Kenneth MacAlpine, though disturbed by quarrels over the
succession, and by Northmen in the west, north, and east, none the less
in some way "held a good grip o' the gear" against Vikings, English of
Lothian, and Welsh of Strathclyde.  In consequence of a marriage with a
Welsh princess of Strathclyde, or Cumberland, a Scottish prince, Donald,
brother of Constantine II., became king of that realm (908), and his
branch of the family of MacAlpin held Cumbria for a century.



ENGLISH CLAIMS OVER SCOTLAND.


In 924 the first claim by an English king, Edward, to the over-lordship
of Scotland appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  The entry contains a
manifest error, and the topic causes war between modern historians,
English and Scottish.  In fact, there are several such entries of
Scottish acceptance of English suzerainty under Constantine II., and
later, but they all end in the statement, "this held not long."  The
"submission" of Malcolm I. to Edmund (945) is not a submission but an
alliance; the old English word for "fellow-worker," or "ally," designates
Malcolm as fellow-worker with Edward of England.

This word (midwyrhta) was translated _fidelis_ (one who gives fealty) in
the Latin of English chroniclers two centuries later, but Malcolm I. held
Cumberland as an ally, not as a subject prince of England.  In 1092 an
English chronicle represents Malcolm III. as holding Cumberland "by
conquest."

The main fact is that out of these and similar dim transactions arose the
claims of Edward I. to the over-lordship of Scotland,--claims that were
urged by Queen Elizabeth's minister, Cecil, in 1568, and were boldly
denied by Maitland of Lethington.  From these misty pretensions came the
centuries of war that made the hardy character of the folk of Scotland.
{10}



THE SCOTTISH ACQUISITION OF LOTHIAN.


We cannot pretend within our scope to follow chronologically "the
fightings and flockings of kites and crows," in "a wolf-age, a war-age,"
when the Northmen from all Scandinavian lands, and the Danes, who had
acquired much of Ireland, were flying at the throat of England and
hanging on the flanks of Scotland; while the Britons of Strathclyde
struck in, and the Scottish kings again and again raided or sought to
occupy the fertile region of Lothian between Forth and Tweed.  If the
dynasty of MacAlpin could win rich Lothian, with its English-speaking
folk, they were "made men," they held the granary of the North.  By
degrees and by methods not clearly defined they did win the Castle of the
Maidens, the acropolis of Dunedin, Edinburgh; and fifty years later, in
some way, apparently by the sword, at the battle of Carham (1018), in
which a Scottish king of Cumberland fought by his side, Malcolm II. took
possession of Lothian, the whole south-east region, by this time entirely
anglified, and this was the greatest step in the making of Scotland.  The
Celtic dynasty now held the most fertile district between Forth and
Tweed, a district already English in blood and speech, the centre and
focus of the English civilisation accepted by the Celtic kings.  Under
this Malcolm, too, his grandson, Duncan, became ruler of Strathclyde--that
is, practically, of Cumberland.

Malcolm is said to have been murdered at haunted Glamis, in Forfarshire,
in 1034; the room where he died is pointed out by legend in the ancient
castle.  His rightful heir, by the strange system of the Scots, should
have been, not his own grandson, Duncan, but the grandson of Kenneth III.
The rule was that the crown went alternately to a descendant of the House
of Constantine (863-877), son of Kenneth MacAlpine, and to a descendant
of Constantine's brother, Aodh (877-888).  These alternations went on
till the crowning of Malcolm II. (1005-1034), and then ceased, for
Malcolm II. had slain the unnamed male heir of the House of Aodh, a son
of Boedhe, in order to open the succession to his own grandson, "the
gracious Duncan."  Boedhe had left a daughter, Gruach; she had by the
Mormaor, or under-king of the province of Murray, a son, Lulach.  On the
death of the Mormaor she married Macbeth, and when Macbeth slew Duncan
(1040), he was removing a usurper--as he understood it--and he ruled in
the name of his stepson, Lulach.  The power of Duncan had been weakened
by repeated defeats at the hands of the Northmen under Thorfinn.  In 1057
Macbeth was slain in battle at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and Malcolm
Canmore, son of Duncan, after returning from England, whither he had fled
from Macbeth, succeeded to the throne.  But he and his descendants for
long were opposed by the House of Murray, descendants of Lulach, who
himself had died in 1058.

The world will always believe Shakespeare's version of these events, and
suppose the gracious Duncan to have been a venerable old man, and Macbeth
an ambitious Thane, with a bloodthirsty wife, he himself being urged on
by the predictions of witches.  He was, in fact, Mormaor of Murray, and
upheld the claims of his stepson Lulach, who was son of a daughter of the
wrongfully extruded House of Aodh.

Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's grandson, on the other hand, represented the
European custom of direct lineal succession against the ancient Scots'
mode.




CHAPTER IV.  MALCOLM CANMORE--NORMAN CONQUEST.


The reign of Malcolm Canmore (1057-1093) brought Scotland into closer
connection with western Europe and western Christianity.  The Norman
Conquest (1066) increased the tendency of the English-speaking people of
Lothian to acquiesce in the rule of a Celtic king, rather than in that of
the adventurers who followed William of Normandy.  Norman operations did
not at first reach Cumberland, which Malcolm held; and, on the death of
his Norse wife, the widow of Duncan's foe, Thorfinn (she left a son,
Duncan), Malcolm allied himself with the English Royal House by marrying
Margaret, sister of Eadgar AEtheling, then engaged in the hopeless effort
to rescue northern England from the Normans.  The dates are confused:
Malcolm may have won the beautiful sister of Edgar, rightful king of
England, in 1068, or at the time (1070) of his raid, said to have been of
savage ferocity, into Northumberland, and his yet more cruel reprisals
for Gospatric's harrying of Cumberland.  In either case, St Margaret's
biographer, who had lived at her Court, whether or not he was her
Confessor, Turgot, represents the Saint as subduing the savagery of
Malcolm, who passed wakeful nights in weeping for his sins.  A lover of
books, which Malcolm could not read, an expert in "the delicate, and
gracious, and bright works of women," Margaret brought her own gentleness
and courtesy among a rude people, built the abbey church of Dunfermline,
and presented the churches with many beautiful golden reliquaries and
fine sacramental plate.

In 1072, to avenge a raid of Malcolm (1070), the Conqueror, with an army
and a fleet, came to Abernethy on Tay, where Malcolm, in exchange for
English manors, "became his man" _for them_, and handed over his son
Duncan as a hostage for peace.  The English view is that Malcolm became
William's "man for all that he had"--or for all south of Tay.

After various raidings of northern England, and after the death of the
Conqueror, Malcolm renewed, in Lothian, the treaty of Abernethy, being
secured in his twelve English manors (1091).  William Rufus then took and
fortified Carlisle, seized part of Malcolm's lands in Cumberland, and
summoned him to Gloucester, where the two Kings, after all, quarrelled
and did not meet.  No sooner had Malcolm returned home than he led an
army into Northumberland, where he was defeated and slain, near Alnwick
(Nov. 13, 1093).  His son Edward fell with him, and his wife, St
Margaret, died in Edinburgh Castle: her body, under cloud of night, was
carried through the host of rebel Celts and buried at Dunfermline.

Margaret, a beautiful and saintly Englishwoman, had been the ruling
spirit of the reign in domestic and ecclesiastical affairs.  She had
civilised the Court, in matters of costume at least; she had read books
to the devoted Malcolm, who could not read; and he had been her
interpreter in her discussions with the Celtic-speaking clergy, whose
ideas of ritual differed from her own.  The famous Culdees, originally
ascetic hermits, had before this day united in groups living under
canonical rules, and, according to English observers, had ceased to be
bachelors.  Masses are said to have been celebrated by them in some
"barbarous rite"; Saturday was Sabbath; on Sunday men worked.  Lent
began, not on Ash Wednesday, but on the Monday following.  We have no
clearer account of the Culdee peculiarities that St Margaret reformed.
The hereditary tenure of benefices by lay protectors she did not reform,
but she restored the ruined cells of Iona, and established _hospitia_ for
pilgrims.  She was decidedly unpopular with her Celtic subjects, who now
made a struggle against English influences.

In the year of her death died Fothadh, the last Celtic bishop of St
Andrews, and the Celtic clergy were gradually superseded and replaced by
monks of English name, English speech, and English ideas--or rather the
ideas of western Europe.  Scotland, under Margaret's influence, became
more Catholic; the celibacy of the clergy was more strictly enforced (it
had almost lapsed), but it will be observed throughout that, of all
western Europe, Scotland was least overawed by Rome.  Yet for centuries
the Scottish Church was, in a peculiar degree, "the daughter of Rome,"
for not till about 1470 had she a Metropolitan, the Archbishop of St
Andrews.

On the deaths, in one year, of Malcolm, Margaret, and Fothadh, the last
Celtic bishop of St Andrews, the see for many years was vacant or merely
filled by transient bishops.  York and Canterbury were at feud for their
superiority over the Scottish Church; and the other sees were not
constituted and provided with bishops till the years 1115 (Glasgow),
1150,--Argyll not having a bishop till 1200.  In the absence of a
Metropolitan, episcopal elections had to be confirmed at Rome, which
would grant no Metropolitan, but forbade the Archbishop of York to claim
a superiority which would have implied, or prepared the way for, English
superiority over Scotland.  Meanwhile the expenses and delays of appeals
from bishops direct to Rome did not stimulate the affection of the
Scottish "daughter of Rome."  The rights of the chapters of the
Cathedrals to elect their bishops, and other appointments to
ecclesiastical offices, in course of time were transferred to the Pope,
who negotiated with the king, and thus all manner of jobbery increased,
the nobles influencing the king in favour of their own needy younger
sons, and the Pope being amenable to various secular persuasions, so that
in every way the relations of Scotland with the Holy Father were
anomalous and irksome.

Scotland was, indeed, a country predestined to much ill fortune, to
tribulations against which human foresight could erect no defence.  But
the marriage of the Celtic Malcolm with the English Margaret, and the
friendly arrival of great nobles from the south, enabled Scotland to
receive the new ideas of feudal law in pacific fashion.  They were not
violently forced upon the English-speaking people of Lothian.



DYNASTY OF MALCOLM.


On the death of Malcolm the contest for the Crown lay between his
brother, Donald Ban, supported by the Celts; his son Duncan by his first
wife, a Norse woman (Duncan being then a hostage at the English Court,
who was backed by William Rufus); and thirdly, Malcolm's eldest son by
Margaret, Eadmund, the favourite with the anglicised south of the
country.  Donald Ban, after a brief period of power, was driven out by
Duncan (1094); Duncan was then slain by the Celts (1094).  Donald was
next restored, north of Forth, Eadmund ruling in the south, but was
dispossessed and blinded by Malcolm's son Eadgar, who reigned for ten
years (1097-1107), while Eadmund died in an English cloister.  Eadgar had
trouble enough on all sides, but the process of anglicising continued,
under himself, and later, under his brother, Alexander I., who ruled
north of Forth and Clyde; while the youngest brother, David, held Lothian
and Cumberland, with the title of Earl.  The sister of those sons of
Malcolm, Eadgyth (Matilda), married Henry I. of England in 1100.  There
seemed a chance that, north of Clyde and Forth, there would be a Celtic
kingdom; while Lothian and Cumbria would be merged in England.  Alexander
was mainly engaged in fighting the Moray claimants of his crown in the
north and in planting his religious houses, notably St Andrews, with
English Augustinian canons from York.  Canterbury and York contended for
ecclesiastical superiority over Scotland; after various adventures,
Robert, the prior of the Augustinians at Scone, was made Bishop of St
Andrews, being consecrated by Canterbury, in 1124; while York consecrated
David's bishop in Glasgow.  Thanks to the quarrels of the sees of York
and Canterbury, the Scottish clergy managed to secure their
ecclesiastical independence from either English see; and became, finally,
the most useful combatants in the long struggle for the independence of
the nation.  Rome, on the whole, backed that cause.  The Scottish
Catholic churchmen, in fact, pursued the old patriotic policy of
resistance to England till the years just preceding the Reformation, when
the people leaned to the reformed doctrines, and when Scottish national
freedom was endangered more by France than by England.




CHAPTER V.  DAVID I. AND HIS TIMES.


With the death of Alexander I. (April 25, 1124) and the accession of his
brother, David I., the deliberate Royal policy of introducing into
Scotland English law and English institutions, as modified by the Norman
rulers, was fulfilled.  David, before Alexander's death, was Earl of the
most English part of Lothian, the country held by Scottish kings, and
Cumbria; and resided much at the court of his brother-in-law, Henry I.  He
associated, when Earl, with nobles of Anglo-Norman race and language,
such as Moreville, Umfraville, Somerville, Gospatric, Bruce, Balliol, and
others; men with a stake in both countries, England and Scotland.  On
coming to the throne, David endowed these men with charters of lands in
Scotland.  With him came a cadet of the great Anglo-Breton House of
FitzAlan, who obtained the hereditary office of Seneschal or _Steward_ of
Scotland.  His patronymic, FitzAlan, merged in Stewart (later Stuart),
and the family cognizance, the _fesse chequy_ in azure and argent,
represents the Board of Exchequer.  The earliest Stewart holdings of land
were mainly in Renfrewshire; those of the Bruces were in Annandale.  These
two Anglo-Norman houses between them were to found the Stewart dynasty.

The wife of David, Matilda, widow of Simon de St Liz, was heiress of
Waltheof, sometime the Conqueror's Earl in Northumberland; and to gain,
through that connection, Northumberland for himself was the chief aim of
David's foreign policy,--an aim fertile in contentions.

We have not space to disentangle the intricacies of David's first great
domestic struggles; briefly, there was eternal dispeace caused by the
Celts, headed by claimants to the throne, the MacHeths, representing the
rights of Lulach, the ward of Macbeth. {20}  In 1130 the Celts were
defeated, and their leader, Angus, Earl of Moray, fell in fight near the
North Esk in Forfarshire.  His brother, Malcolm, by aid of David's Anglo-
Norman friends, was taken and imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle.  The result
of this rising was that David declared the great and ancient Celtic
Earldom of Moray--the home of his dynastic Celtic rivals--forfeit to the
Crown.  He planted the region with English, Anglo-Norman, and Lowland
landholders, a great step in the anglicisation of his kingdom.
Thereafter, for several centuries, the strength of the Celts lay in the
west in Moidart, Knoydart, Morar, Mamore, Lochaber, and Kintyre, and in
the western islands, which fell into the hands of "the sons of Somerled,"
the Macdonalds.

In 1135-1136, on the death of Henry I., David, backing his own niece,
Matilda, as Queen of England in opposition to Stephen, crossed the Border
in arms, but was bought off.  His son Henry received the Honour of
Huntingdom, with the Castle of Carlisle, and a vague promise of
consideration of his claim to Northumberland.  In 1138, after a disturbed
interval, David led the whole force of his realm, from Orkney to
Galloway, into Yorkshire.  His Anglo-Norman friends, the Balliols and
Bruces, with the Archbishop of York, now opposed him and his son Prince
Henry.  On August 22, 1138, at Cowton Moor, near Northallerton, was
fought the great battle, named from the huge English sacred banner, "The
Battle of the Standard."

In a military sense, the fact that here the men-at-arms and knights of
England fought as dismounted infantry, their horses being held apart in
reserve, is notable as preluding to the similar English tactics in their
French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Thus arrayed, the English received the impetuous charge of the wild
Galloway men, not in armour, who claimed the right to form the van, and
broke through the first line only to die beneath the spears of the
second.  But Prince David with his heavy cavalry scattered the force
opposed to him, and stampeded the horses of the English that were held in
reserve.  This should have been fatal to the English, but Henry, like
Rupert at Marston Moor, pursued too far, and the discipline of the Scots
was broken by the cry that their King had fallen, and they fled.  David
fought his way to Carlisle in a series of rearguard actions, and at
Carlisle was joined by Prince Henry with the remnant of his men-at-arms.
It was no decisive victory for England.

In the following year (1139) David got what he wanted.  His son Henry, by
peaceful arrangement, received the Earldom of Northumberland, without the
two strong places, Bamborough and Newcastle.

Through the anarchic weakness of Stephen's reign, Scotland advanced in
strength and civilisation despite a Celtic rising headed by a strange
pretender to the rights of the MacHeths, a "brother Wimund"; but all went
with the death of David's son, Prince Henry, in 1152.  Of the prince's
three sons, the eldest, Malcolm, was but ten years old; next came his
brothers William ("the Lion") and little David, Earl of Huntingdon.  From
this David's daughters descended the chief claimants to the Scottish
throne in 1292--namely, Balliol, Bruce, and Comyn: the last also was
descended, in the female line, from King Donald Ban, son of Malcolm
Canmore.

David had done all that man might do to settle the crown on his grandson
Malcolm; his success meant that standing curse of Scotland, "Woe to the
kingdom whose king is a child,"--when, in a year, David died at Carlisle
(May 24, 1153).



SCOTLAND BECOMES FEUDAL.


The result of the domestic policy of David was to bring all accessible
territory under the social and political system of western Europe, "the
Feudal System."  Its principles had been perfectly familiar to Celtic
Scotland, but had rested on a body of traditional customs (as in Homeric
Greece), rather than on written laws and charters signed and sealed.
Among the Celts the local tribe had been, theoretically, the sole source
of property in land.  In proportion as they were near of kin to the
recognised tribal chief, families held lands by a tenure of three
generations; but if they managed to acquire abundance of oxen, which they
let out to poorer men for rents in kind and labour, they were apt to turn
the lands which they held only temporarily, "in possession," into real
permanent _property_.  The poorer tribesmen paid rent in labour or
"services," also in supplies of food and manure.

The Celtic tenants also paid military service to their superiors.  The
remotest kinsmen of each lord of land, poor as they might be, were valued
for their swords, and were billeted on the unfree or servile tenants, who
gave them free quarters.

In the feudal system of western Europe these old traditional customs had
long been modified and stereotyped by written charters.  The King gave
gifts of land to his kinsmen or officers, who were bound to be "faithful"
(_fideles_); in return the inferior did homage, while he received
protection.  From grade to grade of rank and wealth each inferior did
homage to and received protection from his superior, who was also his
judge.  In this process, what had been the Celtic tribe became the new
"thanage"; the Celtic king (_righ_) of the tribe became the thane; the
province or group of tribes (say Moray) became the earldom; the Celtic
Mormaer of the province became the earl; and the Crown appointed _vice-
comites_, sub-earls, that is sheriffs, who administered the King's
justice in the earldom.

But there were regions, notably the west Highlands and isles, where the
new system penetrated slowly and with difficulty through a mountainous
and almost townless land.  The law, and written leases, "came slowly up
that way."

Under David, where his rule extended, society was divided broadly into
three classes--Nobles, Free, Unfree.  All holders of "a Knight's fee," or
part of one, holding by _free_ service, hereditarily, and by charter,
constituted the _communitas_ of the realm (we are to hear of the
_communitas_ later), and were free, noble, or gentle,--men of coat
armour.  The "ignoble," "not noble," men with no charter from the Crown,
or Earl, Thane, or Church, were, if lease-holders, though not "noble,"
still "free."  Beneath them were the "unfree" _nativi_, sold or given
with the soil.

The old Celtic landholders were not expropriated, as a rule, except where
Celtic risings, in Galloway and Moray, were put down, and the lands were
left in the King's hands.  Often, when we find territorial surnames of
families, "_de_" "of" this place or that,--the lords are really of Celtic
blood with Celtic names; disguised under territorial titles; and finally
disused.  But in Galloway and Ayrshire the ruling Celtic name, Kennedy,
remains Celtic, while the true Highlands of the west and northwest
retained their native magnates.  Thus the Anglicisation, except in very
rebellious regions, was gradual.  There was much less expropriation of
the Celt than disguising of the Celt under new family names and
regulation of the Celt under written charters and leases.



CHURCH LANDS.


David I. was, according to James VI., nearly five centuries later, "a
sair saint for the Crown."  He gave Crown-lands in the southern lowlands
to the religious orders with their priories and abbeys; for example,
Holyrood, Melrose, Jedburgh, Kelso, and Dryburgh--centres of learning and
art and of skilled agriculture.  Probably the best service of the regular
clergy to the State was its orderliness and attention to agriculture, for
the monasteries did not, as in England, produce many careful chroniclers
and historians.

Each abbey had its lands divided into baronies, captained by a lay
"Church baron" to lead its levies in war.  The civil centre of the barony
was the great farm or grange, with its mill, for in the thirteenth
century the Lowlands had water-mills which to the west Highlands were
scarcely known in 1745, when the Highland husbandmen were still using the
primitive hand-quern of two circular stones.  Near the mill was a hamlet
of some forty cottages; each head of a family had a holding of eight or
nine acres and pasturage for two cows, and paid a small money rent and
many arduous services to the Abbey.

The tenure of these cottars was, and under lay landlords long remained,
extremely precarious; but the tenure of the "bonnet laird" (_hosbernus_)
was hereditary.  Below even the free cottars were the unfree serfs or
_nativi_, who were handed over, with the lands they tilled, to the abbeys
by benefactors: the Church was forward in emancipating these serfs; nor
were lay landlords backward, for the freed man was useful as a spear-man
in war.

We have only to look at the many now ruined abbeys of the Border to see
the extent of civilisation under David I., and the relatively peaceful
condition, then, of that region which later became the cockpit of the
English wars, and the home of the raiding clans, Scotts, Elliots, and
Armstrongs, Bells, Nixons, Robsons, and Croziers.



THE BURGHS.


David and his son and successor, William the Lion, introduced a stable
middle and urban class by fostering, confirming, and regulating the
rights, privileges, and duties of the already existing free towns.  These
became _burghs_, royal, seignorial, or ecclesiastical.  In origin the
towns may have been settlements that grew up under the shelter of a
military castle.  Their fairs, markets, rights of trading, internal
organisation, and primitive police, were now, mainly under William the
Lion, David's successor, regulated by charters; the burghers obtained the
right to elect their own magistrates, and held their own burgh-courts;
all was done after the English model.  As the State had its "good men"
(_probi homines_), who formed its recognised "community," so had the
borough.  Not by any means all dwellers in a burgh were free burghers;
these free burghers had to do service in guarding the royal castle--later
this was commuted for a payment in money.  Though with power to elect
their own chief magistrate, the burghers commonly took as Provost the
head of some friendly local noble family, in which the office was apt to
become practically hereditary.  The noble was the leader and protector of
the town.  As to police, the burghers, each in his turn, provided men to
keep watch and ward from curfew bell to cock-crow.  Each ward in the town
had its own elected Bailie.  Each burgh had exclusive rights of trading
in its area, and of taking toll on merchants coming within its _Octroi_.
An association of four burghs, Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and
Stirling, was the root of the existing "Convention of Burghs."



JUSTICE.


In early societies, justice is, in many respects, an affair to be settled
between the kindreds of the plaintiff, so to speak, and the defendant.  A
man is wounded, killed, robbed, wronged in any way; his kin retaliate on
the offender and _his_ kindred.  The blood-feud, the taking of blood for
blood, endured for centuries in Scotland after the peace of the whole
realm became, under David I., "the King's peace."  Homicides, for
example, were very frequently pardoned by Royal grace, but "the pardon
was of no avail unless it had been issued with the full knowledge of the
kin of the slaughtered man, who otherwise retained their _legal_ right of
vengeance on the homicide."  They might accept pecuniary compensation,
the blood-fine, or they might not, as in Homer's time. {27}  At all
events, under David, offences became offences against the King, not
merely against this or that kindred.  David introduced the "Judgment of
the Country" or _Visnet del Pais_ for the settlement of pleas.  Every
free man, in his degree, was "tried by his peers," but the old ordeal by
fire and Trial by Combat or duel were not abolished.  Nor did
"compurgation" cease wholly till Queen Mary's reign.  A powerful man,
when accused, was then attended at his trial by hosts of armed backers.
Men so unlike each other as Knox, Bothwell, and Lethington took advantage
of this usage.  All lords had their own Courts, but murder, rape, arson,
and robbery could now only be tried in the royal Courts; these were "The
Four Pleas of the Crown."



THE COURTS.


As there was no fixed capital, the King's Court, in David's time,
followed the King in his annual circuits through his realm, between
Dumfries and Inverness.  Later, the regions of Scotia (north of Forth),
Lothian, and the lawless realm of Galloway, had their Grand Justiciaries,
who held the Four Pleas.  The other pleas were heard in "Courts of
Royalty" and by earls, bishops, abbots, down to the baron, with his
"right of pit and gallows."  At such courts, by a law of 1180, the
Sheriff of the shire, or an agent of his, ought to be present; so that
royal and central justice was extending itself over the minor local
courts.  But if the sheriff or his sergeant did not attend when summoned,
local justice took its course.

The process initiated by David's son, William the Lion, was very slowly
substituting the royal authority, the royal sheriffs of shires, juries,
and witnesses, for the wild justice of revenge; and trial by ordeal, and
trial by combat.  But hereditary jurisdictions of nobles and gentry were
not wholly abolished till after the battle of Culloden!  Where Abbots
held courts, their procedure, in civil cases, was based on laws
sanctioned by popes and general councils.  But, alas! the Abbot might
give just judgment; to execute it, we know from a curious instance, was
not within his power, if the offender laughed at a sentence of
excommunication.

David and his successors, till the end of the thirteenth century, made
Scotland a more civilised and kept it a much less disturbed country than
it was to remain during the long war of Independence, while the beautiful
abbeys with their churches and schools attested a high stage of art and
education.




CHAPTER VI.  MALCOLM THE MAIDEN.


The prominent facts in the brief reign of David's son Malcolm the Maiden,
crowned (1153) at the age of eleven, were, first, a Celtic rising by
Donald, a son of Malcolm MacHeth (now a prisoner in Roxburgh Castle), and
a nephew of the famous Somerled Macgillebride of Argyll.  Somerled won
from the Norse the Isle of Man and the Southern Hebrides; from his sons
descend the great Macdonald Lords of the Isles, always the leaders of the
long Celtic resistance to the central authority in Scotland.  Again,
Malcolm resigned to Henry II. of England the northern counties held by
David I.; and died after subduing Galloway, and (on the death of
Somerled, said to have been assassinated) the tribes of the isles in
1165.



WILLIAM THE LION.


Ambition to recover the northern English counties revealed itself in the
overtures of William the Lion,--Malcolm's brother and successor,--for an
alliance between Scotland and France.  "The auld Alliance" now dawned,
with rich promise of good and evil.  In hopes of French aid, William
invaded Northumberland, later laid siege to Carlisle, and on July 13,
1174, was surprised in a morning mist and captured at Alnwick.  Scotland
was now kingless; Galloway rebelled, and William, taken a captive to
Falaise in Normandy, surrendered absolutely the independence of his
country, which, for fifteen years, really was a fief of England.  When
William was allowed to go home, it was to fight the Celts of Galloway,
and subdue the pretensions, in Moray, of the MacWilliams, descendants of
William, son of Duncan, son of Malcolm Canmore.

During William's reign (1188) Pope Clement III. decided that the Scottish
Church was subject, not to York or Canterbury, but to Rome.  Seven years
earlier, defending his own candidate for the see of St Andrews against
the chosen of the Pope, William had been excommunicated, and his country
and he had unconcernedly taken the issue of an Interdict.  The Pope was
too far away, and William feared him no more than Robert Bruce was to do.

By 1188, William refused to pay to Henry II. a "Saladin Tithe" for a
crusade, and in 1189 he bought from Richard I., who needed money for a
crusade, the abrogation of the Treaty of Falaise.  He was still disturbed
by Celts in Galloway and the north, he still hankered after
Northumberland, but, after preparations for war, he paid a fine and
drifted into friendship with King John, who entertained his little
daughters royally, and knighted his son Alexander.  William died on
December 4, 1214.  He was buried at the Abbey of Arbroath, founded by him
in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury, who had worked a strange posthumous
miracle in Scotland.  William was succeeded by his son, Alexander II.
(1214-1249).



ALEXANDER II.


Under this Prince, who successfully put down the usual northern risings,
the old suit about the claims to Northumberland was finally abandoned for
a trifling compensation (1237).  Alexander had married Joanna, daughter
of King John, and his brother-in-law, Henry III., did not press his
demand for homage for Scotland.  The usual Celtic pretenders to the
throne were for ever crushed.  Argyll became a sheriffdom, Galloway was
brought into order, and Alexander, who died in the Isle of Kerrera in the
bay of Oban (1249), well deserved his title of "a King of Peace."  He was
buried in Melrose Abbey.  In his reign the clergy were allowed to hold
Provincial or Synodal Councils without the presence of a papal Legate
(1225), and the Dominicans and Franciscans appeared in Scotland.



ALEXANDER III.


The term King of Peace was also applied to Alexander III., son of the
second wife of Alexander II., Marie de Coucy.  Alexander came to the
throne (1249) at the age of eight.  As a child he was taken and held
(like James II., James III., James V., and James VI.) by contending
factions of the nobles, Henry of England intervening.  In 1251 he wedded
another child, Margaret, daughter of Henry III. of England, but Henry
neither forced a claim to hold Scotland during the boy's minority (his
right if Scotland were his fief), nor in other respects pressed his
advantage.  In February 1261-1262 a girl was born to Alexander at
Windsor; she was Margaret, later wife of Eric of Norway.  Her daughter,
on the death of Alexander III. (March 19, 1286), was the sole direct
descendant in the male line.

After the birth of this heiress, Alexander won from Norway the isles of
the western coast of Scotland in which Norse chieftains had long held
sway.  They complained to Hakon of Norway concerning raids made on them
by the Earl of Ross, a Celtic potentate.  Alexander's envoys to Hakon
were detained, and in 1263, Hakon, with a great fleet, sailed through the
islands.  A storm blew most of his Armada to shore near Largs, where his
men were defeated by the Scots.  Hakon collected his ships, sailed north,
and (December 15) died at Kirkwall.  Alexander now brought the island
princes, including the Lord of Man, into subjection; and by Treaty, in
1266, placed them under the Crown.  In 1275 Benemund de Vicci (called
Bagimont), at a council in Perth, compelled the clergy to pay a tithe for
a crusade, the Pope insisting that the money should be assessed on the
true value of benefices--that is, on "Bagimont's Roll,"--thenceforth
recognised as the basis of clerical taxation.  In 1278 Edward I. laboured
to extract from Alexander an acknowledgment that he was England's vassal.
Edward signally failed; but a palpably false account of Alexander's
homage was fabricated, and dated September 29, 1278.  This was not the
only forgery by which England was wont to back her claims.

A series of bereavements (1281-1283) deprived Alexander of all his
children save his little grandchild, "the Maid of Norway."  She was
recognised by a great national assembly at Scone as heiress of the
throne; and Alexander had no issue by his second wife, a daughter of the
Comte de Dreux.  On the night of March 19, 1285, while Alexander was
riding from Edinburgh to visit his bride at Kinghorn, his horse slipped
over a cliff and the rider was slain.




CHAPTER VII.  ENCROACHMENTS OF EDWARD I.--WALLACE.


The Estates of Scotland met at Scone (April 11, 1286) and swore loyalty
to their child queen, "the Maid of Norway," granddaughter of Alexander
III.  Six guardians of the kingdom were appointed on April 11, 1286.  They
were the Bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, two Comyns (Buchan and
Badenoch), the Earl of Fife, and Lord James, the Steward of Scotland.  No
Bruce or Baliol was among the Custodians.  Instantly a "band," or
covenant, was made by the Bruces, Earls of Annandale and Carrick, to
support their claims (failing the Maid) to the throne; and there were
acts of war on their part against another probable candidate, John
Balliol.  Edward (like Henry VIII. in the case of Mary Stuart) moved for
the marriage of the infant queen to his son.  A Treaty safeguarding all
Scottish liberties as against England was made by clerical influences at
Birgham (July 18, 1290), but by October 7 news of the death of the young
queen reached Scotland: she had perished during her voyage from Norway.
Private war now broke out between the Bruces and Balliols; and the party
of Balliol appealed to Edward, through Fraser, Bishop of St Andrews,
asking the English king to prevent civil war, and recommending Balliol as
a person to be carefully treated.  Next the Seven Earls, alleging some
dim elective right, recommended Bruce, and appealed to Edward as their
legal superior.

Edward came to Norham-on-Tweed in May 1291, proclaimed himself Lord
Paramount, and was accepted as such by the twelve candidates for the
Crown (June 3).  The great nobles thus, to serve their ambitions,
betrayed their country: _the communitas_ (whatever that term may here
mean) made a futile protest.

As lord among his vassals, Edward heard the pleadings and evidence in
autumn 1292; and out of the descendants, in the female line, of David
Earl of Huntingdon, youngest son of David I., he finally (November 17,
1292) preferred John Balliol (_great-grandson_ of the earl through his
eldest daughter) to Bruce the Old, grandfather of the famous Robert
Bruce, and _grandson_ of Earl David's second daughter.  The decision,
according to our ideas, was just; no modern court could set it aside.  But
Balliol was an unpopular weakling--"an empty tabard," the people said--and
Edward at once subjected him, king as he was, to all the humiliations of
a petty vassal.  He was summoned into his Lord's Court on the score of
the bills of tradesmen.  If Edward's deliberate policy was to goad
Balliol into resistance and then conquer Scotland absolutely, in the
first of these aims he succeeded.

In 1294 Balliol was summoned, with his Peers, to attend Edward in
Gascony.  Balliol, by advice of a council (1295), sought a French
alliance and a French marriage for his son, named Edward; he gave the
Annandale lands of his enemy Robert Bruce (father of the king to be) to
Comyn, Earl of Buchan.  He besieged Carlisle, while Edward took Berwick,
massacred the people, and captured Sir William Douglas, father of the
good Lord James.

In the war which followed, Edward broke down resistance by a sanguinary
victory at Dunbar, captured John Comyn of Badenoch (the Red Comyn),
received from Balliol (July 7, 1296) the surrender of his royal claims,
and took the oaths of the Steward of Scotland and the Bruces, father and
son.  He carried to Westminster the Black Rood of St Margaret and the
famous stone of Scone, a relic of the early Irish dynasty of the Scots;
as far north as Elgin he rode, receiving the oaths of all persons of note
and influence--except William Wallace.  _His_ name does not appear in the
list of submissions called "The Ragman's Roll."  Between April and
October 1296 the country was subjugated; the castles were garrisoned by
Englishmen.  But by January 1297, Edward's governor, Warenne, Earl of
Surrey, and Ormsby, his Chief Justice, found the country in an uproar,
and at midsummer 1297 the levies of the northern counties of England were
ordered to put down the disorders.



THE YEAR OF WALLACE.


In May the _commune_ of Scotland (whatever the term may here mean) had
chosen Wallace as their leader; probably this younger son of Sir Malcolm
Wallace of Elderslie, in Renfrewshire, had already been distinguished for
his success in skirmishes against the English, as well as for strength
and courage. {36}  The popular account of his early adventures given in
the poem by Blind Harry (1490?) is of no historical value.  His men
destroyed the English at Lanark (May 1297); he was abetted by Wishart,
Bishop of Glasgow, and the Steward; but by July 7, Percy and Clifford,
leading the English army, admitted the Steward, Robert Bruce (the future
king), and Wishart to the English peace at Irvine in Ayrshire.  But the
North was up under Sir Andrew Murray, and "that thief Wallace" (to quote
an English contemporary) left the siege of Dundee Castle which he was
conducting to face Warenne on the north bank of the Forth.  On September
11, the English, under Warenne, manoeuvred vaguely at Stirling Bridge,
and were caught on the flank by Wallace's army before they could deploy
on the northern side of the river.  They were cut to pieces, Cressingham
was slain, and Warenne galloped to Berwick, while the Scots harried
Northumberland with great ferocity, which Wallace seems to have been
willing but not often able to control.  By the end of March 1298 he
appears with Andrew Murray as Guardian of the Kingdom for the exiled
Balliol.  This attitude must have aroused the jealousy of the nobles, and
especially of Robert Bruce, who aimed at securing the crown, and who,
after several changes of side, by June 1298 was busy in Edward's service
in Galloway.

Edward then crossed the Border with a great army of perhaps 40,000 men,
met the spearmen of Wallace in their serried phalanxes at Falkirk, broke
the "schiltrom" or clump of spears by the arrows of his archers;
slaughtered the archers of Ettrick Forest; scattered the mounted nobles,
and avenged the rout of Stirling (July 22, 1298).  The country remained
unsubdued, but its leaders were at odds among themselves, and Wallace had
retired to France, probably to ask for aid; he may also conceivably have
visited Rome.  The Bishop of St Andrews, Lamberton, with Bruce and the
Red Comyn--deadly rivals--were Guardians of the Kingdom in 1299.  But in
June 1300, Edward, undeterred by remonstrances from the Pope, entered
Scotland; an armistice, however, was accorded to the Holy Father, and the
war, in which the Scots scored a victory at Roslin in February 1293,
dragged on from summer to summer till July 1304.  In these years Bruce
alternately served Edward and conspired against him; the intricacies of
his perfidy are deplorable.

Bruce served Edward during the siege of Stirling, then the central key of
the country.  On its surrender Edward admitted all men to his peace, on
condition of oaths of fealty, except "Messire Williame le Waleys."  Men
of the noblest Scottish names stooped to pursue the hero: he was taken
near Glasgow, and handed over to Sir John Menteith, a Stewart, and son of
the Earl of Menteith.  As Sheriff of Dumbartonshire, Menteith had no
choice but to send the hero in bonds to England.  But, if Menteith
desired to escape the disgrace with which tradition brands his name, he
ought to have refused the English blood-price for the capture of Wallace.
He made no such refusal.  As an outlaw, Wallace was hanged at London; his
limbs, like those of the great Montrose, were impaled on the gates of
various towns.

What we really know about the chief popular hero of his country, from
documents and chronicles, is fragmentary; and it is hard to find anything
trustworthy in Blind Harry's rhyming "Wallace" (1490), plagiarised as it
is from Barbour's earlier poem (1370) on Bruce. {38}  But Wallace was
truly brave, disinterested, and indomitable.  Alone among the leaders he
never turned his coat, never swore and broke oaths to Edward.  He arises
from obscurity, like Jeanne d'Arc; like her, he is greatly victorious;
like her, he awakens a whole people; like her, he is deserted, and is
unlawfully put to death; while his limbs, like her ashes, are scattered
by the English.  The ravens had not pyked his bones bare before the Scots
were up again for freedom.




CHAPTER VIII.  BRUCE AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.


The position towards France of Edward I. made it really more desirable
for him that Scotland should be independent and friendly, than half
subdued and hostile to his rule.  While she was hostile, England, in
attacking France, always left an enemy in her rear.  But Edward supposed
that by clemency to all the Scottish leaders except Wallace, by giving
them great appointments and trusting them fully, and by calling them to
his Parliament in London, he could combine England and Scotland in
affectionate union.  He repaired the ruins of war in Scotland; he began
to study her laws and customs; he hastily ran up for her a new
constitution, and appointed his nephew, John of Brittany, as governor.
But he had overlooked two facts: the Scottish clergy, from the highest to
the lowest, were irreconcilably opposed to union with England; and the
greatest and most warlike of the Scottish nobles, if not patriotic, were
fickle and insatiably ambitious.  It is hard to reckon how often Robert
Bruce had turned his coat, and how often the Bishop of St Andrews had
taken the oath to Edward.  Both men were in Edward's favour in June 1304,
but in that month they made against him a treasonable secret covenant.
Through 1305 Bruce prospered in Edward's service, on February 10, 1306,
Edward was conferring on him a new favour, little guessing that Bruce,
after some negotiation with his old rival, the Red Comyn, had slain him
(an uncle of his was also butchered) before the high altar of the Church
of the Franciscans in Dumfries.  Apparently Bruce had tried to enlist
Comyn in his conspiracy, and had found him recalcitrant, or feared that
he would be treacherous (February 10, 1306).

The sacrilegious homicide made it impossible for Bruce again to waver.  He
could not hope for pardon; he must be victorious or share the fate of
Wallace.  He summoned his adherents, including young James Douglas,
received the support of the Bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, hurried to
Scone, and there was hastily crowned with a slight coronet, in the
presence of but two earls and three bishops.

Edward made vast warlike preparations and forswore leniency, while Bruce,
under papal excommunication, which he slighted, collected a few nobles,
such as Lennox, Atholl, Errol, and a brother of the chief of the Frazers.
Other chiefs, kinsmen of the slain Comyn, among them Macdowal of Argyll,
banded to avenge the victim; Bruce's little force was defeated at Methven
Wood, near Perth, by Aymer de Valence, and prisoners of all ranks were
hanged as traitors, while two bishops were placed in irons.  Bruce took
to the heather, pursued by the Macdowals no less than by the English; his
queen was captured, his brother Nigel was executed; he cut his way to the
wild west coast, aided only by Sir Nial Campbell of Loch Awe, who thus
founded the fortune of his house, and by the Macdonalds, under Angus Og
of Islay.  He wintered in the isle of Rathlin (some think he even went to
Norway), and in spring, after surprising the English garrison in his own
castle of Turnberry, he roamed, now lonely, now with a mobile little
force, in Galloway, always evading and sometimes defeating his English
pursuers.  At Loch Trool and at London Hill (Drumclog) he dealt them
heavy blows, while on June 7, 1307, his great enemy Edward died at
Borough-on-Sands, leaving the crown and the war to the weakling Edward
II.

Fortune had turned.  We cannot follow Bruce through his campaign in the
north, where he ruined the country of the Comyns (1308), and through the
victories in Galloway of his hard-fighting brother Edward.  With enemies
on every side, Bruce took them in detail; early in March 1309 he routed
the Macdowals at the west end of the Pass of Brander.  Edward II. was
involved in disputes with his own barons, and Bruce was recognised by his
country's Church in 1310 and aided by his great lieutenants, Sir James
Douglas and Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray.  By August 1311 Bruce was
carrying the war into England, sacking Durham and Chester, failing at
Carlisle, but in January 1313, capturing Perth.  In summer, Edward Bruce,
in the spirit of chivalry, gave to Stirling Castle (Randolph had taken
Edinburgh Castle) a set day, Midsummer Day 1314, to be relieved or to
surrender; and Bruce kept tryst with Edward II. and his English and Irish
levies, and all his adventurous chivalry from France, Hainault, Bretagne,
Gascony, and Aquitaine.  All the world knows the story of the first
battle, the Scottish Quatre Bras; the success of Randolph on the right;
the slaying of Bohun when Bruce broke his battle-axe.  Next day Bruce's
position was strong; beneath the towers of Stirling the Bannockburn
protected his front; morasses only to be crossed by narrow paths impeded
the English advance.  Edward Bruce commanded the right wing; Randolph the
centre; Douglas and the Steward the left; Bruce the reserve, the
Islesmen.  His strength lay in his spearmen's "dark impenetrable wood";
his archers were ill-trained; of horse he had but a handful under Keith,
the Marischal.  But the heavy English cavalry could not break the squares
of spears; Keith cut up the archers of England; the main body could not
deploy, and the slow, relentless advance of the whole Scottish line
covered the plain with the dying and the flying.  A panic arose, caused
by the sight of an approaching cloud of camp-followers on the Gillie's
hill; Edward fled, and hundreds of noble prisoners, with all the waggons
and supplies of England, fell into the hands of the Scots.  In eight
strenuous years the generalship of Bruce and his war-leaders, the
resolution of the people, hardened by the cruelties of Edward, the
sermons of the clergy, and the utter incompetence of Edward II., had
redeemed a desperate chance.  From a fief of England, Scotland had become
an indomitable nation.



LATER DAYS OF BRUCE.


Bruce continued to prosper, despite an ill-advised attempt to win
Ireland, in which Edward Bruce fell (1318.)  This left the succession, if
Bruce had no male issue, to the children of his daughter, Marjory, and
her husband, the Steward.  In 1318 Scotland recovered Berwick, in 1319
routed the English at Mytton-on-Swale.  In a Parliament at Aberbrothock
(April 6, 1320) the Scots announced to the Pope, who had been
interfering, that, while a hundred of them survive, they will never yield
to England.  In October 1322 Bruce utterly routed the English at Byland
Abbey, in the heart of Yorkshire, and chased Edward II. into York.  In
March 1324 a son was born to Bruce named David; on May 4, 1328, by the
Treaty of Northampton, the independence of Scotland was recognised.  In
July the infant David married Joanna, daughter of Edward II.

On June 7, 1329, Bruce died and was buried at Dunfermline; his heart, by
his order, was carried by Douglas towards the Holy Land, and when Douglas
fell in a battle with the Moors in Spain, the heart was brought back by
Sir Simon Lockhart of the Lee.  The later career of Bruce, after he had
been excommunicated, is that of the foremost knight and most sagacious
man of action who ever wore the crown of Scotland.  The staunchness with
which the clergy and estates disregarded papal fulminations (indeed under
William the Lion they had treated an interdict as waste-paper) indicated
a kind of protestant tendency to independence of the Holy See.

Bruce's inclusion of representatives of the Burghs in the first regular
Scottish Parliament (at Cambuskenneth in 1326) was a great step forward
in the constitutional existence of the country.  The king, in Scotland,
was expected to "live of his own," but in 1326 the expenses of the war
with England compelled Bruce to seek permission for taxation.




CHAPTER IX.  DECADENCE AND DISASTERS--REIGN OF DAVID II.


The heroic generation of Scotland was passing off the stage.  The King
was a child.  The forfeiture by Bruce of the lands of hostile or
treacherous lords, and his bestowal of the estates on his partisans, had
made the disinherited nobles the enemies of Scotland, and had fed too
full the House of Douglas.  As the star of Scotland was thus clouded--she
had no strong man for a King during the next ninety years--the sun of
England rose red and glorious under a warrior like Edward III.  The
Scottish nobles in many cases ceased to be true to their proud boast that
they would never submit to England.  A very brief summary of the wretched
reign of David II. must here suffice.

First, the son of John Balliol, Edward, went to the English Court, and
thither thronged the disinherited and forfeited lords, arranging a raid
to recover their lands.  Edward III., of course, connived at their
preparations.

After Randolph's death (July 20, 1332), when Mar--a sister's son of
Bruce--was Regent, the disinherited lords, under Balliol, invaded
Scotland, and Mar, with young Randolph, Menteith, and a bastard of Bruce,
"Robert of Carrick," leading a very great host, fell under the shafts of
the English archers of Umfraville, Wake, the English Earl of Atholl,
Talbot, Ferrers, and Zouche, at Dupplin, on the Earn (August 12, 1332).
Rolled up by arrows loosed on the flanks of their charging columns, they
fell, and their dead bodies lay in heaps as tall as a lance.

On September 24, Edward Balliol was crowned King at Scone.  Later, Andrew
Murray, perhaps a son of the Murray who had been Wallace's companion-in-
arms, was taken, and Balliol acknowledged Edward III. as his liege-lord
at Roxburgh.  In December the second son of Randolph, with Archibald, the
new Regent, brother of the great Black Douglas, drove Balliol, flying in
his shirt, from Annan across the Border.  He returned, and was opposed by
this Archibald Douglas, called Tineman, the Unlucky, and on July 19,
1333, Tineman suffered, at Halidon Hill, near Berwick, a defeat as
terrible as Flodden; Berwick, too, was lost, practically for ever,
Tineman fell, and Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, was a
prisoner.  These Scots defeats were always due to rash frontal attacks on
strong positions, the assailants passing between lines of English bowmen
who loosed into their flanks.  The boy king, David, was carried to France
(1334) for safety, while Balliol delivered to Edward Berwick and the
chief southern counties, including that of Edinburgh, with their castles.

There followed internal wars between Balliol's partisans, while the
patriots were led by young Randolph, by the young Steward, by Sir Andrew
Murray, and the wavering and cruel Douglas, called the Knight of
Liddesdale, now returned from captivity.  In the desperate state of
things, with Balliol and Edward ravaging Scotland at will, none showed
more resolution than Bruce's sister, who held Kildrummie Castle; and
Randolph's daughter, "Black Agnes," who commanded that of Dunbar.  By
vast gifts Balliol won over John, Lord of the Isles.  The Celts turned to
the English party; Edward III. harried the province of Moray, but, in
1337, he began to undo his successes by formally claiming the crown of
France: France and Scotland together could always throw off the English
yoke.

Thus diverted from Scotland, Edward lost strength there while he warred
with Scotland's ally: in 1341 the Douglas, Knight of Liddesdale,
recovered Edinburgh Castle by a romantic surprise.  But David returned
home in 1341, a boy of eighteen, full of the foibles of chivalry, rash,
sensual, extravagant, who at once gave deadly offence to the Knight of
Liddesdale by preferring to him, as sheriff of Teviotdale, the brave Sir
Alexander Ramsay, who had driven the English from the siege of Dunbar
Castle.  Douglas threw Ramsay into Hermitage Castle in Liddesdale and
starved him to death.

In 1343 the Knight began to intrigue traitorously with Edward III.; after
a truce, David led his whole force into England, where his rash chivalry
caused his utter defeat at Neville's Cross, near Durham (October 17,
1346).  He was taken, as was the Bishop of St Andrews; his ransom became
the central question between England and Scotland.  In 1353 Douglas,
Knight of Liddesdale, was slain at Williamshope on Yarrow by his godson,
William, Lord Douglas: the fact is commemorated in a fragment of perhaps
our oldest narrative Border ballad.  French men-at-arms now helped the
Scots to recover Berwick, merely to lose it again in 1356; in 1357 David
was set free: his ransom, 100,000 merks, was to be paid by instalment.
The country was heavily taxed, but the full sum was never paid.  Meanwhile
the Steward had been Regent; between him, the heir of the Crown failing
issue to David, and the King, jealousies arose.  David was suspected of
betraying the kingdom to England; in October 1363 he and the Earl of
Douglas visited London and made a treaty adopting a son of Edward as king
on David's demise, and on his ransom being remitted, but in March 1364
his Estates rejected the proposal, to which Douglas had assented.  Till
1369 all was poverty and internal disunion; the feud, to be so often
renewed, of the Douglas and the Steward raged.  David was made
contemptible by a second marriage with Margaret Logie, but the war with
France drove Edward III. to accept a fourteen years' truce with Scotland.
On February 22, 1371, David died in Edinburgh Castle, being succeeded,
without opposition, by the Steward, Robert II., son of Walter, and of
Marjorie, daughter of Robert Bruce.  This Robert II., somewhat outworn by
many years of honourable war in his country's cause, and the father of a
family, by Elizabeth Mure of Rowallan, which could hardly be rendered
legitimate by any number of Papal dispensations, _was the first of the
Royal Stewart line_.  In him a cadet branch of the English FitzAlans,
themselves of a very ancient Breton stock, blossomed into Royalty.



PARLIAMENT AND THE CROWN.


With the coming of a dynasty which endured for three centuries, we must
sketch the relations, in Scotland, of Crown and Parliament till the days
of the Covenant and the Revolution of 1688.  Scotland had but little of
the constitutional evolution so conspicuous in the history of England.
The reason is that while the English kings, with their fiefs and wars in
France, had constantly to be asking their parliaments for money, and
while Parliament first exacted the redress of grievances, in Scotland the
king was expected "to live of his own" on the revenue of crown-lands,
rents, feudal aids, fines exacted in Courts of Law, and duties on
merchandise.  No "tenths" or "fifteenths" were exacted from clergy and
people.  There could be no "constitutional resistance" when the Crown
made no unconstitutional demands.

In Scotland the germ of Parliament is the King's court of vassals of the
Crown.  To the assemblies, held now in one place, now in another, would
usually come the vassals of the district, with such officers of state as
the Chancellor, the Chamberlain, the Steward, the Constable or Commander-
in-Chief, the Justiciar, and the Marischal, and such Bishops, Abbots,
Priors, Earls, Barons, and tenants-in-chief as chose to attend.  At these
meetings public business was done, charters were granted, and statutes
were passed; assent was made to such feudal aids as money for the king's
ransom in the case of William the Lion.  In 1295 the seals of six Royal
burghs are appended to the record of a negotiation; in 1326 burgesses, as
we saw, were consulted by Bruce on questions of finance.

The misfortunes and extravagance of David II. had to be paid for, and
Parliament interfered with the Royal prerogative in coinage and currency,
directed the administration of justice, dictated terms of peace with
England, called to account even hereditary officers of the Crown (such as
the Steward, Constable, and Marischal), controlled the King's expenditure
(or tried to do so), and denounced the execution of Royal warrants
against the Statutes and common form of law.  They summarily rejected
David's attempt to alter the succession of the Crown.

At the same time, as attendance of multitudes during protracted
Parliaments was irksome and expensive, arose the habit of intrusting
business to a mere "Committee of Articles," later "The Lords of the
Articles," selected in varying ways from the Three Estates--Spiritual,
Noble, and Commons.  These Committees saved the members of Parliament
from the trouble and expense of attendance, but obviously tended to
become an abuse, being selected and packed to carry out the designs of
the Crown or of the party of nobles in power.  All members, of whatever
Estate, sat together in the same chamber.  There were no elected Knights
of the Shires, no representative system.

The reign of David II. saw two Scottish authors or three, whose works are
extant.  Barbour wrote the chivalrous rhymed epic-chronicle 'The Brus';
Wyntoun, an unpoetic rhymed "cronykil"; and "Hucheoun of the Awle Ryal"
produced works of more genius, if all that he is credited with be his
own.




CHAPTER X.  EARLY STEWART KINGS: ROBERT II.  (1371-1390).


Robert II. was crowned at Scone on March 26, 1371.  He was elderly,
jovial, pacific, and had little to fear from England when the deaths of
Edward III. and the Black Prince left the crown to the infant Richard II.
There was fighting against isolated English castles within the Scottish
border, to amuse the warlike Douglases and Percies, and there were
truces, irregular and ill kept.  In 1384 great English and Scottish raids
were made, and gentlemen of France, who came over for sport, were
scurvily entertained, and (1385) saw more plundering than honest fighting
under James, Earl of Douglas, who merely showed them an army that, under
Richard II., burned Melrose Abbey and fired Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee.
Edinburgh was a town of 400 houses.  Richard insisted that not more than
a third of his huge force should be English Borderers, who had no idea of
hitting their Scottish neighbours, fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law,
too hard.  The one famous fight, that of Otterburn (August 15, 1388), was
a great and joyous passage of arms by moonlight.  The Douglas fell, the
Percy was led captive away; the survivors gained advancement in renown
and the hearty applause of the chivalrous chronicler, Froissart.  The
oldest ballads extant on this affair were current in 1550, and show
traces of the reading of Froissart and the English chroniclers.

In 1390 died Robert II.  Only his youth was glorious.  The reign of his
son, Robert III. (crowned August 14, 1390), was that of a weakling who
let power fall into the hands of his brother, the Duke of Albany, or his
son David, Duke of Rothesay, who held the reins after the Parliament (a
Parliament that bitterly blamed the Government) of January 1399.  (With
these two princes the title of Duke first appears in Scotland.)  The
follies of young David alienated all: he broke his betrothal to the
daughter of the Earl of March; March retired to England, becoming the man
of Henry IV.; and though Rothesay wedded the daughter of the Earl of
Douglas, he was arrested by Albany and Douglas and was starved to death
(or died of dysentery) in Falkland Castle (1402).  The Highlanders had
been in anarchy throughout the reign; their blood was let in the great
clan duel of thirty against thirty, on the Inch of Perth, in 1396.
Probably clans Cameron and Chattan were the combatants.

On Rothesay's death Albany was Governor, while Douglas was taken prisoner
in the great Border defeat of Homildon Hill, not far from Flodden.  But
then (1403) came the alliance of Douglas with Percy; Percy's quarrel with
Henry IV. and their defeat; and Hotspur's death, Douglas's capture at
Shrewsbury.  Between Shakespeare, in "Henry IV.," and Scott, in 'The Fair
Maid of Perth,' the most notable events in the reign of Robert III. are
immortalised.  The King's last misfortune was the capture by the English
at sea, on the way to France, of his son James in February-March 1406.
{52}  On April 4, 1406, Robert went to his rest, one of the most unhappy
of the fated princes of his line.



THE REGENCY OF ALBANY.


The Regency of Albany, uncle of the captured James, lasted for fourteen
years, ending with his death in 1420.  He occasionally negotiated for his
king's release, but more successfully for that of his son Murdoch.  That
James suspected Albany's ambition, and was irritated by his conduct,
appears in his letters, written in Scots, to Albany and to Douglas,
released in 1408, and now free in Scotland.  The letters are of 1416.

The most important points to note during James's English captivity are
the lawlessness and oppression which prevailed in Scotland, and the
beginning of Lollard heresies, nascent Protestantism, nascent Socialism,
even "free love."  The Parliament of 1399, which had inveighed against
the laxity of Government under Robert II., also demanded the extirpation
of heresies, in accordance with the Coronation Oath.  One Resby, a
heretical English priest, was arraigned and burned at Perth in 1407,
under Laurence of Lindores, the Dominican Inquisitor into heresies, who
himself was active in promoting Scotland's oldest University, St Andrews.
The foundation was by Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St Andrews, by virtue of a
bull from the anti-pope Benedict XIII., of February 1414.  Lollard ideas
were not suppressed; the chronicler, Bower, speaks of their existence in
1445; they sprang from envy of the wealth, and indignation against the
corruptions of the clergy, and the embers of Lollardism in Kyle were not
cold when, under James V., the flame of the Reformation was rekindled.

The Celtic North, never quiet, made its last united effort in 1411, when
Donald, Lord of the Isles, who was in touch with the English Government,
claimed the earldom of Ross, in right of his wife, as against the Earl of
Buchan, a son of Albany; mustered all the wild clans of the west and the
isles at Ardtornish Castle on the Sound of Mull; marched through Ross to
Dingwall; defeated the great northern clan of Mackay, and was hurrying to
sack Aberdeen when he was met by Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, the
gentry of the northern Lowlands, mounted knights, and the burgesses of
the towns, some eighteen miles from Aberdeen, at Harlaw.  There was a
pitched battle with great slaughter, but the Celts had no cavalry, and
the end was that Donald withdrew to his fastnesses.  The event is
commemorated by an old literary ballad, and in Elspeth's ballad in
Scott's novel, 'The Antiquary.'

In the year of Albany's death, at a great age (1420), in compliance with
the prayer of Charles VII. of France, the Earl of Buchan, Archibald,
Douglas's eldest son, and Sir John Stewart of Derneley, led a force of
some 7000 to 10,000 men to war for France.  Henry V. then compelled the
captive James I. to join him, and (1421) at Bauge Bridge the Scots, with
the famed La Hire, routed the army of Henry's brother, the Duke of
Clarence, who, with 2000 of the English, fell in the action.  The victory
was fruitless; at Crevant (1423) the Scots were defeated; at Verneuil
(1424) they were almost exterminated.  None the less the remnant, with
fresh levies, continued to war for their old ally, and, under Sir Hugh
Kennedy and others, suffered at Rouvray (February 1429), and were with
the victorious French at Orleans (May 1429) under the leadership of
Jeanne d'Arc.  The combination of Scots and French, at the last push,
always saved the independence of both kingdoms.

The character of Albany, who, under his father, Robert III., and during
the captivity of James I., ruled Scotland so long, is enigmatic.  He is
well spoken of by the contemporary Wyntoun, author of a chronicle in
rhyme; and in the Latin of Wyntoun's continuator, Bower.  He kept on
friendly terms with the Douglases, he was popular in so far as he was
averse to imposing taxation; and perhaps the anarchy and oppression which
preceded the return of James I. to Scotland were due not to the weakness
of Albany but to that of his son and successor, Murdoch, and to the
iniquities of Murdoch's sons.

The death of Henry V. (1422) and the ambition of Cardinal Beaufort,
determined to wed his niece Jane Beaufort to a crowned king, may have
been among the motives which led the English Government (their own king,
Henry VI., being a child) to set free the royal captive (1424).




CHAPTER XI.  JAMES I.


On March 28, 1424, James I. was released, on a ransom of 40,000 pounds,
and after his marriage with Jane Beaufort, grand-daughter of John of
Gaunt, son of Edward III.  The story of their wooing (of course in the
allegorical manner of the age, and with poetical conventions in place of
actual details) is told in James's poem, "The King's Quair," a beautiful
composition in the school of Chaucer, of which literary scepticism has
vainly tried to rob the royal author.  James was the ablest and not the
most scrupulous of the Stuarts.  His captivity had given him an English
education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a
fiery determination to put down the oppression of the nobles.  "If God
gives me but a dog's life," he said, "I will make the key keep the castle
and the bracken bush keep the cow."  Before his first Parliament, in May
1424, James arrested Murdoch's eldest son, Sir Walter Fleming of
Cumbernauld, and the younger Boyd of Kilmarnock.  The Parliament left a
Committee of the Estates ("The Lords of the Articles") to carry out the
royal policy.  Taxes for the payment of James's ransom were imposed; to
impose them was easy, "passive resistance" was easier; the money was
never paid, and James's noble hostages languished in England.  He next
arrested the old Earl of Lennox, and Sir Robert Graham of the Kincardine
family, later his murderer.

These were causes of unpopularity.  During a new Parliament (1425) James
imprisoned the new Duke of Albany (Murdoch) and his son Alexander, and
seized their castles. {57}  The Albanys and Lennox were executed; their
estates were forfeited; but resentment dogged a king who was too fierce
and too hurried a reformer, perhaps too cruel an avenger of his own
wrongs.

Our knowledge of the events of his reign is vague; but a king of Scotland
could never, with safety, treat any of his nobles as criminals; the whole
order was concerned to prevent or avenge severity of justice.

At a Parliament in Inverness (1427) he seized the greatest of the
Highland magnates whom he had summoned; they were hanged or imprisoned,
and, after resistance, Alastair, the new Lord of the Isles, did penance
at Holyrood, before being immured in Tantallon Castle.  His cousin,
Donald Balloch, defeated Mar at Inverlochy (where Montrose later routed
Argyll) (1431).  Not long afterwards Donald fled to Ireland, whence a
head, said to be his, was sent to James, but Donald lived to fight
another day.

Without a standing army to garrison the inaccessible Highlands, the Crown
could neither preserve peace in those regions nor promote justice.  The
system of violent and perfidious punishments merely threw the Celts into
the arms of England.

Execution itself was less terrible to the nobles than the forfeiting of
their lands and the disinheriting of their families.  None the less,
James (1425-1427) seized the lands of the late Earl of Lennox, made
Malise Graham surrender the earldom of Strathearn in exchange for the
barren title of Earl of Menteith, and sent the sufferer as a hostage into
England.  The Earl of March, son of the Earl who, under Robert III., had
gone over to the English cause, was imprisoned and stripped of his
ancient domains on the Eastern Border; and James, disinheriting Lord
Erskine, annexed the earldom of Mar to the Crown.

In a Parliament at Perth (March 1428) James permitted the minor barons
and freeholders to abstain from these costly assemblies on the condition
of sending two "wise men" to represent each sheriffdom: a Speaker was to
be elected, and the shires were to pay the expenses of the wise men.  But
the measure was unpopular, and in practice lapsed.  Excellent laws were
passed, but were not enforced.

In July-November 1428 a marriage was arranged between Margaret the infant
daughter of James and the son (later Louis XI.) of the still uncrowned
Dauphin, Charles VIII. of France.  Charles announced to his subjects
early in 1429 that an army of 6000 Scots was to land in France; that
James himself, if necessary, would follow; but Jeanne d'Arc declared that
there was no help from Scotland, none save from God and herself.  She was
right: no sooner had she won her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Pathay,
and elsewhere (May-June 1429) than James made a truce with England which
enabled Cardinal Beaufort to throw his large force of anti-Hussite
crusaders into France, where they secured Normandy.  The Scots in France,
nevertheless, fought under the Maid in her last successful action, at
Lagny (April 1430).

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."

The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her Mass in her private
chapel.  Her priest was mobbed by the godly; on the following Sunday Knox
denounced her Mass, and had his first interview with her later.  In vain
she spoke of her conscience; Knox said that it was unenlightened.
Lethington wished that he would "deal more gently with a young princess
unpersuaded."  There were three or four later interviews, but Knox,
strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord
Ochiltree, a Stewart, was proof against the queen's fascination.  In
spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary
kept her temper, and, for long, cast in her lot with Lethington and her
brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth.

The Court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with
Bothwell, who, though a Protestant, had sided with Mary of Guise during
the brawls of 1559.  He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate,
reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well
educated.

In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics
should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided
between the preachers and the queen, "between God and the devil," says
Knox.  Thenceforth there was a rift between the preachers and the
politicians, Lethington and Lord James (now Earl of Mar), on whom Mary
leaned.  The new Earl of Mar was furtively created Earl of Murray and
enjoyed the gift after the overthrow of Huntly.

In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth.  Certainly
Lethington hoped that Elizabeth "would be able to do much with Mary in
religion," meaning that, if Mary's claims to succeed Elizabeth were
granted, she might turn Anglican.  The request for a meeting, dallied
with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while, at home, Arran
(March 31) accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary's
person.  Arran probably told truth, but he now went mad; Bothwell was
imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562.
Lethington, in June, was negotiating for Mary's interview with Elizabeth;
Knox bitterly opposed it; the preachers feared that the queen would turn
Anglican, and bishops might be let loose in Scotland.  The masques for
Mary's reception were actually being organised, when, in July, Elizabeth,
on the pretext of persecutions by the Guises in France, broke off the
negotiations.

The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of which the origins are
obscure.  Mary, with her brother and Lethington, made a progress into the
north, were affronted by and attacked Huntly, who died suddenly (October
28) at the fight of Corrichie; seized a son of his, who was executed
(November 2), and spoiled his castle which contained much of the property
of the Church of Aberdeen.  Mary's motives for destroying her chief
Catholic subject are not certainly known.  Her brother, Lord James, in
February made Earl of Mar, now received the lands and title of Earl of
Murray.  At some date in this year Knox preached against Mary because she
gave a dance.  He chose to connect her dance with some attack on the
Huguenots in France.  According to 'The Book of Discipline' he should
have remonstrated privately, as Mary told him.  The dates are
inextricable.  (See my 'John Knox and the Reformation,' pp. 215-218.)
Till the spring of 1565 the main business was the question of the queen's
marriage.  This continued to divide the ruling Protestant nobles from the
preachers.  Knox dreaded an alliance with Spain, a marriage with Don
Carlos.  But Elizabeth, to waste time, offered Mary the hand of Lord
Robert Dudley (Leicester), and, strange as it appears, Mary would
probably have accepted him, as late as 1565, for Elizabeth let it be
understood that to marry a Catholic prince would be the signal for war,
while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth's favourite, Dudley, she
would be acknowledged as Elizabeth's heiress.  Mary was young, and showed
little knowledge of the nature of woman.

In 1563 came the affair of Chatelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot
apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid
himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland.  Mary had
listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but
Chatelard went too far.  He was decapitated in the market street of St
Andrews (Feb. 22, 1563).  It is clear, if we may trust Knox's account,
singularly unlike Brantome's, that Chatelard was a Huguenot.

About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the centre of
Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating Mass.  This was in accordance
with law, and to soften Knox the girl queen tried her personal influence.
He resisted "the devil"; Mary yielded, and allowed Archbishop Hamilton
and some fifty other clerics to be placed "in prison courteous."  The
Estates, which met on May 27 for the first time since the queen landed,
were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of
Discipline.  They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of
unspeakable cruelties.  Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till
their common interests brought them together in 1565.

In June 1563 Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of
Lennox (the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and the
rival of the Hamiltons for the succession to the thrones), apparently for
the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox's son
Darnley, and then thwarting it.  (It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to
send Lennox.)  Knox's favourite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley: despite
his notorious character he sometimes favoured the English Puritans.  When
Holyrood had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary's absence in autumn 1563,
broke up the Catholic attendants on Mass (such attendance, in Mary's
absence, was illegal), and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox
called together the godly.  The Council cleared him of the charge of
making an unlawful convocation (they might want to make one, any day,
themselves), and he was supported by the General Assembly.  Similar
conduct of the preachers thirty years later gave James VI. the
opportunity to triumph over the Kirk.

In June 1564 there was still discord between the Kirk and the Lords, and,
in a long argument with Lethington, Knox maintained the right of the
godly to imitate the slayings of idolaters by Phineas and Jehu: the
doctrine bore blood-red fruits among the later Covenanters.  Elizabeth,
in May 1564, in vain asked Mary to withdraw the permission (previously
asked for by her) to allow Lennox to visit Scotland and plead for the
restitution of his lands.  The objection to Lennox's appearance had come,
through Randolph, from Knox.  "You may cause us to take the Lord
Darnley," wrote Kirkcaldy to Cecil, to stop Elizabeth's systems of
delays; and Sir James Melville, after going on a mission to Elizabeth,
warned Mary that she would never part with her minion, now Earl of
Leicester.

Lennox, in autumn 1564, arrived and was restored to his estates, while
Leicester and Cecil worked for the sending of his son Darnley to
Scotland.  Leicester had no desire to desert Elizabeth's Court and his
chance of touching her maiden heart.

The intrigues of Cecil, Leicester, and Elizabeth resemble rather a
chapter in a novel than a page in history.  Elizabeth notoriously hated
and, when she could, thwarted all marriages.  She desired that Mary
should never marry: a union with a Catholic prince she vetoed,
threatening war; and Leicester she offered merely "to drive time."  But
Mary, evasively tempted by hints, later withdrawn, of her recognition as
Elizabeth's successor, was, till the end of March 1565, encouraged by
Randolph, the English ambassador at her Court, to remain in hope of
wedding Leicester.

Randolph himself was not in the secret of the English intrigue, which was
to slip Darnley at Mary.  He came (February 1565): Cecil and Leicester
had "used earnest means" to ensure his coming.  On March 17 Mary was
informed that she would never be recognised as Elizabeth's successor till
events should occur which never could occur.  On receiving this news Mary
wept; she also was indignant at the long and humiliating series of
Elizabeth's treacheries.  Her patience broke down; she turned to Darnley,
thereby, as the English intriguers designed, breaking up the concord of
her nobles.  To marry Darnley involved the feud of the Hamiltons, and the
return of Murray (whom Darnley had offended), of Chatelherault, Argyll,
and many other nobles to the party of Knox and the preachers.  Leicester
would have been welcome to Knox; Darnley was a Catholic, if anything, and
a weak passionate young fool.  Mary, in the clash of interests, was a
lost woman, as Randolph truly said, with sincere pity.  Her long
endurance, her attempts to "run the English course," were wasted.

David Riccio, who came to Scotland as a musician in 1561, was now high in
her and in Darnley's favour.  Murray was accused of a conspiracy to seize
Darnley and Lennox; the godly began to organise an armed force (June
1565); Mary summoned from exile Bothwell, a man of the sword.  On July
29th she married Darnley, and on August 6th Murray, who had refused to
appear to answer the charges of treason brought against him, though a
safe-conduct was offered, was outlawed and proclaimed a rebel, while
Huntly's son, Lord George, was to be restored to his estates.  Thus
everything seemed to indicate that Mary had been exasperated into
breaking with the party of moderation, the party of Murray and
Lethington, and been driven into courses where her support, if any, must
come from France and Rome.  Yet she married without waiting for the
necessary dispensation from the Pope.  Her policy was henceforth
influenced by her favour to Riccio, and by the jealous and arrogant
temper of her husband.  Mary well knew that Elizabeth had sent money to
her rebels, whom she now pursued all through the south of Scotland; they
fled from Edinburgh, where the valiant Brethren, brave enough in throwing
stones at pilloried priests, refused to join them; and despite the feuds
in her own camp, where Bothwell and Darnley were already on the worst
terms, Mary drove the rebel lords across the Border at Carlisle on
October 8.

Mary seemed triumphant, but the men with her--Lethington, and Morton the
Chancellor--were disaffected; Darnley was mutinous: he thought himself
neglected; he and his father resented Mary's leniency to Chatelherault,
who had submitted and been sent to France; all parties hated Riccio.
There was to be a Parliament early in March 1566.  In February Mary sent
the Bishop of Dunblane to Rome to ask for a subsidy; she intended to
reintroduce the Spiritual Estate into the House as electors of the Lords
of the Articles, "tending to have done some good anent the restoring of
the old religion."  The Nuncio who was to have brought the Pope's money
later insisted that Mary should take the heads of Murray, Argyle, Morton,
and Lethington!  Whether she aimed at securing more than tolerance for
Catholics is uncertain; but the Parliament, in which the exiled Lords
were to be forfeited, was never held.  The other nobles would never
permit such a measure.

George Douglas, a stirring cadet of the great House was exciting
Darnley's jealousy of Riccio, but already Randolph (February 5, 1566) had
written to Cecil that "the wisest were aiming at putting all in hazard"
to restore the exiled Lords.  The nobles, in the last resort, would all
stand by each other: there was now a Douglas plot of the old sort to
bring back the exiles; and Darnley, with his jealous desire to murder
Riccio, was but the cat's-paw to light the train and explode Mary and her
Government.  Ruthven, whom Mary had always distrusted, came into the
conspiracy.  Through Randolph all was known in England.  "Bands" were
drawn up, signed by Argyll (safe in his own hills), Murray, Glencairn,
Rothes, Boyd, Ochiltree (the father of Knox's young wife), and Darnley.
His name was put forward; his rights and succession were secured against
the Hamiltons; Protestantism, too, was to be defended.  Many Douglases,
many of the Lothian gentry, were in the plot.  Murray was to arrive from
England as soon as Riccio had been slain and Mary had been seized.

Randolph knew all and reported to Elizabeth's ministers.

The plan worked with mechanical precision.  On March 9 Morton and his
company occupied Holyrood, going up the great staircase about eight at
night; while Darnley and Ruthven, a dying man, entered the queen's supper-
room by a privy stair.  Morton's men burst in, Riccio was dragged forth,
and died under forty daggers.  Bothwell, Atholl, and Huntly, partisans of
Mary, escaped from the palace; with them Mary managed to communicate on
the morrow, when she also held talk with Murray, who had returned with
the other exiles.  She had worked on the fears and passions of Darnley;
by promises of amnesty the Lords were induced to withdraw their guards
next day, and in the following night, by a secret passage, and through
the tombs of kings, Mary and Darnley reached the horses brought by Arthur
Erskine.

It was a long dark ride to Dunbar, but there Mary was safe.  She pardoned
and won over Glencairn, whom she liked, and Rothes; Bothwell and Huntly
joined her with a sufficient force, Ruthven and Morton fled to Berwick
(Ruthven was to die in England), and Knox hastened into Kyle in Ayrshire.
Darnley, who declared his own innocence and betrayed his accomplices, was
now equally hated and despised by his late allies and by the queen and
Murray,--indeed, by all men, chiefly by Morton and Argyll.  Lethington
was in hiding; but he was indispensable, and in September was reconciled
to Mary.

On June 19, in Edinburgh Castle, she bore her child, later James VI.; on
her recovery Darnley was insolent, and was the more detested, while
Bothwell was high in favour.  In October most of the Lords signed, with
Murray, a band for setting Darnley aside--_not_ for his murder.  He is
said to have denounced Mary to Spain, France, and Rome for neglecting
Catholic interests.  In mid-October Mary was seriously ill at Jedburgh,
where Bothwell, wounded in an encounter with a Border reiver, was
welcomed, while Darnley, coldly received, went to his father's house on
the Forth.  On her recovery Mary resided in the last days of November at
Craigmillar Castle, near Edinburgh.  Here Murray, Argyll, Bothwell,
Huntly, and Lethington held counsel with her as to Darnley.  Lethington
said that "a way would be found," a way that Parliament would approve,
while Murray would "look through his fingers."  Lennox believed that the
plan was to arrest Darnley on some charge, and slay him if he resisted.

At Stirling (December 17), when the young prince was baptised with
Catholic rites, Darnley did not appear; he sulked in his own rooms.  A
week later, the exiles guilty of Riccio's murder were recalled, among
them Morton; and Darnley, finding all his enemies about to be united,
went to Glasgow, where he fell ill of smallpox.  Mary offered a visit
(she had had the malady as a child), and was rudely rebuffed (January 1-
13, 1567), but she was with him by January 21.  From Glasgow, at this
time, was written the long and fatal letter to Bothwell, which places
Mary's guilt in luring Darnley to his death beyond doubt, if we accept
the letters as authentic. {129}

Darnley was carried in a litter to the lonely house of Kirk o' Field, on
the south wall of Edinburgh.  Here Mary attended him in his sickness.  On
Sunday morning, February 9, Murray left Edinburgh for Fife.  In the night
of Sunday 9-Monday 10, the house where Darnley lay was blown up by
gunpowder, and he, with an attendant, was found dead in the garden: how
he was slain is not known.

That Bothwell, in accordance with a band signed by himself, Huntly,
Argyll, and Lethington, and aided by some Border ruffians, laid and
exploded the powder is certain.  Morton was apprised by Lethington and
Bothwell of the plot, but refused to join it without Mary's written
commission, which he did not obtain.  Against the queen there is no
trustworthy direct evidence (if we distrust her alleged letters to
Bothwell), but her conduct in protecting and marrying Bothwell (who was
really in love with his wife) shows that she did not disapprove.  The
trial of Bothwell was a farce; Mary's abduction by him (April 24) and
retreat with him to Dunbar was collusive.  She married Bothwell on May
15.  Her nobles, many of whom had signed a document urging her to marry
Bothwell, rose against her; on June 15, 1567, she surrendered to them at
Carberry Hill, while they, several of them deep in the murder plot, were
not sorry to let Bothwell escape to Dunbar.  After some piratical
adventures, being pursued by Kirkcaldy he made his way to Denmark, where
he died a prisoner.

Mary, first carried to Edinburgh and there insulted by the populace, was
next hurried to Lochleven Castle.  Her alleged letters to Bothwell were
betrayed to the Lords (June 21), probably through Sir James Balfour, who
commanded in Edinburgh Castle.  Perhaps Murray (who had left for France
before the marriage to Bothwell), perhaps fear of Elizabeth, or human
pity, induced her captors, contrary to the counsel of Lethington, to
spare her life, when she had signed her abdication, while they crowned
her infant son.  Murray accepted the Regency; a Parliament in December
established the Kirk; acquitted themselves of rebellion; and announced
that they had proof of Mary's guilt in her own writing.  Her romantic
escape from Lochleven (May 2, 1568) gave her but an hour of freedom.
Defeated on her march to Dumbarton Castle in the battle of Langside Hill,
she lost heart and fled to the coast of Galloway; on May 16 crossed the
Solway to Workington in Cumberland; and in a few days was Elizabeth's
prisoner in Carlisle Castle.

Mary had hitherto been a convinced but not a very obedient daughter of
the Church; for example, it appears that she married Darnley before the
arrival of the Pope's dispensation.  At this moment Philip of Spain, the
French envoy to Scotland, and the French Court had no faith in her
innocence of Darnley's death; and the Pope said "he knew not which of
these ladies were the better"--Mary or Elizabeth.  But from this time,
while a captive in England, Mary was the centre of the hopes of English
Catholics: in miniatures she appears as queen, quartering the English
arms; she might further the ends of Spain, of France, of Rome, of English
rebels, while her existence was a nightmare to the Protestants of
Scotland and a peril to Elizabeth.

After Mary's flight, Murray was, as has been said, Regent for the crowned
baby James.  In his council were the sensual, brutal, but vigorous
Morton, with Mar, later himself Regent, a man of milder nature;
Glencairn; Ruthven, whom Mary detested--he had tried to make unwelcome
love to her at Lochleven; and "the necessary evil," Lethington.  How a
man so wily became a party to the murder of Darnley cannot be known: now
he began to perceive that, if Mary were restored, as he believed that she
would be, his only safety lay in securing her gratitude by secret
services.

On the other side were the Hamiltons with their ablest man, the
Archbishop; the Border spears who were loyal to Bothwell; and two of the
conspirators in the murder of Darnley, Argyll and Huntly; with Fleming
and Herries, who were much attached to Mary.  The two parties, influenced
by Elizabeth, did not now come to blows, but awaited the results of
English inquiries into Mary's guilt, and of Elizabeth's consequent
action.




CHAPTER XXI.  MINORITY OF JAMES VI.


"Let none of them escape" was Elizabeth's message to the gaolers of Mary
and her companions at Carlisle.  The unhappy queen prayed to see her in
whose hospitality she had confided, or to be allowed to depart free.
Elizabeth's policy was to lead her into consenting to reply to her
subjects' accusations, and Mary drifted into the shuffling English
inquiries at York in October, while she was lodged at Bolton Castle.
Murray, George Buchanan, Lethington (now distrusted by Murray), and
Morton produced, for Norfolk and other English Commissioners at York,
copies, at least, of the incriminating letters which horrified the Duke
of Norfolk.  Yet, probably through the guile of Lethington, he changed
his mind, and became a suitor for Mary's hand.  He bade her refuse
compromise, whereas compromise was Lethington's hope: a full and free
inquiry would reveal his own guilt in Darnley's murder.  The inquiry was
shifted to London in December, Mary always being refused permission to
appear and speak for herself; nay, she was not allowed even to see the
letters which she was accused of having written.  Her own Commissioners,
Lord Herries and Bishop Lesley, who (as Mary knew in Herries's case) had
no faith in her innocence, showed their want of confidence by proposing a
compromise; this was not admitted.  Morton explained how he got the
silver casket with the fatal letters, poems to Bothwell, and other
papers; they were read in translations, English and Scots; handwritings
were compared, with no known result; evidence was heard, and Elizabeth,
at last, merely decided--that she could not admit Mary to her presence.
The English Lords agreed, "as the case does now stand," and presently
many of them were supporting Norfolk in his desire to marry the accused.
Murray was told (January 10, 1669) that he had proved nothing which could
make Elizabeth "take any evil 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/15955