Reign of James the Second

Volume 4, Chapter 1 of History of Scotland (1149-1603) by Patrick Fraser Tytler

The assassination of James the First, and the succeeding minority of his son, a boy of only six years of age, was, if not a triumph to the majority of the Scottish nobility, at least an event eminently favourable to their power and pretensions. His murderers, it is true, whether from the instant execration which bursts out against a deed of so dark and sanguinary a character, or from the personal revenge of the queen-mother, were punished with speedy and unmitigated severity. Yet, when the first sentiments of horror and amazement were abated, and the Scottish aristocracy begun to regard the consequences likely to arise from the sudden destruction which had overtaken the king in the midst of his schemes for the abridgment of their exorbitant power, it is impossible but that they should have contemplated the eventof his death with secret satisfaction. The sentiments so boldly avowed by Graham in the midst of his tortures, that the day was near at hand when they would bless his memory for having rid them of a tyrant, must have forcibly recurred to their minds; and when they regarded the fate of the Earl of March, so summarily and cruelly stript of his immense possessions, and contemplated the magnitude of James plans, and the stern firmness with which, in so short a reign, he had carried them into effect, we can readily believe that the recovery of the privileges which they had lost, and the erection of some permanent barriers, against all future encroachments of the crown, would be the great objects to which, under the minority of his successor, they would direct their attention.

It happened also, unfortunately for Scotland, that such a scheme for the resumption of power by the feudal nobility, in other words, for the return of anarchy and disorder throughout the country, was but too likely to prove successful. The improvements introduced by James the First; the judicial machinery for the more perfect administration of justice; the laws for the protection of the lower orders against the insolence of the great; the provisions for the admission of the representatives of the commercial classes into parliament, and for the abridgment of the military strength of the great feudal lords—were rather in the state of prospective changes, than of measures whose salutary effects had been tried by time, and to which the nation had become attached by long usage. These improvements had been all carried into effect within the short space of fourteen years; they still bore upon them the hateful gloss of novelty and innovation; and, no longer supported by the firmness of the monarch with whom they originated, they could present but a feeble resistance to the attacks of the numerous and powerful classes whose privileges they abridged, and with whose ambition their continuance was incompatible. The prospect of recovering, during a long minority, the estates and the feudal perquisites which had been resumed or cut down by James the First; the near view of successful venality which constantly accompanied the possession of the great offices under an infant sovereign; and the facility, in the execution of such schemes, which every feudal government offered to any faction who were powerful or fortunate enough to possess themselves of the person of the king, rendered the period upon which we now enter one of great excitement amongst the Scottish nobles. The greater chiefs amongst them adopted every means to increase their personal strength and importance, recruiting the ranks of their armed vassals and followers, and placing persons of tried fidelity in their castles and strongholds; the lesser barons attached themselves to the moro powerful by those leagues or bands which bound them by the strictest ties to work the will of their lord; and both classes set themselves attentively to watch the course of events, and to take immediate advantage of those sudden changes and emergencies which were so likely to arise in a country thrown into the utmost dismay and confusion by the murder of the sovereign.

But although such appear to have been the low and interested feelings of the greater proportion of the nobility, we are not to suppose that the support of the crown, and the cause of order and good government, were utterly abandoned. They still retained many friends in the dignified clergy, as well as among those learned and able churchmen from whose ranks the legal officers of the crown, and the diplomatic agents who transacted all foreign missions and alliances, were generally selected; and they could undoubtedly reckon upon the attachment of the mercantile and commercial classes, now gradually rising into importance, and upon the affectionate support of the great body of the lower orders, in so far as they were left untrammelled by the fetters of their feudal servitude.

Whilst such were the sentiments which animated the various bodies in the state upon the murder of the king, it may easily be supposed that terror was the first feeling which arose in the bosom of the queenmother. Utterly uncertain as to the ramifications of the conspiracy, and trembling lest the same vengeance which had fallen upon the father should pursue the son, she instantly fled with the young prince to Edinburgh; nor did she esteem herself secure till she had retreated with her charge within the castle. The command of this fortress, rendered now a place of far higher importance than usual, by its affording a retreat to the queen and the prince, was at this time in the hands of William Crichton baron of Crichton, and master of the household to the late king, a person of great craft and ambition; and who, although still in the ranks of the lower nobility, was destined to act a principal part in the future history of the times.

After the first panic had subsided, a parliament assembled at Edinburgh within less than a month after the murder of the king ; and measures appear to have been adopted for the government of the country during the minority. The first care, however, was the coronation of the young prince; and for this purpose the principal nobles and barons of the kingdom, with the dignified clergy, and a great multitude of the free tenants of the crown, conducted him in procession from the castle of Edinburgh to the abbey of Holyrood, where he was crowned and anointed amid demonstrations of universal loyalty.

Under any other circumstances than those in which James succeeded, the long-established custom of conducting the ceremony of the coronation at the A bbey of Scone, would not have been departed from; but its proximity to the scene of the murder rendered it dangerous and suspected; and, as delay was equally hazardous, the queen was obliged to purchase security and speed at the expense of somewhat of that solemnity which would otherwise have accompanied the pageant. Two important measures followed the coronation: The first, the nomination of the queen-mother to undertake the custody of the king till he had attained his majo. rity, and to become, at the same time, the guardian of the princesses, his sisters, with an annual allowance of four thousand marks ; the second, the appointment of Archibald fifth earl of Douglas and duke of Touraine, to be lieutenant-general of the kingdom . This baron, Sir Thomas Boyd of Kilmarnock, in his account in Exchequer, of the undoubtedly the most powerful subject in Scotland, and whose revenue, from his estates at home and in France, was probably nearly equal to that of his sovereign, was the son of Archibald fourth Earl of Douglas, who was slain at the battle of Verneuil, and of Margaret daughter to King Robert the Third, so that he was nephew of the late king. His power, however, proved to be of short duration, for he lived little more than a year after his nomination to this high office.

It is unfortunate that no perfect record has been preserved of the proceedings of the first parliament of James the Second. From a mutilated fragment which remains, it is certain that it was composed, as usual, of the clergy, barons, and commissaries of the burghs; and that all alienations of lands, as well as of moveable property, which happened to be in the possession of the late king at his death, and which had been made without consent of the three Estates, were revoked, whilst an inventory of the goods and treasure in the royal coffers was directed to be taken, and an injunction given, that no alienation of the king's lands or property should be made to any person whatever, without the consent of the three Estates, until he had reached his full age of twenty-one years. We may conjecture, on strong grounds, that the subjects to which the general council next turned their attention, were the establishment of a peace with England, and the renewal of amicable relations with the court of France, and the commercial states of Holland.

With regard to peace with England, various circumstances concurred in the condition of that country to facilitate the negotiation. Under the minority of Henry the Sixth, the war with France, and the struggle to maintain unimpaired the conquests of Henry the Fifth, required a concentration of the national strength and resources, which must have been greatly weakened by any invasion upon the part of Scotland; and the Cardinal of Winchester, who was at this time possessed of the principal power in the government, was uncle to the Queen of Scotland. Commissioners were accordingly despatched by the Scottish parliament, who, after a meeting with the English envoys, found little difficulty in concluding a nine years' truce between the two kingdoms, which was appointed to commence on the first of May, 1438, and to terminate on the first of May, 1447."f" Its provisions contain some interesting enactments regarding the commercial intercourse between the two countries, deformed indeed by those unwise restrictions, which were universal at this time throughout Europe, yet evincing an ardent anxiety for the prosperity of the country. In addition to the common stipulations against seizing vessels driven into port, and preventing shipwrecked mariners from returning home, it was agreed, that if any vessel belonging to either country, were carried by an enemy into a port of the other kingdom, no sale of the vessel or cargo should be permitted, without the consent of the original owners; that no vessel, driven into any port, should be liable to arrest for any debt of the king, or of any other person; but that all creditors should have safe conducts, in order to sue for and recover their debts, with lawful damages and interest; that, in cases of shipwreck, the property should be preserved and delivered to the owners; that when goods were landed for the purpose of repairing the ship, they might be reshipped in the same, or in any other vessel, without payment of duties; and that vessels of either kingdom, putting into ports of the other in distress for provisions, might sell goods for that purpose, without being chargeable with customs for the rest of the cargo. It was finally provided, that no wool or woolfels should be carried from one kingdom to the other, either by land or by water; and that, in all cases of depredation, not only the chief offenders, but also the receivers and encouragers, and even the communities of the towns in which the plundered goods were received, should be liable for compensation to the sufferers, who might sue for redress before the conservators of the truce, or the wardens of the marches. The principal of these conservators for England were, the king's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and his kinsman, the Duke of Norfolk, with the Earls of Salisbury, Northumberland, and Westmoreland; and for Scotland, Archibald earl of Douglas and duke of Touraine, with the Earls ofAngus, Crawford, and Avendale, and the Lords Gordon, Maxwell, Montgomery, and Crichton.- Care was taken to send an intimation of the truce to the Scottish merchants who were resident in Holland and in Zealand; and with regard to France, although there can be little doubt, from the ancient alliance with Scotland, and the marriage of the sister of the king to the Dauphin, that the feelings of the country were

strongly attached to the cause of Charles the Seventh, and that the total expulsion of the English would have been an event joyfully welcomed inScotland; yet the reverses experienced in the battles of Crevant and Verneuil, effectually cooled the ardour of that kingdom for foreign war, and appear to have compelled the nation to a temporary and unwilling neutrality.

We have seen that Antony bishop of Urbino, the papal legate, was in Scotland at the time of the murder of the late king, and that a general council of the clergy, which had been called at Perth, for the purpose of receiving his credentials, was abruptly broken off by this event. The destruction of all contemporary records has unfortunately left the proceedings of this council in complete obscurity; and we only know, that towards the conclusion of the year 1438, Sir Andrew Meldrum, a knight of St John of Jerusalem, was despatched through England into Scotland, on a mission connected with the "good of religion,'' and that a papal nuncio, Alfonso de Crucifubreis, proceeded about the same time, to the Scottish court. It is not improbable that the church, which at the present moment felt deep alarm from the disorders of the Hussites in Bohemia, and the growth of heresy in England, was anxious to engage on its side the council and ministers of the infant monarch of Scotland, and to interest them in putting down those heterodox opinions, which, it is certain, during the last reign, had made a considerable progress in that country.

An extraordinary event now claims our attention, which is involved in much obscurity, but drew after it important results. The queen-mother soon found that the castle of Edinburgh, an asylum which she had so willingly sought for her son the king, was rendered, by the vigilance and jealousy of Crichton the governor, much too difficult of access to herself and her friends. It was, in truth, no longer the queen, but this ambitious baron, who was the keeper of the royal person. Under the pretence of superintending the expenses of the household, he seized and dilapidated the royal revenues, surrounded the young sovereign by his own creatures, and permitted neither the queen-mother, the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, nor Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, a baron who had been in high favour with the late king, to have any share in the government. Finding it impossible, by any remonstrances, to obtain her wishes, the queen had recourse to stratagem. At the conclusion of a visit of a few days, which she had been permitted to pay to her son, it was dexterously managed that the prince should be concealed in a large wardrobe chest, which was carried along with some luggage out of the castle. In this he was conveyed to Leith, and from thence transported by water to Stirling castle, the jointure-house of his mother, which was at this time under the command of Livingston of Callendar. Whether the Earl of Douglas, the Bishop of Glasgow who was chancellor, or any of the other officers of state, were privy to this successful enterprise, there are unfortunately no documents to determine; but it seems difficult to believe that the queen should have undertaken it, and carried it through, without some powerful assistants; and it is still more extraordinary that no proceedings appear to have been adopted against Crichton, for his unjustifiable seclusion of the youthful monarch from his mother, an act which, as it appears in the history of the times, must have almost amounted to treason.

The records of a parliament, which was held at Edinburgh on the twenty-seventh of November, 1438, by the Earl of Douglas, therein styled the lieutenantgeneral of the realm; and of a second meeting of the three Estates, which assembled at Stirling, on the thirteenth of March, in the same year, are so brief and mutilated, that little light can be elicited either as to the different factions which unquestionably tore and divided the state, or regarding the provisions which were adopted by the wisdom of parliament for the healing of such disorders.

There is indeed a general provision for the remedy of the open plunder and robbery then prevalent in the country. The sheriff, within whose county the thieves had taken refuge, was commanded to see strict restoration made, and to denounce as rebels to the king's lieutenant, all who refused to obey him, under the penalty of being himself removed from his office, and punished as the principal offender. But where there is strong reason to suspect that the lieutenant and the greater barons were themselves the robbers, and that the sheriffs were their immediate dependants, it may easily be believed, that unless in instances where they were desirous of cutting off some unfortunate spoiler, who had incurred their resentment, the act was most imperfectly executed, if not universally evaded.

Having liberated her son, the king, from the durance in which he had been kept by Crichton, "the queenmother appears for some time to have reposed unlimited confidence in the fidelity of Sir Alexander Livingston; whilst the Earl of Douglas, the most powerful man in the state, refused to connect himself with any faction; and, although nominally the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, took little interest in the scene of trouble and intrigue with which the youthful monarch was surrounded. It does not even appear that he presided in a parliament which was assembled at Stirling, probably a short time after the successful issue of the enterprise of the queen. In this meeting of the three Estates, the dreadful condition of the kingdom, and the treasonable conduct of Sir William Crichton, were, as far as we can judge from the mutilated records which have been preserved, the principal subjects for consideration. It was resolved, that there should be two sessions held yearly, within the realm, in which the lord-lieutenant and the king's council should sit, the first to begin on the day after the exaltation of Holy Cross; and the second on the first Monday in Lent thereafter following. At the same time, an enactment was passed, with an evident reference to Crichton, by which it was ordained, that where any rebels had taken refuge within their castles or fortalices, and held the same against lawful authority, or wherever there was any "violent presumption of rebellion and destruction of the country,'-' it became the duty of the lieutenant to raise the lieges, to besiege such places, and arrest the offenders, of whatever rank they might be.

The Earl of Douglas, however, either too indolent to engage in an employment which would have required the utmost resolution, or too proud to embroil himself with what he considered the private feuds between Crichton and Livingston, refused to carry the act into execution; and Livingston, having raised his vassals, laid siege in person to the castle of Edinburgh.

The events immediately succeeding, are involved in much obscurity; so that, in the absence of original authorities, and the errors and contradictions of historians, it is difficult to discover their true causes, or to give any intelligible account of the sudden revolutions which took place. Amid these difficulties, I adopt the narrative which approaches nearest to those fragments of authentic evidence that have survived the common wreck.

When he perceived that he was beleaguered by the forces of Xiivingston, Crichton, who did not consider himself strong enough to contend singly against the united strength of the queen and this baron, secretly proposed a coalition to the Earl of Douglas, but his advances were received by that powerful chief with infinite scorn. The pride of the haughty potentate could ill brook any suggestion of a division of authority with one who-tn he considered so far beneath him; and it is said, that in a fit of bitter irony, he declared how much satisfaction it would give him if his refusal should cause two such unprincipled disturbers of the public peace mutually to destroy each other. These rivals, however, although either of them would willingly have risen upon the ruin of the other, were too crafty to fulfil the wishes of the Earl of Douglas; and his proud answer, which was soon carried to their ears, seems to have produced in their minds a disposition towards a settlement of their differences. It was evident, that singly they could have little hope of resisting the lieutenant-general of the kingdom: but Livingston possessed the confidence of the queen-mother, and the custody of the king, her son; and with this weight thrown into the scale, it was not unlikely that a coalition might enable them to make head against his authority. The result of such mutual feelings was a truce between the rival lords, which ended in a complete reconciliation, and in the delivery of the castle of Edinburgh into the hands of Sir William Livingston. The young king, whom he had carried along with him to Edinburgh, was presented by Crichton with the keys of the fortress, and supped there on the night when the agreement was concluded; on the morrow, the new friends divided between them the power which had thus fallen into their hands. Cameron bishop of Glasgow, who was a partisan of the house of Douglas, and filled the place of chancellor, was deprived of a situation, in which there is reason to believe he had behaved with much rapacity. The vacant office was bestowed upon Crichton, whilst to Livingston was committed the guardianship of the king's person, and the chief management in the government. With regard to Douglas, it is not easy to ascertain what measures were resolved upon; and it is probable that this great noble, confident in his own power, and in the high trust committed to him by the parliament, would have immediately proceeded against the confederate lords, as traitors to the state. But at this important crisis he was suddenly attacked by a malignant fever, and died at Restalrig, on the twenty-sixth of June, 1439,"f leaving an immense and dangerous inheritance of power and pride to his son, a youth of only seventeen years of age.

The coalition might, therefore, for the present, be regarded as completely triumphant; and Livingston and Crichton, possessed of the king's person, and enjoying that unlimited command over the queen-mother, against which an unprotected woman could offer no resistance, were at liberty to reward their friends, to requite their enemies, and to administer the affairs of the government with a power, which for a while, seemed little short of absolute. The consequences of thisstate of things were such as might have been anticipated. Theadministration of the government became venal and disorderly. Owing to the infancy of the king, and the neglect of appointing a lieutenant-general, or governor of the realm, in the place of the Duke of Touraine, the nation knew not where to look for that firm controlling authority, which should punish the guilty, and protect the honest and industrious. Those tyrannical barons, with which Scotland at this period abounded in common with the other countries of Europe, began to stir and be busy in the anticipation of a rich harvest of plunder, and to entertain and increase their troops of retainers; whose numbers and strength as they calculated, would induce Livingston, Crichton, and the lords of their party, to attach them at any price to their service.

Meanwhile, in the midst of this general confusion, the right of private war, and the prevalence of deadly feud, those two curses of the feudal system, flourished in increased strength and virulence. Sir Alan Stewart of Darnley, who had held the high office of Constable of the Scottish army in France, was treacherously slain at Polmais thorn, between Falkirk and Linlithgow, by Sir Thomas Boyd of Kilmarnock, for " auld feud which was betwixt them,'' in revenge of which, Sir Alexander Stewart collected his vassals, and, "in plain battle,'' to use the expressive words of an old historian, " manfully set upon Sir Thomas Boyd, who was cruelly slain, with many brave men on both sides." The ground where the conflict took place, was at Craignaucht Hill, a romantic spot, near Neilston, in Renfrewshire; and with such determined bravery was it contested, that, it is said, the parties, by mutual consent, retired sundry times to rest and recover breath, after which they recommenced the combat to the sound of the trumpet, till the victory at last declared for the Stewarts. These slaughters and contests amongst the higher ranks, produced their usual abundant increase of robbery, plunder, burning, and murder, amongst the large body of the friends and vassals who were in the remotest degree connected with the parties; so that, whilst Livingston and Crichton possessed the supreme power, and, with a few of their favourites, flourished upon the outlawries and forfeitures, and kept a firm hold over the person of the youthful monarch, whom they immured along with his mother, the queen, in Stirling castle, the state of the country became so deplorable as to call aloud for redress.

It was at this dark period, that the queen-mother, who was in the prime of life, and still a beautiful woman, finding that she was little else than a prisoner in the hands of Livingston, determined to procure protection for herself by marriage. Whether it was an alliance of love or of ambition, is not apparent; but it is certain that Margaret, unknown to the faction by whom she was so strictly guarded, espoused Sir James Stewart, third son of John Stewart lord Lorn, and commonly known by the name of the Black Knight of Lorn. This powerful baron was in strict alliance with the House of Douglas. As husband of the queen-mother, to whom, in the first instance, the parliament had committed the custody of the king's person, he might plausibly insist upon a principal share in the education of the youthful prince, as well as in the administration of the government; and a coalition between the party of the queen-mother and the Earl of Douglas, might, if managed with prudence and address, have put a speedy termination to the unprincipled tyranny of Livingston.

But this able and crafty baron, who ruled all things around the court at his pleasure, had earlier information of these intrigues than the queen and her husband imagined; and whilst they, confiding in his pretended approval of their marriage, imprudently remained within his power, Sir James was suddenly arrested, with his brother, Sir William Stewart, and cast into a dungeon in Stirling castle, with every circumstance of cruelty and ignominy. An ancient manuscript affirms, that Livingston put "thaim in pittis and bollit thaim :,,"f" an expression of which the meaning is obscure; but to whatever atrocity these words allude, it was soon shown that the ambition and audacity of the governor of Stirling was not to be contented with the imprisonment of the Black Knight of Lorn. Almost immediately after this act of violence, the apartments of the queen herself, who then resided in the castle, were invaded by Livingston; and although the servants of her court, headed by Napier,^ one of her household, made a violent resistance, in which this gentleman was wounded, his royal mistress was torn from her chamber, and committed to an apartment, where she was placed under a guard, and cut off from all communication with her husband or his party.

It is impossible to believe that Livingston would have dared to adopt these treasonable measures, which afterwards cost him his head, unless he had been supported by a powerful faction, and by an armed force which, for the time, was sufficient to overcome all resistance. The extraordinary scene which followed, can only be explained upon t his supposition. A general convention of the nobility was held at Stirling, after the imprisonment of the queen. It was attended by the Bishops of Glasgow, Moray, Ross, and Dunblane, upon the part of the clergy; and for the nobility, by the Earl of Douglas, Alexander Seton lord of Gordon, Sir William Crichton chancellor, and Walter lord of Dirleton; and at the same time, that there might at least be an appearance of the presence of a third Estate, James of Parcle, commissary of Linlithgow, William Cranston, burgess and commissary of Edinburgh, and Andrew Reid, burgess and commissary of Inverness, were present as representatives of the burghs, and sanctioned, by their seals, the transaction which took place. In this convention, the queen-mother, with advice and consent of this faction, which usurped to themselves the name of the three Estates, resigned into the keeping of Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, the person of the king, her dearest son, until he had reached his majority; she, at the same time, surrendered in loan to the same baron her castle of Stirling, as the residence of the youthful monarch; and for the due maintenance of his household and dignity, conveyed to him her annual allowance of four thousand marks, granted by the parliament upon the death of the king her husband. The same deed which recorded this strange and unexpected revolution, declared that the queen had remitted to Sir Alexander Livingston and his accomplices, all rancour of mind, which sho had erroneously conceived against them, for the imprisonment of her person, being convinced that their conduct had been actuated by none other motives than those of truth, loyalty, and a zealous anxiety for the safety of their sovereign. It provided also, that the lords and barons, who were to compose the retinue of the queen, should be approved of by Livingston; and that this princess might have access to her son at all times, with the cautious proviso, that such interview should take place in the presence of unsuspected persons: in the event of the king's death, the castle was to be redelivered to the queen; and it was lastly stipulated that the Lord of Livingston and his friends were not to be annoyed or brought "nearer the death" for any part which they might have acted in these important transactions.

It would be ridiculous to imagine, that this pardon and sudden confidence, bestowed with so much apparent cordiality, could be anything else than hollow and compulsory. That the queen should have received into her intimate councils the traitors who, not a month before, had violently seized and imprisoned her husband, invaded her royal chamber, staining it with blood, and reducing her to a state of captivity, is too absurd to be accounted for even by the mutability of female caprice. The whole transaction exhibits an extraordinary picture of the country,—of the despotic power which, in a few weeks, might be lodged in the hands of a successful and unprincipled faction,—of the pitiable weakness of the party of the queen, and the corruption and venality of the great officers of the crown. It must have been evident to the queenmother, that Livingston and Crichton divided between them the supreme power; and, in terror for the life of her husband, and dreading her own perpetual imprisonment, she seems to have consented to purchase security and freedom at the price of the liberty and independence of the king, her son, then a boy in his ninth year. He was accordingly delivered up to Livingston, who kept him in a state of honourable captivity at Stirling.

This state of things could not be of long continuance. The coalition was from the first purely selfish; it depended for its continuance upon the strict division of authority between two ambitious rivals; and soon after, the chancellor, jealous of the superior power of Livingston, determined to make him sensible on how precarious a basis it was founded. Seizing the opportunity of the governor's absence at Perth, he rode with a strong body of his vassals, under cover of night, to the royal park of Stirling, in which the king was accustomed to take the pastime of the chase. Crichton, favoured by the darkness, concealed his followers in the wood; and, at sunrise, had the satisfaction to see the royal cavalcade approach the spot where he lay in ambush. In an instant the youthful monarch was surrounded by a multitude which rendered resistance hopeless; and the chancellor, kneeling, and with an action rather of affectionate submission than of command, taking hold of his bridle rein, besought him to leave that fortress, where he was more a prisoner than a king, and to permit himself to be rescued by his faithful subjects, and restored to his free rights as a sovereign. Saying this, Crichton conducted his willing victim, amid the applauses and loyal protestations of his vassals, to Linlitbgow, where he was met by an armed escort, who conducted him to the castle of Edinburgh.

To the king himself, this transaction brought merely a change of masters; but to Livingston it was full not only of mortification, but danger. Although he would have been glad to have availed himself of the power, he distrusted the youth and versatility of the Earl of Douglas. To the queen-mother he had given cause of mortal offence, and there was no other individual in the country whose authority, if united to his own, was weighty enough to counteract the exorbitant power of the chancellor. He had recourse, therefore, to dissimulation; and coming to Edinburgh, accompanied by a small train, he despatched a flattering message to Crichton, deplored the misunderstanding which had taken place, and expressed his willingness to submit all differences to the judgment of their mutual friends, and to have the question regarding the custody of the royal person determined in the same manner. It happened that there were then present in Edinburgh two prelates, whose character for probity and wisdom peculiarly fitted them for the task of reconciling the rival lords. These were Leighton bishop of Aberdeen, and Winchester bishop of Moray, by whose mediation Crichton and Livingston, unarmed, and slenderly attended, repaired to the church of St Giles, where a reconciliation took place; the charge of the youthful monarch being once more intrusted to Livingston, whilst the chancellor was rewarded by an increase of his individual authority in the management of the state, and the advancement of his personal friends to offices of trust and emolument.f

In the midst of these selfish and petty contests for power, the people were afflicted by almost every scourge which could be let loose upon a devoted country: by intestine feuds, by a severe famine, and by a widespread and deadly pestilence. The fierce inhabitants of the Western Isles, under the command of Lauchlan Maclean and Murdoch Gibson, two leaders notorious for their spoliations and murders, broke in upon the continent; and, not content with the devastation of the coast, pushed forward into the heart of the Lennox, where they slew Colquhoun of Luss in open battle, and reduced the whole district to the state of a blackened and depopulated desert.j Soon after this, the famine became so grievous, that multitudes of the poorer classes died of absolute want. It is stated in an ancient contemporary chronicle, that the boll of wheat was then generally sold at forty shillings, and the boll of oatmeal at thirty. We know from the authority of Stow, that the scarcity was also severely felt in England, where wheat rose from its ordinary price of five shillings and four pence the quarter to one pound; and soon after, in the course of the year 1440, to one pound four shillings. The consequences of unwholesome food were soon seen in a dreadful sickness of the nature of dysentery, which broke out amongst the people, and carried away great numbers; so that, when the pestilence soon after arrived in Scotland, and its ravages were added to the already widely spread calamity, the unhappy country seemed rapidly advancing to a state of depopulation. This awful scourge, which first showed itself at Dumfries, was emphatically denominated "the pestilence without mercy," for none were seized with it who did not certainly die within twenty-four hours after the attack.

To these prolific causes of national misery, there was added another in the overgrown power of the house of Douglas, and the evils which were encouraged by the lawless demeanour of its youthful chief. Upon the death of Archibald duke of Touraine and fifth Earl of Douglas, we have seen that the immense estates of this family devolved upon his son William, a youth who was then only in his seventeenth year; a period of life liable, even under the most common circumstances, to be corrupted by power and adulation. To Douglas, however, the accession brought a complication of trials, which it would have required the maturity of age and wisdom to have resisted. As Duke of Touraine, he was a peer of France, and possessed one of the richest principalities in that kingdom. In his own country, he inherited estates, or rather provinces, in Galloway, Annandale, Wigtown, and other counties, which were covered by warlike vassals, and protected by numerous castles and fortalices; and in ancestry, he could look to a long line of brave progenitors, springing, on the father's side, from the heroic stock of the Good Sir James, and connected, in the maternal line, with the royal family of Scotland. The effects of all this upon the character of the youthful earl, were not long of making their appearance. He treated every person about him with an unbounded arrogance of demeanour; he affected a magnificence which outshone the splendour of the sovereign; when summoned by the governor in the name of the king, he disdained to attend the councilgeneral, where he was bound to give suit and service as a vassal of the throne; and in the reception he gave to the messages which were addressed to him, carried himself more as a supreme and independent prince, than a subject who received the commands of his master. Soon after the death of his father, he despatched Malcolm Fleming of Biggar, along with Alan Lauder of the Bass, as his ambassadors to carry his oath of allegiance to the French monarch, and receive his investiture in the dukedom of Touraine. The envoys appear to have been warmly welcomed by Charles the Seventh; and, flattered by the reception which was given them, as well as by his immediate accession to his foreign principality, Douglas increased his train of followers, enlisted into his service multitudes of idle, fierce, and unprincipled adventurers, who wore his arms, professing themselves his vassals only to obtain a license for their tyranny, whilst within his own vast territories, he openly insulted the authority of the government, and trampled upon the restraints of the laws.

A parliament in the meantime was assembled (second August, 1440) at Stirling, for the purpose of taking into consideration the disordered state of the country, and some of those remedies were again proposed which had already been attended with such frequent failure, not so much from any defect in principle, as from the imperfect manner in which they were carried into execution. It was declared that the holy church should be maintained in freedom, and the persons and property of ecclesiastics universally protected; according to ancient usage, the justiciars on the southern and northern sides of the Firth of Forth were commanded to hold their courts twice in the year, whilst the same duty was to be faithfully performed by the lords of regalities, within their jurisdiction, and by the judges and officers of the sovereign upon the royal lands. On the occurrence of any rebellion, slaughter, or robbery, it was ordained that the king should instantly ride in person to the spot, and, summoning before him the sheriff of the county, see immediate justice done upon the offenders; for the more speedy execution of which, the barons were directed to assist with their persons, vassals, and property. It was, in all probability, at this parliament, that those grievous complaints were presented concerning the abuses which then prevailed throughout the country, which Lindsay of Pitscottie, the amusing historian of these times, has described as originating in the overgrown power of the house of Douglas. "Many and innumerable complaints were given in, whereof the like were never seen before. There were so many widows, bairns, and infants, seeking redress for their husbands, kindred, and friends, that were cruelly slain by wicked bloody murderers, sicklike many for herschip, theft and reif, that there was no man but he would have ruth and pity to hear the same. Shortly, murder, theft, and slaughter, were come in such dalliance among the people, and the king's acts had fallen into such contempt, that no man wist where to seek refuge, unless he had sworn himself a servant to some common murderer or bloody tyrant, to maintain him contrary to the invasion of others, or else had given largely of his gear to save his life, and afford him peace and rest."

There can be little doubt that this dreadful state of things was to be ascribed, as much to the misgovernment of Livingston, and the lawless dominion of Crichton, as to the evil example which was afforded by the Earl of Douglas. On the one hand, that proud potentate, whilst he kept at a distance from court, and haughtily declined all interference with government, excused himself by alleging that the custody of the sovereign, and the management of the state, were in the hands of two ambitious and unprincipled tyrants, who had treasonably possessed themselves of the king's person, and sanctioned by their example the outrages of which they complained. On the other, Livingston and the chancellor, with equal asperity, and more of the appearance of justice—for, however unwarrantably, they represented the supreme authority—complained that Douglas refused obedience to the summons of his sovereign; that he affected a state and magnificence unbecoming and dangerous in a subject; and traversed the country with an army of followers, whose excesses created the utmost misery and distress in whatever district he chose to fix his residence. Both complaints were true; and Livingston and Crichton soon became convinced, that, to secure their own authority, they must crush the power of Douglas. For this purpose, they determined to set spies upon his conduct, and either to discover or create some occasion to work his ruin; whilst, unfortunately for himself, the prominent points of his character gave them every chance of success. He was still a youth, ambitious, violent, and courageous even to rashness; his rivals united to a coolness and wariness, which had been acquired in a long course of successful intrigues, an energy of purpose, and a cruelty of heart, which left no hope for a fallen enemy. In a contest between such unequal enemies, the triumph of the chancellor and Livingston might have been easily anticipated; but, unfortunately, much obscurity hangs over the history of their proceedings. In this failure of authentic evidence, a conjecture may be hazarded, that these crafty statesmen, by means of the paid flatterers with whom they surrounded the young earl, prevailed upon him to express doubts as to the legitimacy of the title of James the Second to the throne, and to advocate the pretensions of the children of Euphemia Ross, the second queen of Robert the Second. Nor, considering Douglas's own descent, was it at all unlikely that he should listen to such suggestions. By his mother, Euphemia Graham, the daughter of Patrick earl of Strathern, he was descended from Robert the Second; and his second queen, Euphemia countess of Ross, whose children, notwithstanding an act of the legislature which declared the contrary, were disposed to consider their title to the crown preferable to any other. It is well known, on the other hand, that the Earl of Carrick, the son of Robert the Second, by his first marriage with Elizabeth More, was born to that monarch previous to his marriage with his mother, and that he succeeded to the crown by the title of Robert the Third, in consequence of that legal principle which permits the subsequent marriage of the parties to confer legitimacy upon the i ssue born out of wedlock. Under these circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine that the Earl of Douglas may have been induced to consider his mother's brother, Malise earl of Strathern, as possessed of a more indubitable title to the crown than the present sovereign, and that a conspiracy to employ his immense and overgrown power in reinstating him in his rights, may have been a project which was broached amongst his adherents, and carried to the ready ears of his enemies. This theory proceeds upon the idea that Douglas was inclined to support the issue of Euphemia Ross, the queen of Robert the Second, in opposition to those of his first wife, who died before his accession to the throne; whilst, on the other hand, if the earl considered the title of James the First as unquestionable, he, as the grandson of James's eldest sister, Margaret, daughter of Robert the Third, might have persuaded himself that, upon the failure of James the Second without issue, he had a specious claim to the crown. When we take into consideration the fact that Douglas and his brother were tried for high treason, and remember that when the young king interceded for them, Crichton reprimanded him for a desire to gratify his pity at the expense of the security of his throne, it is difficult to resist the inference, that in one or other of these ways the youthful baron had plotted against the crown.

Having obtained sufficient evidence of the guilt of Douglas to constitute against him and his near adherents a charge of treason, the next object of his enemies was to obtain possession of his person. For this purpose the chancellor, Crichton, addressed a letter to him, in which he flattered his youthful vanity, and regretted, in his own name and that of the governor, Livingston, that any misunderstanding should have arisen which deprived the government of his services. He expressed, in the strongest terms, their anxiety that this should be removed, and concluded by inviting him to court, where he might have personal intercourse with his royal kinsman, where he would be received with the distinction and consideration befitting his high rank, and might contribute his advice and assistance in the management of the public aflairs, and the suppression of those abuses which then destroyed the peace of the country. By this artful conduct, Crichton succeeded in disarming the resentment, without awakening the suspicions, of his opponent; and Douglas, in the openness of his disposition, fell into the snare which had been laid for him. Accompanied by his only brother, David, his intimate friend and counsellor Sir Malcolm Fleming, and a slender train of attendants, he proceeded towards Edinburgh, at that moment the royal residence, and on his road thither was magnificently entertained by the chancellor at his castle of Crichton. From thence he continued his journey to the capital; but before he entered the town, it was observed by some of the gentlemen who rode in his train, that there appeared to be too many private messages passing between the chancellor and the governor; and some of his councillors, reminding him of an advice of his father, that in circumstances of danger, he and his brother ought never to proceed together, entreated him either to turn back, or at least send forward his brother and remain himself where he then was. Confident, however, in his own opinion, and lulled into security by the magnificent hospitality of Crichton, Douglas rebuked his friends for their suspicions; and, entering the city, rode fearlessly to the castle, where he was met at the gates by Livingston with every expression of devotion, and conducted to the presence of his youthful sovereign, by whom he M as treated with marked distinction.

The vengeance destined to fall upon the Douglases does not appear to have been immediate. It was necessary to secure the castle against any sudden attack; to find pretences for separating the earl from his accustomed attendants; and to make preparations for the pageant of a trial. During this interval, he was admitted to an intimate familiarity with the king; and James, who had just completed his tenth year, with the warm and sudden affection of that age, is said to have become fondly attached to him: but all was now ready, and the catastrophe at last was deplorably rapid and sanguinary. Whilst Douglas and his brother sat at dinner with the chancellor and Livingston, after a sumptuous entertainment the courses were removed, and the two youths found themselves accused, in words of rude and sudden violence, as traitors to the state. Aware, when too late, that they were betrayed, they started from table, and attempted to escape from the apartment; but the door was beset by armed men, who, on a signal from Livingston, rushed into the chamber, and seized and bound their victims, regardless of their indignation and reproaches. It is said that the youthful monarch clung around Crichton, and pleaded earnestly, and even with tears, for his friends; yet tho chancellor not only refused to listen, but sharply commanded him to cease his intercession for traitors who had menaced his throne, A hurried form of trial was now run through, at which the youthful king was compelled to preside in person; and, condemnation having been pronounced, the earl and his brother were instantly carried to execution, and beheaded in the back court of the castle. What were the precise charges brought against them, cannot now be discovered. That they involved some expressions which reflected upon the right of the sovereign, and perhaps embraced a design for the restoration of the children of the second marriage of Robert the Second, from which union Douglas was himself descended, has been already stated as the most probable hypothesis in the absence of all authentic evidence. It is certain, that three days after the execution, Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, their confidential friend and adviser, was brought to trial on a charge of treason, and beheaded on the same ground which was still wet with the blood of his chief, f

It might have been expected that the whole power of the house of Douglas would have been instantly directed against Livingston and the chancellor, to avenge an execution, which, although sanctioned by the formality of a trial, was, from its secrecy and cruelty, little better than a state murder. Judging also from the common course adopted by the government after an execution for treason, we naturally look for the confiscation of the estates, and the division of the family property amongst the adherents of the governor and the chancellor; but here we are again met by a circumstance not easily explained. James earl of Avendale, the grand-uncle of the murdered earl, to whom by law the greater part of his immense estates reverted, entered immediately into possession of them, and assumed the title of Earl of Douglas, without question or difficulty. That he was a man of fierce and determined character, had been early shown in his slaughter of Sir David Fleming of Cumbernauld, the father of the unfortunate baron who now shared the fate of the Douglases ; and yet, in an age when revenge was esteemed a sacred obligation, and under circumstances of provocation which might have roused remoter blood, we find him not only singularly supine, but, after a short period, united in the strictest bonds of intimacy with those who had destroyed the head of his house. The conjecture, therefore, of an acute historian, that the trial and execution of the Earl of Douglas was, perhaps, undertaken with the connivance and assistance of the next heir to the earldom, does not seem altogether improbable; whilst it is difficult to admit the easy solution of the problem which is brought forward by other inquirers, who discover that the uncommon obesity of the new successor to this dignity may have extinguished in him all ideas of revenge.

The death of the Earl of Douglas had the effect of abridging, for a short season, the overgrown power of the family. His French property and dukedom of Touraine, being a male fief, returned to the crown of France, whilst his large unentailed estates in the counties of Galloway and Wigtown, along with the domains of Balvenie and Ormond, reverted to his only sister Margaret, the most beautiful woman of her time, and generally known by the appellation of the Fair Maid of Galloway. The subsequent history of this youthful heiress affords another presumption that the alleged crime of Douglas, her brother, was not his overgrown power, but his treasonable designs against the government; for within three years after his death, William earl of Douglas, who had succeeded to his father, James the Gross, was permitted to marry his cousin of Galloway, and thus once more to unite in his person the immense estates of the family. Euphemia also, the Duchess of Touraine, and the mother of the murdered earl, soon after the death of her son, acquired a powerful protector, by marrying Sir James Hamilton of Cadyow, afterwards Lord Hamilton.

In the midst of these proceedings, which for a time strengthened the authority of Livingston and the chancellor, the foreign relations of the kingdom were fortunately of the most friendly character. The intercourse with England, during the continuance of the truce, appears to have been maintained without interruption, not only between the subjects of either realm, who resorted from one country to the other for the purposes of commerce, travel, or pleasure, but by various mutual missions and embassies, undertaken apparently with the single design of confirming the good dispositions which subsisted between the two countries. With France the communication was still more cordial and constant; whilst a marriage between the princess Isabella, the sister of the king, and Francis de Montfort, eldest son to the Duke of Bretagne, increased the friendship between the two kingdoms. An anecdote, preserved by the historian of Brittany, acquaints us with the character of the princess, and the opinions of John, surnamed the Good and Wise, as to the qualifications of a wife. On asking his ambassadors, after their return from Scotland, what opinion they had formed regarding the lady, he received for answer, that she was beautiful, elegantly formed, and in the bloom and vigour of health; but remarkably silent, not so much, as it appeared to them, from discretion, as from extreme simplicity. "Dear friends,'' said John the Good and Wise, "return speedily and bring her to me. She is the very woman I have been long in search of. By St Nicholas! a wife seems, to my mind, sufficiently acute, if she can tell the difference between her husband's shirt and his shirt ruffle."

The general commercial prosperity of the Netherlands, with which Scotland had for many centuries carried on a flourishing and lucrative trade, had been injured at this time by a war with England, and by intestine commotions amongst themselves; but with Scotland their commercial relations do not appear to have experienced any material interruption; and, although the precise object of his mission is not discoverable, Thomas bishop of Orkney, in 1441, repaired to Flanders, in all probability for the purpose of confirming the amicable correspondence between the two countries, for a beautiful portrait of this princess, taken from an original in the cathedral church of Valines.and congratulating them on the cessation of foreign war and domestic dissension. Whilst such were the favourable dispositions entertained by England, France, and the Netherlands, it appears, from the public records, that the court of Rome was anxious at this time to maintain a close correspondence with Scotland; and there is reason for suspecting, that the growth of Lollardism, and the progress of those heretical opinions for which Resby had suffered in 1407, and against which the parliament of James the First directed their censures in 1424, were the causes which led to the frequent missions from the Holy See. In 1438. Andrew Meldrum, a knight of St John of Jerusalem, paid a visit to the Scottish court, on a mission connected with the good of religion, In the following year, Alfonso de Orucifubreis, the papal nuncio, obtained a passport, for the purpose of proceeding through England into Scotland; and, in 1439, William Croyser, a native of that country, but apparently resident at Rome, invested also with the character of nuncio of the apostolic see, and in company with two priests of the names of Turnbull and Lithgow, repaired to Scotland, where he appears to have remained, engaged in ecclesiastical negotiations, for a considerable period. It is unfortunate that there are no public muniments which tend to explain or to illustrate the specific object of the mission,

But although threatened with no dangers from abroad, the accumulated evils which in all feudal kingdoms have attended the minority of the sovereign, continued to afflict the country at home. On the death of his father, James the Gross, the ability, the pride, and the power of the house of Douglas, revived with appalling strength and vigour in William, the eighth Earl of Douglas, his son and successor, inferior in talents and ambition to none who had borne the name before him. By his mother, Lady Beatrix Sinclair, he was descended from a sister of King Robert the Third; by his father, from the Lady Christian Bruce, sister of Robert the First, f His extensive estates gave him the command of a more powerful army of military vassals _than any other baron in the kingdom, whilst the situation of these estates made him almost an absolute monarch upon the Borders, which, upon any disgust or offence offered him by the government, he could open to the invasion of England, or fortify against the arm and authority of the law. He was supported also by many warlike and potent lords in his own family, and by connexion with some of the most ancient and influential houses in Scotland. His mother, a daughter of the house of Sinclair earl of Orkney, gave him the alliance of this northern baron; his brothers were the Earls of Moray and Ormond; by his married sisters, he was in strict friendship with the Hays of Errol, the Flemings, and the Lord of Dalkeith.

The possession of this great influence only stimulated an ambitious man like Douglas to grasp at still higher authority; and two paramount objects presented themselves to his mind, to the prosecution of which he devoted himself with constant solicitude, and which afford a strong light to guide us through a portion of the history of the country, hitherto involved in obscurity. The first of these was to marry the Fair Maid of Galloway, his own cousin, and thus once more unite in his person the whole power of the house of Douglas.

The second, by means of this overwhelming influence, to obtain the supreme management of the state, as governor of the kingdom, and to act over again the history of the usurpation of Albany and the captivity of James the First. It must not be forgotten also, that the heiress of Galloway was descended, by the father's side, from the eldest sister of James the First, and, by the mother, from David earl of Strathern, eldest son of Robert the Second, by his second marriage. It is not therefore impossible, that, in the event of the death of James the Second, some vague idea of asserting a claim to the crown may have suggested itself to the imagination of this ambitious baron.

Upon Livingston and the chancellor, on the other hand, the plans of Douglas could not fail to have an important influence. The possession of such overgrown estates in the hands of a single subject, necessarily rendered his friendship or his enmity a matter of extreme importance to these statesmen, whose union was that of fear and necessity, not of friendship. Both were well aware that upon the loss of their offices, there would be a brief interval between their disgrace and their destruction. Orichton knew that he was liable to a charge of treason for the forcible seizure of the king's person at Stirling; Livingston, that his imprisonment of the queen, and his usurpation of the government, made him equally guilty with the chancellor; and both, that they had to answer for a long catalogue of crimes, confiscations, and illegal imprisonments, which, when the day of reckoning at last arrived, must exclude them from all hope of mercy. To secure, therefore, the exclusive friendship of Douglas, and to employ his resources in the mutual destruction of each other, was the great object which governed their policy. In the meantime, the youthful monarch, who had not yet completed his thirteenth year, beheld his kingdom transformed into a stage, on which his nobles contended for the chief power; whilst his subjects were cruelly oppressed, and he himself handed about, a passive puppet, from the failing grasp of one faction, into the more iron tutelage of a more successful party in the state. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more miserable picture of a nation, either as it regards the happiness of the king or of the people.

It is not therefore surprising, that, soon after this, the state of the country, abandoned by those who possessed the highest offices only to convert them into instruments of their individual ambition, called loudly for some immediate interference and redress. Sir Robert Erskine, who claimed the earldom of Mar, and apparently on just grounds,finding himself opposed by the intrigues of the chancellor, took the law into his own hands, and laying siege to the castle of Kildrummie, carried it by storm; upon which the king, or rather his ministers, seized the castle of Alloa, the property of Erskine. This same baron, as Sheriff of the Lennox, was Governor of Dumbarton, one of the strongest fortresses in the kingdom; but during his absence in the north, Galbraith of Culcreuch, a partisan of the Earl of Douglas, with the connivance of his master, and the secret encouragement of Crichton, ascended the rock with a few followers, and forcing an entrance by Wallace's tower, slew Robert Sempill the captain, and overpowering the garrison, made themselves masters of the place. In the north, Sir William Ruthven sheriff of Perth, attempting, in the execution 

of his office, to conduct a culprit to the gallows, was attacked by John Gorme Stewart of Athole, at the head of a strong party of armed highlanders, who had determined to rescue their countryman from the vengeance of the law. Stewart had once before been serviceable to government, in employing the wild freebooters whom he commanded, to seize the traitor Graham, who, after the murder of James the First, had concealed himself in the fastnesses of Athole; but, under the capriciousness of a feudal government, the arm which one day assisted the execution of the law, might the next be lifted up in defiance of its authority; and Stewart, no doubt, argued that his securing one traitor entitled him, when it suited his own convenience, to let loose another. Ruthven, however, a brave and determined baron, at the head of his vassals, resented this interference; and, after a sanguinary conflict upon the North Inch of Perth, both he and his fierce opponent were left dead upon the field.

In the midst of these outrageous proceedings, the Earl of Douglas, in prosecution of his scheme for his marriage with the heiress of Galloway, entered into a coalition with Livingston, the king's governor. Livingston's grandson, Sir James Hamilton of Cadyow, had married Euphemia dowager-duchess of Touraine, the mother of Douglas's first wife; and it is by no means improbable, that the friends of the Maiden of Galloway, who was to bring with her so noble a dowry, consented to her union with the Earl of Douglas, upon a promise of this great noble to unite his influence with the governor, and put down the arrogant domination of the chancellor. The events, at least, which immediately occurred, demonstrate some coalition of

+ Anchinleck Chronicle, p. 35.

this sort. Douglas, arriving suddenly at Stirling castle with a modest train, instead of the army of followers by which he was commonly attended, besought and gained admittance into the royal presence, with the humble purpose, as he declared, of excusing himself from any concern in those scenes of violence which had been lately enacted at Perth and Dumbarton. The king, as was reported, not only received his apology with a gracious ear, but was so much prepossessed by his winning address, and his declarations of devoted loyalty, that he made him a member of his privy council, and appears soon after to have conferred upon him the office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, which had been enjoyed by the first Duke of Touraine. The consequence of this sudden elevation of Douglas, was the immediate flight of the chancellor Crichton to the castle of Edinburgh, where he began to strengthen the fortifications, to lay in provisions, and to recruit his garrison, as if he contemplated a regular siege. To imagine that this elevation of Douglas was accomplished by the king, a boy who had not yet completed his thirteenth year, would be ridiculous. It was evidently the work of the governor, who held an exclusive power over the king^ person; and it indicated, for the moment, a coalition of parties, which might well make Crichton tremble.

In the meantime, Livingston, pleading his advanced age, transferred to his eldest son, Sir James, the weighty charge of the sovereign's person, and his government of Stirling castle; whilst Douglas, in the active exercise of his new office of lieutenant-general, which entitled him to summon in the king's name, and obtain delivery of any fortress in the kingdom, assembled a large military force. At the head of these troops, and attended by the members of the royal household and privy council, he proceeded to the castle of Barnton, in Mid-Lothian, the property of the chancellor Crichton, demanded its delivery in the king's behalf, and exhibited the order which entitled him to make the requisition. To this haughty demand, the governor of the fortress, Sir Andrew Crichton, sent at first a peremptory refusal; but, after a short interval, the preparations for a siege, and the display of the king's banner, overcame his resolution, and induced him to capitulate. Encouraged by this success, Douglas levelled the castle with the ground, and summoned the chancellor Crichton, and his adherents, to attend a parliament at Stirling, to answer before his peers upon a charge of high treason. The reply made to this by the'proud baron, was of a strictly feudal nature, and consisted in a raid or predatory expedition, in which the whole military vassals of the house of Crichton broke out with fire and sword upon the lands of the Earl of Douglas, and of his adherent, Sir John Forester of Corstorphine, and inflicted that sudden and summary vengeance, which gratified the feelings of their chief, and satisfied their own lust for plunder. Whilst the chancellor thus let loose his vassals upon those who meditated his ruin, his estates were confiscated in the parliament which met at Stirling; his friends and adherents, who disdained or dreaded to appear and plead to the charges brought against them, were outlawed, and declared rebels to the king's authority; and he himself, shut up in the castle of Edinburgh, concentrated his powers of resistance, and pondered over the likeliest method of averting his total destruction.

Douglas, in the meantime, received, through the influence of the Livingstons, the reward to which he had ardently looked forward. A divorce was obtained from his first countess; a dispensation arrived from Rome, permitting the marriage between himself and his cousin; and although still a girl, who had not completed her twelfth year, the Fair Maid of Galloway was united to the earl, and the immense estates which had fallen asunder upon the execution of William, were once more concentrated in the person of the lieutenant-general of the kingdom. In this manner did Livingston, for the purpose of gratifying his ancient feud with the chancellor, lend his influence to the accumulation of a power, in the hands of an ambitious subject, which was incompatible with the welfare of the state or the safety of the sovereign.

But although the monarch was thus abandoned by those who ought to have defended his rights, and the happiness of the state sacrificed to the gratification of individual revenge, there were still a few honest and upright men to be found, who foresaw the danger, and interposed their authority to prevent it; and of these the principal, equally distinguished by his talents, his integrity, and his high birth, was Kennedy bishop of St Andrews, a sister's son of James the First, and by this near connexion with the king, entitled to stand forward as his defender against the ambitious faction

who maintained possession of his person. Kennedy's rank, as head of the Scottish church, invested him with an authority, to which, amid the general corruption and licentiousness of the other officers in the state, the people looked with reverence and affection. His mind, which was of the highest order of intellect, had been cultivated by a learned and excellent education, enlightened by foreign travel, and exalted by a spirit of unaffected piety. During a residence of four years at Rome, he had risen into esteem with the honester part of the Roman clergy; and, aware of the abuses which had been introduced, during the minority of the sovereign, into the government of the church—of the venality of the presentations—the dilapidation of the ecclesiastical lands—the appointment of the licentious dependants of the feudal barons who had usurped the supreme power—Kennedy, with a resolution which nothing could intimidate, devoted his attention to the reformation of the manners of the clergy, the dissemination of knowledge, and the detection of all abuses connected with the ecclesiastical government. Upon the disgrace of Crichton, this eminent person was advanced to the important office of chancellor, which he retained only for a brief period; and in his double capacity of primate and head of the law, there were few subjects which did not, in one way or other, come within the reach of his conscientious and inquiring spirit.

Upon even a superficial examination of the state of the country, it required little discernment to discover, that out of the union of the two parties of the Livingstons and the Douglases, had already sprung an infinite multitude of grievances, which weighed heavily upon the people, and that, if not speedily counteracted, the further growth of this coalition might en

danger the security of the crown, and threaten the life of the sovereign. The penetrating spirit of Kennedy soon detected an alarming confirmation of these suspicions in the assiduity evinced by Douglas, to drawwithin the coalition between himself and Livingston, all the proudest and most powerful of the feudal families, as well as in the preference which he manifested for those to whom the severity of the government of James the First had already given cause of offence and dissatisfaction, and who, with the unforgiving spirit of feudal times, transferred to the person of his son the hatred with which they had regarded the father. Of this there was a striking example in a league or association which Douglas at this time entered into with Alexander, the second Earl of Crawford, who had married Mariot de Dunbar, the sister of that unfortunate Earl of March whom we have seen stripped of his ancient and extensive inheritance by James the First, under circumstances of such severity, and at best of such equivocal justice, as could never be forgotten by the remotest connexions of the sufferer. When Kennedy observed such associations, indicating in Douglas a purpose of concentrating around him, not only the most powerful barons, but the most bitter enemies of the ruling dynasty, he at once threw the whole weight of his authority and experience into the scale of the late chancellor, and united cordially with Crichton in an endeavour to defeat such formidable purposes. But he was instantly awakened to the dangers of such a proceeding, by the ferocity with which his interference was resented. At the instigation of the lord-lieutenant, the Earl of Crawford, along with Alexander Ogilvy, Livingston governor of Stir

Douglas's Peerage, vol. i. p. 376. History, vol. iii. p.2!8.

ling castle, Lord Hamilton, and Robert Reoch, a wild highland chief, assembled an overwhelming force, and, with every circumstance of savage and indiscriminate cruelty, laid waste the lands belonging to the bishop, both in Fife and Angus; leading captive his vassals, destroying his granges and villages with fire, and giving up to wide and indiscriminate havoc, the only estates, perhaps, in the kingdom, which, under the quiet and enlightened rule of this prelate, had been reduced under a system of agricultural improvement. Kennedy, in deep indignation, instantly summoned the Earl of Crawford to repair the ravages which had been committed; and finding that the proud baron disdained to obey, proceeded, with that religious pomp and solemnity which was fitted to inspire awe and terror even in the savage bosoms of his adversaries, to excommunicate the earl and his adherents, suspending them from the services and the sacraments of religion, and denouncing, against all who harboured or supported them, the extremest curses of the church. It may give us some idea of the danger and the hopelessness of the task in which the Bishop of St Andrews now consented to labour—the reformation of the abuses of the government—when we remember that three of the principal parties engaged in these acts of spoliation, were the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, the governor of the royal person, and one of the most confidential members of the king's privy-council.-f" Douglas, in his character of king's lieutenant, now

Aucbinleck Chronicle, p. 39. Robert Reoch, or Swarthy Robert, was the ancestor of the Robertsons of Strowan. He had apprehended the Earl of Athole, one of the murderers of James the First. He is sometimes styled Robert Duncanson. See Hist. vol. iii. p. 2(i8.

+ MS. indenture in the possession of Mr Maule of Panmure, between the king's council, and daily about him, on one part, and Walter Ogilvy of Beaufort, on the other.

assembled the vassals of the crown, and laid siege to Edinburgh castle, which Crichton, who had anticipated his movements, was prepared to hold out against him to the last extremity. The investment of the fortress, however, continued only for nine weeks; at the expiration of which period, the chancellor, who, since his coalition with the Bishop of St Andrews and the house of Angus, was discovered by his adversaries to have a stronger party than they were at first willing to believe, surrendered the castle to the king, and entered into a treaty with Livingston and Douglas, by which he was not only ensured of indemnity, but restored to no inconsiderable portion of his former power and influence. There can be little doubt that the reconciliation of this powerful statesman with the faction of Douglas, was neither cordial nor sincere: it was the result of fear and interest, the two great motives which influence the conduct of such men in such times; but from the friendship and support of so pure a character as Kennedy, a presumption arises in favour of the integrity of the late chancellor, when compared with the selfish ambition, and lawless conduct of his opponents.

In the midst of these miserable scenes of war and commotion, the queen-mother, who, since her marriage with the Black Knight of Lorn, had gradually fallen into neglect and obscurity, died at the castle of Dunbar. Her fate might have afforded to any moralist a fine lesson upon the instability of human grandeur. A daughter of the noble and talented house of Somerset, she was courted by James the First, during his captivity, with romantic ardour, in the shades of Windsor, and in the bloom of beauty became the queen of this great monarch. After fourteen years of happiness and glory, she was doomed herself to witness the dreadful assassination of her royal consort; and having narrowly escaped the ferocity which would have involved her in a similar calamity, she enjoyed, after the capture of her husband's murderers, a brief interval of vengeance and of power. Since that period, the tumult of feudal war, and the struggles of aristocratic ambition, closed thickly around her; and losing her influence with the guardianship of the youthful monarch, the solitary tie which invested her with distinction, she sunk at once into the wife of a private baron, by whom she appears to have been early neglected, and at last utterly forsaken. The latest events in her historyare involved in an uncertainty which itself pronounces a melancholy commentary on the depth of the neglect into which she had fallen; and we find her dying in the castle of Dunbar, then in the possession of a noted freebooter and outlaw, Patrick Hepburn of Hailes. Whether this baron had violently seized the queen, or whether she had willingly sought a retreat in the fortress, does not appear; but the castle, soon after her death, was delivered up to the king by Hepburn, who, as a partisan of the house of Douglas, was pardoned his excesses, and restored to favour. It was a melancholy consequence of the insecurity of persons and of property in those dark times, that a widow became the mark, or the victim, of every daring adventurer, and by repeated nuptials, was compelled to defend herself against the immediate attacks of licentiousness and ambition.

Upon the death of their mother the queen, the two princesses, her daughters, Jane and Eleanor, were sent to the Court of France, on a visit to their sister the Dauphiness; anxious, in all probability, to escape from a country which was at that moment divided by contending factions, and where their exalted rank only exposed them to more certain danger. On their arrival in France, however, they found the court plunged in distress by the death of the Dauphiness, who seems to have become the victim of a conspiracy which, by circulating suspicions against her reputation, and estranging the affections of her husband, succeeded at last in bringing her to an early grave. There is strong evidence of her innocence in the deep sorrow for her death expressed by Charles the Seventh, and his anxiety that the Dauphin should espouse her sister Jane, a marriage for which he in vain solicited a papal dispensation. Her husband, afterwards Lewis the Eleventh, was noted for his craft and his malignity; and there is little doubt, that even before the slanderous attack upon her character by Jamet de Tillay, the neglect and cruelty of the Dauphin had nearly broken a heart of much susceptibility, enfeebled by an overdevotion to poetry and romance, and seeking a refuge from scenes of domestic suffering in the pleasures of literary composition, and the patronage of men of genius.

In the meantime, amid a constant series of petty feuds and tumults, which, originating in private ambition, are undeserving the notice of the historian, one from the magnitude of the scale on which it was acted, as well as from the illustrations which it affords us of the manners of the times, requires a more particular recital. The religious house of Arbroath had appointed Alexander Lindsay, eldest son of the Earl of Crawford, their chief justiciar, a man of ferocious habits, and of great ambition, who, from the length and bushiness of his beard, was afterwards commonly known by the appellation of the "Tiger, or Earl Beardy." The prudent monks, however, soon discovered that the Tiger was too expensive a protector, and having deposed him from his office, they conferred it upon Ogilvy of Innerquharity, an unpardonable offence in the eyes of the Master of Crawford, who instantly collected an army of his vassals, for the double purpose of inflicting vengeance upon the intruder, and repossessing himself of the dignity from which he had been ejected. There can be little doubt that the Ogilvies must have sunk under this threatened attack, but accident gave them a powerful ally in Sir Alexander Seton of Gordon, afterwards Earl of Huntly, who, as he returned from court, happened to lodge for the night at the castle of Ogilvy, at the moment when this baron was mustering his forces against the meditated assault of Crawford. Seton, although in no way personally interested in the quarrel, found himself, it is said, compelled to assist the Ogilvies, by a rude but ancient custom, which bound the guest to take common part with his host in all dangers which might occur so long as the food eaten under his roof remained in his stomach. With the small train of attendants and friends who accompanied him, he joined the forces of Innerquharity, and proceeding to the town of Arbroath, found the opposite party drawn up in great strength on the outside of the gates. The families thus opposed in mortal defiance to each other, could number amongst their adherents many of the bravest and most opulent gentlemen in the country; and the two armies exhibited an imposing appearance of armed knights, barbed horses, and embroidered banners. As the combatants, however, approached each other, the Earl of Crawford, who had received information of the intended combat, being anxious to avert it, suddenly appeared on the field, and galloping up between the two lines, was mortally wounded by a soldier, who was enraged at his interference, and ignorant of his rank. The event naturally increased the bitterness of hostility, and the Crawfords, who were assisted by a large party of the vassals of Douglas, infuriated at the loss of their chief, attacked the Ogilvies with a desperation which soon broke their ranks, and reduced them to irreclaimable disorder. Such, however, was the gallantry of their resistance, that they were almost entirely cut to pieces; and five hundred men, including many noble barons in Forfar and Angus, were left dead upon the field. Seton himself had nearly paid with his life the penalty of his adherence to the rude usage of the times; and John Forbes of Pitsligo, one of his followers, was slain: nor was the loss which the Ogilvies sustained in the field their worst misfortune: for Lindsay, with his characteristic ferocity, and protected by the authority of Douglas, let loose his army upon their estates; and the flames of their castles, the slaughter of their vassals, the plunder of their property, and the captivity of their wives and children, instructed tHe remotest adherents of the Justiciar of Arbroath, how terrible was the vengeance which they had provoked. What must have been the state of the government, and how miserable the consequences of those feudal manners and customs, which have been admired by superficial inquirers, where the pacific attempt of a few monks to exercise their undoubted privilege in choosing their own protector, could involve a whole province in bloodshed, and kindle the flames of civil war in the heart of the country! It does honour to the administration of Kennedy, that, although distracted by such domestic feuds, he found leisure to attend to the foreign commercial relations of the state, and that a violent dissension which had broken out betwixt the Scots and the Bremeners, who had seized a ship freighted from Edinburgh, and threatened further hostilities, was amicably adjusted by envoys despatched for the purpose to Flanders.

The consequences of the death of the Earl of Crawford require particular attention. That ambitious noble had been one of the firmest allies of Douglas; and the lieutenant-general, well aware that superior power was the sole support of an authority which he had very grossly abused, immediately entered into a league with the new Earl of Crawford, and Alexander earl of Ross and lord of the Isles, in whose mind the imprisonment and degrading penance inflicted upon him by James the First, had awakened desires of revenge, the deeper only from their being long repressed. The alliance between these three nobles was on the face of it an act of treason, as it bore to be a league offensive and defensive against all men, not excepting the sovereign; and it was well known that Crawford, from his near connexion with the forfeited house of March, inherited a hatred of the royal family, which, increased by his native ferocity, had at last grown up into a determined resolution to destroy the race. The coalition seems to have acquired additional strength, during the succeeding year, by the accession of the Livingstons; so that, with the exception of Crichton and Kennedy, there was scarcely to be found a baron of consequence who was not compelled to support the governor in his attempt to sink the authority of the sovereign, and concentrate in his own person the undivided administration of the state.

Against his success in this treasonable project, Douglas soon found that his most formidable opponent was the young king himself, who had reached the age of seventeen years, and although under the disadvantage of a confined education, began to evince a sagacity of judgment, and a vigour of character, which gave the fairest promise of excellence. Cautiously abstaining from offering any open disgust to the governor, he attached silently to his service the upright and able Kennedy, and the experienced Crichton, who appears about this time to have been raised to the dignity of a lord in parliament, and soon after reinstated in the important office of chancellor. Aware, even at this early age, of the intellectual superiority of the clergy, he exerted himself to secure the services of the most distinguished of this order; by friendly negotiations with England, he secured the favourable dispositions of Henry the Sixth; and with the courts of France and of Rome he appears to have been on terms of the utmost confidence and amity. To ascribe the whole merit of these wise and politic measures to the young monarch, would be absurd; but allowing that they originated with the party of Crichton and of Kennedy, with whom he had connected himself, the praise of the selection of such advisers, and the confidence with which they were treated, belongs to James.

This confidence was soon after evinced upon an important occasion, when the king granted a commission to the chancellor Crichton, his secretary Railston bishop of Dunkeld, and Nicholas de Otterburn official of Lothian, to repair to France for the purpose of renewing the league which for many centuries had subsisted between the two countries, and with a commission to choose him a bride amongst the princesses of that royal court. The first part of their duty was soon after happily accomplished; but as the family of the King of France afforded at that moment no suitable match for their young sovereign, the Scottish ambassadors, by the advice of Charles the Seventh, proceeded to the court of the Duke of Gueldres, and made their proposals to Mary, the only daughter and heiress of this wealthy potentate, and nearly related to the French king. In the succeeding year, accordingly, the princess was solemnly affianced as the intended consort of the King of Scotland.

In the midst of these measures, James was careful to afford no open cause of suspicion or disgust to the faction of the Livingstons, or to the still more powerful party of the Douglases and Crawfords. His policy was to disunite them in the first instance, and afterwards to destroy them in detail; and, in furtherance of this project, he appears to have called home from the continent Sir James Stewart, the husband of his late mother the. queen-dowager, and Robert Fleming, the son of Sir Malcolm Fleming, who, by the command, or with the connivance of the Livingstons, had been executed in Edinburgh castle along with the Earl of Douglas and his brother. All this, to a deep observer, must have indicated a preparation for the fall of the Livingstons; but, as the king was careful to retain them in his service, and to use their assistance in his negotiations, they appear to have been deceived into a false security, and to have neglected all means of defence, and all opportunity of escape, till it was too late. Douglas, however, was not so easily seduced; but suspecting the designs of the monarch, which were quietly maturing amid the peace and tranquillity with which he was surrounded, determined to divide his strength and defeat his purposes, by involving him in a war with England. Nor was this a matter of much difficulty, as the truce which subsisted between the two countries was on the point of expiring, and the Borderers had already commenced their hostilities. Three parties at present divided England: that of the good Duke of Gloucester, who seems to have been animated by a sincere love for his sovereign, Henry the Sixth, and an enlightened desire to promote the prosperity of the nation by the maintenance of pacific relations withScotland; that of the queen and the Duke of Suffolk, the determined enemies of Gloucester, and solicitous only for the concentration of the whole power of the state into their own hands; and, lastly, that of Richard duke of York, who, having already formed a design upon the crown, made it his chief business to widen the breach between the two factions of Gloucester and the queen, and to prepare the way for his own advancement, by increasing the miseries which the nation suffered under the domination of the house of Lancaster. To this able and ambitious prince, the decay of the English power in France, and the resumption of hostilities upon the Borders, were subjects rather of congratulation than of regret: and when both countries contained two powerful nobles, Douglas and the Duke of York, equally solicitous for war, it is only matter of surprise that hostilities should not have broken out at a more early period.

On their occurrence, the aggression seems to havo first proceeded from the English, who, under the command of the Earls of Northumberland and Salisbury, wardens of the east and west marches, broke violently, and in two divisions of great force, into Scotland, and left the towns of Dunbar and Dumfries in flames. This, according to the usual course of Border warfare, led to an immediate invasion of Cumberland by James Douglas of Balveny, brother of the Earl of Douglas, in which Alnwick was burnt and plundered, and the whole of that province cruelly wasted and depopulated; whilst, as the spirit of revenge, and the passionate desire of retaliation, spread over a wider surface, the whole armed population of the country flowed in at the call of the wardens, and a force of six thousand English, under the command of the younger Percy, along with Sir John Harrington and Sir John Pennington, crossed the Solway, and encamped upon the banks of the river Sark, where they were soon after defeated by the Scots, under the command of Hugh earl of Ormond, another brother of the Earl of Douglas. Along with Ormond were Sir John Wallace of Craigie, the Sheriff of Ayr, the Laird of Johnston, and the Master of Somerville, who commanded a force considerably inferior to that which they encountered, being about four thousand strong. They succeeded, however, in dispersing the English, of whom fifteen hundred men were left deadupon the field, five hundred drowned in the Sol way, and the leaders, Percy, Harrington, and Pennington, taken prisoners; by whose ransom, as well as the plunder of the English camp, the Scottish leaders were much enriched. The Scots lost only twenty-six soldiers; but Wallace of Craigie, a leader of great courage and experience, whose conduct had mainly contributed to the victory, soon after, died of his wounds.

It would appear, however, that both countries were willing to consider this infringement of the peace rather as an insulated and accidental disturbance of the Borders, than a fixed determination to renew the war. It led to no more serious hostilities; and whilst, in England, the loss of the French dominions, the rebellion of Ireland, and the intrigues of the Yorkists, spread dissatisfaction and alarm throughout the country, the King ofScotland, whose character seemed gradually to gain in intelligence and vigour, looked anxiously forward to the arrival of his intended consort, and summoned his parliament to meet at Stirling on the fourth of April, 1449. Unfortunately, with a single and unimportant exception, no record of the transactions of this meeting of the Estates has reached our times.-f" We know, however, that the practice of appointing a committee of parliament, composed of the representatives of the bishops, the barons, and the commissaries of the burghs, was continued; and it may be conjectured, that their remaining deliberations principally regarded the approaching marriage of the king. Preparations for this joyful event now engrossed the court; and it was determined that the ceremony should be conducted with much magnificence and solemnity.

On the eighteenth of June, the fleet which bore the bride anchored in the Forth. It consisted of thirteen large vessels, and had on board a brilliant freight of French and Burgundian chivalry. The Archduke of Austria, the Duke of Brittany, and the Lord of Campvere, all brothers-in-law to the King of Scotland, along with the Dukes of Savoy and of Burgundy, with a suite of knights and barons, accompanied the princess and her ladies, whilst a body-guard of three hundred men-at-arms, clothed, both man and horse, in complete steel, attended her from the shore to the palace of Holyrood, where she was received by her youthful consort.f The princess, a lady of great beauty, and, as it afterwards proved, of masculine talent and understanding, rode, according to the manners of the times, behind the Lord Campvere, encircled by the nobles of France, Burgundy, andScotland, and welcomed by the acclamations of an immense concourse of spectators. The portion of the bride amounted to sixty thousand crowns, which was stipulated to be paid within two years by the maternal uncle of the princess, Philip the Good duke of Burgundy, one of the wealthiest and most powerful princes in Europe, who now attended her to Scotland. James on the other hand, settled upon the queen, in the event of his previous decease, a dowry of ten thousand crowns, which was secured upon lands in Strathern, Athole, Methven, and Linlithgow; and he bound himself, in the event of a male heir being born to the Duke of Gueldres, to renounce all claims to which his marriage with the princess might otherwise have entitled him. At the same period, in consideration of the amicable and advantageous commercial intercourse which, from remote ages, had been maintained between the Scottish merchants and the people of Brabant, Flanders, Holland, Zealand, and other territories, all of which were now subject to the Duke of Burgundy, a treaty of perpetual friendship and alliance was concluded between these united states and the kingdom of Scotland, in which their respective sovereigns engaged to compel all aggressors upon their mutual subjects, whether the attack and spoliation was conducted by land or sea, to make the amplest satisfaction and restitution to the injured parties. From the moment of the arrival of the Princess of Gueldres till the solemnization of her marriage and coronation, the time was occupied by feasting, masks, revelry, and tournaments; amongst which last amusements there occurred a noted combat at outrance, in which three Burgundian champions, famous amongst their contemporaries for an unrivalled skill in their weapons, challenged the bravest of the Scottish knights to an encounter with the lance, battle-axe, sword, and dagger. The challenge of the foreign knights, two of whom belonged to the ancient and noble family of Lalain, whilst the third was the Sieur de Meriadet, Lord of Longueville, was accepted by James Douglas, brother of the earl, another baron of the same name, brother of Douglas of Lochleven, and Sir John Ross of Halket.

The lists were erected at Stirling, where the combatants having entered, splendidly apparelled, first proceeded to arm themselves in their pavilions. They were then knighted by the king; and, at the sound of the trumpet, engaged in a desperate encounter, in which spears were soon shivered and cast aside to make way for the close combat. At length, one of the Douglases being felled to the ground by the stroke of a battle-axe, the monarch, anxious to avoid the further effusion of blood, or to stain his nuptial entertainment by the death of such brave knights, threw down his gauntlet, and terminated the contest. It may give us some idea of the immense power possessed at this period by the Earl of Douglas, when we mention, that on this chivalrous occasion, the military suite by which he was surrounded, and at the head of which he conducted the Scottish champions to the lists, consisted of a force amounting to five thousand men.

Soon after this the royal marriage was solemnized in the abbey of Holy rood, and the king, guided by the advice and experience of Crichton and Kennedy, resumed his designs for the vindication of his own authority, and the destruction of those unprincipled barons who had risen, during his minority, upon its ruins. Against Douglas, however, on account of his exorbitant power, it was as yet impossible to proceed, although an example of his insolent cruelty occurred about this time, in the murder of Colvil of Oxenham and a considerable body of his retainers,-)- which deeply incensed the young monarch. Dissembling his resentment till a more favourable opportunity, the king directed his whole strength against the faction of the Livingstons; and having received secret information of a great convocation which they were to hold at the bridge of Inchbelly, which passes over the Kelvin near Kirkintilloch, he was fortunate enough to surround them by the royal forces, and arrest the leading men of the family, before they could adopt any measures either for resistance or escape. James Livingston, eldest son of the aged and noted Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar; Robyn of Callendar captain of Dumbarton; David Livingston of Greenyards; John Livingston captain of Doune castle; Robert Livingston of Lithgow; and, not long after, Sir Alexander himself, were seized and thrown into prison, while such expedition was used, that within forty days not only their whole property was put under arrest, but every officer who acted under their authority, was expelled violently from his situation, and every castle or fortalice which was held by themselves or their vassals, seized and occupied by the sovereign. The manner in which this bold and sweeping measure was carried into execution, is involved in an obscurity very similar to that which, in a former reign, attended the arrest of the family and faction of Albany by James the First. In both instances the great outlines of the transaction alone remain, and all the minute but not less important causes which led to the weakening the resistance of the victims of royal vengeance, to the strengthening the hands of the executive, and to the surprise and discomfiture of a formidable faction, which had for twelve years controlled and set at defiance the utmost energies of the government, are lost in the silence of contemporary history and the destruction of original records. All that is certainly known, seems to indicate an extraordinary increase in the resources, courage, and ability of the king, and a proportionable diminution in the strength, or a remarkable indifference and lukewarmness in the zeal, of the great families by whom he had been so long retained in a state of ignominious durance.

Immediately after this unexpected display of his power, which excited great astonishment in the country, the king despatched the Bishop of Brechin and the Abbot of Melrose, his treasurer and confessor, along with the Lords Montgomery and Grey, as his ambassadors, for the purpose of concluding a truce with England; and a meeting having taken place with the commissioners of the English monarch in the cathedral church at Durham, on the twenty-fifth of November, a cessation of hostilities for an indefinite period was agreed on, in which the most ample provisions were included for the encouragement of the commerce of both kingdoms, and which, upon six months' previous warning being given, might be lawfully infringed by the English or the Scottish monarch. A confirmation of the treaty with France, and a ratification of the league with the Duke of Brittany, immediately succeeded to the negotiations in England ;"(" and James, having thus wisely secured himself against any disturbance from abroad, summoned his parliament to meet at Edinburgh on the nineteenth of January, and proceeded, with a determined purpose and exemplary severity, to enforce the judgment of the law against the manifold offences of the house of Livingston.

Their principal crime, in itself an act of open treason, had been the violent attack upon the queen, and the imprisonment of her person, on the third of August, 1439; and with a manifest reference to this subject, it was declared, "That if any man should assist, counsel, or maintain those that are arraigned by the sovereign in the present parliament, on account of crimes committed against the king or his late dearest mother, they should be liable to the punishment inflicted on the principal offenders.'' Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar, the head of the family, and now an aged man, James Dundas of Dundas, his cousin-german, and Robert Bruce, brother to Bruce of Clackmannan, were forfeited and imprisoned in Dumbarton castle. The vengeance of the law next fell upon Alexander Livingston, a younger son of the Lord of Callendar, along with Robert Livingston, comptroller, who were hanged, and afterwards beheaded, on the Castle-hill at Edinburgh; upon which Archibald Dundas, whose brother had been shut up in Dumbarton, threw himself into the castle of Dundas, which was at that time strongly garrisoned and full of provisions, declaring that he would die upon the walls, or extort from the king a free pardon to himself and his adherents. Why the father, the eldest son James, and James Dundas, who were all of them personally engaged in the atrocious attack on the queen, were permitted to escape with imprisonment, whilst a mortal punishment was reserved for apparently inferior delinquents, it is difficult to discover, -

Another obscurity occurs in the passive manner in which the Earl of Douglas appears to have regarded the downfall of those with whom he had been long connected by the strictest ties of mutual support and successful ambition. There can be little doubt that the king, who had now surrounded himself by some of the ablest men in the country, whom he chiefly selected from the ranks of the clergy, was well aware of the treasonable league between Douglas, Ross, and Crawford, and already meditated the destruction of this haughty potentate, whose power was incompatible with the security of the government; and it is extraordinary that the example of the sudden destruction of his companions in intrigue and insubordination, should not have alarmed the earl for his own safety. The most probable account seems to be, that, aware of the increasing strength of the party of the sovereign, he found it expedient to act as an ally rather than an enemy, and in good time to desert, and even to share in the spoils of those whom he considered it desperate to defend. It is certain, at least, that immediately subsequent to the forfeiture of the Livingstons, Douglas repeatedly experienced the favour and generosity of the sovereign. When Dundas castle, after a resolute defence of three months, surrendered to the royal army, the wealth of the garrison, the cannon, provisions, and military stores, were divided between the king, the Earl of Douglas, and Sir William and Sir George Crichton. On the forfeiture of Dundas's lands, a great part of his estate was settled on Douglas; his lordship of Galloway was erected into a special regality, with the power of holding justice and chamberlain ayres, to be held blanch of the sovereign; he obtained also the lands of Blairmaks in Lanarkshire, forfeited by James of Dundas, and of Coulter and Ogleface, which had been the property of the Livingstons.

In the same parliament which inflicted so signal a vengeance upon this powerful family, the condition of the country, and the remedy of those abuses which had grown up during the minority of the monarch, engaged the attention of the legislature; and to some of the resolutions which were passed, as they throw a strong light on the times, it will be necessary to direct our attention. After the usual declaration of the intention of the sovereign to maintain the freedom of "Haly Kirk," and to employ the arm of the civil power to carry the ecclesiastical sentence into execution against any persons who had fallen under the censures of the church, the parliament provided, that general peace should be proclaimed and maintained throughout the realm, and that all persons were to be permitted to travel in security for mercantile or other purposes, in every part of the country, without the necessity of "having assurance one of the other.,' The "king's peace," it was observed, was henceforth to be "sufficient surety to every man," as the sovereign was resolved to employ such officers alone as could well punish all disturbers of the public peace. In the event of any person being, notwithstanding this enactment, in mortal fear of another, a daily and hourly occurrence in these times of feudal riot and disorder, he was commanded to go to the sheriff, or nearest magistrate, and swear that he dreads him; after which the officer was to take pledges for the keeping of the peace, according to the ancient statutes upon this subject. Those who filled the office of judges were to be just men, who understood the law, and whose character should be a warrant for an equal administration of justices the small as well as to the great. It was appointed that the justice should make his progress through the country twice in the year, according to the old law.

The attention of the parliament appears to have been next directed to that grave subject, of which the recent history of the country had afforded so many illustrations, rebellion against the king's person and authority, upon which it was first provided, that the crime should be punished according to the judgment of the three Estates, who were to take into consideration "the quality and the quantity of the rebellion." In the next place, when any man openly and "notourly" raised rebellion against the sovereign, or made war upon the lieges, or gave encouragement or protection to those guilty of such offences, the parliament declared it to be the duty of the sovereign, with assistance of the whole strength of the country, to proceed in person against the offender, and inflict upon him speedy punishment; whilst all persons who in any way afforded countenance to those convicted of rebellion, were to be punished with the same severity as the principal delinquents.

The next enactment of this parliament constituted an important era in the history of the liberty of the subject; and I think it best to give it in its ancient simplicity:—" It is declared to be ordained for the safety and favour of the poor people who labour the ground, that they, and all others who have taken or shall take lands in any time to come from lords, according" to a lease which is to run for a certain term of years, shall remain on the lands protected by their lease till the expiry of the same, paying all along the same yearly, rent, and this notwithstanding the lands should pass by sale, or by alienation, into different hands from those by whom they were first given in lease to the tenant." Under the reign of James the First, we have already pointed out the request made by that monarch to the great feudal lords, that they would not summarily remove their tenantry from their lands possessed on lease: this was clearly the earliest step towards the attainment of the important privilege contained in the above statute; a wise and memorable act in its future consequences on the security of property, the liberty of the great body of the people, and the improvement of the country.

For the prevention of those invasions of property, which were at this period so frequent throughout the country, the sheriff was peremptorily enjoined to make immediate inquiry, and compel the offenders to instant restoration; an act easily engrossed in the statutebook, but almost impossible to be carried into execution, so long as the sheriff himself was under the fear and authority of one or other of the great feudal lords, or might perhaps be himself a principal offender. We find it accordingly provided, that these officers, along with the justices, chamberlains, coroners, and other magistrates, shall be prevented from collecting around them, in their progresses through the country, those numerous trains of attendants, which grievously oppressed the people, and that they should content themselves with that moderate number of followers, appointed by the ancient laws upon this subject.

The statute which immediately followed, from the strength and simplicity of its language, gives us a singular and primitive picture of the times. It related to that description of persons, who, disdaining all regular labour, have ever been, in the eyes of the civil magistrate, a perverse and hateful generation, "sornars, outlyars, masterful beggars, fools, bards, and runners about." For the putting away of all such vexatious and rude persons, who travelled through the country with their horses, hounds, and other property, all sheriff's, barons, aldermen, and bailies, either without or within burgh, were directed to make inquiry into this matter at every court which they held; and, in the event of any such individuals being discovered, their horses, hounds, and other property, were to be immediately confiscated to the crown, and they themselves put in prison till such time as the king "had his will of them.'' And it was also commanded by the parliament, that the same officers, when they held their courts, should make inquiry whether there be any persons that followed the profession of "Fools," or such like runners about, who did not belong to the class of bards; and such being discovered, they were to be put in prison or in irons for such trespass, as long as they had any goods or substance of their own to live upon. If they had nothing to live upon, it was directed that "their ears be nailed to the Tron, or to any other tree, and then cut off, and they themselves banished the country, to which, if they returned again, they Were upon their first apprehension to be hanged."

For the examination of the acts of parliament, and of general councils, which had been assembled in the time of the present king and of his late father, the three Estates appointed a committee of twelve persons, four chosen from the bishops, four from the lords, and four from the commissaries of burghs. To this body was committed the task of selecting all such acts as they esteemed wise, and calculated to promote the present advantage of the realm, which were to be revised and presented for approval at the next parliament to be assembled at Perth. For the prevention of that grievous calamity, a dearth of provisions in the land, the sheriffs, bailies, and all other officers, both without and within the burghs, were strictly enjoined to discover, arrest, and punish all such persons within their own jurisdiction, who were in the practice of buying victual or corn, and hoarding it up till the occurrence of a dearth; whilst the provisions which they had thus hoarded were directed to be escheated to the king. In addition to these enactments, whilst free permission was granted to all the subjects of the realm to buy and sell victual at their pleasure, either on the north half or south half of the Firth of Forth, yet the keeping old stacks of corn in the farm-yard later than Christmas was strictly prohibited; and it was enjoined in equally positive terms, that neither burgesses nor other persons who bought victual for the purpose of selling again, should be allowed, to lay up a great store of corn, and keep it out of the market till the ripening of the next harvest; but that, at this late season of the year, they were only to have so much grain in their possession, as was requisite for the support of themselves and their families.

The succeeding statute, upon the punishment of treason, was directed against the repetition of the practices of Livingston, Douglas, and Crichton, which disgraced the minority of this sovereign. It provided that, in the event of any person committing treason against the king's majesty, by rising against him in open war, or laying violent hands upon his person— by giving countenance to those convicted of treason— supplying with military stores and armed men the castles of convicted traitors—holding out such castles against the king's forces, or assailing any fortress in which the king's person might happen to be at the time —he should be immediately arrested, and openly punished as a traitor. When those who had been guilty of theft or robbery were men of such power and authority, that the justiciar was not in safety to hold his court, or to put down, by the arm of the law, such "great and masterful theft," he was instantly to communicate with the king, who, with the assistance of his privy council, should provide a remedy; and, in order that such bold and daring offenders be not placed upon their guard as to the legal processes in preparation against them, the justice-clerk was commanded not to reveal his action to any person whatever, or alter it in any way from the form in which it was given him, except for the king's advantage, or change any names, or put out any of the rolls without orders from the king or his council, and this under the penalty of the loss of his office and estate, at the will of the sovereign. How lamentable a picture does it present of the condition of the country when such expressions could be employed; where an acknowledged infringement of the law was permitted, "if it be for the king's advantage"; and in which the right of the subject to be informed of the offence of which he was accused, previous to his trial, appears to be thus unceremoniously sacrificed!

Upon the important subject of the money of the realm, reference was made, in this parliament, to a former act, now unfortunately lost, by which twentyfour persons were chosen from the three Estates to appoint proper regulations as to the importation of bullion by the merchants, the new coinage and its issue, and the circulation of the money then current. Strict search was directed to be made at all seaports, and upon the Borders and marches, for the apprehension of those carrying money out of the kingdom; and all false strikers of gold and silver, all forgers of false groats and pennies, were to be seized wherever found, and brought to the king, to be punished as the law directed. In the same parliament, the monarch, with that affectionate respect for the clergy, which could not fail to be experienced by a prince who had successfully employed their support and advice to escape from the tyranny of his nobles, granted to them some important privileges. In a charter, dated on the twenty-fourth January, 1449, he declared that, "for the salvation of his own soul, and that of Queen Mary his consort, with consent of his three Estates, and in terms of a schedule then presented to him, he conferred upon all bishops of cathedral churches in Scotland, the privilege of making their testaments, of levying the fruits of vacant sees, and converting them to their use, the vicars-general of the cathedrals rendering a true account of the same."

At the time the king held this parliament, he appears to have entertained the most amicable disposition towards England, wisely considering, that it would require a long interval of peace to reform the condition of his own kingdom, and to rectify the abuses, to which he was now beginning to direct his undivided attention. He was well aware that the English government, entirely occupied in a vain effort to retain the provinces -which had been conquered in France, and weakened by the selfish administration of the queen and her favourite, Suffolk, could have little disposition to engage in a war with Scotland; and he considered the protest of that government, upon the old and exploded claim of homage, as a piece of diplomatic etiquette, which it would be absurd to make a serious ground of offence. He accordingly despatched John Methven, a doctor of decretals, as his ambassador to the court of England: he appointed the Bishops of Dunkeld and Brechin, with the Earls of Douglas, Angus, and Crawford, to meet the commissioners of Henry the Sixth, for the regulation of the truces, and settlement of the marches: whilst he encouraged, by every method in his power, the friendly intercourse between the two countries.

At the same time, without absolutely attempting to deprive the Earl of Douglas of his high office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, a measure which must have excited extreme commotion, he silently withdrew from him his countenance and employment, surrounding himself by the most energetic counsellors, whom he promoted to the chief offices in the state, rewarding the chancellor Crichton "for his faithful services rendered to the king's father, and to the king himself;" and weakening the power of the earl and his party, rather by the formidable counterpoise which he raised against it, than by any act of determined hostility.-f" The consequences of this line of policy were highly favourable to the king. The power and unjust usurpation of Douglas over the measures of government, decreased almost imperceptibly, yet by sure degrees. as the character of the sovereign increased in firmness, and the authority of the ministers by whom he managed the government became more steadily exerted; the terror with which the people had regarded the tyrannic sway of this imperious noble, began to be dispelled; and the despot himself, aware that his dominion was on the wane, and conscious that any open insurrection would be premature, determined to leave the country for a season, and repair to Rome on a visit to the pope, making some stay, in his way thither, at the courts of England and France. His train consisted of six knights, with their own suites and attendants, and fourteen gentlemen of the best families, in the country, with their servants, accompanied by a body of eighty horse, or men-at-arms.

Although the only motives assigned for this expedition, were those arising out of religion and the love of travel, it seems by no means improbable that Douglas had other objects in view. In right of his wife, he possessed a claim to the wealthy Duchy of Touraine; which, although then a male fief, might be altered to heirs-general by the King of France, at the request of so potent a baron. In England also, he could not possibly be ignorant of the intrigues of the Yorkists against the government of Henry the Sixth; and he may have had hopes of strengthening his own power, or diminishing that of his sovereign, by an alliance with a faction whose views were expressly opposed to the pacific policy of the present government of Scotland.In addition to this, althoug habsent in person, and with the apparent intention of remaining some years abroad, he left powerful friends at home, whose motions he directed, and by whose assistance he entertained the hope of once more possessing himself of the supreme power in the state. Upon James Douglas, his brother, Lord of Balveny, he conferred the office of procurator or administrator of his estates during his absence; and there seems a strong presumption, that he secretly renewed that treasonable correspondence with the Earls of Ross and Crawford, which has been already mentioned as embracing an offensive and defensive alliance against all men, not excepting the person of the sovereign.

In the meantime, he and his numerous suite set sail for Flanders, from which they proceeded to Paris. He was here joined by his brother, James Douglas, at this time a scholar at the university, and intending to enter the church, but afterwards Earl of Douglas. From the court of France, where he was received with distinction, Douglas proceeded to that of the supreme pontiff, during the brilliant season of the jubilee, where his visit appears to have astonished the polite and learned Italians, as much by its foreign novelty as by its barbaric pomp. His return, however, was hastened by disturbances at home, arising out of the insolence and tyranny of his brother, Douglas of Balveny, to whom he had delegated his authority, and against the abuses of whose government such perpetual complaints were carried to the king, that, according to the provisions of the late act of parliament upon the subject, he found it necessary to conduct in person an armed expedition into the lands of the delinquent. The object of this enterprise was to expel from their strongholds that congregation of powerful barons, who were retained in the service of this feudal prince, and under the terror of his name, invaded the property of the people, and defied the control of the laws. James, however, did not betake himself to this measure, until he had in vain attempted to appease the disturbances, and inflict punishment upon the offenders by the arm of the civil power; but having been driven to this last necessity, he made himself master of Lochmaben castle, exterminated from their feudal nests the armed retainers, who were compelled to restore their plunder, and razed to the ground Douglas castle, which had long been the centre of insubordination. He then returned to court, and, under the idea that they had suffered a sufficient imprisonment, restored to liberty Sir Alexander Livingston and Dundas of Dundas, who had been confined in Dumbarton castle since the memorable forfeiture of the Livingstons in the preceding year. Dundas appears immediately to have repaired to Rome, with the design, in all probability, of secretly communicating witli Douglas, whilst that formidable potentate, dreading the full concentration of the regal vengeance, which had already partially burst upon him, set out forthwith on his return to Scotland.

In the meantime, his friends and confederates were not idle at home. In 1445, a secret league, as we have already seen, had been entered into between Douglas and the Earls of Ross and Crawford, and the confederacy now resorted to hostile measures. Ross, who died in 1449, had transmitted to his eldest son, John, his treason along with his title; and the new earl, who was connected by marriage with the Livingstons, broke outinto rebellion, and seized the royal castles of Inverness, Urquhart, and Ruthven in Badenoch. This last place he immediately demolished; Urquhart was committed to Sir James Livingston, who, on the first news of Ross's rebellion, had escaped from the king's court to the highlands; whilst Inverness castle was supplied with military stores, and strongly garrisoned. Although a rebellion which threatened to involve the whole of the northern part of Scotland in war and tumult, must have been known, and was probably instigated by Douglas, it appears that the king, from his ignorance of the earl's confederacy with Ross and Crawford, did not suspect his connivance. Douglas's absence from Scotland, and the secrecy with which the treasonable correspondence had been conducted, for a while blinded the eyes of the monarch; and on his return from Rome, having expressed his indignation at the excesses committed by his vassals during his absence, and his resolution to employ his power on the side of the laws, he was again received into favour, and appointed, along with the Bishops of Dunkeld and Brechin, and the Earls of Angus and Crawford, a commissioner to treat of the prolongation of the truce with England.-!

The earl, however, showed himself little worthy of this renewed confidence upon the part of the king. He put his seal, indeed, into the hands of the other commissioners, for the purpose of giving a sanction to the articles of truce, but he remained himself in Scotland; and although the evidence is not of that direct nature which makes his guilt unquestionable, there seems a strong presumption, that, in concert with the Earls of Ross and Crawford, supported by the faction of the Livingstons and Hamiltons, and in conjunction with the party of the Yorkists in England, he entered into a conspiracy against his sovereign. It is well known, that at this moment the Duke of York, father to Edward the Fourth was busy in exciting a spirit of dissension in England, and anxious to adopt every means to weaken the power of Henry the Sixth. Douglas accordingly despatched his brother, Sir James, who repaired to London, and continued there for a considerable time, caressed by the faction which was inimical to the existing government; whilst the earl soon after obtained a protection for himself, his three brothers, twenty-six gentlemen, and sixty-seven attendants, who proposed to visit the court of England, and proceed afterwards to the continent. It is worthy of observation, that the persons whose names are included in these letters of safe conduct, are the same who afterwards joined the house of Douglas in their open revolt, and there seems to be no doubt, from this circumstance, that although the conspiracy did not now burst forth in its full strength, it was rapidly gaining ground, and advancing to maturity.

It was impossible, however, to conduct their treasonable designs upon so great a scale, without exposing themselves to the risk of detection; and some suspicions having been excited at this moment, or some secret information transmitted to the king, enough of the intrigue was discovered to justify parliament in depriving the Earl of Douglas of his office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, f It will be recollected that the sovereign was now in his twenty-first year; that by attaching to his service the most enlightened of his clergy, and making use of the energetic talents of Crichton, his chancellor, he had already left nothing to Douglas but the name of his great office; and although his suspicion of the treasonable designs of the earl must have accelerated this last step, yet his deprivation appears to have been carried into execution without any open rupture. Indeed, James seems to have been anxious that the blow should not fall too heavily; and with this object the formidable noble was invested almost immediately after with the office of Warden of the west and middle marches of Scotland. At the same time, an entail was executed, by which the earldoms of Douglas and Wigtown were settled upon him and his descendants.

It was at this crisis of the struggle between the legitimate prerogative of the Scottish sovereign and his ministers, and the overgrown authority of the house of Douglas, that the Duke of York and his party in England availed themselves of the popular discontents, occasioned by the loss of the French provinces, to dispossess the Duke of Somerset and the queen from the chief management of the state, and to acquire the principal control over the government. In consequence of this revolution, a decided change is apparent in the conduct of England towards the sister country, from the principles of a wise and pacific policy to those of an unsettled, ambitious, and sometimes decidedly hostile character. The first appearance of this is discernible in the negotiations regarding the truce which took place at Durham on the fourth of August, 1451, where the amicable correspondence between the two countries was interrupted by a protest regarding the idle and antiquated claim of homage. Fortunately, however, this did not prevent the treaty of truce from being brought to a conclusion.

In the meantime, Douglas returned to his principality in Annandale, and in the exercise of his authority of warden, commenced anew that series of tyrannical measures, which had already brought upon him the indignation of the government. Herries of Terregles, a gentleman of ancient family, having attempted to defend himself by arms from the violence of his partisans, and to recover from them the property of which he had been plundered, was taken prisoner, and dragged before the earl, who in contempt of an express mandate of the king, solemnly delivered by a herald, ordered him to be instantly hanged. Soon after this, another audacious transaction occurred, in the murder of Sir John Sandilands of Calder, a kinsman of James, by Sir Patrick Thornton, a dependant of the house of Douglas, along with whom were slain two knights, Sir James and Sir Allan Stewart, both of whom enjoyed the regard and intimacy of the sovereign.

It appears to have been about this time, that, either from the circumstance of its having been more openly renewed, or less carefully concealed, the treasonable league between Douglas and the Earls of Ross and Crawford was discovered by James, who justly trembled at the formidable and extensive power which he found arrayed against the government. On the side of England, however, he was secure, owing to the recent renewal of the truce; upon the friendship of France he could calculate with equal certainty; but as it was impossible at once to destroy a conspiracy which was backed by a force equal to almost one-half of the armed population of Scotland, the king was compelled to temporize, and await a season when his own power should be more confirmed, and that of Douglas weakened by the jealousies and dissensions which, after some time, might be expected to break out in a confederacy, embracing so many men of fierce, capricious, and selfish habits. Douglas, however, who had already irritated and insulted the monarch, by the murder of Herries and Sandilands, seemed determined not to imitate the calmness and moderation of the government; and, whilst the king's chief minister, the chancellor Crichton, was proceeding with his retinue through the southern suburb of Edinburgh, with the intention of embarking on board a vessel in the Forth, the party was suddenly attacked by an armed band of ruffians hired for the purpose by the earl. Contrary, indeed, to the hopes of this lawless baron, the old chancellor defended himself with much bravery; and, after being wounded, escaped to Crichton castle, where, with a spirit which forgot the sense of pain in the desire of revenge, he instantly collected his vassals, and making an unexpected attack upon Douglas, expelled him and his adherents from the city.

It affords a melancholy picture of the times, that this outrageous attack, committed upon the person of the chancellor and chief minister in the kingdom, was suffered to pass unpunished and even unnoticed by the law, and that he who had openly defied the royal authority, and trampled upon the regulations so recently passed in the parliament, was not long after employed in some political negotiations with England, in which there seems strong reason to believe he acted a part inimical to the existing government. The explanation of this must be looked for in the fact, that although partially aware of his treason, and determined to leave nothing unattempted to undermine and destroy his power, James was conscious that Douglas was still too strong for him, and dreaded to drive him into a rebellion which might have threatened the security of his throne. It was easy for him, on the other hand, silently to defeat his treachery, by conjoining with hiui, in the diplomatic or judicial situations in which he was employed, those tried counsellors upon whom he could implicitly rely; and, in the meantime, he employed the interval in concentrating that power by means of which he trusted to overwhelm him. An extraordinary outrage of the earl, however, accelerated the royal vengeance.

In the execution of the negotiation intrusted to him, Douglas had continued his correspondence with the party of the Yorkists in England, who still possessed a great influence in the state, although sometimes overruled by the opposite faction of Somerset and th queen. It seems to have been in consequence of such malign influence, that a letter was directed at this time by Henry the Sixth to the Scottish government, refusing to deliver up certain French ambassadors, who, on their voyage to Scotland, had been captured by the English; and this step, which almost amounted to a declaration of hostility, was intended to be followed by a rising in Scotland, to be conducted by Douglas. On his return, therefore, to that country, the earl repaired to his estates; and, in furtherance of his league with the Earls of Ross and Crawford, summoned the whole body of his vassals to assemble their armed retainers, and join in the treasonable association. One of these, however, a gentleman of spirit and independence, named Maclellan, tutor of Bomby, a sister's son to Sir Patrick Gray captain of the king's guard, refused to obey an order which he rightly stigmatized as an act of open rebellion, and was in consequence seized by the earl, and cast into prison. The speedy and mortal punishment with which Douglas was accustomed to visit such offences, rendered the arrest of Maclellan a subject of immediate alarm at court; and as he was beloved by the young king, and the near kinsman of one of his confidential servants, James despatched an order under the royal seal, commanding the immediate release of the prisoner; which, to prevent all mistake, he sent by the hands of Sir Patrick Gray. This baron accordingly rode post to Douglas castle, and was received by its haughty lord with affected courtesy and humility. Well aware, however, of Gray's near relationship to his prisoner, he at once suspected the object of his'errand; and, being determined to defeat it, gave private orders for the instant execution of Maclellan. He then returned to Gray, and requested him to remain and share his hospitality. "You found me," said he, "just about to sit down to dinner; if it pleases you, we shall first conclude our repast, and then peruse the letter with which I am honoured by my sovereign." Having concluded the meal, Douglas rose from table, broke the royal seal, and glancing over the contents of the paper, assumed a look of much concern. "Sorry am I," said he, "that it is not in my power to give obedience to the commands of my dread sovereign, much as I am beholden to him for so gracious a letter to one whom he has been pleased of late to regard with somewhat altered favour; but such redress as I can afford thou shalt have speedily." Douglas then took Gray by the hand, and led him to the castle green, where the bleeding trunk of his poor friend lay beside the block upon which he had been recently beheaded. "Yonder, Sir Patrick," said he, "lies your sister's son—unfortunately he wants the head—but you are welcome to do with his body what you please." It may well be imagined how deep was the impression made by this cold and savage jest upon the mind of Gray; but he was in the den of the tyrant, and a single incautious word might have stretched him beside his murdered kinsman. Dissembling therefore his grief and indignation, he only replied, that since he had taken the head, the body was of little avail; and calling for his horse, mounted him, with a heavy heart, and rode across the drawbridge, to which the earl accompanied him. Once more, however, without the walls, and secure of his life, he reined up, and shaking his mailed glove, defied Douglas as a coward, and a disgrace to knighthood, whom, if he lived, he would requite according to his merits, and lay as low as the poor gentleman he had destroyed. Yet even this ebullition of natural indignation had nearly cost • him dear; for the earl, braved in his own castle, gave orders for an instant pursuit, and the chase was continued almost to Edinburgh, Gray only escaping by the uncommon fleetness of his horse.

An action like this was fitted to rouse to the highest pitch the indignation of the sovereign, and the reprehension of every lover of freedom and good order. It manifested an utter contempt for the royal authority, a defiance of the laws, and a cruel exultation in the exercise of power. It had occurred too, at a moment when an attempt had been made by the statutes lately passed in parliament, to put down the insolence of aristocratic tyranny, and was of the most dangerous example. It was evident to the sovereign that some instantaneous step must be taken to reduce an overgrown power which threatened to plunge the country into civil war, and that the time was come when it was to be shown whether he or the Earl of Douglas should henceforth rule in Scotland. But James, who had become aware of the league with Ross and Crawford, and of the overwhelming force which Douglas was ready to bring into the field, wisely hesitated before he adopted that course to which his determined temper inclined him; with the advice of Crichton and his most prudent counsellors, he determined rather to enter into a personal negotiation with Douglas, and to attempt to convince him of the folly of his ambition, in defying the authority of the crown, and affecting the state and jurisdiction of an independent prince. He had hopes that, in this manner, he might prevail upon the earl to plead guilty to the offences which he had committed; to accept the pardon which was ready to be tendered to him, upon his indemnifying the relations of those he had so cruelly injured; and to take that upright share in the government, to which he was entitled by his high rank, his great estates, and his important official situation.

In furtherance of this design, and suppressing his indignation at his late conduct, by considerations of political expediency, James despatched Sir William Lauder of Hatton, who had attended Douglas in his pilgrimage to Rome, with a message to him, expressive of the desire of the king to enter into a personal conference, promising absolute security for his person, and declaring, that upon an expression of regret for his misdemeanours, the offended majesty of the law might be appeased, and the pardon of the sovereign extended in his favour. It is impossible, in the imperfect historical evidence which remains of these dark and mysterious transactions, to discover whether this conduct and these promises of the king were perfectly sincere or otherwise.

It is asserted, in a contemporary chronicle, that the nobles who were then about the person of the monarch, meaning the privy councillors and officers of his household, put their names and seals to a letter of safe conduct, which bore the royal signature, and to which the privy seal was attached. It is added, by the same writer, that many of the nobles had transmitted a written obligation to the earl, by which they bound themselves, even if the king should show an inclination to break his promise, that they, to the utmost of their power, would compel him to observe it; and there seems no reason to doubt the accuracy of this account.-) But, in the lax morality of the times, the most solemn obligations were often little regarded; and there were many crafty casuists around the king, ready to persuade him, that with a traitor, who, by repeated acts of rebellion, had thrown himself without the pale of the laws, no faith ought to be kept; that to seize such an offender, every method was fair, and even fraud praiseworthy; and that, having once obtained possession of his person, it would be illegal to release him, till he had been declared innocent of the crimes of which he was accused by the verdict of a jury. That this was probably the full extent to which James had carried his intentions in entrapping Douglas, is to be inferred from the circumstances in which he was placed, and the partial light of contemporary records. That he meditated the dreadful and unjustifiable vengeance in which the interview concluded, cannot be supposed by any one who considers for a moment the character of the king,

But to whatever extent the sovereign had carried his design, Douglas, believing himself secure under the royal protection and the oaths of the nobility, came with a small retinue to Stirling, in company with Sir William Lauder of Hatton; and having first taken up his residence in the town, soon after passed to the castle, where he was received by the king with much apparent cordiality, and invited to return on the morrow to dine at the royal table. He accordingly obeyed; and on the following day, not only dined, but supped with the king; whilst nothing appeared to have disturbed in the slightest degree the harmony of their intercourse. After supper, however, which, we learn from the contemporary chronicle was at seven in the evening, the monarch, apparently anxious to have some private conversation with the earl, took him aside from the crowd of courtiers by whom they were surrounded, into an inner chamber, where there were none present but the captain of his body-guard, Sir Patrick Gray, whom he had lately so cruelly injured, Sir William Crichton, Lord Gray, Sir Simon Glendonane, and a few more of his most intimate counsellors."f- James, then walking apart with Douglas, with as much calmness and command of temper as he could assume, began to remonstrate upon his late violent and illegal proceedings. In doing so, it was impossible he should not speak of the execution of Herries, the waylaying of Sandilands, and the late atrocious murder of the tutor of Bomby. The sovereign next informed him, that he had certain intelligence of the treasonable league which he had formed with the Earls of Ross and Crawford: he explained to him that his very admission that such a confederacy existed, made him obnoxious to the punishment of a rebel, and threw him out of the protection of the laws; and he conjured him, as he loved his country, and valued his own safety and welfare, to break the band which bound him to such traitors, and return, as it became a dutiful subject, to his allegiance. But Douglas, unaccustomed to such remonstrances, and perhaps heated by the recent entertainment, listened with impatience, and replied with haughty insolence. He even broke into reproaches; upbraided James with his being deprived of his office of lieutenant-governor of the kingdom; and after a torrent of passionate abuse against the counsellors who had insinuated themselves into the royal confidence, declared that he little regarded the name of treason, with which his proceedings had been branded; that as for his confederacy with Ross and Crawford, he had it not in his power to dissolve it; and, if he had, he would be sorry to break with his best friends to gratify the idle caprices of his sovereign. Hitherto the king had listened with patience, which was the more remarkable, as he was naturally fiery and impetuous in his temper; but this rude defiance, uttered to his face by one whom he regarded as an open enemy; who had treated his royal mandate with contempt; under whose nails, to use a strong expression of the times, the blood of his best friends was scarce drv, entirely overcame his self-command. He broke at once, from a state of quiescence, into an ungovernable fury, drew his dagger, and exclaiming, "False traitor, if thou wilt not break the band, this shall!" he stabbed him first in the throat, and instantly after in the lower part of the body. Upon this, Sir Patrick Gray, with a readiness and good-will which was whetted by revenge, at one blow felled him with his poleaxe; and the rest of the nobles who stood near the king, rushing in upon the dying man, meanly gratified their resentment by repeated strokes with their knives and daggers; so that he expired in a moment, without uttering a word, and covered with twenty-six wounds. The window was then thrown open, and the mangled trunk cast into an open court adjoining the royal apartments.

For a murder so atrocious, committed by the hand of the sovereign, and upon the person of a subject for whose safety he had solemnly pledged his royal word, no justification can be pleaded. It offered to the country, at a time when it was important to afford a specimen of respect for the laws, and reverence for the authority of parliament, an example the most pernicious that can be conceived, exhibiting the sovereign in the disgraceful attitude of trampling upon the rules which it was his duty to respect, and committing with his own hand the crimes for which he had arraigned his subjects. But if James must be condemned, it is impossible to feel much commiseration for Douglas, whose career, from first to last, had been that of a selfish, ambitious, and cruel tyrant; who, at the moment when he was cut off, was all but a convicted traitor; and whose death, if we except the mode by which it was brought about, was to be regarded as a public benefit. These considerations, however, were solely entertained by the friends of peace and good order: by the immediate relatives, and the wide circle of the retainers and vassals of the earl, his assassination was regarded with feelings of bitter and unmingled indignation.

Immediately after the death of his powerful enemy, the king, at the head of an armed force, proceeded to Perth in pursuit of the Earl of Crawford, another party, as we have seen, in the league which had cost his associate so dear. In his absence, the faction of Douglas, led by Sir James Douglas, the brother of the murdered chief, who succeeded to the earldom, along with Hugh earl of Onnond, Lord Hamilton, and six hundred barons and gentlemen, followers and supporters of the family, invaded the town of Stirling, and in the first ebullition of their fury and contempt, according to an ancient custom of defiance, blew out upon the king twenty-four horns at once. They then took the letter of assurance, subscribed by the names and guaranteed by the seals of the Scottish nobles, and, exhibiting it at the Cross, proceeded to nail it, with many "slanderous words," to a board, which they tied to the tail of a sorry horse, and thus dragged it, amid the hooting and execration of their followers, through the streets. The scene of feudal defiance was concluded by their setting fire to the town, and carrying off a great booty.-j

In the meantime the king proceeded to enrich and reward his servants, by the forfeiture of the lands of those who had shared in the treason of Douglas. He promoted to the office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom the Earl of Huntley, committing to his assured loyalty and experience in war the task of putting down the rebellion of Crawford and Ross; and empowering

him to promise to all who came forward to join the royal standard, an ample indemnity for past offences, as well as to those who continued firm in their original loyalty the most substantial marks of the favour of the crown. Huntley, in the execution of his new office, instantly raised a large force in the northern counties, and having displayed the royal banner, encountered the Earl of Crawford, surnamed "The Tiger," on a level moor beside the town of Brechin, and gave him a total defeat. The action was fought with determined bravery on both sides; and, although Huntley far outnumbered his opponents, for a long time proved doubtful; but, during the warmest part of the struggle, Colessie of Balnamoon, now called Bonnymoon, who commanded the left wing of the Angus billmen, went over to the enemy, in consequence of some disgust he had conceived the night before in a conference with Crawford; and the effect of his sudden desertion was fatal to his party. His troops, dismayed at this unexpected calamity, and regardless of the furious and almost insane efforts which he made to restore the day, took to flight in all directions. John Lindsay of Brechin, brother to the Tiger, Dundas of Dundas, with sixty other lords and gentlemen, were slain upon the field. On the other side, the loss did not exceed five barons and a small number of yeomen; but amongst the slain, Huntley had to mourn his two brothers, Sir William and Sir Henry Seton. During the confusion and flight of Crawford^ army, a yeoman of the opposite side, riding eagerly in pursuit, became involved in the crowd, and, fearful of discovery, allowed himself to be hurried along to Finhaven Castle, to which the discomfited baron retreated. Here, amid the tumult and riot consequent upon a defeat, he is said to have overheard with horror the torrent of abuse and blasphemy which burst from the lips of the bearded savage, who, calling for a cup of wine on alighting from his horse, and cursing in the bitterness of his heart the traitor who had betrayed him, declared that he would willingly take seven years' roasting in hell to have the honour of such a victory as had that day fallen to Huntley.

In the meantime, although the king was thus victorious in the north, the civil war, which was kindled in almost every part of Scotland, by the murder of Douglas, raged with pitiless and unabated fury. The Earl of Angus, although bearing the name of Douglas, had refused to join in the late rebellion, in consequence of which his castle of Dalkeith, a place of great strength, was instantly beleaguered by the enemy, who ravaged and burnt the adjacent town, and bound themselves by a great oath not to leave the siege till they had razed it to the ground. 'The bravery, however, of Patrick Cockburn, the governor, soon compelled them to forego their resolution, and to divert the fury which had been concentrated against Dalkeith upon the villages and granges of the adjacent country. The roads and highways became utterly insecure, the labours of agriculture were intermitted, the pursuits of trade and commerce destroyed or feebly followed, from the terror occasioned by the troops of armed banditti who overspread the country, and nothing but insolent riot and needy boldness was prosperous in the land. In the north, whilst Huntley was engaged with Crawford, the Earl of Moray, brother of the late Earl of Douglas, invaded and wasted his estates in Strathbogie. Huntley, on the other hand, victorious at Brechin, fell, with a vengeance whetted by private as well as public wrongs, upon the fertile county of Moray, and completely razed to the ground that half of the city of Elgin which belonged to his enemy; whilst Crawford, infuriated but little weakened by his loss at Brechin, attacked in detail, and "harried" the lands of all those to whose refusal to join his banner he ascribed his defeat, expelling them from their towers and fortalices, giving the empty habitations to the flames, and carrying themselves and their families into captivity.

In addition to the miseries of open war were added the dangers of domestic treason. James, the ninth Earl of Douglas, through the agency of his mother lady Beatrix, who at this time repaired to England, continued that secret correspondence with the party of the Yorkists, which appears to have been begun by the late earl."f- Soon after this, in the extremity of his resentment against the murderer of his brother, he agreed to meet the Bishop of Carlisle, with the Earl of Salisbury and Henry Percy, as commissioners from the English government, then entirely under the management of the Yorkists, and not only to enter into a treaty of mutual alliance and support, but to swear homage to the monarch of England, as his lawful sovereign. Such a miserable state of things calling loudly for redress, the king summoned the three Estates to assemble at Edinburgh, on the twelfth of June, 1452. During the night, however, previous to the meeting, a placard, signed with the names of James earl of Douglas, his three brothers, and Lord Hamilton, their near connexion, was fixed to the door of the house of parliament, renouncing their allegiance to James of Scotland, as a perjured prince and merciless murderer, who had trampled on the laws, broken his word and oath, and violated the most sacred bond of hospitality; declaring, that henceforth they held no lands from him, and never would give obedience to any mandate which bore the name and style which he had disgraced and dishonoured. It may be easily imagined that a defiance of this gross nature was calculated to exasperate the bitterness of feudal resentment; and from the mutilated records which remain to us of the proceedings of this parliament, the leaders and followers of the house of Douglas appear to have been treated with deserved severity.

It was first of all declared in a solemn deed, which met with the unanimous approval of the parliament, that the late Earl of Douglas having, at the time of his death, avowed himself an enemy to the king, and acknowledged a treasonable league as then existing between him and the Earls of Crawford and Ross, was in a state of open rebellion, and that, in such cirumstances, it was lawful for the king to put him summarily to death.-f Sir James Crichton, the eldest son of the lord chancellor, was created Earl of Moray, in the place of Archibald Douglas, late Earl of Moray, who was forfeited. Others of the loyal barons, who had come forward at this dangerous crisis in support of the crown, were rewarded with lands and dignities. Lord Hay, constable of Scotland, and head of an ancient house, whose bravery and attachment to the crown had been transmitted through a long line of ancestry, was created Earl of Errol. Sir George Crichton of Cairnes was rewarded with the earldom of Caithness, and the Baron of Darnley, Hepburn of Hailes, Boyd, Fleming, Borthwick, Lyle, and Cathcart, were invested with the dignity of lords of parliament. Lands partly belonging to the crown, partly consisting of estates which had been forfeited by the Douglases and their adherents, were bestowed upon Lord Campbell, and his son Sir Colin Campbell, Sir David Hume, Sir Alexander Homo, Sir James Keir, and others; but as the appropriation of these estates was an act of the secret council, carried through without the sanction and during the sitting of parliament, it was believed to be unconstitutional, and liable to legal challenge. In the meantime, however, these events, combined with the increasing energy and ability of the sovereign, and the joyful occurrence of the birth of a prince, afterwards James the Third,+ had the effect of weakening the once formidable power of Douglas. The loss of its chief, the defeat of Crawford, the forfeiture of Moray, the sight of those strong and powerful vassals, who, either from the love of their prince, or the hope of the rewards which were profusely distributed, nocked daily to court with their troops of armed retainers, all combined to render the allies of this rebellious house not a little doubtful of the ultimate success of the struggle in which they were engaged; and when, immediately after the conclusion of the parliament, the royal summonses were issued for the assembling of an army on the moor of Pentland, near Edinburgh, the monarch in a short time found himself at the head of a force of thirty thousand men, excellently armed and equipped, and animated by one sentiment of loyalty and affection.

With this army, the king proceeded in person against the Earl of Douglas, directing his march through the districts of Peebles-shire, Selkirk forest, Dumfries, and Galloway, in which quarters lay the principal estates of this great rebel, who did not dare to make any resistance against the invasion. To prevent the destruction of the crops, which, as it was now the middle of autumn, were almost fully ripe, was impossible; and an ancient chronicle complains that the royal army " destroyit the country right fellounly, baith in cornes, meadows, and victuals;" whilst many barons and gentlemen, who held lands under the Douglases, but dreading the vengeance of the sovereign, had joined the expedition, endured the mortification of seeing their own estates utterly ravaged and laid waste, by the friends whose power they had increased, and whose protection they anticipated. Notwithstanding these misfortunes, which it is probable the sovereign, by the utmost exertion of his prerogative, could not prevent, the army continued united and attached to the royal cause, so that, on its appearance before the castle of Douglas, that haughty chief, who had lately renounced his allegiance, and who still maintained a secret correspondence with England, found himself compelled to lay down his arms, and to implore, with expressions of deep contrition, that he might be once more restored to favour. The consequence of this was a negotiation, in which James, conscious, perhaps, of the provocation he had given, and anxious to restore tranquillity to his dominions, consented to pardon the Earl of Douglas and his adherents, upon certain conditions which are enumerated in a written bond, or " appointment," as it is denominated, the original of which is still preserved.

In this interesting document, James earl of Douglas, in the first place, engaged to abstain from every attempt to possess himself of the lands of the earldom of Wigtown or of the lordship of Stewarton, forfeited by the last earl, and presented by the sovereign to his consort the queen. He next promised in his own name, and in that of his brother, as well as the Lord Hamilton, fully and for ever to forgive all manner of rancour of heart, feud, malice, and envy, which they had entertained in time past, or might conceive in time to come, against any of the king's subjects, and more especially against all those who were art and part in the slaughter of the late William earl of Douglas; and he stipulated, for himself and his friends, to obey the wishes of his sovereign, by taking such persons once more heartily into his friendship. The next provision did honour to the humanity of the king, and evinced an enlightened anxiety for the welfare of the lower classes of his people. By it, the earl obliged himself, that the whole body of his tenants and rentallers, wherever they might be settled upon his estates, should remain unmolested in their farms, and protected by their tacks or leases till "Whitsunday come a year;" except those tenants that occupied the granges andfarm "steadings," which were in the hands of the late earl at the time of his decease, for his own proper use. Even these, however, were not to be immediately dispossessed, but permitted to remain upon theirfarms till the ensuingWhitsunday, so that the corns should be duly gathered in, and neither the proprietor nor the cultivator endamaged by the sudden desertion of the ground. Douglas next engaged to dissolve all illegal bands or confederations into which he had already entered, and to make no more treasonable agreements in time to come: he promised to bring no claim against the king for any rents which he might have levied, or which the queen might have distrained in Douglasdale or Galloway, previous to this agreement: he bound himself, in the execution of his office of warden, to maintain and defend the Borders, and keep the truce between the kingdoms to the best of his skill and power, and to pay to his sovereign lord, the king, all honour and worship, "he having such surety as was reasonable for safety of his life." Lastly, he engaged to restore all goods which had been seized from persons who enjoyed letters of protection, and to make compensation for all injuries which they had sustained; and to this agreement he not only put his own hand and seal, but, for the greater solemnity, took his oath upon the holy gospels.

That the king was led by sound policy, in his desire to convert the Earl of Douglas from a dangerous opponent of the government into a peaceable subject, cannot be doubted. But although the principle was good, the measures adopted for the accomplishment of the end in view, were injudicious. Instead of effectually abridging the vast power of Douglas, leaving him just so much as should prevent him from being driven to despair, James, either following his own opinion, or misled by the advice of Crichton and Kennedy, who at this time acted as his chief counsellors, not only promised to put liim into possession of the earldom of Wigtown and the lands of Stewarton, but engaged in a negotiation with the court of Rome, the object of which was to prevail upon the pope to grant a dispensation for the marriage of the earl with the Countess Margaret, the youthful widow of his deceased brother. The dispensation having accordingly been procured, the marriage took place, although the unnatural alliance was forced upon the heiress of Galloway, contrary to her earnest tears and entreaties. It is difficult to understand, from the imperfect records of those times, how such sagacious politicians as Crichton and Kennedy should have given their countenance to a measure so pregnant with mischief. It again united in the person of the Earl of Douglas the immense entailed and unentailed estates of the family; and, should he have children, it revived the disputed claims between the descendants of Euphemia Ross and Elizabeth More, holding out an inducement to that ambitious noble to re-enact his brother's treason."f- There is reason to believe, indeed, that perhaps at the very moment when Douglas was thus experiencing the distinguished favour of his sovereign, and undoubtedly within a very short period thereafter, he had engaged in a secret treasonable correspondence with Malise earl of Menteith, then a prisoner in Pontefract castle, and the English ministers. Its object was to overturn the existing government in Scotland, and to put an end to the dynasty then on the throne, by means of a civil insurrection, which was to be seconded by the arms and the money of the Yorkists, whilst the confidence with which he was treated enabled him to mature his designs in the sunshine of the royal favour.

In the meantime, the king, apparently unsuspicious of any such intentions, undertook an expedition to the north, accompanied by his privy council and a select body of troops, consisting, in all probability, of that personal guard, which, in imitation of the French monarchs, appears for the first time during this reign in Scotland. The Earl of Huntley, by his zeal and activity in the execution of his office of lieutenantgeneral, had succeeded in restoring the northern counties to a state of quiet and security; and in the progress through Angus a singular scene took place. The Earl of Crawford, lately notorious for his violent and rebellious career, and the dread of Scotland under his appellation of the " Tiger," suddenly presented himself before the royal procession, clothed in beggarly apparel, his feet and head bare, and followed by a few miserable looking servants in the same ragged weeds. In this dejected state, he threw himself on his knees before the king, and, with many tears, implored his forgiveness for his repeated treasons. Huntley, with whom he had already made his peace, along with Crichton and Kennedy, by whose advice this pageant of feudal contrition had been prepared, now interceded in his behalf; and the king, moved by the penitence, not only of the principal offender, but of the miserable troop by whom he was accompanied, extended his hand to Crawford. He assured him that he was more anxious to gain the hearts than the lands of his nobles, although by repeated treasons, their estates had been forfeited to the crown, and bade him and his companions be of good cheer, as he was ready freely to forgive them all that had past, and to trust that their future loyalty would atone for their former rebellion. The fierce chief was accordingly restored to his honours and estates; and the king appears to have had no reason to repent his clemency, for Crawford, at the head of a strong body of the barons and gentlemen of Angus, accompanied the monarch

in his future progress. On his return, he entertained him with great magnificence at his castle of Finhaven; and, from this time till the period of his death, remained a faithful supporter of the government. It was unfortunate, indeed, that a fever, which cut him off six months after his restoration to the royal favour, left him only this brief interval of loyalty to atone for a life of rebellion.-f

It is pleasing to be compelled for a few moments to intermit the narrative of domestic war and civil confusion, by the occurrence of events which indicate a desire at least to soften the ferocity of feudal manners, by the introduction of schools of learning. In the month of January, 1450, Pope Nicholas, at the request of William Turnbull bishop of Glasgow, granted his rescript for the foundation of a university in that city; and in the month of June, in the subsequent year, the papal bull was proclaimed at the Cross with great solemnity. Yet at first the infant university was sparingly endowed; and such was the iniquity of the times, and the unfavourable disposition towards learning, that, so late as the year 1521, we are informed by Mair, in his History of Scotland, it was attended by a very small number of students. J

The transactions which occupied the years immediately succeeding the death of the Earl of Crawford, are involved in an obscurity which is the more to be lamented, as their consequences were highly important, and ultimately led to the total destruction of the House of Douglas. The only contemporary chronicle which remains is unfortunately too brief to afford us any satisfactory insight into the great springs of a rebellion which shook the security of the throne; and the light reflected on those dark times by the few original records which remain, is so feeble and uncertain, that it operates rather as a distraction than an assistance to the historian. In such circumstances, abstaining from theory and conjecture, the greater outlines are all that it is possible to trace.

During the year 1454, the Earl of Douglas entered deeply into a treasonable correspondence with the powerful party of the Yorkists in England, who, at this time, having succeeded in undermining the influence of the Duke of Somerset, had obtained the supreme management of the state. The great principles which regulated the foreign policy of the party of York, were enmity to France, and, consequently, to Scotland, the ancient ally of that kingdom; and this naturally led to a secret negotiation with the Earl of Douglas. His ambition, his power, his former rebellion, his injuries and grievances, were all intimately known at the English court; and it was not difficult for a skilful intriguer like the Duke of York, by addressing to him such arguments as were best adapted to his design, to inflame his mind with the prospect of supreme authority, and rouse his passions with the hope of revenge. Douglas, however, had miscalculated the strength of the king, which was far greater than he supposed; and he had reckoned too certainly on the support of some powerful fellow-conspirators, who, bound to him, not by the ties of affection, but of interest, fell off the moment they obtained a clear view of the desperate nature of the enterprise in which he was engaged.

In the midst of these threatened dangers, and in the end of the year 1454, Lord Crichton, late chancellor of the kingdom, and a statesman of veteran experience, died at the castle of Dunbar. If we except his early struggles with his rival Livingston, for the custody of the person of the infant king, his life, compared with that of most of his fellow-nobles, was one of upright and consistent loyalty; and since his coalition with Kennedy, he had so endeared himself to his sovereign, that the most intimate of the royal counsellors dreaded to impart to him an event which they knew would so deeply affect him.

In the meantime, Douglas despatched Lord Hamilton into England, where, in a meeting with the Yorkists, an immediate supply of money and of troops was promised,-f" upon the condition that the conspirators should give a pledge of the sincerity of their intentions, by taking the oath of homage to the English crown,—a piece of treachery to which Hamilton would not consent, although there is reason to believe it met with few scruples in the convenient conscience of Douglas. Before, however, this test had been taken, the royal vengeance burst upon the principal conspirator with a violence and a rapidity for which he appears to have been little prepared. James, at the head of a force which defied all resistance, attacked and stormed his castle of Inveravon, and, after having razed it to the ground, pressed forward without a check, to Glasgow, where he collected the whole strength of the western counties, and a large force of the highlanders and islesmen. With this army he marched to Lanark, invaded Douglasdale and Avondale, which he wasted with all the fury of military execution; and, after delivering up to fire and sword the estates belonging to Lord Hamilton, passed on to Edinburgh; from thence, without delay, at the head of a new force, chiefly of lowlanders, he invaded the forests of Selkirk and Ettrick, and compelled all the barons and landed gentlemen, of whom he entertained any suspicion, to renew their allegiance, and join the royal banner, under the penalty of having their castles levelled with the ground, and their estates depopulated. He next besieged the castle of Abercorn, which, from the great strength of its walls, and the facilities for defence afforded by its situation, defied for a month the utmost attempts of the royal army.-f- Battered and broken up at last, by the force of the machines which were brought to bear upon the towers, and exposed to the shot of a gun of large size, which was charged and directed by a French engineer, the place was taken by escalade, and the principal persons who had conducted the defence instantly hanged. The walls were then dismantled, and the rest of the garrison dismissed with their lives. During the siege, a desperate but ineffectual attempt to disperse the royal army was made by Douglas, who concentrated his forces at Lanark,! and, along with his kinsman, Lord Hamilton, advanced to the neighbourhood of Abercorn, where, however, such was the terror of the royal name, and the success of the secret negotiation of Bishop Kennedy with the leaders in the rebel army, that in one night they deserted the banner of their chief, and left him a solitary fugitive, exposed to the unmitigated rigour of the regal vengeance. Hamilton, whose treachery to Douglas had principally occasioned this calamity, was immediately committed to close confinement, whilst the great earl himself, hurled in a moment from the pinnacle of pride and power to a state of terror and destitution, fled from his late encampment, under cover of night, and, for some time, so effectually eluded pursuit, that none knew in what part of Scotland he was concealed.

In the meantime, the success of the king was attended with the happiest effects throughout the country, not only in affording encouragement to the friends of peace and order, who dreaded the re-establishment of a power in the house of Douglas, which repeated experience had shown to be incompatible with the security of the realm, but in bringing over to the royal party those fierce feudal barons, who, either from fear, or the love of change and of plunder, had entered into bands with the house of Douglas, and now found it their interest to desert a falling cause. In consequence of this change, the castles, which, in the commencement of the rebellion, had been filled with military stores, and fortified against the government, were gradually given up, and taken possession of by the friends of the crown. Douglas castle, with the strong fortresses of Thrieve in Galloway, Strathaven, Lochendorb, and Tarnaway, fell successively into the hands of the king; and the Earl of Douglas, having once mote reappeared in Annandale at the head of a tumultuous assemblage of outlaws, who had been drawn together by the exertions of his brothers, the Earls of Moray and Ormond, was encountered at Arkinholme,-f and totally defeated by the king's troops, under the command of the Earl of Angus. The battle was fought, by Douglas, with that desperate courage which arose out of the conviction that

it must be amongst his last struggles for existence; but the powerful and warlike Border families, the Maxwells, Scotts, and Johnstons, inured to daily conflict, had joined the standard of the king, and the undisciplined rabble which composed the rebel army were unable to stand against them. Ormond was taken prisoner, and instantly executed; his brother, the Earl of Moray, fell in the action; and after a total dispersion of his army, the arch-rebel, along with his only remaining brother, Sir John Douglas of Balveny, made his escape into the wilds of Argyleshire, where he was received by the Earl of Ross, the only friend who now remained to him, of all the great connexions upon whose assistance he had so confidently reckoned in his enterprise against his sovereign. These important events took place during the continuance of the siege of Abercorn, and the first intimation of them received by the king was the arrival of a soldier from the field of Arkinholme, who laid the bleeding and mangled head of the Earl of Moray at the feet of his prince. "The king," says an ancient chronicle, "commended the bravery of the man who brought him this ghastly present, although he knew not at the first look to whom the head belonged.

Having brought his affairs to this successful conclusion, James assembled his parliament at Edinburgh, on the ninth of June, 1455, and proceeded to let loose the offended vengeance of the laws against the rebels who had appeared in arms against the government. James late earl of Douglas, having failed to appear and answer to the charges brought against him, after having been duly summoned at his castles of Douglas and Strathaven, was declared a traitor; his mother, Beatrice countess of Douglas, in consequence of the support and assistance lent by her to the cause of her son, his brother Archibald late earl of Moray, who had fallen at Arkinholme, and Sir John Douglas of Balveny, who had fortified the castle of Abercorn, and leagued himself with the king's enemies of England, were involved in the same condemnation; and the prelates and clergy who sat in the parliament, having retired, David Dempster of Caraldstone pronounced it to be the judgment of the three Estates, that these persons had forfeited their lives, and that their whole moveable and unmoveable property, their estates, chattels, superiorities, and offices, had escheated in the hands of the crown. To give additional solemnity to this sentence, the instrument of forfeiture, which is still preserved was corroborated by the seals of the Bishops of St Andrews, Dunblane, Ross, Dunkeld, and Lismore; by those of the Earls of Athole, Angus, Menteith, Errol, and Huntley; those of the Lords Lome, Erskine,Campbell, Grahame, Somerville, Montgomery, Maxwell, Leslie, Glamis, Hamilton, Gray, Boyd, and Borthwick; whilst the sanction of the whole body of the commissioners of the burghs, who were not provided at the moment with the seals of their respective communities, was declared to be fully given by appending to it the single seal of the burgh of Haddington.

Whilst such events were passing in the low country, the Earl of Douglas, formidable even in his last struggle, had entered into an alliance with John earl of Ross and lord of the Isles, to whom he had fled immediately after the disastrous issue of the battle of Arkinholrae. This powerful ocean prince immediately assembled his vassals, and having collected a fleet of a hundred light galleys, which received on board a force of five thousand men, he intrusted the chief command to his near relation, Donald Balloch lord of Isla, and a chief of formidable power not only in Scotland, but in the north of Ireland. Animated by hereditary hatred against the Scottish throne, Donald conducted a naval "raid," or predatory expedition, along the western coast of Scotland, commencing hostilities at Innerkip, and thence holding his progress to Bute, the Oumrays, and the fertile island of Arran. Yet, owing to the able measures of defence adopted by the king, the enterprise met with little success; and the loss to the government, in lives and in property, was singularly disproportionate to the formidable maritime force which was engaged. "There was slain," says a contemporary chronicle, whose homely recital there is no reason to suspect of infidelity, "of good men fifteen, of women two or three, of children three or four. The plunder included five or six hundred horse, ten thousand oxen and kine, and more than a thousand sheep and goats. At the same time, they burnt down several mansions in Innerkip, around the church, harried all Arran, stormed and levelled with the ground the castle of Brodick, and wasted with fire and sword the islands of the Cumrays. They also levied tribute upon Bute, carrying away a hundred bolls of meal, a hundred bolls of malt, a hundred marts, and a hundred marks of silver.""!" The expedition appears to have been concluded by an attack upon Lauder bishop of Lismore, a prelate who had made himself obnoxious to the party of Douglas, by affixing his seal to the instrument of their forfeiture. This dignitary, a son of the ancient family of Lauder of Balcomy in Fife, had been promoted by James the First to the bishopric of Argyle; but ignorant of the manners and the language of the rude inhabitants of his diocese, he early became unpopular, and his attempts to extinguish the disorders with which he was surrounded, by the firm authority of ecclesiastical law, were received with execration, and almost universal resistance. Three years previous to the expedition of Donald Balloch, on the occurrence of some misunderstanding between a parson or vicar of the bishop, whom he had appointed to one of his churches, and some of the Celtic officials attached to the administration of the diocese, Sir Gilbert Maclachlan, and Sir Morice Macfadyan, who filled the offices of chancellor and treasurer of the cathedral, having assembled the whole force of the clan Lachlan, violently assaulted the prelate during the course of a peaceful journey to his own cathedral church. They scornfully addressed him in the Gaelic tongue, dragged from their horses and bound the hands of the clerks which composed his train, stripped them of their rich copes, hoods, and velvet caps, plundered next morning the repositories of the church of its silver and ornaments, even seized the bulls and charters, and compelled the bishop, under terror of his life, to promise that he would never prosecute the men who had thus shamefully abused him. Such were the miserable scenes of havoc and violence which fell to the lot of the prelates who were bold enough to undertake the charge of those remote and savage dioceses; and we now, only three years after this cruel assault, find the same unfortunate dignitary attacked by the fierce admiral of the Isles, and after the slaughter of the greater part of his attendants, driven into a sanctuary which seems scarcely to have protected him from the fury of his enemies.

Whilst Douglas thus succeeded in directing against the king the vengeance of the Isles, he himself had retired to England, where he was not only received with distinction by his ally the Duke of York, at this time possessed of the supreme power in the government, but repaid for his service by an annual pension of five hundred pounds, "to be continued to him until he should be restored to his possessions, or to the greater part of them, by the person who then called himself King of Scots.""f- It was hardly to be expected that an indignity like this, offered by a faction which had all along encouraged a rebellion in Scotland as a principal instrument in promoting their intrigues, should not have excited the utmost resentment in the bosom of the Scottish monarch; and it was evident that a perseverance in such policy must inevitably hurry the two nations into war. James, however, whose kingdom was scarce recovered from the lamentable effects of the late rebellion, with a wisdom which was willing to overlook the personal injury, in his anxiety to secure to his people the blessing of peace, despatched a conciliatory embassy to the English court. At the same time, he directed a letter to Henry the Sixth, complaining of the encouragement held out to a convicted traitor like Douglas, warning him of the fatal consequences which must result to himself in England, as well as to the kingdom which had been committed by God to his charge, if rebellion in a subject was thus fostered by a Christian prince; and declaring that, however unwilling to involve his subjects in war, he would never so far forget his kingly office as to permit his own dignity to be insulted, and the prosperity of his people endangered, with impunity, by any power whatever.

This spirited remonstrance appears to have been followed by preparations for immediate hostilities, which, it may be easily believed, were not rendered less urgent by the following extraordinary epistle, which was soon after transmitted to the Scottish monarch :—" The king, to an illustrious prince, James, calling himself King of Scotland, sends greeting: We presume that it is notorious to all men, and universally acknowledged as a fact, that the supreme and direct dominion over the kingdom of Scotland appertains by law to the King of England, as monarch of Britain. We presume it to be equally acknowledged and notorious, that fealty and homage are due by the King of Scots, to the King of England, upon the principle that it becomes a vassal to pay such homage to his superior and overlord; and that from times of so remote antiquity that they exceed the memory of man, even to the present day, we and our progenitors, Kings of England, have possessed such rights, and you and your ancestors have acknowledged such a dependence. Wherefore, such being the case, whence comes it that the subject hath not scrupled insolently to erect his neck against his master? and what think ye ought to be his punishment, when he spurns the condition and endeavours to compass the destruction of his person? With what sentence is treason generally visited—or have you lived so ignorant of all things as not to be aware of the penalties which await the rebel, and him who is so hardy as to deny his homage to his liege superior? If so, we would exhort you speedily to inform yourself upon the matter, lest the lesson should be communicated by the experience of your own person, rather than by the information of others. To the letters which have been presented to us by a certain person, calling himself your lionherald and king-at-arms, and which are replete with all manner of folly, insolence, and boasting, we make this brief reply: It hath ever been the custom of those who fight rather by deceit than with open arms, to commit an outrageous attack, in the first instance, and then to declare war; to affect innocence, and shift their own guilt upon their neighbours; to cover themselves with the shadow of peace and the protection of truces, whilst beneath this veil they are fraudulently plotting the ruin of those they call their friends. To such persons, whose machinations we cordially despise, it seems to us best to reply by actions. The repeated breaches of faith, therefore, which we have suffered at your hands; the injury, rapine, robbery, and insolence, which have been inflicted upon us, contrary to the rights of nations, and in defiance of the faith of treaties, shall be passed over in silence rather than committed to writing; for we esteem it unworthy of our dignity to attempt to reply to you in your own fashion by slanders and reproaches. We would desire, however, that, in the mean season, you should not be ignorant that, instead of its having the intended effect of inspiring us with terror, we do most cordially despise this vain confidence and insolent boasting, in which we have observed the weakest and most pusillanimous persons are generally the greatest adepts; and that you should be aware that it is our firm purpose, with the assistance of the Almighty, to put down and severely chastise all such insolent rebellions, and arrogant attempts, which it hath been your practice contumeliously to direct against us. Wishing, nevertheless, with that charity which becomes a Christian prince, that it may please our Lord Jesus Christ to reclaim you from error into the paths of justice and truth, and to inspire you for the future with a spirit of more enlightened judgment and counsel, we bid you farewell." It does not appear that the king took any notice of this singular specimen of diplomatic insolence, in which, with an amusing inconsistency, the writer condemns the error into which he falls himself; but it is evident, from the preparations appointed to be made by the parliament, which assembled at Edinburgh, during the course of the same year, on the fourth of August, and afterwards on the thirteenth of October, that it had been preceded, and it was certainly followed, by serious hostilities -upon the Borders. The particulars of these conflicts on the marches do not, however, appear in the later historians of the times, or in the pages of the contemporary chronicles; and, although carried on with all the desolating fury which distinguished the warfare of the marches, they led to no important results, and were soon after intermitted, in consequence of the partial recovery of health by Henry the Sixth; a circumstance which removed the Duke of York from the office of protector, and for a while deprived him of the supreme power in the state. The Earl of Douglas, however, continued still in England, animated by the bitterest resentment against James, and exerting every effort to organize a force sufficiently strong to enable him to invade the kingdom from which he had been so justly expelled. His success in this treasonable object, although ultimately of so alarming a nature as once more to threaten the tranquillity of the kingdom, was counteracted for the present by the revival of the influence of the Duke of Somerset, which had ever been favourable to Scotland; and the measures adopted by the parliament for strengthening the authority of the crown, and increasing the defensive force of the kingdom, were well calculated to render abortive the utmost attempts of its enemies.

With regard to the first of these objects, it would be difficult to explain the intentions of the legislature in a more forcible manner than in the words of the statute itself. It declared, that "since the poverty of the crown is ofttimes the cause of the poverty of the realm, and of many other inconveniences which it would be tedious to enumerate, it had been ordained, by the advice of the full council of parliament, that there should be, from this time, appointed certain lordships and castles in every part of the realm, where, at different periods of the year, the sovereign may be likely to take up his residence, which were to belong in perpetuity to the crown, never to be settled or bestowed either in fee or franctenure upon any person whatever, however high his rank or estate, except by the solemn advice and decree of the whole parliament, and under circumstances which affected the welfare and prosperity of the kingdom." For the additional security of the crown lands, it was further declared "that even if the present monarch, or any of his successors, should alienate or convey away to any person the lordships and castles which were the property of the crown, such a transaction being contrary to the will of parliament, should not stand good in law; but that it should be permitted to the king, for the time being, to resume these lands into his own hands without the solemnity of any intervening process of law; and not only to resume them, but to insist that those who had unjustly occupied these royal estates should refund the whole rents and profits which they had received, till the period of their resumption by the crown." It was lastly enacted, "that the present king and his successors should be obliged to take an oath, that they shall keep this statute and duly observe it in every particular." There was added to this enactment, a particular enumeration of the crown lands and revenue. In the light which it throws on the history of the constitution, at a period when the crown was struggling for existence against the growing power of the aristocracy, it is too interesting to be passed over.

The first article in this enumeration, is, the sum arising from the whole customs of Scotland, which were in the hands of James the First on the day of his death; it being, however, provided, that those officers whose pensions, were payable out of the customs, should receive compensation from some other source. After this,follows the specific enumeration of the crown lands, beginning with the lordship of Ettrick forest, and the whole lordship or principality of Galloway, along with the castle of Thrieve. These two great accessions of territory, which were now annexed to the crown, had long formed one of the richest and most populous portions of the forfeited estates of the house of Douglas. Next, we find the castle of Edinburgh with the lands of Ballincreif and Gosford, together with all other estates pertaining to the king within the sheriffdom of Lothian. Also, the castle of Stirling, with all the

crown lands around it; the castle of Dumbarton, with the lands of Cardross, Roseneath, and the pension from Cadyow, with the pension of the "ferme nieill" of Kilpatrick; the whole earldom of Fife, with the palace of Falkland; the earldom of Strathern, with the rights belonging to it; the house and lordship of Brechin, with the services and superiority of Cortachy; the castles and lordships of Inverness and Urquhart, with the water-mails or rents due for the fishings of Inverness; the lordship of Abernethy, and the several baronies of Urquhart, Glenorchane, Bonnechen Bonochar, Annache, Edderdail, otherwise called Ardmanache, Pecty, Brachly, and Strathern; and, lastly, the Redcastle, with the lordships in the county of Ross which are attached to it. It was also particularly provided, that all regalities, which at present belonged to the king, should be indissolubly annexed to the crown lands, and that in time to come, no erection of regalities should take place without the advice of the parliament. Other measures of the same parliament had an evident reference to the increasing the authority of the crown. It was ordained, that, for the future, the wardenry of the Borders, an office of the utmost power and responsibility, should cease to be hereditary; that the wardens should have no jurisdiction in cases of treason, except where such cases arose out of an infraction of the truce; and that no actions or pleas in law should be brought into the court of the warden, but ought to be prosecuted before the justice ayre. The situation of warden had long been esteemed the inalienable property of the house of Douglas, and its abolition as a hereditary dignity was the consequence of the late rebellion. But the able ministers who at this time directed the king's councils, were not satisfied with cutting down the exorbitant power of the warden. The blow was wisely aimed against the principle which made any office whatever a hereditary fee; and it was declared that, in all time to come, "no office should be given in fee or heritage, whilst such as had been so disposed of since the death of the late king, were revoked and abolished, due care being taken that any price or consideration which had been advanced by the incumbent, should be restored. From the operation of this excellent statute, an exception was made in favour of the wardenry of the march, which the king had bestowed on his son Alexander earl of March and lord of Annandale. A few other statutes, enacted in this same parliament, deserve attention. He who arrested any false coiner, and brought him to the king, was to have ten pounds for his labour, and the escheat of the offender. Sorners-f- were to be punished as severely as thieves or robbers; and for the settlement of those inferior disputes which were perpetually occurring between the subjects of the burghs of the realm, it was provided, that the privy council should select eight or twelve persons, according to the size of the town, to whose decision all causes, not exceeding the sum of five pounds, were to be intrusted.

A curious statute followed on the subject of dress, which is interesting, from its minuteness. It declared, that with regard to the dresses to be worn by earls, lords of parliament, commissaries of burghs, and advocates, at all parliaments and general councils, the earls should take care to use mantles of "brown granyt," open in the front, furred with ermine, and lined before with the same, surmounted by little hoods of the same cloth, to be used for the shoulders. The other lords of parliament were directed to have a mantle of red cloth, open in front, and lined with silk, or furred with "Cristy gray, grece, or purray, with a hood furred in the same manner, and composed of the same cloth whilst all commissaries of burghs were commanded to have a pair of cloaks,—such is the phrase made use of,—of blue cloth, made to open on the right shoulder, to be trimmed with fur, and having hoods of the same colour. If any earl, lord of parliament, or commissary, appeared in parliament, or at the general council, without this dress, he was to pay a fine of ten pounds to the king. All men of law employed and paid as "forespeakers," were to wear a dress of green cloth, made after the fashion of a "tunykill," or little tunic, with the sleeves open like a tabard, under a penalty of five pounds to the king, if they appeared either in parliament or at general councils without it; and in every burgh where parliament or general councils were held, it was directed that there be constructed "where the bar uses to stand," a platform, consisting of three lines of seats, each line higher than the other, upon which the commissaries of the burghs were to take their places.

At a prorogued meeting of the same parliament, held at Stirling on the thirteenth of October, regulations were made for the defence of the kingdom against any sudden invasion of the English, which explain the system of transmitting information by beacons adopted in those early times, in an interesting manner. At the different fords or passages of the Tweed between Roxburgh and Berwick, where it was customary for the English forces to cross the river, certain watchmen were stationed, whose duty it was to light a bale-fire, or beacon, the moment they received word of the approach of an enemy. It was to be so placed as to be seen at Hume castle, and to this station the watchmen were instantly to repair. The beacon fires were to be regulated in the following manner: One fire was understood to signify that an enemy was reported to be approaching,—two fires, that they were coming for certain,—by four fires, lighted up at once, and each beside another, like four "candellis, and all at aym," to use the homely language of the statute, it was to be understood that the invading army was one of great strength and power. The moment that the watchmen stationed at Eggerhope (now Edgerton) castle descried the beacon at Hume, they were commanded to light up their bale-fire; and the moment the men stationed at Soutra Edge descried the Eggerhope fire, they were to answer it by a corresponding beacon on their battlements; and thus, fire answering to fire, from Dunbar, Haddington, Dalkeith, all Lothian was to be roused as far as Edinburgh castle. At Edinburgh, four beacons were instantly to be lighted to warn the inhabitants of Fife, Stirling, and the eastern part of Lothian. Beacons were also directed to be kindled on North Berwick Law, and Dunpender Law, to warn the coast side of the sea: it being understood that all the fighting men on the west side of Edinburgh should assemble in that city; and all to the east of it, at Haddington; whilst all merchants and burghers were directed to join the host as it passed through their respective communities. By another statute of the same parliament, two hundred spearmen and two hundred bowmen were ordered to be maintained, at the expense of the Border lords, upon the east and middle marches; whilst, upon the west marches, there was to be kept up a force of one hundred bows and one hundred spears; the Border lords and barons being strictlyenjoinedto have their castles in good repair, well garrisoned, and amply provided with military stores, whilst they themselves were to be ready, having assembled their vassals at their chief places of residence, to join the warden, and pass forward with the host wherever he pleased to lead them.

Some other statutes are worthy of notice, as illustrating the state of the Borders, and the manners of the times. It was directed, that when a warden raid took place, meaning an invasion of England by the lord warden in person, or when any other chieftain led his host against the enemy, no man was to be permitted, under pain of death, and forfeiture of his whole goods, to abstract any part of the general booty, until, according to the ancient custom of the marches, it had been divided into three parts, in presence of the chief leader of the expedition; any theft of the plunder or the prisoners belonging to the leaders or their men —any supplies furnished to the English garrisons of Roxburgh or Berwick—any warning given to the English of a meditated invasion by the Scots—any private journey into England, without the king's or the warden's safe-conduct, was to be punished as treason, with the loss of life and estate; and it was strictly enjoined upon the principal leaders of any raids into England, that they should cause these directions of the parliament to be communicated to their host previous to the expedition, so that none might allege ignorance of the law as an excuse of its violation.

Amid these wise endeavours to strengthen the power of the crown, and to provide for the security of the kingdom, James was surprised by the arrival at court of two noble ladies, who threw themselves upon his protection. These were the Countess of Douglas, known before her marriage by the name of the Fair Maid of Galloway; and the Countess of Ross, a daughter of the once powerful house of Livingston.-f- The first had been miserable in her marriage with that Earl of Douglas who had fallen by the king's hand in Stirling castle, and equally wretched in her subsequent unnatural union with his brother, at this moment a rebel in England. Profiting by his absence, she now fled to the court of the king, representing the cruelty with which she had been treated both by the one and the other. She was not only welcomed with the utmost kindness and courtesy, but immediately provided with a third husband, in the king's uterine brother, Sir John Stewart, son of his mother by her second husband, the Black Knight of Lorn. In what manner her marriage with Douglas was dissolved does not appear; but it is singular that she had no children by either of her former husbands. Her third lord, to whom she bore two daughters,]: was soon afterwards created Earl of Athole, and enriched by the gift of the forfeited barony of Balveny. To the Countess of Ross, the wife of the rebel earl of that name, and to whom her husband's treason appears to have been as distasteful as to the consort of the Earl of Douglas,

Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, vol. ii. pp. 44, 45. + Buchanan, book xi. chap. xlv.

t Her two daughters were Lady Janet, married to Alexander earl of Huntley ; and Lady Catherine, to John, sixth Lord Forbes.

Janies, with equal readiness, extended the royal favour, and assigned her a maintenance suited to her rank; whilst not long after, a third noble female, his sister, the Princess Annabella, arrived from the court of the Duke of Savoy. She had been betrothed to Louis, the second son of the Duke of Savoy; but, at the request of the King of France, and on payment of the sum of twenty-five thousand crowns, James consented to a dissolution of the intended marriage; and, on her return to Scotland, she became the wife of the first Earl of Huntley.-)"

Disengaged from these minor cares, the king found himself soon after involved in a negotiation requiring greater delicacy in its management, and which, if abortive, might have been productive of consequences prejudicial to the kingdom. It arose out of a complaint transmitted to the Scottish court by Christian king of Norway, upon the subject of the money due by the King of Scotland for the Western Isles and the kingdom of Man, in virtue of the treaty concluded in 1426 between James the First and Eric king of Norway. This treaty itself was only a confirmation of the original agreement, by which, nearly two hundred years before, Alexander the Third had purchased these islands from Magnus, then King of Norway; and Christian now remonstrated, not merely on the ground that a large proportion of arrears was due, but that one of his subjects, Biorn son of Thorleif, the Lieutenant of Iceland, having been driven by a storm into a harbour in the Orkneys, had been seized by the Scottish authorities, contrary to the faith of treaties, and cast, with his wife and his attendants, into prison.J Happily>

In the meantime, in consequence of the re-establishment of the influence of the house of Lancaster, by the restoration of Henry the Sixth, and his queen, a woman of masculine spirit, affairs began to assume a more favourable aspect on the side of England; and the King of Scotland having despatched the Abbot of Melrose, Lord Graham, Vans dean of Glasgow, and Mr George Fala burgess of Edinburgh, as his commissioners to the English government, a truce between the two countries was concluded, which was to last till the sixth of July, 1459. This change, however, in the administration of affairs in England, did not prevent the Earl of Douglas, who, during the continuance of the power of the Yorkists, had acquired a considerable influence in that country, from making the strongest efforts to regain the vast estates of which he had been deprived, and to avenge himself on the sovereign whose allegiance he had forsworn. He accordingly assembled a force in conjunction with the Earl of Northumberland, and breaking across the Border, wasted the fertile district of the Merse in Berwickshire, with the merciless fury of a renegade. After a course of plunder and devastation, which, without securing the confidence of his new friends, made him detested by his countrymen, he was met, and totally defeated, by the Earl of Angus, at the head of a division of the royal army; nearly a thousand of the English were slain, seven hundred taken prisoners, and Douglas, once more driven a fugitive into England, found himself so effectually shorn of his power, and limited in his resources, that he remained perfectly inoffensive during the remainder of this reign.

The lordship of Douglas, and the wide domains attached to this dignity, were now, in consequence of his important public services, conferred upon the Earl of Angus, a nobleman of great talents and ambition, connected by his mother, who was a daughter of Robert the Third, with the royal family, and inheriting by his father, George, first Earl of Angus, a son of the first Earl of Douglas, the same claim to the crown through the blood of Baliol, which we have already seen producing a temporary embarrassment upon the accession of Robert the Second, in the year 1370.f Upon the acquisition by Angus of the forfeited estates of Douglas, the numerous and powerful vassals of that house immediately attached themselves to the fortunes of this rising favourite, whom the liberality of the king had already raised to a height of power almost as giddy and as dangerous as that from which his predecessor had been precipitated. Apparent, however, as were the dangerous consequences which might be anticipated from this policy, we must blame rather that miserable feudal constitution under which he lived, than censure the monarch who was compelled to accommodate himself to its principles. The only weapons by which a feudal sovereign could overwhelm a noble whose strength menaced the crown, were to be found in the hands of his brethren of the aristocracy; and the only mode by which he could insure their co-operation in a struggle, which, as it involved in some degree an attack upon their own rights must have excited their jealousy, was to permit them to share in the spoils of his forfeiture.

Some time previous to this conclusive defeat of Douglas, the parliament had again assembled at Edinburgh; when, at the desire of the king, they took into consideration the great subjects of the defence of the country, the regulations of the value of the current coin, the administration of justice, and the establishment of a set of rules, which are entitled, "concerning the governance of the pestilence a dreadful scourge, which now, for the fifth time, began to commit its ravages in the kingdom. Upon the first head, it was provided, that all subjects of the realm possessed of lands or goods, should be ready mounted and armed, according to the value of their property, to ride for the defence of the country, the moment they received warning, either by sound of trumpet or lighting of the beacon; that all manner of men, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, should hasten to join the muster, on the first intelligence of the approach of an English host, except they were in such extreme poverty as to be unable to furnish themselves with weapons. Every yeoman, however, worth twenty marks, was to furnish himself at the least with a jack and sleeves down to the wrist, or, if not thus equipt, with a pair of splents, a sellat, or a prikit hat, a sword and buckler, and a bow and sheaf of arrows. If unskilled in archery, he was to have an axe and a targe, made either of leather or of fir, with two straps in the inside. Warning was to be given by the proper officers, to the inhabitants of every county, that they provide themselves with these weapons, and attend the weapon-schawing, or armed muster, before the sheriffs, bailies, or stewards of regar lities, on the morrow after the "lawe days after Christmas." The king, it was next declared, ought to make it a special request to some of the richest and most powerful barons, "that they make carts of war; and in each cart place two guns, each of which was to have two chambers, to be supplied with the proper warlike tackling, and to be furnished also with a cunning man to shoot them. And if," it was quaintly added, "they have no skill in the art of shooting with them, at the time of passing the act, it is hoped that they will make themselves master of it before they are required to take the field against the enemy."

With regard to the provisions for defence of the realm upon the Borders during the summer season, the three Estates declared it to be their opinion, that the Borderers did not require the same supplies which were thought necessary when the matter was first referred to the king, because this year they were more able to defend themselves than in any former season; first, it was observed they were better, and their enemies worse provided than before; secondly, they were certain of peace, at least on two Borders, till Candlemas. On the West Borders, it was remarked, the winter was seldom a time of distress, and the English would be as readily persuaded to agree to a special truce from Candlemas till " Wedderdais," as they now did till Candlemas; considering also, that during this last summer, the enemy have experienced great losses, costs, and labour in the war, and, as it is hoped, will have the same in summer, which is approaching. The English, it was said, had been put to far more labour and expense, and had suffered far greater losses in the war this last summer than the Scottish Borderers. It was therefore, the opinion of the three Estates, that the Borderers should, for the present, be contented without overburdening the government by their demands; and if any great invasion was likely to come upon them, the parliament recommended that the midland barons should be ready to offer them immediate supplies and assistance.

Upon the subject of the pestilence, the great object seems to have been to prevent contagion, by shutting up the inhabitants both of town and country, for a certain season, within their houses. The clergy, to whom the consideration of the most difficult matters of state policy appears to have been at this period invariably committed, were of opinion, in the words of the statute, "that no person, either dwelling in burgh, or in the upland districts, who had provision enough to maintain himself and his followers or servants, should be expelled from his own house, unless he will either not remain in it," or may not be shut up in the same. And should he disobey his neighbours, and refuse to keep himself within his residence, he was to be compelled to remove from the town. Where, however there were any people, neither rich enough to maintain themselves nor transport their families forth of the town, the citizens were directed to support them at their own expense, so that they did not wander away from the spot where they ought to remain, and carry infection through the kingdom, or "fyle the cuntro about thame." "And if any sick folk," it was observed, "who had been put forth from the town, were caught stealing away from the station where they had been shut up," the citizens were commanded to follow and bring them back again, punishing them for such conduct, and compelling them to remain in durance. It was directed by the same statute, that no man should burn his neighbours' houses, meaning the mansions which had been deserted as infected, or in which the whole inhabitants had died, unless it could be done without injury to the adjoining healthy tenements; and the prelates were commanded to make general processions throughout their dioceses twice in the week, for the stanching of the pestilence, and " to grant pardon" (by which word possibly is meant indulgences) to the priests who exposed themselves by walking in these processions.

With regard to the important subject of the money and coinage of the realm, it will be necessary to look back, for a moment, to the provisions of the parliament held at Stirling a few years before this period, which were then purposely omitted, that the state of the coinage under this reign, and the principles by which it was regulated, might be brought under the eye in a connected series.

We find it first declared in a public paper, entitled, The Advisement of the Deputes of the Three Estates, touching the Matter of the Money, that, on many accounts, it was considered expedient there should be an issue of a new coinage, conforming in weight to the money of England. Out of the ounce of burnt or refined silver, or bullion, eight groats were to be coined, and smaller coins of half groats, pennies, halfpennies, and farthings, of the same proportionate weight and fineness. The new groat was to have course for eight pence, the half groat for four pence, the penny for two pence, the halfpenny for one penny, and the farthing for a halfpenny. It was also directed that the English groat, of which eight groats contained one ounce of silver, should be reckoned of the value of eight pence the piece; that the English half-groat, agreeing in weight to the same, should be taken for four pence, and that the English penny should only be received for such value as the receiver chooses to affix to it. From the time that this new groat was struck, and a day appointed for its issue, the groat now current was to descend in its value to four pence, and the half-groat to two pence, till which time they were to retain the value of the new money. It was next directed by the parliament, that there should be struck a new penny of gold, to be called "a lion," with the figure of a lion on the one side, and on the reverse, the image of St Andrew, clothed in a side-coat, reaching to his feet, which piece was to be of an equal weight with the half English noble, otherwise it should not be received in exchange by any person,—the value of which lion, from the time it was received into currency, was to be six shillings and eight pence of the new coinage, and the half-lion three shillings and four pence. After the issue of the new coinage, the piece called the demy, which, it was declared, had now a current value of nine shillings, was to be received only for six shillings and eight pence, and the half-demy for three shillings and four pence.

The exact value of the foreign coins then current in Scotland was fixed at the same time; the French real being fixed at six shillings and eight pence; the salute, which is of the same weight as the new lion, at the same rate of six shillings and eight pence; the French crown, now current in France, having on each side of the shield a crowned fleur-de-lys, the Dauphin's crown, and the Flemish ridar, are, in like manner, to he estimated at the same value as the new lion. The English noble was fixed at thirteen shillings and four pence; the half-noble at six shillings and eight pence; the Flemish noble at twelve shillings and eight pence; and all the other kind of gold not included in the established currency was to have its value according to the agreement of the buyer and seller.

The master of the mint was made responsible for all gold and silver struck under his authority, until the warden had taken assay of it, and put it in his store; nor was any man to be obliged to receive this money should it be reduced by clipping; the same master having full power to select, and to punish for any misdemeanour, the coiners and strikers who worked under him, and who were by no means to be goldsmiths by profession, if any others could be procured.

Such were the regulations regarding the current money of Scotland, which were passed by the Scottish parliament in 1451; but it appears that, in the interval between this period and the present year 1456, the value affixed to the various coins above mentioned, including those of foreign countries as well as the new issue of lions, groats, and half-groats, had been found to be too low; so that the merchants and traders discovering that there was actually more bullion in the money than the statutory value fixed by parliament, kept it up and made it an article of export. That such was the case, appears evident from the expressions used by the parliament of 1456 with regard to the pieces called demys, the value of which we have seen fixed in 1451 at six shillings and eight pence. "And to the intent," it was remarked, "that the demys which are kept in hand should 'come out,' and have course through the realm, and remain within it, instead of being carried out of it, the parliament judged it expedient that the demy be cried to ten shillings." Upon the same principle, and to prevent the same occurrence, which was evidently viewed with alarm by the financialists of this period, a corresponding increase of the value of the other current coins, both of foreign countries and of home coinage, above that given them in 1451, was fixed by the parliament of 1456. Thus, the Henry English noble was fixed at twenty-two shillings; the French crown, Dauphin's crown, salute, and Flemish ridars, which had been fixed at six shillings and eight pence, were raised, in 1456, to eleven shillings; the new lion, from its first value of six shillings and eight pence, was raised to ten shillings; the new groat from eight pence to twelve pence; the half-groat from four pence to six pence. In conclusion, the lords and auditors of the exchequer were directed by the same parliament to examine with the utmost care, and make trial of the purity of the gold and silver, which was presented by the warden of the mint.

It was provided that, in time of fairs and public markets, none of the king's officers were to take distress, or levy any tax, upon the goods and wares of so small a value and bulk as to be carried to the fair either on men's backs, in their arms, or on barrows and sledges. On the other hand, where the merchandise was of such value and quantity, that it might be exposed for sale in great stalls, or in covered "oramys" or booths, which occupied room in the fair, a temporary tax was allowed to be levied upon the proprietors of these, which, however, was directed to be restored to the merchant at the court of the fair, provided he had committed no trespass, nor excited any disturbance during its continuance, f The enactments of this parliament upon the subject of the administration of justice, were so completely altered or modified in a subsequent meeting of the Estates, that at present it seems unnecessary to advert ta them.

In the meanwhile, the condition of the kingdom evidently improved, fostered by the care of the sovereign, whose talents, of no inferior order, were daily advancing into the strength and maturity of manhood. Awake to the infinite superiority of intellect in the clergy over the warlike but rude and uninformed body of his nobles, it was the wise policy of James to select from them his chief ministers, employing them in his foreign negotiations and the internal administration of the kingdom, as far as it was possible to do so without exciting resentment in the great class of his feudal barons. It was the consequence of this system, that a happy understanding, and a feeling of mutual affection and support, existed between the monarch and this numerous and influential class, so that, whilst the king maintained them in their independence, they supported him in his prerogative. Thus, at a provincial council which was convoked at Perth, where Thomas bishop of Aberdeen presided as conservator statutorum, it was declared, in opposition to the doctrine so strenuously insisted on by the Holy See, that the king had an undoubted right, by the ancient law and custom ofScotland, to the ecclesiastical patronage of the kingdom, by which it belonged to him to present to all benefices during the vacancy of the see. Whilst J am es, however, was thus firm in the assertion of those rights which he believed to be the unalienable property of the crown, he was careful to profess the greatest reverence in all spiritual matters for the authority of the Holy See; and, on the accession of Pius the Second, the celebrated iEneas Sylvius, to the papal crown, he appointed commissioners to proceed to Rome, and perform his usual homage to the sovereign pontiff.

It was about this same time that the crown received a valuable addition to its political strength, in the annexation of the earldom of Mar to the royal domains. Since the period of the failure of the heir-male in 1435, in the person of Alexander Stewart, natural son of the Earl of Buchan, brother of Robert the Third, this wide and wealthy earldom had been made the subject of litigation, being claimed by the crown, as ultimus hceres, by Robert lord Erskine, the descendant of Lady Ellen Mar, sister of Donald, twelfth Earl of Mar, and by Sir Robert Lyle of Duchal, who asserted his descent from a co-heiress. There can be no doubt that the claim of Erskine was just and legal. So completely, indeed, had this been established, that, in 1438, he had been served heir to Isabel countess of Mar; and in the due course of law, he assumed the title of Earl of Mar, and exercised the rights attached to this dignity. In consequence, however, of the act of the legislature already alluded to, which declared that no lands belonging to the king should be disposed of previous to his majority, without consent of the three Estates, the earl was prevented from attaining possession of his undoubted right; and now, that no such plea could be maintained, an assize of error was assembled in presence of the king, and, by a verdict, which appears flagrantly unjust, founded upon perversions of the facts and misconstructions of the ancient law of the country, the service of the jury was reduced; and the earldom being wrested from the hands of its hereditary lord, was declared to have devolved upon the king. The transaction, in which the rights of a private individual were sacrificed to the desire of aggrandizing the crown, casts a severe reflection upon the character of the king and his ministers, and reminds us too strongly of his father's conduct in appropriating the earldom of March. It was fortunate, however, for the monarch, that the house of Erskine was distinguished as much by private virtue as by hereditary loyalty; and that, although not insensible to the injustice with which they had been treated, they were willing rather to submit to the wrong than endanger the country by redressing it. In the meantime, James, apparently unvisited by any compunction, setr tled the noble territory which he had thus acquired upon his third son, John, whom he created Earl of Mar.

Soon after this, the clemency of the monarch was implored by one who, from the course of his former life, could scarcely expect that it should be extended in his favour. John lord of the isles and earl of Ross, a baron from his early years familiar with rebellion, and whose coalition with the Earls of Crawford and Douglas had, on a former occasion, almost shook the throne, being weakened by the death of Crawford, and the utter defeat of Douglas, became alarmed for the fate which might soon overtake him, and, by a submissive message, intreated the royal forgiveness, offering, as far as it was still left to him, to repair the wrongs he had inflicted. To this communication, the offended monarch at first refused to listen; because the suppliant, like Crawford, had not in person submitted himself unconditionally to his kingly clemency; but after a short time, James relented from the sternness of his resolution, and consented to extend to the humbled chief a period of probation, within which, if he should evince the reality of his repentance by some notable exploit, he was to be absolved from all the consequences of his rebellion, and reinstated in the royal favour. What notable service was performed by Ross history has not recorded; but his presence, three years subsequent to.this, at the siege of Roxburgh, and his quiescence during the interval, entitle us to presume that he was restored to the royal favour.

The aspect of affairs in England was now favourable to peace; and Henry the Sixth, with whom the Scottish monarch had always cultivated a friendly intercourse, having proposed a prolongation of the truce, by letters transmitted under the privy seal, James immediately acceded to his wishes. A desire for the tranquillity of his kingdom, an earnest wish to be united in the bonds of charity and love with all Christian princes, and a reverent obedience to the admonitions of the pope exhorting to peace with all the faithful followers of Christ, and to a strict union against the Turks and infidels, who were the enemies of the Catholic faith, were enumerated by the king as the motives by which he was actuated to extend the truce with England for the further space of four years, from the sixth of July, 1459, when the present truce terminated. Having thus provided for his security, for a considerable period, upon the side of England, James devoted his attention to the foreign political relations of his kingdom. An advantageous treaty was concluded by his ambassadors with John king of Castile and Leon. The same statesmen to whom this negotiation was intrusted were empowered to proceed to Denmark, and adjust the differences between Scotland and the northern potentate, upon the subject of the arrears due for the Western Isles and the kingdom of Man; whilst a representation was made, at the same time, to Charles the Seventh of France, the faithful ally of Scotland, that the period was now long past when the Scottish crown ought to have received delivery of the earldom of Xaintonge and lordship of Rochfort, which were stipulated to be conveyed to it in the marriage treaty between the Princess Margaret, daughter of James the First and Lewis the Dauphin of France. It appears by a subsequent record of a parliament of James the Third, that the French monarch had agreed to the demand, and put James in possession of the earldom.

It is impossible to understand the causes, or to trace clearly the consequences, of the events which at this period occurred in Scotland, without a careful attention to the political condition of the sister country, then torn by the commencement of the fatal contest between the houses of York and Lancaster. In the year 1459, a struggle had taken place amongst these fierce competitors for the possession of supreme power, which terminated in favour of Henry the Sixth, who expelled from the kingdom his enemy, the Duke of York, with whom the Earl of Douglas, on his first flight fromScotland, had entered into the strictest friendship. Previous to this, however, the Scottish renegade baron, ever versatile and selfish, observing the sinking fortunes of York, had embraced the service of the house of Lancaster, and obtained a renewal of his English pension, as a reward from Henry for his assistance against his late ally of York. James, at the same time, and prior to the flight of York to Ireland, had despatched an embassy to Henry, for the purpose of conferring with him upon certain "secret matters," which of course it is vain to look for in the instructions delivered to the ambassadors; but Lesley, a historian of respectable authority, informs us that, at a mutual conference between the English and Scottish commissioners, a treaty was concluded, by which Henry, in return for the assistance to be given him by the Scottish king, agreed to make over to him the county of Northumberland, along with Durham and some neighbouring districts, which in former times, it is well known, had been the property of the Scottish crown. We are not to be astonished that the English ambassadors, the Bishop of Durham and Beaumont great-chamberlain of England, should have been required to keep those stipulations concealed which, had they transpired, must have rendered Henry's government so highly unpopular; and it may be remarked that this secret treaty, which arose naturally out of the prior political connexions between James and Henry, explains, the causes of the rupture of the truce, and the subsequent invasion of England by the Scottish monarch, an event which, as it appears in the narrative of our popular historians, is involved in much obscurity.

In consequence of this secret agreement, and irritated by the disturbances which the Duke of York and his adherents, in contempt of the existing truce, perpetually excited upon the Scottish Borders, James, in the month of August 1459, assembled a formidable army, which, including camp followers and attendants, composing nearly one half of the whole, mustered sixty thousand strong. With this force he broke into England, and in the short space of a week, won and destroyed seventeen towers and castles, ravaging Northumberland with fire and sword, pushing forward to Durham, and wasting the neighbouring territories with that indiscriminate havoc, which, making little distinction between Yorkists or Lancastrians, threatened to injure, rather than to assist, the government of his ally the English king. Alarmed, accordingly, at this desolating progress, Henry despatched a messenger to the Scottish camp, who, in an interview of the monarch, explained to him that the disturbances which had excited his resentment originated solely in the insolence of the Yorkists; but that he trusted to be able to put down his enemies within a short period, without calling upon his faithful ally for that assistance, which, if his affairs were less prosperous, he would willingly receive. In the meantime he besought him to cease from that invasion of his dominions, in which, however unwillingly, his friends as well as his foes were exposed to plunder, and to draw back his army once more into his own kingdom. To this demand James readily assented, and after a brief stay in England, recrossed the Borders, and brought his expedition to a conclusion.-f"

Immediately after his retreat, an English army, of which the principal leaders were the Duke of York and the Earl of Salisbury, and which included various barons of both factions, approached the Scottish marches; but the meditated invasion was interrupted by the dissensions amongst the leaders; and a host, consisting of more than forty thousand men, fell to pieces, and dispersed without performing anything of consequence.£ To account for so singular an occurrence, it must be recollected, that at this moment a temporary and hollow agreement had been concluded between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, in which, under the outward appearance of amity, the causes of mortal dissension were working as deeply as before, so that, whilst it was natural to find the two factions attempting to coalesce for the purpose of inflicting vengeance upon the Scots, it was equally to be expected that the king and the Lancastrians, who now possessed the supreme power, should be little inclined to carry matters to extremities. A few months, however, once more saw England involved in the misery of civil war; and although Henry was totally defeated by the Earl of Salisbury, who commanded the Yorkists, in the battle of Bloreheath, yet his fortunes seemed again to revive upon the desertion of the Duke of York by his army at Ludford Field; and James, rejoicing in the success of his ally, immediately despatched his ambassadors, the Bishops of Glasgow and Aberdeen, with the Abbots of Holyrood, Melrose, and Dunfermline, and the Lords Livingston and Avendale, to meet with the commissioners of England, confirm the truces between the kingdoms, and congratulate the English monarch on his successes against his enemies.

But short was the triumph of the unfortunate Henry: and within the course of a single month the decisive victory gained by the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick at Northampton, at once destroyed the hopes of his party; reduced himself to the state of a captive in the hands of his implacable enemies; and saw his queen and the prince his son compelled to seek a retreat in Scotland. It was now time for James seriously to exert himself in favour of his ally; and the assistance which, under a more favourable aspect of his fortunes, had been deprecated, was now anxiously implored. Nor was the Scottish monarch insensible to the entreaty, or slow to answer the call. He received the fugitive queen and the youthful prince with much affection, assigned them a residence and allowance suitable to their rank; and, having issued his writs for the assembly of his vassals, and commanded the Earl of Huntley, his lieutenant-general, to superintend the organizing of the troops, he determined upon an immediate invasion of England. Previous, however, to this great expedition, which ended so fatally for the king, there had been a meeting of the three Estates, which lasted for a considerable period, and from whose united wisdom and experience proceeded a series of regulations which relate almost to every branch of the civil government of the country. To these, which present an interesting picture of Scotland in the fifteenth century even in the short sketch to which the historian must confine himself, we now, for a few moments, direct our attention.

The first subject which came before parliament is entitled, concerning the "article of the session," and related to the formation of committees of parliament for the administration of justice. It was directed that the Lords of the Session should sit three times in the year, for forty days at a time, in Edinburgh, Perth, and Aberdeen; and that the court or committee which was to sit should be composed of nine judges, who were to have votes in the decision of causes, three being chosen from each Estate, along with the clerk of the register. Their first sitting was directed to begin at Aberdeen on the fifteenth of June, and continue thenceforward for forty days; the second session was to commence at Perth on the fifth of October, and the third at Edinburgh on the thirteenth of February. The names of the persons to be selected from the clergy, the barons, and the burghers, as the different members of the session, were then particularly enumerated for the three several periods; and the sheriff was directed to be ready to receive them on their entry into the town, and undergo such trouble or charges as might be found necessary. In a succeeding statute, however, it was observed that, considering the shortness of the period for which the Lords of Session are to hold their Court, and the probability that they will not be called upon to undertake such a duty more than once every seven years, they ought, out of their benevolence, to pay their own costs; and upon the conclusion of the three yearly sessions, the king and his council promise to select other lords from the three Estates, who should sit in the same manner as the first, at such places as were most convenient.

The next subject to which the parliament directed their attention, regarded the defence of the country and the arming of the lieges. "Wapinschawings," or musters, in which the whole disposable force of a district assembled for their exercise in arms, and the inspection of their weapons, were directed to be held by the lords and barons, spiritual as well as temporal, four times in the year. The games of the football and the golf were to be utterly abolished. Care was to be taken, that adjoining to each parish-church a pair of butts should be made, where shooting was to be practised every Sunday: every man was to shoot six shots at the least; and if any person refused to attend, he was to be found liable in a fine of two pence, to be given to those who came to the bow-marks, or "wapinschawings," for drink money. This mode of instruction was to be used from Pasch to Allhallowmas; so that by the next midsummer it was expected that all persons would be ready, thus instructed and accoutred. In every head town of the shire, there were to be a good bow-maker, and "a fledger" or arrow-maker. These tradesmen were to be furnished by the town with the materials for their trade, according as they might require them; and if the parish was large, according to its size, there were to be three or four or five bow-marks set up; so that every man within the parish, who was within fifty, and past twelve years of age, should be furnished with his weapons,and practise shooting; whilst those men above this age, or past threescore, were directed to amuse themselves with such honest games as were best adapted to their time of life, excepting always the golf and football.

There followed a minute and interesting sumptuarvlaw,- relative to the impoverishment of the realm by the sumptuous apparel of men and women; which, as presenting a vivid picture of the dresses of the times, I shall give as nearly as possible in the words of the original. It will perhaps be recollected, that in a parliament of James the First, held in the year 1429,f the same subject had attracted the attention of the legislature; and the present necessity of a revision of the laws against immoderate costliness in apparel, indicates an increasing wealth and prosperity in the country. "Seeing," it declared, "that each estate has been greatly impoverished through the sumptuous clothing of men and women, especially within the burghs, and amongst the commonalty 'to landwart,' the lords thought it speedful that restriction of such vanity should be made in this manner. First, no man within burgh that lived by merchandise, except he be a person of dignity, as one of the aldermen or bailies, or other good worthy men of the council of the town, should either himself wear, or allow his wife to wear, clothes of silk, or costly scarlet gowns, or furring of mertricksand all were directed to take especial care "to make their wives and daughters to be habited in a manner correspondent to their estate; that is to say, on their heads short curches, with little hoods, such as are used in Flanders, England, and other countries; and as to the gowns, no woman should wear mertricks or letvis, or tails of unbefitting length, nor trimmed with furs, except on holydays." At the same time, it was ordered, "that poor gentlemen living in the country, whose property was within forty pounds, of old extent, should regulate their dress according to the same standard; whilst amongst the lower classes, no labourers or husbandmen were to wear, on their work days, any other stuff than grey or white cloth, and on holydays, light blue, green, or red—their wives dressing correspondently, and using curches of their own making. The stuff they wore was not to exceed the price of forty pence the ell. No woman was to come to the kirk or market with her face 'mussalit,' or covered, so that she might not be known, under the penalty of forfeiting the curch. And as to the clerks, no one was to wear gowns of scarlet, or furring of mertricks, unless he were a dignified ofiicer in a cathedral or college-church, or a nobleman or doctor, or a person having an income of two hundred marks. These orders touching the dresses of the community, were to be immediately published throughout the country, and carried into peremptory and rigorous execution." 

Other regulations of the same parliament are worthy of notice; some of them evincing a slight approach towards liberty, in an attention to the interests of the middle and lower classes of the people, and a desire to get loose of the grievous shackles imposed by the feudal system upon many of the most important branches of national prosperity; others, on the contrary,imposing restrictions upon trade and manufactures, in that spirit of legislative interference which, for many ages after this, retarded commercial progress, and formed a blot upon the statute book of this country, as well as of England. With regard to "feu-farms," and their leases, it was thought expedient by the parliament that the king should begin and set a good example to the rest of his barons, so that if any estate happened to be in "ward," in the hands of the crown, upon which leases had been granted, the tenants in such farms should not be removed, but remain upon the land, paying to the king the rent which had been stipulated during the currency of the lease; and, in like manner, where any prelate, baron, or freeholder, wished to set either the whole or a part of his land in "feu-farm,'the king was to be obliged to ratify such "assedations," or leases. With regard to "regalities," and the privileges connected with them, a grievance essentially arising out of the feudal system, it was declared that all rights and freedoms belonging to them should be interpreted by the strictest law, and preserved, according to the letter of their founding charter; and that any lord of regality who abused his privileges, to the breaking of the king's laws and the injury of the country, should be rigorously punished.

In the same parliament, it was made a subject of earnest request to the king, that he would take into consideration the great miseries inflicted upon men of every condition, but especially upon his poor commons, by the manner of holding his itinerant chamberlain courts; and that, with the advice of his three Estates now assembled, some speedy remedy might be provided. Another heavy grievance, removed at this time, was a practice which prevailed during the sitting of parliament, and of the session, by which the king's constables, and other officers, were permitted to levy a tax upon the merchants and tradesmen who then brought their goods to market, encouraged by the greater demand for their commodities. This was declared henceforth illegal, unless the right of exaction belonged to the constable "of fee," for which he must show his charter.-fAn attempt was made in the same parliament to abolish that custom of entering into "bands or leagues," of which we have seen so many pernicious consequences in the course of this history. It was declared, that "within the burghs throughout the realm, no bands or leagues were to be permitted, and no rising or commotion amongst the commons, with the object of hindering the execution of the common law of the realm, unless at the express commandment of their head officers;" and that no persons who dwelt within burghs should either enter into " man-rent," or ride, or "rout" in warlike apparel, with any leader except the king, or his officers, or the lord of the burgh within which they dwelt, under the penalty of forfeiting their lives, and having their goods confiscated to the king.

With regard to those lawless and desperate, or, as they are termed in the act, "masterful persons, who did not scruple to seize other men's lands by force of arras, and detain them from their owners," application was directed to be instantly made to the sheriff, who, under pain of being dismissed from his office, was to proceed to the spot and expel such occupants from the ground, or, on their refusal, commit them to the king's ward; a service easily prescribed by the wisdom of the three Estates, but, as they were probably well aware, not to be carried into execution, except at the peril of the life of the officer to whom it was intrusted. All persons, of every degree, barons, lords spiritual, or simple freeholders, were enjoined when they attended the justice ayres, or sheriff courts, to come in sober and quiet manner, with no more attendants than composed their daily household, and taking care, that on entering their inn or lodging, they laid their harness and warlike weapons aside, using for the time nothing but their knives; and where any persons at deadly feud should happen to meet at such assemblies, the sheriff was directed to take pledges from both, binding them to keep the peace; whilst, for the better regulation of the country at the period when justice ayres were held, and in consequence of the great and mixed multitude which was then collected together, the king's justice was commanded to search for and apprehend all masterful beggars, all idle sorners, all itinerant bards and feigned fools, and either to banish them from the country, or commit them to the common prison. Lit, or dye, was to be "cried up,n and no litstar or dyer was to follow the trade of a draper, or to be permitted to buy or sell cloth; whilst regarding the estate of merchandise, and for the purpose of restricting the multitude of "sailors," it was the unanimous opinion of the clergy, the barons, and the king, that no person should be allowed to sail or trade in ships, but such as were of good reputation and ability; that they should have at the least three serplaiths of their own goods, or the same intrusted to them; and that those who traded by sea in merchandise, ought to be freemen and indwellers within burghs.

In the same parliament, some striking regulations are met with regarding the encouragement extended to agriculture, and the state of the woods and forests throughout the country. Every man possessed of a plough and of eight oxen, was commanded to sow, at the least, each year, a firlot of wheat, half a firlot of peas, and forty beans, under the penalty of ten shillings to the baron of the land where he dwelt, as often as he was found in fault; and if the baron sowed not the same proportions of grain, peas, and beans, in his own domains, he was to pay ten shillings to the king for his own offence, and forty shillings if he neglected to levy the statutory penalty against his husbandmen. The disappearance of the wood of Scotlandunder the reign of James the First, and the attention of the legislature to this subject, have already been noticed.^ It appears from one of the provisions of this parliament, held by his successor, that some anxiety upon this subject was still entertained by the legislature; for wo find it declared that, "regarding the plantation of woods and hedges, and the sowing of broom, the lords thought it advisable that the king should advise all his freeholders, both spiritual and temporal, to make it a provision in their Whitsunday's lease, that all tenants should plant woods and trees, make hedges, and sow broom, in places best adapted, according to the nature of the farm, under a penalty to be fixed by the proprietor; and that care should be taken that the enclosures and hedges were not constructed of dry stakes driven into the ground, and wattled, or of dry worked or planed boards, but of living trees, which might grow and be plentiful in the land:''

With regard to the preservation of such birds and wild fowls as " are gainful for the sustentation of man," namely, partridge, plover, wild-ducks, and such like, it was declared, that no one should destroy their nests or their eggs, or slay them in moulting time when unable to fly; and that, on the contrary, all manner of persons should be encouraged, by every method that could be devised, utterly to extirpate all "fowls of reiff," such as eras, buzzards, gleds, mytalls, rooks, crows, wherever they might be found to build and harbour; "for," say the three Estates, "the slaughter of these will cause the multiplication of great multitudes of divers kinds of wild fowls for man's sustentation." In the same spirit, red-fish, meaning salmon and grilse, were forbidden to be taken in close time, under a fine of forty pounds; and no manner of vessel, creel, or other contrivance, was to be used for the purpose of intercepting the spawn or smelt in their passage to the sea, under the like penalty.

Touching the destruction of the wolf, it was enjoined by the parliament, that where such animals were known to haunt, the sheriff, orthe bailies of the district, should assemble the population three times in the year, between St Mark's day and Lammas, which is the time of the whelps; and whoever refused to attend the muster should be fined a wedder, as is contained in the old act of James the First on this subject. He who slew a wolf was to be entitled to a penny from every household in the parish where it was killed, upon bringing the head to the sheriff; and if he brought the head of a fox, he was to receive six pence from the same officer. The well-known enactment passed in the reign of James the First, against leasing-making, or the crime of disseminating false reports, by which discord might be created between the king and his subjects, was confirmed in its full extent; and the statutes of the same prince regarding the non-attendance of freeholders in parliament whose holding was under forty pounds; the use of one invariable " measure" throughout the realm; the restriction of " muir burning" after the month of March, till the corn had been cut down; and the publication of the acts of the legislature, by copies given to the sheriffs and commissaries of burghs, which were to be openly proclaimed and read throughout their counties and communities, were repeated, and declared to be maintained in full force.

The enactments of the parliament concluded by an affectionate exhortation and prayer, which it would injure to give in any words but its own: "Since," it declared, "God of his grace had sent our sovereign lord such progress and prosperity, that all his rebels and breakers of justice were removed out of his realm, and no potent or masterful party remained there to cause any disturbance, provided his highness was inclined himself to promote the peace and common profit of the realm, andto see equal justice distributed amongst his subjects; his three Estates, with all humility, exhorted and required his highness so diligently to devote himself to the execution of these acts and statutes above written, that God may be pleased with him, and that all his subjects may address their prayers for him to God, and give thanks to their heavenly Father, for his goodness in sending them such a prince to be their governor and defender." Such was the solemn conclusion of the last parliament of James of which any material record has been preserved; for, although we have certain evidence of three meetings of the great council of the nation subsequent to this, the fact is only established by insulated charters, which convey no information of their particular proceedings. The peroration is affectionate, but marked, also, with a tone of honest freedom approaching to remonstrance. It might almost lead us to suspect that James's late unjustifiable proceedings, regarding the earldom of Mar, had occasioned some unquiet surmisings in the minds of his nobility, that he possibly intended to use the excuse afforded him by the reiterated rebellion oi the Douglases to imitate the designs of his father, and to attempt to complete the scheme for the suppression of the aristocracy of the kingdom, which had cost that monarch his life.

In the meantime, however, the king assembled his army. An acute writer has pronounced it difficult to discover the pretences or causes which induced James to infringe the truce ;f" but we have only to look to the captivity of Henry the Sixth, the triumph of the Yorkists in the battle of Northampton, and the subsequent flight of the Queen of England to the Scottish court, to account satisfactorily for the invasion. J ames was bound, both by his personal friendship and connexion with Henry, by a secret treaty, already alluded to, and by his political relations with France, the ally of the house of Lancaster, to exert himself for its restoration to the throne; and it has already been shown that, by the articles of the treaty, his assistance was not to go unrewarded. As long, however, as Henry and his energetic queen had the prospect of reducing the opposition of the house of York, and, by their unassisted efforts, securing a triumph over their enemies, the invasion of the Scottish monarch would have detracted from the popularity of their party, and thrown an air of odium even over their success; but now that the king was a captive in the hands of his enemies, and his queen a fugitive in a foreign land, the assistance of James, and the fulfilment of the stipulations of the treaty, were anxiously required. The only key to the complicated understanding of the transactions of Scotland during the wars of the Two Roses, is to recollect that the hostilities of James were directed, not against England, but against the successes of the house of York.

Since the calamitous battle of Durham, and the captivity of David the Second, a period embracing upwards of a hundred years, the important frontier fortress of Roxburgh had been in the possession of England. It was now commanded by Neville lord Fauconberg, a connexion of the Earl of Warwick, the principal supporter of the cause of the Yorkists, and James determined to commence his campaign by besieging it in person. On being joined, accordingly, by the Earl of Huntley, his lieutenant-general, and the Earl of Angus, who had risen into great estimation with his sovereign from the cordial assistance which he had given in the suppression of the rebellion of Douglas, the king proceeded across the Borders, at the head of an army which was probably superior in numbers to that which he had lately conducted against England. He was joined also by the Earl of Ross, to whom we have seen that he had extended a conditional pardon, and who, eager to prove himself worthy of an entire restoration to the royal favour, came to the camp with a powerful body of his fierce and warlike vassals. The siege was now opened, but it was destined to receive a sudden and melancholy interruption. The king, who had carried along with the army some of those rude pieces of ordnance which began now to be employed in Scottish war, f proceeded, in company with the Earl of Angus, and others of his nobility, to examine a battery which had begun to play upon the town. Of the cannon which composed it, one was a great gun of Flemish manufacture, which had been purchased by James the First, but little employed during his pacific reign. It was constructed of longitudinal bars of iron, fixed with iron hoops, which were made tight in a very rude manner, by strong oaken wedges. This piece, from the ignorance of the engineer, had been over-charged, and as the king stood near, intently observing the direction of the guns, it unfortunately exploded, and struck the monarch with one of its massy wooden wedges in the body. The blow was followed by instant death, having fallen upon the mortal region of the groin, and broken the thigh; whilst the Earl of Angus, who stood near, was severely wounded by the same fragment.-f

An event so lamentable, which cut off their prince in the sight of his army, whilst he was yet in the flower of his strength, and in the very entrance of manhood, was accompanied by universal regret and sorrow; and, perhaps, there is no more decisive proof of the affection with which the nobility were disposed to regard the monarch, thus untimely snatched from them, than the first step which they adopted, in despatching a message to the court, requiring the immediate attendance of the queen, with a strict injunction to bring her eldest son, the prince, now king, along with her.J Nor was the queen-mother, although overpowered by the intelligence of her husband's death, of a character which, in the over indulgence of feminine sorrow, was likely to forget the great duties which she owed to her son. Attended by a small suite, in which were some of the prelates who formed the wisest counsellors of the deceased monarch, she travelled night and day to Roxburgh, and soon presented herself in the midst of the army, clothed in her weeds, and holding in her hand the little prince, then a boy of only eight years of age, whom, with tears, she introduced to them as their king. The sight was well calculated to arouse to a high pitch the feelings of loyalty and devotedness; and availing herself of the enthusiasm of the moment, she, with a magnanimity and vigour which did her honour, besought the nobles to continue the siege, and earnestly deprecated the idea of breaking up the leaguer, or disbanding the army, before they had made themselves master of a fortress, the possession of which was of the first importance to Scotland. Heart-broken as she was with the loss of her beloved lord, she would rather celebrate his obsequies, she said, by the accomplishment of a victory which he had so much at heart, than waste the time in vain regrets and empty lamentations. And such was the effect of her appeal, that the leaders of the army, and the soldiers themselves, catching the ardour with which she was animated, instantly recommenced the attack, and, pressing the assault with the most determined fury, carried the castle by storm, on the very day of her arrival in the camp.

It must be recollected that James had not completed his thirtieth year when he met his death in this untimely manner; and of course the greater portion of his life and reign was occupied by a minority, during which the nation was in that state of internal disorganization so lamentably frequent where such an event occurs under a feudal government. Taking this into consideration, we need not hesitate to pronounce him a prince of unusual vigour and capacity; and perhaps the eulogium of Buchanan, no obsequious granter of praise to kings, is one of the strongest proofs of this assertion. His wisdom in the internal administration of his kingdom, was conspicuously marked by the frequency with which he assembled his parliament; and by a series of zealous and anxious, if not always enlightened, laws for the regulation of the commerce, and the encouragement of

the agriculture of the country, for the organization of the judicial departments, and the protection of the middling and lower classes of his subjects, whether farmers, artisans, or merchants. His genius in war was not exhibited in any great military triumphs, for he was cut off in the outset of his career; but the success with which he put down, by force of arms, the repeated rebellions of some of the most powerful of his nobility; the attention which he paid to the arming of his subjects, and the encouragement of warlike exercises amongst the people; his directions to his higher nobles to devote themselves to the study of artillery, and the construction of cannon; and the ardour with which he appears to have engaged in his first war with England, although it does not justify the hyperbolical panegyric of Abercromby and Johnson, entitles us to believe, that in a military contest with England, the national honour would not have been sullied in his hands. It is not improbable, however, that, had ho lived a little longer, his maturer wisdom and experience would have considered even a successful war, which was not undertaken for the purposes of national defence, a severe calamity, rather than a subject of glory or congratulation.

His policy of employing the most able and enlightened amongst the clergy as his chief ministers, to whom he intrusted his foreign negotiations, as well as tho chief offices in the judicial and financial departments of the government, was borrowed from the example of his father, but improved upon, and more exclusively followed, by the wisdom of the son; whilst his discrimination in selecting for the military enterprises in which he was engaged, such able commanders as Huntley and Angus, and that judicious union of firm ness and lenity by which ho ultimately disarmed of their enmity, and attached to his interest, such fierce spirits as the Earl of Crawford and the Lord of the Isles, do equal honour to the soundness of his judgment, and to the kindly feelings of his heart. That he was naturally of a violent and ungovernable temper, the unjustifiable assassination of Douglas too lamentably demonstrated; but the catastrophe appears to have made the deepest impression upon a youthful mind, which, though keen, was of an affectionate temperament fitted to feel deeply the revulsion of remorse; and the future lenity of a reign fertile in rebellion, is to be traced perhaps to the consequences of his crime, and the lessons taught him by his repentance.

In estimating his character, another subject for praise is to be found in the skill with which he divided into separate factions an aristocracy which, under any general or permanent combination, would have been far too powerful for the crown; in the art by which he held out to them the prospect of rising upon the ruins of their associates in rebellion, and, by a judicious distribution of the estates and the dignities which were set afloat by treason, induced them to destroy, or at least to weaken and neutralise, the strength of each other. This policy, under the management of such able ministers as Kennedy and Crichton, was his chief instrument in carrying to a successful conclusion one of his most prominent enterprises, the destruction of the immense and overgrown power of the house of Douglas, an event which is in itself sufficient to mark his reign as an important era in the history of the country.

The person of this prince was robust, and well adapted or those warlike and knightly exercises in which he is said to have excelled. His countenance was mild and intelligent, but deformed by a large red mark on the cheek, which has given him, amongst contemporary chronicles, the surname of "James with the fiery face." By his queen he left three sons: James, his successor, Alexander duke of Albany, and John earl of Mar; and two daughters: Mary, who took to her first husband Lord Boyd, and afterwards Lord Hamilton, and Margaret, who married Sir William Crichton, son of the chancellor. From a charter, which is quoted by Sir James Balfour, it would appear that he had another son, named David, created Earl of Moray, who, along with a daughter, died in early infancy.