attempted, but failed, to take the castle of Dalkeith. The civil war between the king and the Douglases was carried on with vigour in the north by their ally, the fifth Earl of Crawford, who was defeated at Brechin by the Earl of Huntly as the king's lieutenant, a character which, the contemporary chronicle hints, gave him a larger following. Archibald, earl of Moray, another brother of the earl, ravaged Huntly's lands of Strathbogie, in revenge for which Huntly harried those of Moray on his return from Brechin. A parliament was summoned, which met in Edinburgh on 12 June, when the Earl of Crawford and Lord Lindsay, two of the chief allies of Douglas, were forfeited. While it sat a letter signed with the seals of Sir James Douglas, the Earl of Ormonde, and Sir James Hamilton, was put by night on the door of the parliament house, disowning the king's authority and denouncing the privy council as traitors. The three estates, meeting in separate houses, answered this defiance by a declaration that the late earl did not come to Stirling under a safe-conduct, and that his death was the just penalty of his treason. The chief supporters of the king were rewarded with titles, especially the Crichtons, Sir James, the eldest son of the chancellor, being created Earl of Moray, a dignity from which he had been unjustly kept, for he had married the elder daughter of the last earl, but the influence of Douglas had procured it for his brother Archibald, the husband of her younger sister. The parliament was then continued for fifteen days, when a general levy of the lieges, both burgesses and landed men, was summoned. They came to the number of thirty thousand to Pentland Muir, and with the king at their head marched through Peeblesshire, Selkirkshire, and Dumfriesshire, doing no good, says the chronicler, but wasting the country through which they passed, even lands belonging to the king's friends. The object, no doubt, was to overawe the Douglases. On 28 Aug. Earl James made a submission at Douglas, by which he bound himself to renounce all enmity against those who caused his brother's death, to do his duty as warden of the marches, and to relinquish the earldom of Wigton and lordship of Stewarton unless voluntarily restored by the queen. There followed a curious, and on the part of the king imprudent, return for this submission, a request to the pope to allow the earl to marry his brother's widow, the Maid of Galloway, for which a dispensation was granted by Nicholas V on 26 Feb. 1453. It is stated by Hume of Godscroft, on the authority of a metrical history of the Douglases which has not been preserved, that the marriage with her former husband had never been consummated, and this is supported by the terms of the dispensation, which is printed from the original in the Vatican by Andrew Stuart in his ‘Genealogical History of the Stuarts.’ On 18 April the earl was appointed one of the commissioners to make a truce with England. This brought Douglas again in contact with the English court, with which he, like his brother, kept up a constant intrigue. Before going to England, for which he received a safe-conduct on 22 May, the earl visited an ally in an opposite quarter, the Earl of Ross and Lord of the Isles in Knapdale, exchanging gifts of wine, silk, and English cloth, for which he received mantles, probably of fur, in return, as signs of their alliance against the king. Another Douglas, a bastard of the fifth earl, about the same time joined Donald Balloch of the Isles in attacking by sea Inverkip in Renfrewshire and the Cumbrae Isles, and casting down Brodick Castle in Arran. Douglas appears, after making his peace with the king, to have paid a visit to England, for on 17 June 1453 Malise, earl of Strathearn, who had remained there as one of the hostages for James I, was released on the petition of the Earl of Douglas and Lord Hamilton, and on 19 Feb. 1454 certain disbursements were allowed to Garter king-at-arms for meeting Douglas on the border and attendance on Lord Hamilton in London and elsewhere, but the terms of the entries leave it doubtful whether Douglas himself had proceeded further than the border.
In the beginning of 1455 hostilities between the king and Douglas broke out anew. In March the king cast down the castle of Inveravon in Linlithgowshire, then marched to Glasgow, where he collected the men of the west and a band of highlanders, and passed to Lanark. There an engagement took place, in which the adherents of Douglas were routed, and Douglasdale, Avondale, as well as the lands of Lord Hamilton, were laid waste. The king then crossed to Edinburgh and thence to Ettrick Forest, which he reduced by compelling all the Douglas vassals to join him by a threat of burning their castles. Having thus subdued the two districts in which the Douglases were strongest, he returned to Lothian, and set siege to Abercorn, an important but isolated castle of the family. There Lord Hamilton, by the advice of his uncle James Livingstone, chamberlain of Scotland—Douglas having, it is said, imprudently told him he could do without his aid—came and submitted to the royal mercy, obtained a pardon, but was put in ward at Roslin. This desertion of his principal sup-
