The sustained and powerful remonstrances of Henry at the Court of France at length produced an effect. Albany remained nominally Regent, and French garrisons were maintained in Dunbar and Dumbarton; but he was obliged to leave Scotland. Margaret and her husband had previously been enabled to return, and the country was governed by a congress of deputies, consisting of Angus, the Earls of Arran, Huntley, and Argyle, and the Archbishops of St Andrew's and Glasgow. This arrangement was a compromise which could be of no long continuance. The Archbishop of St Andrew's, James Beton, was devoted to France; Angus was true to England; while in spite of a superficial reconciliation, a blood- feud, deep and ineffaceable, divided the Douglases and the Hamiltons. For centuries the law in Scotland had been too weak to reach the heads of powerful clans or families. The great nobles avenged their own injuries by their own swords; and, where justice could only be executed by crime, each act of violence provoked fresh retaliation. A plot was laid by the Earl of Arran, supported by Beton, to seize Angus in Edinburgh. The latter had with him but a small train of half-armed followers, not more than eighty or a hundred; but they were all knights and gentlemen; they were popular in the city; and, when the fray commenced, the citizens, seeing them defending themselves with their swords, reached them lances out of the windows.[1] The Douglases gained the advantage; and after
- ↑ Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol. i p. 62.
