dynastic intrigues during more than two centuries and gave impetus to the Reformation. Never was marriage so fruitful in tragedies as the wedding of Lord Hamilton and the princess Mary.
There followed ecclesiastical feuds, centring round Patrick Graham, the new bishop of St Andrews. These, to the present day, have been misunderstood (see The Archbishops of St Andrews, by Herkless and Hannay, for details). It is not possible here to unravel the problem, but documents at St Andrews, now printed, demonstrate the error of the historians who regard Graham as a holy man, persecuted because he was half a premature Protestant. At Rome he procured, without royal or national assent, the archbishopric for St Andrews; he became insane and was succeeded by the learned Schevez. Glasgow also became an archbishopric.
James now followed a policy in which Louis XI. succeeded, but he himself failed utterly. He surrounded himself with men of low birth, such as Ireland, a scholar and diplomatist; Rogers, a great musician; and Cochrane, apparently an architect or sculptor—he is styled a mason or stone-cutter. This aroused the wrath of the nobles and the two princes of the blood, Albany and Mar. Mar was arrested on a charge of magic, and died, whether murdered or from natural causes is uncertain, while his accomplices are said to have been the protomartyrs of witchcraft, scarcely heard of in Scotland till the reformers began to burn old women. Albany was arrested for treason, escaped to France, and was under sentence of forfeiture.
Relations with England were now unfriendly, and parliament, in March 1482, denounced Edward IV. as “the reiver, Edward.” By May the Douglases brought Albany from France to England, where he swore fealty to Edward, and was to be given the Scottish crown. The duke of Gloucester (later Richard III.) marched north and took Berwick, while the earl of Angus, with other nobles, hanged Cochrane and other favourites of James over Lauder bridge. The domestic mutiny and the English war ended in a compromise, Albany being restored to office and estates. He took Edinburgh castle, in which James was interned, and he was made lieutenant-general. Yet, aided by Angus, he continued to intrigue with Edward for the gift of the Scottish crown. By March 1483 he was reduced, we know not how; he laid down his office, and was forbidden to approach the court. On the death of Edward IV. he lost his chief supporter (9th of April 1483), and was forfeited while absent in England. He and Douglas entered Scotland with a small force (22nd of July 1484), and were defeated at Lochmaben: Albany escaped, went to France, and was slain in a tournament, leaving issue, but Douglas was captured and interned till his death in the monastery of Lindores.
Our information for this period is so scanty that we do not know how James reached his new position, how he overcame Albany and his other rebels. At peace with England, and allied with France, he quarrelled with the church, and it was decreed that the clergy who obtained benefices from Rome were guilty of treason. He planned a set of royal marriages with England, and this was the ground of his subjects' charge against him of servility to England. “James IV. and James V. are constantly upbraided for not doing the very things which James III. is execrated for having done,” namely, securing peace and amity with their powerful neighbour. James III. “died in his enemies' day,” and such accounts as we have of him are written by the partisans of his unruly nobles, Argyll, Lennox and Angus.
They secured the crown prince, James, now aged fifteen, their motive being that under James III. the guilt of their murders and rebellion still hung over their heads. The Estates refused to give them an amnesty for seven years; and the arch rebel, Angus Bell the Cat, with Argyll, the young prince, Lennox and other malcontents, declared that he was deposed, and proclaimed his son as his successor and Argyll as chancellor. Doing what they falsely accused James of having done, they sent, or obtained from England leave to send, members of their party to intrigue with Henry VII. (1st of May 1488). After a half reconciliation, James marched in force to Stirling, the key of the north, but the treacherous commander of the castle, Shaw of Sauchie, held the castle against him. James and his leaders, Atholl and Huntly, with their Stewarts and Gordons, and the levies of burgesses, and the mounted gentry of Fife, encountered the wild border spearmen of Hepburn and Home and the Galloway men, the whole being led by Angus and the rebel prince at Sauchie burn, near Bannockburn. How it chanced we know not; James's horse seems to have run away and thrown him (he was a bad horseman), and the story goes that he was taken into a cottage and stabbed by a priest. In fact, as his rebels put it, “he happinit to be slain” at Beaton's mill. He was accused of having accumulated great treasures. They were never found, or, if found, never accounted for by the finders.
His real history remains unknown; we have only Ferrerius, who is vague, and the late and slanderous gossip of the writers of the Reformation. We know that James was Clement; that the middle and lower classes stood by him; that he was a great amateur in the arts; that he was betrayed again and again by those of his own house, finally by his own son. A hideous tale is told by Buchanan against his private morals, but it is certainly inaccurate in detail, and is uncorroborated, while it appears to turn on a confusion between an alleged royal mistress, “the Daisy,” and Margaret (Daisy), the king's own sister. It is clear to any reader of Ferrerius, Lesley and Buchanan that they all drew from a common source, now unknown, and this source may well have been a chronicle inspired by James's enemies. James III. of Scotland has been almost as much the butt of slanderous charges as the Jacobite James III. of England and VIII. of Scotland, “The Old Pretender.”
With James IV. we enter on the modern history of Scotland. The king escaped the evils of a long minority, was a “free king” James IV. and managed his own policy. He was tall, handsome, strong and recklessly brave. He inherited his father's love of art and of nascent science; but this fault was forgiven him, as his manners were popular, his horsemanship good, and his bearing frank and free. The early Tudor policy of Henry VII. was not to make open war on Scotland, but to intrigue secretly, especially with the treacherous Douglas, earl of Angus, and with Ramsay, earl of Bothwell under James III., but soon dispossessed. They schemed to kidnap the king as vainly as Henry VIII. later planned to kidnap many of his foreign opponents. Under James IV. the houses of Hepburn of Hailes, ancestor of Queen Mary's Bothwell; of the Huntly Gordons; and of the Kers of Ferniehirst and Cessford, rose into new importance; while the Huntlys and Argylls were entrusted with the maintenance of order among the fighting clans of the west and north. They aggrandized themselves at the expense of the Macleans, Macdonalds, Camerons and Clan Chattan, but their sway was far from being peaceful and orderly.
The king, reckless as he was, had more than his share of the Stuart melancholy. His parricidal rebellion lay heavy on his conscience; he practised asceticism at intervals, and dreamed of eastern pilgrimages. But he also fostered a navy, under Sir Andrew Wood, who swept the seas of the English pirates. James threw Scotland into the whirlpool of European politics, dealing with Spanish envoys and with the duchess of Burgundy, the patroness of the mysterious Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, duke of York, son of Edward IV. Meanwhile, to balance the power of the primate, James purchased from Innocent VIII. an archbishopric for the bishop of Glasgow (1492), who laid information against the heretics of Kyle in Ayrshire. They had evolved or inherited anti-papal heresies much like those of the reformers of 1559, but James turned their trial into a jest. He made a secret treaty to defend France if she were attacked by England, but meanwhile a five years truce was concluded (1491). In the following year James was in correspondence with Perkin, then in Ireland; in 1495 he received that prétendant, married him to a daughter of Huntly, and in 1496 raided northern England in his company, — all this in contempt of the offered hand of a Tudor princess. In the autumn of 1497 an attempted raid by James ended in a seven
