he desire of James IV, was the
queen-mother, Margaret Tudor. Her subsequent career is one long tale of
intrigue, too elaborate and intricate to require a full recapitulation
here. The war lingered on, in a desultory fashion, till May, 1515. Lord
Dacre ravaged the borders, and the Scots replied by a raid into England;
but there is nothing of any interest to relate. From the accession of
Francis I, in 1515, the condition of politics in Scotland, as of all
Europe, was influenced and at times dominated by his rivalry with the
Emperor. The unwonted desire of France for peace and alliance with
England placed the Scots in a position of considerable difficulty, and
the difficulty was accentuated by the more than usually distracted state
of the country during the minority of the king. In August, 1514,
Margaret (who had in the preceding April given birth to a posthumous
child to James IV) was married to the Earl of Angus, the grandson of
Archibald Bell-the-Cat. It was felt that the sister of Henry VIII and
the wife of a Douglas could scarcely prove a suitable guardian of a
Stewart throne, and the Scots invited the Duke of Albany, son of the
traitor duke, and cousin of the late king, to come over to Scotland and
undertake the government. Despite some efforts of Henry to prevent him,
Albany came to Scotland in May, 1515. He was a French nobleman,
possessed large estates in France, and, although he was, ere long,
heir-presumptive to the Scottish throne, could speak no language but
French. When he arrived in Scotland he found against him the party of
Margaret and Angus, while the Earls of Lennox and Arran were his ardent
supporters. The latter nobleman was the grandson of James II, being the
son of the Princess Mary and James, Lord Hamilton, and he was,
therefore, the next heir to the throne after Albany. The interests of
both might be endangered should Margaret and Angus become all-powerful,
and so we find them acting together for some time. Albany was
immediately made regent of Scotland, and the care of the young king and
his brother, the baby Duke of Ross, was entrusted to him. It required
force to obtain possession of the children, but the regent succeeded in
doing so in August, in time to defeat a scheme of Henry VIII for
kidnapping the princes. The queen-mother fled to England, where, in
October, she bore to Angus a daughter, Margaret, afterwards Countess of
Lennox and mother of the unfortunate Darnley. She then proceeded to pay