their continual
feuds among themselves, and the reckless independence of each great
man's following, whose only care was to please their lord, with little
regard either for the King and Parliament or the laws they made. During
this period his mother died, though there is little reason to suppose
that she had any power or influence in his council, or that her loss was
material to him. She had married a second time, another James Stewart
called the Black Knight of Lorne, and had taken a considerable part in
the political struggles of the time always with a little surrounding of
her own, and a natural hope in every change that it might bring her son
back to her. It is grievous that with so fair a beginning, in all the
glow of poetry and love, this lady should have dropped into the position
of a foiled conspirator, undergoing even the indignity of imprisonment
at the hands of the Regents whom she sometimes aided and sometimes
crossed in their arrangements. But a royal widow fallen from her high
estate, a queen-mother whose influence was feared and discouraged and
every attempt at interference sternly repressed, would need to have been
of a more powerful character than appears in any of her actions to make
head against her antagonists. She died in Dunbar in 1446, of grief, it
is said, for the death of her husband, who had been banished from the
kingdom in consequence of some hasty words against the power of the
Douglas, of whom however, even while he was still in disgrace, Sir James
Stewart had been a supporter. Thus ended in grief and humiliation the
life which first came into sight of the world in the garden of the great
donjon at Windsor some quarter of a century before, amid all the
splendour of English wealth and greatness, and all the sweet
surroundings of an English May.

James was married in 1450, when he had attained his twentieth year, to
Mary of Gueldres, about whom during her married life the historians find
nothing to say except that the King awarded pardon to various
delinquents at the request of the Queen--an entirely appropriate and
becoming office. No doubt his marriage, so distinct as a mark of
maturity and independence, did something towards emancipating James from
the Douglas influence; and it is quite probable that the selection of
Sir William Crichton to negotiate the marriage and bring home the bride
may indicate a lessening supremacy of favour towards Douglas in the mind
of his young sovereign. Pitsc