the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the
little King, perhaps in those small state-rooms in well-defended
Edinburgh, perhaps in the sunshine at Holyrood with his poet, had
pleasant days.

James was already a growing boy when the last and worst of the tyrannies
which oppressed his youth began. When the disastrous episode of Albany
was well over the Douglases again made one last desperate struggle for
the supreme power. Angus it would seem was not discouraged by the change
in the Queen from love to hate, nor even by the efforts which she had
begun to make to divorce and shake him off, and it is evident that he
must have secured the liking of the little King, to whom in the close
intimacy of the family as his mother's husband he must have been known
from earliest childhood. The Earl was handsome and young, one of the
finest cavaliers of the Court, and probably was kind to the infant who
could not contradict or cross him, and whose favour it was so expedient
to secure. It costs a young man little to make himself adored by a boy
to whom he seems the incarnation of manly strength and splendour. And
there is every appearance that James accepted Angus's rule at first with
pleasure, no doubt looking up to him as a guide in the manly exercises
which could be pursued in his following with more spirit and zeal than
in the Queen's surroundings. The great power of the Douglases, which it
took so much bloodshed to break down, and which James II had spent all
his life in contending with, extinguished in one branch of the family,
seemed now to have developed in another with increased and extended
force. Angus was as great, as potent, as universally feared as the Earls
of Douglas had ever been; and almost as lawless, filling the country
with his exactions and those of his dependants. He had attained this
triumph after many drawbacks and downfalls and against the strongest
opponents, and Scotland was overawed by the terror of that well-known
name. It was scarcely to be supposed, however, that the young King,
precociously aware of all the dangers of his position, could remain
subject willingly as he grew up to the sway of a vassal of the Crown
however great. There must have been private counsellors ever ready to
whisper that Douglas was nothing save by the King's authority, and that
James's favour alone could keep him in his usurped place. A few months
after he had attained the age of sixteen, the boy over wh