England and France Scotland

James V. and Henry

VIII.—Under the influence of his mother, who had been freed from Angus by a decision of the Papal Court in 1527 and had therefore no reason for hostility to Henry VIII., James, for a few years, was on friendly terms with his uncle. After the English breach with Rome, when Henry felt his isolation in Christendom, he urged his nephew to follow his ex ample and enrich himself with the spoils of the monasteries. The Reformation was, by this time, making some progress in Scot land, but James, though he recognized the need of a reformation of the lives of the clergy, had no sympathy with the new doctrines, and he was not prepared to adopt Henry's methods. He made two French marriages; after his first wife, a daughter of Francis I., died, as a bride, in 1537, he married Mary of Guise, widow of the duc de Longueville. Henry, however, persevered in trying to detach James from his French alliance and to alienate him from Cardinal Beaton, the leader of the Church Party; he con tinued to urge him to dissolve the monasteries, and made various attempts to arrange a personal interview; we now know that he intended to kidnap him. James declined his uncle's overtures and refused to give him a chance of seizing his person, and Henry broke off friendly relations, revived the claim of homage, and sent armies to invade Scotland.

James was not supported by his nobility. His conflict with Angus had embittered his relations with the great families at the beginning of his reign; he offended the Border chiefs by restor ing order in the Borders, and in carrying out his father's policy in the Western Isles, he quarrelled with the earl of Argyll. The result was that he had come more and more to rely upon the support of the clergy, and by this and by the employment of favourites he still further alienated the nobles. The opposition of the Scottish nobility to James V. was stimulated by the Tudor methods of bribery, and their eyes were fixed on the spoils of the church. They refused to support James in what they called a French war, and it was Beaton and the ecclesiastical party that furnished James with the army that was routed at the battle of Solway Moss in Nov. 1542. The king's health had prevented his taking part in the fighting, and he returned to Falkland Palace, where he died on Dec. 14, six days after the birth, at Linlithgow, of his daughter and heiress, Mary Queen of Scots.

The Minority of Queen Mary.

The death of his nephew gave Henry VIII. a great opportunity which he failed to use, for the new rulers of Scotland might have been persuaded to ac cept the Reformation and seize the lands of the Church. The regent, the earl of Arran (a son of the Arran of the preceding reign, and, like his father, heir-presumptive to the throne) was appointed in defiance of the efforts of Beaton and was known to incline to the new doctrines. Henry succeeded in negotiating, in July the preliminaries of a marriage treaty between his heir (afterwards Edward VI.) and the infant Queen of Scots, but he followed up this success by making demands which the Scots indignantly refused, and he was known to have plotted to kidnap the regent and the queen-mother, Mary of Guise. The result was a reconciliation between Arran and Beaton and the re pudiation of the English marriage treaty (Dec. 1543). If Henry

had been patient he might have won in the end, for Arran and Beaton were likely to quarrel, and the temptation to dissolve the monasteries during a minority of the Crown would have been very strong. But Henry lost his temper, and his brother-in-law, the earl of Hertford (afterwards Protector Somerset), ravaged southern Scotland in 1544 and 1545—his merciless campaigns were derisively known as "the English Wooing." Scotland was thus thrown once more into the arms of France, and the murder of Beaton, the leader of the French party, in his own episcopal castle of St. Andrews (1546) did not affect the political situ ation. His murderers were glad to have English help in defend ing the castle of St. Andrews, but a national alliance with Eng land was impossible for the time.

Protector Somerset carried on the policy of Henry VIII. His personal attitude to the Scottish problem was wiser than that of his late master; he aimed at a union on equal terms, and, if he had come into power in 1542 instead of in the course of events might have been widely different. As it was, all that he could do was to employ force in an endeavour to sever the Franco-Scottish alliance, and in this he completely failed, though he gained some military reputation by his third invasion of Scot land and his victory at Pinkie in Sept. 1547—the last of the old battles between England and Scotland. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government had, with French help, captured the castle of St. Andrews (July and the Regent Arran entered into nego tiations for a marriage of the girl queen to the heir of the French throne. In Aug. 1548 Mary was sent to France, where she re mained for 13 years. The French continued to assist the Scots to recapture strongholds taken by the English, and the Auld Alli ance seemed to be more firmly cemented than ever when peace was made with England in 1551• End of the French Alliance.—But France had become too great a Power to treat Scotland on equal terms, and Henry II. was determined to make the country a province of France. Arran was bribed to resign the regency in favour of Mary of Guise, and the new regent, as her recently published correspondence shows, became an agent of French policy. She was surrounded by French advisers—a Frenchman shared with the earl of Huntly the dig nity of the chancellorship—and she relied upon the services of French soldiers, who had always been unpopular in Scotland. The Scots were alarmed. They spoke of Scotland as threatened with the fate of Brittany, and parliament in 1555 had to pass an act against slanderers of the queen regent and of the French troops "sent for the common weal and suppressing the auld enemy." There were several outbreaks against the French garrisons. Anti French feeling was stimulated by the growth of the Reformed doctrines, which had been spread by the "cartloads of Bibles" that Somerset is recorded to have brought with him. In 1557, the Scottish Protestants formed a league which they called "the Congregation of the Lord," and signed the first National Cove nant in the interests of Protestantism.