It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history.  Boyd made himself Governor to the king, his son married the king’s eldest sister, Mary, and became Earl of Arran.  But brief was the triumph of the Boyds.  In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of his house was arranged.  Boyd fled the country; the king’s sister, divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal Stewarts, if that family were extinct.  The Hamiltons, the wealthiest house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy’s successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian.  Graham dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country, always jealous of interference from Rome.  But he was reported on as more or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed.  Had he been defending (as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an unfavourable view of his intellect.  In any case, whether the clergy, backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the universal rule.  Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance, were attaining their lowest level. {67} By 1476 the Lord of the Isles, the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross, which was attached to the Crown (1476).  His treaty of Ardtornish had come to light.  But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James’s devotion to the arts—­a thing intolerable—­and to the society of low-born favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, “a stone-cutter,” prepared the sorrows and the end of his reign.

The intrigues which follow, and the truth about the character of James, are exceedingly obscure.  We have no Scottish chronicle written at the time; the later histories, by Ferrerius, an Italian, and, much later, by Queen Mary’s Bishop Lesley, and by George Buchanan, are full of rumours and contradictions, while the State Papers and Treaties of England merely prove the extreme treachery of James’s brother Albany, and no evidence tells us how James contrived to get the better of the traitor.  James’s brothers Albany and Mar were popular; were good horsemen, men of their hands, and Cochrane is accused of persuading James to arrest Mar on a charge of treason and black magic.  Many witches are said to have been burned:  perhaps the only such case before the Reformation.  However it fell out—­all is obscure—­Mar died in prison; while Albany, also a prisoner on charges of treasonable intrigues with the inveterate Earl of Douglas, in the English interest, escaped to France.