Meanwhile, the Church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the newly-created Archbishop of Glasgow (1491) and the Archbishop of St Andrews, and disturbed by the Lollards, in the region which was later the centre of the fiercest Covenanters,—­Kyle in Ayrshire.  But James laughed away the charges against the heretics (1494), whose views were, on many points, those of John Knox.  In 1493-1495 James dealt in the usual way with the Highlanders and “the wicked blood of the Isles”:  some were hanged, some imprisoned, some became sureties for the peacefulness of their clans.  In 1495, by way of tit-for-tat against English schemes, James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard III.  Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between Ireland and Burgundy since 1488.  He was welcomed by James at Stirling in November 1495, and was wedded to the king’s cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, now supreme in the north.  Rejecting a daughter of England, and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared to invade England in Perkin’s cause; the scheme was sold by Ramsay, the would-be kidnapper, and came to no more than a useless raid of September 1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497.  The Spanish envoy, de Ayala, negotiated a seven-years’ truce in September, after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton.

The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the Border; he put them down, and made Argyll Lieutenant of the Isles.  Between the Campbells and the Huntly Gordons, as custodians of the peace, the fighting clans were expected to be more orderly.  On the other hand, a son of Angus Og, himself usually reckoned a bastard of the Lord of the Isles, gave much trouble.  Angus had married a daughter of the Argyll of his day; their son, Donald Dubh, was kidnapped (or, rather, his mother was kidnapped before his birth) for Argyll; he now escaped, and in 1503, found allies among the chiefs, did much scathe, was taken in 1506, but was as active as ever forty years later.

The central source of these endless Highland feuds was the family of the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles, claiming the earldom of Ross, resisting the Lowland influences and those of the Gordons and Campbells (Huntly and Argyll), and seeking aid from England.  With the capture of Donald Dubh (1506) the Highlanders became for the while comparatively quiescent; under Lennox and Argyll they suffered in the defeat of Flodden.

From 1497 to 1503 Henry VII. was negotiating for the marriage of James to his daughter Margaret Tudor; the marriage was celebrated on August 8, 1503, and a century later the great grandson of Margaret, James VI. came to the English throne.  But marriage does not make friendship.  There had existed since 1491 a secret alliance by which Scotland was bound to defend France if attacked by England.