James had practically no choice.  In 1536 Henry proposed a meeting with James “as far within England as possible.”  Knowing, as we do, that Henry was making repeated attempts to have James kidnapped and Archbishop Beaton also, we are surprised that James was apparently delighted at the hope of an interview with his uncle—­in England.  Henry declined to explain why he desired a meeting when James put the question to his envoy.  James said, in effect, that he must act by advice of his Council, which, so far as it was clerical, opposed the scheme.  Henry justified the views of the Council, later, when James, returning from a visit to France, asked permission to pass through England.  “It is the king’s honour not to receive the King of Scots in his realm except as a vassal, for there never came King of Scots into England in peaceful manner otherwise.”  Certain it is that, however James might enter England, he would leave it only as a vassal.  Nevertheless his Council, especially his clergy, are blamed for embroiling James with Henry by dissuading him from meeting his uncle in England.  Manifestly they had no choice.  Henry had shown his hand too often.

At this time James, by Margaret Erskine, became the father of James, later the Regent Moray.  Strange tragedies would never have occurred had the king first married Margaret Erskine, who, by 1536, was the wife of Douglas of Loch Leven.  He is said to have wished for her a divorce that he might marry her; this could not be:  he visited France, and on New Year’s Day, 1537, wedded Madeline, daughter of Francis I. Six months later she died in Scotland.

Marriage for the king was necessary, and David Beaton, later Cardinal Beaton and Archbishop of St Andrews, obtained for his lord a lady coveted by Henry VIII., Mary, of the great Catholic house of Lorraine, widow of the Duc de Longueville, and sister of the popular and ambitious Guises.  The pair were wedded on June 10, 1538; there was fresh offence to Henry and a closer tie to the Catholic cause.  The appointment of Cardinal Beaton (1539) to the see of St Andrews, in succession to his uncle, gave James a servant of high ecclesiastical rank, great subtlety, and indomitable resolution, but remote from chastity of life and from clemency to heretics.  Martyrdoms became more frequent, and George Buchanan, who had been tutor of James’s son by Margaret Erskine, thought well to open a window in a house where he was confined, walk out, and depart to the Continent.  Meanwhile Henry, no less than Beaton, was busily burning his own martyrs.  In 1539 Henry renewed his intercourse with James, attempting to shake his faith in David Beaton, and to make him rob his Church.  James replied that he preferred to try to reform it; and he enjoyed, in 1540, Sir David Lyndsay’s satirical play on the vices of the clergy, and, indeed, of all orders of men.  In 1540 James ratified the College of Justice, the fifteen Lords of Session, sitting as judges in Edinburgh.