436

INVASION OF SCOTLAND.-DEATH OF JAMES.

[1542

Thither the king of England went, accompanied by Catherine Howard. But the king of Scotland was induced by the wily cardinal not to hold to the appoint ment. Henry was furious, and determined upon war. He resolved upon renewing the old claim of the English kings to the crown of Scotland; and the privy council directed the archbishop of York to search in "ancient charters and monuments for a "clearer declaration to the world of his majesty's title to that realm." * A manifesto of enormous length was issued, entitled “A declaration containing the just causes and considerations of this present war with the Scots; wherein also appeareth the true and right title that the king's most royal majesty hath to the sovereignty of Scotland." + The duke of Norfolk entered Scotland with a large army in 1542; after the English warden of the east marches had sustained a defeat in Teviotdale. Having accomplished the usual destruction, Norfolk retreated to Berwick, for James was assembling an army in his front. The feudal chiefs gathered round the royal standard on the Borough Muir, as they had gathered under the standard of James IV. Onward they marched for the invasion of England. There was division amongst the host. The rebellious Douglasses were on the side of England. Many of the nobles were favourable to the principles of the Reformation, which their king opposed. The catastrophe came, without any real contest between the two armies. James was deserted by his nobles: "Pleaseth your grace, the king of Scotland the last day of October was at Lauder, and the Lords and Commons of his whole realm with him. The king was very desirous to be in England, but the lords would not agree thereunto; and upon this they returned, and are dispersed, and every man gone into his country." + The deserted James, in grief and indignation, returned to Edinburgh. An army of ten thousand men was, however, got together, under lord Maxwell; with which he proposed to enter England by the western marches. Maxwell crossed the border. But the spirit of jealousy destroyed any chance of success, even in burning and plunder; for one who is termed the king's minion, Oliver Sinclair, produced a commission giving him supreme command. The nobles refused to serve under him, and the clans mutinied. A body of English horse came up, who were believed to be the vanguard of the great army; and in a panic the Scots fled, with the loss of a large number of prisoners-some willing prisoners, as it has been asserted. The king gave himself up to despair. He immured himself in his palace of Falkland; would speak to no one; sickened; and sank under a slow fever, heart-broken, on the 14th of December. A week before, his queen had borne him a daughter -that Mary, whose long struggles with adversity form a striking contrast to the hopelessness of her father.

The lords who were taken at Solway Moss were first harshly treated by Henry, and then propitiated by indulgences. His first object was to negotiate a marriage between his son, Edward, and the daughter of James V., and thus to effect a natural union between the two countries. His second design was to demand the government of Scotland, as the guardian of the infant queen. The imprisoned nobles concluded a treaty with him, that they would deliver up Mary, and acknowledge him as their sovereign lord. They were released, and returned to Scotland to carry out their plan. But Cardinal + Hall, p. 846. State Papers, vol. v. p. 213.

* State Papers, vol. v. p. 212.

1544.]

INVASION UNDER HERTFORD.

437

Beaton produced a will of James V., appointing the cardinal governor of the realm, and guardian of the queen. The earl of Arran was presumptive heir to the throne; and he possessed sufficient power to obtain the regency, and drive Beaton from his usurped authority, the will being affirmed to be a forgery. But Arran belonged to the reforming party; and the church was as yet too strong to allow a dominion that placed its dignities and possessions in imminent peril. Arran was, after some time, during which Beaton had been imprisoned, gained over to the party of the church; and he became an instrument in the hands of the cardinal and the queen-mother. In December, 1543, Beaton became chancellor, and in the following January was constituted the pope's legate à latere in Scotland. He was now supreme in church and state; the friendship and alliance of the excommunicated king of England was renounced; and a treaty with England, which gave Henry some of his demands, was set aside. There was patriotism as well as intolerance in the policy of the papist faction. We cannot follow the dark intrigues of this period; in which some of the reformers were prepared to sacrifice their national independence, and the Romanists to hold their power by craft and persecution. As to any political morality on either side, the Englishman or Scot who wishes to trace his hatred of dishonour to the integrity of statesmen at this great transition period, will be disappointed. The people of Scotland, according to the most acute of observers, Ralph Sadler, would, in 1543, rather "suffer extremity, than come to the obedience and subjection of England: they would have their realm free, and live within themselves, after their own laws and customs." The kirkmen were against the unity of the two realms. The nobles, he thought, "in time would fall to the obedience and devotion of the king's majesty, whereupon the earl of Angus and his brother, with other lords prisoners, do make a perfect foundation." Wherever we turn we find corruption and treachery; dark plots and contemptible rivalries.

Scotland was again invaded in May, 1544. The earl of Hertford arrived in the Firth with a powerful fleet, carrying a force of ten thousand men. He demanded that the infant queen should be immediately surrendered. The regent refused; and Hertford, with an additional force from Berwick, marched upon Edinburgh. One of the gates was battered down, and the city was entered and given up to conflagration and plunder. The castle held out; and some who had been willing to sell Scotland to England, appear to have felt that their duty was now to resist pretensions that were enforced by an invading army. Troops under the command of faithful Scots, and of those who had deserted the English cause, were marching upon Edinburgh in considerable numbers; and Hertford, after burning Leith, retired to Berwick. For two years the war was continued with the usual terrible inflictions upon the peaceful cultivators of the soil. The letters of Hertford in 1545, present a fearful picture of the ravages of his troops in border towns and fertile districts, which poetry and romance have made famous through every land. On the 5th of September Hertford moved with his army out of Newcastle. He had been directed to demolish the abbey of Kelso, and to construct a fortress upon its ruins. The abbey was taken by assault; but the ancient churchmen

"Sadler to Parr," State Papers, vol. v. p. 271.

438

KELSO DESTROYED.

[1545.

had built too strongly for the massive walls to be thrown down by such engineering power as belonged to the sixteenth century. Hertford wrote that he could construct nothing tenable, under four or five months, out of those "buildings of stone, of great height and circuit,-which, to make any convenient fortress there, must of force be down and avoided." The noble ruin still shows that the difficulty was not over-rated. And so Hertford writes, "We have resolved to raze and deface this house of Kelso, so as the

enemy shall have little commodity of the same, and to remain encamped here for five or six days, and in the mean season to devastate and burn all the country hereabouts, as far as we may with our horsemen." Razed and defaced the great abbey was; and onward went the merciless destroyer in his allotted work. Thus his narrative continues::

"As to-morrow we intend to send a good band of horsemen to Melrose and Dryburgh, to burn the same, and all the corn and villages in their way, and so daily to do some exploits here in the march; and at the end of the said five or six days to remove our camp, and to march to Jedworth [Jedburgh] to burn the same, and then to march through a great part of Tyvydale [Teviotdale] to overthrow their piles and stone-houses, and to burn their corn and villages, with all annoyance to the enemy that we can; which in our opinions would be such a scourge and impoverishing to the enemy, as they shall not be able to recover a long season."* Such were the "exploits" of warfare three hundred years ago,-exploits which the great believed just and

1545.]

JEDBURGH BURNT.

439

honourable; and which men might still so believe if a stronger power than the will of princes and nobles had not arisen in the world-the power of public opinion founded upon the progress of knowledge. Yet even in those times there was a spirit of humanity growing up amongst the rude inhabitants of a country, accustomed from time immemorial to murderous forays. In another letter of the 18th of September, Hertford says that he had sent horsemen, who forayed, burnt, and wasted a great part of East Teviotdale; "and for the better execution thereof I sent with them one hundred Irishmen, because the borderers would not most willingly burn their neighbours." The commander is perfectly aware of the ravages he is committing upon innocent people, and he glories in them. His description presents a picture of Scotland, very

different from the barrenness and imperfect culture that some assign to this early period:-"Surely the country is very fair, and so good a corn country, and such plenty of the same, as we have not seen the more plenteous in England; and undoubtedly there is burnt a wonderful deal of corn, for, by reason that the year hath been so forward, they had done much of their harvest, and made up their corn in stacks about their houses, or had it lying in shocks in the fields, and none at all left unshorn; the burning whereof can be no little impoverishment unto them, besides the burning and spoil of their houses." There is no intermission when "havoc " has been cried. From Kelso the main body of the army marched upon Jedburgh; and a detach

* State Papers, vol. v. p. 513.

440

PROPOSAL TO ASSASSINATE BEATON.

[1545.

ment of fifteen hundred light horsemen advanced six or seven miles beyond, "brenning and devasting the country." The abbey of Jedburgh, still glorious in ruin, met the same fate as that of Kelso, though the demolition was not so complete :-"I caused the abbey, the Friars, and town of Jedburgh, and all the villages within two miles and more about the town, to be brent, where was destroyed also no little quantity of corn."

Whilst the earl of Hertford was carrying forward this ignoble work in Scotland, king Henry and his Council were busy in negotiations far more disgraceful than the most barbarous open warfare. Cardinal Beaton was calling forth every means of resisting and annoying Henry; and Henry had commanded Hertford to spare no one in Scotland, who was allied in blood, or associated in friendship, with Beaton. He did not hate the cardinal because he burned and imprisoned the movers of the Reformation. He might have destroyed all the Lutherans in Scotland without offence to the intolerant king. He was the head of the papal faction-he upheld the supremacy of the pope he was the opponent of Henry's designs upon the independence of Scotland, and thus no means would be too base to accomplish his destruction. Whilst Hertford was carrying on his war of devastation in 1545, the Privy Council of England wrote to inform him that the king had seen some letters from the earl of Cassilis to Mr. Sadler, "one containing an offer for the killing of the cardinal, if his majesty would have it done, and would promise, when it were done, a reward." Does Henry indignantly reject this proposal to remove his enemy by assassination? The letter of the Privy Council, which is signed by Wriothesley, the chancellor; the duke of Suffolk; the bishop of Winchester; and four other counsellors, has this answer to the proposition:-"His majesty hath willed us to signify unto your lordship, that his highness, reputing the fact not meet to be set forward expressly by his majesty, will not seem to have to do in it; and yet not misliking the office, thinketh good that Mr. Sadleir, to whom that letter was addressed, should write to the earl of the receipt of his letter containing such an offer, which he thinketh not convenient to be communicated to the king's majesty; marry, to write to him what he thinketh of the matter, (he shall say) that if he were in the earl of Cassel's place, and were as able to do his majesty good service there, as he knoweth him to be, and thinketh a right good will in him to do it, he would surely do what he could for the execution of it, believing verily to do thereby not only acceptable service to the king's majesty, but also a special benefit to the realm of Scotland, and would trust verily the king's majesty would consider his service in the same; as you doubt not, of his accustomed goodness to them which serve him, but he would do the same to him."* Beaton was murdered in 1546; and if the king of England was not an accessary, it was not for the want of inclination.

The guilt of the king of England and his government, in giving encouragement to the proposal to assassinate Cardinal Beaton, is a sufficient proof of the low morality of that age. Cassilis proposed the crime as "a special benefit to the realm of Scotland." The counsellors of Henry accepted it as "an acceptable service to the king's majesty." What was denominated "subtle policy," was a cloak for revolting wickedness. In judging of the

State Papers, vol. v. p. 449.