James declined, thus bringing about a slight
resuscitation of warlike operations. The Scots won a victory at
Piperden, near Berwick, in 1435 or 1436, and in the summer of 1436, when
the Princess Margaret was on her way to France to enter into her
ill-starred union with the dauphin, the English made an attempt to take
her captive. James replied by an attempt upon Roxburgh, but gave it up
without having accomplished anything, and returned to spend his last
Christmas at Perth. His twelve years in Scotland had been mainly
occupied in attempts to reduce his rebellious subjects, especially in
the Highlands, to obedience and loyalty, and he had roused much
implacable resentment. So the poet-king was murdered at Perth in
February, 1436-37, and his English widow was left to guard her son, the
child sovereign, now in his seventh year. It was probably under her
influence that a truce of nine years was made.

When the truce came to an end, Scotland was in the interval between the
two contests with the House of Douglas which mark the reign of James II.
William the sixth earl and his brother David had been entrapped and
beheaded by the governors of the boy king in November, 1440, and the
new earl, James the Gross, died in 1443, and was succeeded by his son,
William, the eighth earl, who remained for some years on good terms with
the king. Accordingly, we find that, when the English burned the town of
Dunbar in May, 1448, Douglas replied, in the following month, by sacking
Alnwick. Retaliation came in the shape of an assault upon Dumfries in
the end of June, and the Scots, with Douglas at their head, burned
Warkworth in July. The successive attacks on Alnwick and Warkworth
roused the Percies to a greater effort, and, in October, they invaded
Scotland, and were defeated at the battle of Sark or Lochmaben
Stone.[56] In 1449 the Franco-Scottish League was strengthened by the
marriage of King James to Marie of Gueldres.

Now began the second struggle with the Douglases. Their great
possessions, their rights as Wardens of the Marches, their prestige in
Scottish history made them dangerous subjects for a weak royal house.
Since the death of the good Lord James their loyalty to the kings of
Scotland had not been unbroken, and it is probable that their
suppression was inevitable in the interests of a strong central
government. But the perfidy with which James, with his own hand,
murdered the Earl, in February, 1451-52, can scarcely be condo