mit his ransom but to send him to Scotland with great riches
and honour." James answered courteously, with expressions of goodwill
and gratitude for the humanity shown towards him, but "I marvel not
little," he said, "that thou considerest not how I have no power above
the Scots so long as I am ane private man and holden in captivity." The
chronicler adds: "Then said King Henry, 'Maist happy people shall they
be that happens to get yon noble man to their prince.'" It is a pity
that we have no more trustworthy proof of this charming story.

As a matter of fact James attained his freedom only after the death of
Albany, when the resistance or the still more effectual indifference to
his liberation of the man who alone could profit by his death in prison,
or by any unpopular step he might be seduced into making to gain his
freedom, was dead, and had ceased from troubling. It would perhaps,
however, be false to say that his imprisonment had done him nothing but
good. So far as education went this was no doubt the case; but it is
possible that in his subsequent life his reforms were too rapid, too
thorough-going, too modern, for Scotland. The English sovereigns were
richer, stronger, and more potent; the English commonalty more perfectly
developed, and more capable of affording a strong support to a monarch
who stood against the nobles and their capricious tyranny. James might
not have been the enlightened ruler he was but for his training in a
region of more advanced and cultivated civilisation; but had he been
less enlightened, more on the level of his subjects, he might have had a
less terrible end and a longer career.

He returned to Scotland--with the bride of whom he had made so beautiful
a picture, preserving her lovely looks and curious garments, and even
the blaze of the Balas ruby on her white throat, to be a delight to all
the after generations--in 1423, during Lent; and on Passion Sunday,
which Boece calls _Care_ Sunday, entered Edinburgh, where there was "a
great confluence of people out of all parts of Scotland richt desirous
to see him: for many of them," says the chronicle, "had never seen him
before, or else at least the prent of his visage was out of their
memory." There must indeed have been but few who could recognise the
little prince who had been stolen away for safety at twelve in the
accomplished man of thirty in all the fulness of his development, a
bridegroom, and accustomed to the state and prestige