and; therefore desired him to send no more of his captains in time
coming." England was obliged to accept, it appeared, this bravado of the
Scots, having no excuse for repeating the experiment, but was
"discontented" and little pleased to be overcome both in courtesy and in
arms.

A more serious matter than this encounter at sea, which was really more
a trial of strength than anything else, was the purely chivalric
enterprise of James in taking up the cause of Perkin Warbeck, the
supposed Duke of York, who imposed upon all Europe for a time, and on
nobody so much as the King of Scotland. This adventurer, who was given
out as the younger son of Edward IV escaped by the relenting of the
murderers when his elder brother was killed in the Tower, was by
unanimous consent of all history a youth of person and manners quite
equal to his pretensions, playing his part of royal prince with a grace
and sincerity which nobody could resist. The grave Pinkerton, so
sarcastically superior to all fables, writing at the end of the
eighteenth century, had evidently not even then made up his mind how to
accept this remarkable personage, but speaks of him as "this unfortunate
prince or pretender," and of James as "sensible of the truth of his
report or misled by appearance," with an evident leaning to the side of
the hero who played so bold a game. The young adventurer came to James
with the most illustrious of guarantees. He brought letters from Charles
VIII of France, and from the Emperor Maximilian, and was followed by a
train of gallant Frenchmen and by everything that was princelike,
gracious, and splendid. So completely was he received and believed at
the Scottish Court that when there arose a mutual love, as the story
goes, between him and the Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of
Huntly, one of the most powerful peers in Scotland, and at the same time
of royal blood, a cousin of the King, the marriage seems to have been
accepted as a most fit and even splendid alliance. No greater pledge of
belief could have been given than this. The King of Scots threw himself
into the effort of establishing the supposed prince's claims as if they
had been his own. Curious negotiations were entered into as to what the
pretender should do if, by the help of Scotland, he was placed upon the
English throne. He was to cede Berwick, that always-coveted morsel which
had to change its allegiance from generation to generation as the
balance betwee