they were always so ready to return on their side when
occasion offered. The pretender, on whose behalf all this was done,
shrank, it would appear, from the devastation, and with something like
the generous compunction of a prince protested that he would rather lose
the crown than gain it so--a protest which James must have thought a
piece of affectation, for he replied with a jeer that his companion was
too solicitous for the welfare of a country which would neither
acknowledge him as prince nor receive him as citizen. Perkin must have
begun to tire the patience of the finest gentleman in Christendom before
James would have made such a contemptuous retort. He returned with the
King, however, when this unsuccessful expedition--the only use of which
was that it proved to James the fruitlessness of fighting on behalf of a
pretender who had no hold upon the people over whom he claimed to
reign--came to an end. It was followed by some slight reprisals on the
part of the English, and after an interval by an embassy to make peace.
Henry VII would seem to have been at all times most unwilling to have
Scotland for an enemy, notwithstanding the strange motive suggested to
him by the traitor Ramsay. "Sir," writes this false Scot, "King Edward
had never fully the perfect love of his people till he had war with
Scotland; and he made sic good diligence and provision therein that to
this hour he is lovit; and your Grace may as well have as gude a tyme as
he had." But the cunning old potentate at Westminster was not moved even
by this argument. Instead of following the instructions of the virulent
spy whose hatred of his native king and country reaches the height of
passion, he sent a wise emissary, moderate like himself, the Bishop of
Durham, to inquire into the reasons of the attack.

And Edinburgh must have had another great sensational spectacle in the
arrival not only of the English commissioners, but of such a great
foreign personage as the Spanish envoy, one of the greatest grandees of
the most splendid of continental kingdoms, who had come to England to
negotiate the marriage of Catherine of Arragon with the Prince of Wales,
and who continued his journey to Scotland with letters of amity from his
sovereigns for James, and with the object of assisting in the
peacemaking between the two Kings. Henry required James to give up the
pretender into his hands--a thing which of course it was not consistent
with honour to do--but it was