nd her monarch the ally of
every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish Crown.

Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort.
Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attests the great increase in
comfort and in wealth.

In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while
(1496) Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of
barons and freeholders of competent estate. Prior Hepburn founded the
College of St Leonard's in the University of St Andrews; and in 1507
Chepman received a royal patent as a printer. Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned
by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing
the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad
example. But with Dunbar, Henryson, and others, Scotland had a school of
poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of
Chaucer. Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the Revival of
Learning; and James, like Charles II., fostered the early movements of
chemistry and physical science. But Flodden ruined all, and the country,
under the long minority of James V., was robbed and distracted by English
intrigues; by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor; by actual warfare
between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place; by the ambitions and
treasons of the Douglases and other nobles; and by the arrival from
France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III.

The truth of the saying, "Woe to the kingdom whose king is a child," was
never more bitterly proved than in Scotland between the day of Flodden
and the day of the return of Mary Stuart from France (1513-1561). James
V. was not only a child and fatherless; he had a mother whose passions
and passionate changes in love resembled those of her brother Henry VIII.
Consequently, when the inevitable problem arose, was Scotland during the
minority to side with England or with France? the queen-mother wavered
ceaselessly between the party of her brother, the English king, and the
party of France; while Henry VIII. could not be trusted, and the policy
of France in regard to England did not permit her to offer any stable
support to the cause of Scottish independence. The great nobles changed
sides constantly, each "fighting for his own hand," and for the spoils of
a Church in which benefices were struggled for and sold like stocks in
the Exchange.

The question, Was Scotland to ally herself with Eng