ell), and by the head of the
Border House of Cessford, Andrew Ker.

It was a repetition of the struggles of Livingstone and Crichton, and now
the great Border lairds begin to take their place in history. Boyd made
himself Governor to the king, his son married the king's eldest sister,
Mary, and became Earl of Arran. But brief was the triumph of the Boyds.
In 1469 James married Margaret of Norway; Orkney and Shetland were her
dower; but while Arran negotiated the affair abroad, at home the fall of
his house was arranged. Boyd fled the country; the king's sister,
divorced from young Arran, married the Lord Hamilton; and his family, who
were Lords of Cadzow under Robert Bruce, and had been allies of the Black
Douglases till their fall, became the nearest heirs of the royal
Stewarts, if that family were extinct. The Hamiltons, the wealthiest
house in Scotland, never produced a man of great ability, but their
nearness to the throne and their ambition were storm-centres in the time
of Mary Stuart and James VI., and even as late as the Union in 1707.

The fortunes of a nephew of Bishop Kennedy, Patrick Graham, Kennedy's
successor as Bishop of St Andrews, now perplex the historian. Graham
dealt for himself with the Pope, obtained the rank of Archbishop for the
Bishop of St Andrews (1472), and thus offended the king and country,
always jealous of interference from Rome. But he was reported on as more
or less insane by a Papal Nuncio, and was deposed. Had he been defending
(as used to be said) the right of election of Bishop for the Canons
against the greed of the nobles, the Nuncio might not have taken an
unfavourable view of his intellect. In any case, whether the clergy,
backed by Rome, elected their bishops, or whether the king and nobles
made their profit out of the Church appointments, jobbery was the
universal rule. Ecclesiastical corruption and, as a rule, ignorance,
were attaining their lowest level. {67} By 1476 the Lord of the Isles,
the Celtic ally of Edward IV., was reduced by Argyll, Huntly, and
Crawford, and lost the sheriffdom of Inverness, and the earldom of Ross,
which was attached to the Crown (1476). His treaty of Ardtornish had
come to light. But his bastard, Angus Og, filled the north and west with
fire and tumult from Ross to Tobermory (1480-1490), while James's
devotion to the arts--a thing intolerable--and to the society of low-born
favourites, especially Thomas Cockburn, "a stone-cutter," pre