estates were forfeited; but resentment dogged a king who was too fierce
and too hurried a reformer, perhaps too cruel an avenger of his own
wrongs.

Our knowledge of the events of his reign is vague; but a king of Scotland
could never, with safety, treat any of his nobles as criminals; the whole
order was concerned to prevent or avenge severity of justice.

At a Parliament in Inverness (1427) he seized the greatest of the
Highland magnates whom he had summoned; they were hanged or imprisoned,
and, after resistance, Alastair, the new Lord of the Isles, did penance
at Holyrood, before being immured in Tantallon Castle. His cousin,
Donald Balloch, defeated Mar at Inverlochy (where Montrose later routed
Argyll) (1431). Not long afterwards Donald fled to Ireland, whence a
head, said to be his, was sent to James, but Donald lived to fight
another day.

Without a standing army to garrison the inaccessible Highlands, the Crown
could neither preserve peace in those regions nor promote justice. The
system of violent and perfidious punishments merely threw the Celts into
the arms of England.

Execution itself was less terrible to the nobles than the forfeiting of
their lands and the disinheriting of their families. None the less,
James (1425-1427) seized the lands of the late Earl of Lennox, made
Malise Graham surrender the earldom of Strathearn in exchange for the
barren title of Earl of Menteith, and sent the sufferer as a hostage into
England. The Earl of March, son of the Earl who, under Robert III., had
gone over to the English cause, was imprisoned and stripped of his
ancient domains on the Eastern Border; and James, disinheriting Lord