kidnap James IV. with his brother, and hand them over to Henry VII., for
277 pounds, 13s. 4d.! Nothing came of this, and a truce with England was
arranged in 1491. Through four reigns, till James VI. came to the
English throne, the Tudor policy was to buy Scottish traitors, and
attempt to secure the person of the Scottish monarch.

Meanwhile, the Church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the
newly-created Archbishop of Glasgow (1491) and the Archbishop of St
Andrews, and disturbed by the Lollards, in the region which was later the
centre of the fiercest Covenanters,--Kyle in Ayrshire. But James laughed
away the charges against the heretics (1494), whose views were, on many
points, those of John Knox. In 1493-1495 James dealt in the usual way
with the Highlanders and "the wicked blood of the Isles": some were
hanged, some imprisoned, some became sureties for the peacefulness of
their clans. In 1495, by way of tit-for-tat against English schemes,
James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be
Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard
III. Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between
Ireland and Burgundy since 1488. He was welcomed by James at Stirling in
November 1495, and was wedded to the king's cousin, Catherine Gordon,
daughter of the Earl of Huntly, now supreme in the north. Rejecting a
daughter of England, and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared
to invade England in Perkin's cause; the scheme was sold by Ramsay, the
would-be kidnapper, and came to no more than a useless raid of September
1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497. The
Spanish envoy, de Ayala, negotiated a seven-years' truce in September,
after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton.

The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the Border; he put them
down, and made Argyll Lieutenant of the Isles. Between the Campbells and