rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew
well that the turn of Scotland would come soon. The ambitions and the
claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards. England was bent
on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the
entire Tudor period England was the home and 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