realm soon after Easter, as he hath sent word here, to make ready for
the same, and that being, it will be great dishonour to him that I, his
mother, having a just cause to part, can nought get a final end; and I
trust your Grace will consider I may do your Grace and my son more
honour to be without him (Lord Methven) than to have him, considering
that he is but a sober man, and if the Queen that is to come, see me
not entreated as I should be, she will think it an evil example." *

* Hamilton Papers, f. 109.


But all her efforts were fruitless; Henry could not be persuaded to
take up her quarrel, and James was obdurate. His mother, however, then
in her forty-ninth year, dispensed with legal formality altogether, and
allied herself to a certain John Stuart, who, according to some, is
identical with the adventurous Earl of Arran, so notorious in the reign
of James VI.

A few more miserable years of petty intrigues, it being no longer in
her power to carry on important ones, and Margaret came to the close of
her faithless, undignified life. But before the end, a ray of sorrow
for her mis-spent days brightened the hitherto unrelieved gloom of her
career. Henry's messenger, sent after her death to gather up the
details of her last moments, and above all, to find out whether she had
made a will, wrote to the king as follows:--

"When she did perceive that death did approach, she did desire the
friars that was her confessors, that they should sit on their knees
before the King, and to beseech him that he would be good and gracious
unto the Earl of Angwische, and did extremely lament and ask God mercy