John Douglas, abbot of the Premonstratensian monks of Tongland, held for the haughty earl, the keys of heaven and of hell, and made him writhe in his superstitious soul at the terrible conviction.
In 1444, as Crichton had arranged, the king took into his own hands the government of the nation, in a convention of the Three Estates, which met within the castle of Stirling, and at the same time, the papal legate came from beyond the sea, in great pomp and bravery, to exact a solemn oath of fealty to Rome from all the Scottish Bishops. Such oaths were beginning to be requisite now, for already had the smoke of those funeral fires, to which they had consigned Resby the Englishman, and Crawar the Bohemian, "infected all on whom it was blown."
The poor chancellor had his hands full of troublesome business, for the Scottish lords were again at their old hereditary occupations, rapine and slaughter.
Patrick Galbraith, a follower of the earl of Douglas, quarrelled with Robert Semple, of Fulwood, about who should command in the royal fortress of Dunbarton, where one was governor of the upper, and the other of the lower castle. The sword was speedily resorted to; Semple was slain, and a strong garrison of Douglas-men occupied the place. The Lindesays and Ogilvies fought the disastrous feudal battle of Arbroath to decide whose chief should be bailie of that regality; and there fell on that bloody field, Alexander, earl of Crawford, six knights, and six hundred men-at-arms.
Then Robert Boyd, of Doughal, ran his sword through Sir James Stewart, of Auchminto, at a lonely place near Kirkpatrick, where the summer woods grew thick and green, and carried off his wife to the castle of Dunbarton, where she brought forth a child prematurely, and died of grief and terror in two days after. Archibald Dunbar stormed the great castle of the earl of Hailes, slew the inmates, and gave it up to the Douglases, while the moss-troopers of Annandale, lest their weapons should rust, kept all the western marches in hot water by their raids and devastations, which were seldom confined to their own border.
The sisters of the king were actually considered in danger, so daring or so enterprising were the younger knights of the Douglas faction; thus the princesses Jane and Eleonora departed to visit their sister, the unhappy dauphiness of France, but arrived too late to see her. She had died of a broken heart, having sunk under the cruelty of her husband (afterwards Louis XI., of infamous memory) and shame at the false charges of Jamet de Tilloy. Eleonora became the wife of Sigismund, archduke of Austria; but the princess Jane returned to her first love, who was the Scottish earl of Angus.
"All the mischiefs at home," says Buchanan, "were imputed to the earl of Douglas, who did all he could to conceal the misdemeanour of his followers, while he studied to afflict the men of different parties; in consequence of the vastness of his power, it was almost a capital offence to call aught he did in question. His influence compelled Sir James Stuart, of Lorn, the king's uncle, to fly the realm, because he spoke freely of the desperate state of the people; and his ship was taken at sea by Flemish pirates, among whom he ended his life in misery."
Such was the hard fate of the Black Knight of Lorn, the husband of the Queen Dowager of Scotland—Jane Beaufort, the fair flower of Windsor.
The English, as usual, took advantage of these turmoils to enter Scotland and burn the tower of Dumfries; so in return for this piece of attention, the Scots, under Lord Balvenie, burned Alnwick, and laid waste to Northumberland, reducing it almost to a desert; and soon after fifteen thousand English, under the Lord Piercy, were cut to pieces on the frontier, as they were about to cross a second time.
The Cheviots, said by a modern writer, to be "a clasp riveting Scotland and England together," were then deemed, like the Tweed and Solway elsewhere, but a natural barrier placed by the hand of God between two rival kingdoms. War brought famine and disease in her ghastly train, and so closed the year 1448.