Todd, to deliver his sovereign into the hands of Henry of England, a project afterwards abandoned.
Time had softened the bitter animosities which attended James at the beginning of his reign. He extended his favour to all parties, and reconciled them to each other. A wonder it was, to see the Douglases, Hamiltons, Gordons, Homes, the Murrays, and Lennoxes, and a thousand others, at peace with each other, and obedient to their sovereign. The earl of Huntley, a man advanced in life, prudent, resolute, and politic, grew into favour. He was among the principal of the Scottish peers; he had sons, to whom the honours of his race would descend, and this one daughter, whom he loved as well as he could love anything, and respected from the extent of her influence, and the perfect prudence of her conduct; she was his friend and counsellor, the mediator between him and her brothers; the kind mistress to his vassals, a gentle, but all-powerful link between him and his king, whose value he duly appreciated.
Her marriage was often the subject of his meditation. Superstition was ever rife in Scotland. James the Third had driven all his brothers from him, because he had been told to beware of one near of kin; and his death, of which his sou was the ostensible agent, fulfilled the prophecy. Second-sight, in the Highlands, was of more avail than the predictions of a Lowland sibyl. The seer of the house of Gordon had, on the day of her birth, seen the Lady Katherine receive homage as a queen, and standing at the altar with one, ou whose young brow he perceived, all dim and shadowy, "the likeness of a kingly "crown." True, this elevation was succeeded by disasters: he had beheld her a fugitive; he saw her stand on the brow of a cliff that overlooked the sea, while the wild clouds careered over the pale moon, alone, deserted; he saw her a prisoner; he saw her stand desolate beside the corpse of him she had wedded—the diadem was still there, dimly seen amid the disarray of his golden curls. These images haunted the earl's imagination, and made him turn a slighting ear to Sir Patrick Hamilton, and other noble suitors of his lovely child. Sometimes he thought of the king, her cousin, or one of his brothers: flight, desolation, and death, were no strange attendants on the state of the king of Scotland, and these miseries he regarded as necessary and predestined; he could not avert, and so he hardly regarded them, while his proud bosom swelled at the anticipation of the thorny diadem, which was to press the brow of a daughter of the Gordon.
Lord Huntley had looked coldly on the English prince. Lord Bothwell, as he called himself, otherwise Sir John Ramsay, of Balmayne, his former accomplice, tampered with him ou the part
