When the truce came to an end, Scotland was in the interval between the two contests with the House of Douglas which mark the reign of James II.  William the sixth earl and his brother David had been entrapped and beheaded by the governors of the boy king in November, 1440, and the new earl, James the Gross, died in 1443, and was succeeded by his son, William, the eighth earl, who remained for some years on good terms with the king.  Accordingly, we find that, when the English burned the town of Dunbar in May, 1448, Douglas replied, in the following month, by sacking Alnwick.  Retaliation came in the shape of an assault upon Dumfries in the end of June, and the Scots, with Douglas at their head, burned Warkworth in July.  The successive attacks on Alnwick and Warkworth roused the Percies to a greater effort, and, in October, they invaded Scotland, and were defeated at the battle of Sark or Lochmaben Stone.[56] In 1449 the Franco-Scottish League was strengthened by the marriage of King James to Marie of Gueldres.

Now began the second struggle with the Douglases.  Their great possessions, their rights as Wardens of the Marches, their prestige in Scottish history made them dangerous subjects for a weak royal house.  Since the death of the good Lord James their loyalty to the kings of Scotland had not been unbroken, and it is probable that their suppression was inevitable in the interests of a strong central government.  But the perfidy with which James, with his own hand, murdered the Earl, in February, 1451-52, can scarcely be condoned, and it has created a sympathy for the Douglases which their history scarcely merits.  James had now entered upon a decisive struggle with the great House, which a temporary reconciliation with the new earl, in 1453, only served to prolong.  The quarrel is interesting for our purpose because it largely decided the relations between Scotland and the rival lines of Lancaster and York.  In 1455, when the Douglases were finally suppressed and their estates were forfeited, the Yorkists first took up arms against Henry VI.  Douglas had attempted intrigues with the Lord of the Isles, with the Lancastrians, and with the Yorkists in turn, and, about 1454, he came to an understanding with the Duke of York.  We find, therefore, during the years which followed the first battle of St. Albans, a revival of active hostilities with England.  In 1456, James invaded England and harried Northumberland in the interests of the Lancastrians.  During the temporary loss of power by the Duke of York, in 1457, a truce was concluded, but it was broken after the reconciliation of York to Henry VI in 1458, and when the battle of Northampton, in July, 1460, left the Yorkists again triumphant, James marched to attempt the recovery of Roxburgh.[57] James I, as we have seen, had abandoned the siege of Roxburgh Castle only to go to his death; his son found his death while attempting the same task.  On Sunday, the 3rd of August, 1460, he was killed by the bursting of a cannon, the mechanism of which had attracted his attention and made him, according to Pitscottie, “more curious than became him or the majesty of a king”.