All was done to make her journey as easy as possible; but when Margaret arrived at Berwick, it needed all Dacre’s powers of persuasion to induce her to enter Scotland.  At Lamberton Kirk, contrary to the regent’s expectation, she was met by Angus, accompanied by Morton and others of the Scottish nobility, with three hundred men, chiefly Borderers.  Albany had left for France, taking with him as hostages the heirs or younger brothers of the principal men in the country, whom he had bound over to keep the peace during his absence, which he then did not intend to prolong beyond five months.

There was now an excellent opportunity for beginning a new and better life, had the queen been so minded; but events proved her to be in a more querulous, treacherous, and discontented mood than ever.  “Her Grace considereth now, the honour of England, and the poverty and wretchedness of Scotland,” wrote Magnus to Wolsey, “which she did not afore, but in her opinion esteemed Scotland equal with England,"* and her complaints to Henry were frequent and loud.

* June 19, 1517; Calig.  B 2, 253; B.M.

She complained of her husband, of her poverty, of the bad faith of the Scottish nation who still left her jointure unpaid, of not being allowed free access to her son.  She had, she said, been obliged to lay in wed (pawn) the plate given to her by Henry, and was likely to be driven to extreme want, as Wolsey would learn by her messenger.  She would have been still worse off, she caused her friends to write, had not Magnus and Dacre drawn up a book at Berwick, the day before her entry into Scotland, by which Angus, signing it, renounced all claim to her “conjunct feoffment."*

* Dacre to Wolsey, Harbottle, 5th March, 1518; R.O.

But Margaret did not stop at complaints; Henry must begin the war again.  He may, she declares, reasonably cause Scottish ships to be taken; for she has suffered long and forborne to do evil, although she knew she would never get good from Scotland by fair means.

When by dint of constant urging to renewed contests the Borders had become one vast battlefield in her quarrel, she wrote to the Marquis of Dorset to beg him to spare the convent of Coldstream, whose abbess had done her good service in times past.* The motive for this intercession was no mere charitable one, the abbess being “one of the best spies for England.”

* Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, to Henry VIII.; Calig.  B 3, 255.

And now, for the first time, Margaret ventures to express the wish that has for long been forming itself in her mind.  She has been much troubled by Angus since her coming to Scotland, and is so more and more daily.  They have not met this half year, and—­after some hovering of the word on her lips, she pronounces it boldly—­she will part with him, if she may by God’s law, and with honour to herself, for he loves her not.  Unlike Henry, when seeking a pretext to divorce his first wife, Margaret was