James was the son of King James IV of Scots and Margaret Tudor, born at Linlithgow Palace. He was only seventeen months old when he succeeded his father after the fatal Battle of Flodden. His father's will had appointed Queen Margaret as Regent, but only on condition of her remaining a widow. Her subsequent marriage to the Earl of Angus, of the great House of Douglas, speedily lost her the regency, which she was naturally loth to resign. The Scottish nobles never ceased to hate her and, while often intriguing with England on their own account, were continually alarmed by the prospect that Margaret would act in the interests of the English King, her brother. But she quarrelled with him, with her second husband and successively with most other people, too much to have any settled policy at all. The French influence was represented in Scotland by Albany, who succeeded Margaret as Regent in 1515; but Albany was often in France and the struggle for influence over the boy was mainly between the Douglases and the Hamiltons. Somebody, perhaps his tutor, Gavin Dunbar, gave James a good education and, though poems have been ascribed to him which he did not write and reforms which he did not initiate, he grew up to be not only a shrewd and clever but a very fairly learned man. In 1524, the Estates declared him to be of age, but Angus retained the chief power over him even after Queen Margaret had divorced Angus and married Henry Stuart. James, however, evidently hated his step-father, and all the Douglas family, and by the time he was really able to think for himself, he chose his councillors mainly from the clergy. He drove Angus out of Scotland and bent all his energies on crushing his partisans, especially upon the borders. He was also concerned to repress feuds, for which he set in working, in 1532, the Central College of Justice at Edinburgh, afterwards known as 'the Fifteen'. From that date, begin King Henry VIII of England's attempts to control his Scottish nephew in various ways. Amongst other ploys, the hand of Princess Mary was offered to James in an attempt to move him into the orbit of England. When his plans were rejected, King Henry, unfortunately, had always the alternative card to play of exciting the disloyal Scottish nobles to make insurrections. Any alliance with England would, James saw, have to be based upon a repudiation of Papal Supremacy and, consequently, upon a breach with his clergy, whom alone he felt able to trust. Protestantism had begun to show its head in a few of the eastern ports of Scotland and James, as an intelligent person, knew and avowed that there were many things in the Scottish Church which urgently needed reform. But both Imperial and French offers of alliance and marriage were being constantly pressed upon him and Henry VIII showed less than his usual diplomatic skill in posing as James's 'candid friend'. The result was that, in 1536, James went to France and was married to Princess Magdalen, daughter of King Francis I, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on 1st January 1537. He landed at Leith with his bride in May. She died in July and, in the Summer of the next year, he married Mary of Guise, the widowed Duchess of Longueville. This meant final rejection of all overtures to the Reformation, a deadly quarrel with Henry VIII and the triumph of the influence of James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, and, upon his death, of his nephew and successor, David Beaton. Henry's rage knew no bounds and the death of the Queen-Mother, Margaret, in 1541, snapped the last link in their father's wise policy of conciliation. At the end of 1540, King James got the Estates to declare forfeit, to the Crown, all the lands of the Douglases and Lindsays, much of the Hamilton and Hepburn property and all the islands on the West and North coasts. It was practically an open declaration of war on the great houses of Scotland. When James, fearing a trap, which had indeed been laid for him, declined, at the end of 1541, to come and meet his Uncle Henry at York, the English King declared war and sent Norfolk with a large force to lay waste the eastern borders. James's barons, after their recent rough treatment, had little inclination to fight for him and his counter-raid in the direction of Carlisle, which he accompanied himself as far as Lochmaben, ended in the dreadful defeat and disgraceful rout of Solway Moss in November 1542. A few days after that, Queen Mary gave birth, on 8th December, to the only child that survived her; and, a week later, James died of a broken heart at Falkland Palace.