Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/564

544, invited the Scotch prisoners, with the Earl of Angus and his brother, to a conference in London. He expressed his anxious desire to heal the old wounds, once and for ever, by a treaty of perpetual peace and the betrothal of Edward and Mary. His objects and his offers were the same precisely which he had desired and proposed twenty years before; but, taught by the experience of past failures, he would not again, if security were possible, expose a combination of occasions, which might never recur, to be ruined by Scotch fickleness. This time he would ensure his success by substantial conditions. He suggested that, on the signature of the two treaties, the infant Queen should be brought into England to be educated; that the Castles of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton should be occupied by English garrisons; that, in the place of a regency, Scotland should be governed by a native council, in the nomination of which he should be himself admitted to a voice; and to Cardinal Beton he paid the same respect which he had paid previously to his uncle the Archbishop—the prisons on the south side of the Border he believed to be safer than those on the north.

If in the administration of human affairs that course is the best which will accomplish, with the smallest amount of inconvenience or suffering, results which in themselves are sooner or later inevitable, we cannot but applaud a scheme which, had circumstances permitted its accomplishment, would have spared Scotland a century of needless calamity, and perhaps might have spread