Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/234

226 usual. From that hour James less coveted the prince's society. He began a little to fear him: not the less did he love and esteem him; and more, far more, did he deem him worthy of the honour, the happiness he intended to bestow upon him.

threads were spun, warp and woof laid on, and Fate busily took up the shuttle, which was to entwine the histories of two beings, at whose birth pomp and royalty stood sponsors, whose career was marked by every circumstance that least accorded with such a nativity. A thousand obstacles stood in the way; the king, with all his fervour, hesitated before he proposed to the earl of Huntley to bestow his daughter, of whom he was justly proud, on a fugitive sovereign, without a kingdom, almost without a name. Fortune, superstition, ten thousand of those imperceptible threads which fate uses when she weaves her most indissoluble webs, all served to bring about the apparently impossible.

The earl of Huntley was a man of a plain, straightforward, resolved ambition. His head was warm, his heart cold, his purpose one—to advance his house, and himself at the head of it, to as high a situation as the position of subject would permit. In the rebellion which occasioned the death of James the Third, he had vacillated, unable quite to ascertain which party would prove triumphant; and when the rebels, rebels then no more, but lieges to James the Fourth, won the day, they looked coldly on their lukewarm partizan. Huntley grew discontented: though still permitted to hold the baton of Earl Marshal, he saw a cloud of royal disfavour darkening his fortunes; in high indignation he joined in the nefarious plot of Buchan, Bothwell; and Sir Thomas