with England. It does not appear that he took any part in the religious conflict, the prelude of the Scottish reformation. Perhaps residence in England may have inclined him towards the reformers' side, but he did not attempt to protect them. On the other hand, he had no love for the Scottish hierarchy. Beaton had never been his friend, and he probably regarded his assassination with equanimity, obtaining one of his benefices, the rich abbey of Arbroath, for his natural son George, usually called the Postulant.
After the death of Henry VIII the protector Somerset renewed the Scotch war with a larger force, and Angus commanded the van in the battle of Pinkie on 10 Sept. 1547, when the Scotch suffered a defeat almost as signal as at Flodden. The only exception to the general discomfiture was due to Angus, whose pikemen, forming in line at the beginning of the engagement, drove back the English horse; but the archers broke his ranks while executing a flank movement, and the regent and his troops, who were in the centre of the Scottish army, were seized with panic. Angus complained bitterly that he had not been supported by them. Their flight lost the day; but Somerset did not follow up his victory, and Angus escaped to Calder. Next year he made some amends for the loss of Pinkie by defeating Lord Wharton, who had invaded the western marches, and driving him back to Carlisle. In June he was present at the parliament which agreed to the marriage of Mary Stuart with the dauphin, and sanctioned her being sent to France. In the desultory warfare, which continued till the peace of 1550, Angus took no prominent part, though he is mentioned in a French despatch as engaging in a skirmish on 13 Dec. 1548 at the head of fifty lancers and two hundred light horse against Luttrel, the English captain of Broughty Castle. On the accession of the queen dowager to the regency, which Arran reluctantly yielded in 1554, Angus obtained a writing under the hand both of the queen dowager and the young queen that her general revocation was not to affect the re-grant of his estates on his return from England in 1547. With the new regent he was not on good terms. He joined the barons in remonstrating against the proposal to impose a tax for the payment of mercenaries. When he came to Edinburgh to attend the council in 1554, he was accompanied by a band of a thousand men, though such retinues had been expressly prohibited. On the keeper of the gate requesting him to check his disorderly followers, his reply was a jest: ‘I must put up with much more myself from the Douglas lads who enter my bedchamber, whether I will or no,’ while as he passed his men he muttered the significant hint, ‘Sharp whingers are good in a crowd.’ Mary of Guise having reproached him with coming in armour, he said, with the same mixture of jest and earnest, ‘It's only my old dad Lord Drummond's coat, a very kindly coat to me; I cannot part with it.’ When ordered to place himself in ward in the castle, he came, but still attended by his followers. The constable remonstrated, saying his orders were to receive only three or four attendants, and Angus replied, ‘So I told my lads, but they would not go home to my wife Meg without me.’ He accordingly rode off home with them to Douglas, taking a protest that he had presented himself according to order at the castle.
On the way home he remarked, ‘The Douglas lads are nice lads; they think it is good to be “loose and lievand”’ (i.e. free and living), which became a proverb on the borders. With the same humour, when the queen dowager proposed to create Huntly a duke, Angus told her, ‘If he is to be a duke [duck], I will be a drake;’ and when she urged that he should give her the custody of Tantallon he vouchsafed no reply, but, speaking to the hawk he was feeding, said, ‘Confound the greedy gled, she can never have enough.’ The queen refusing to understand, and still pressing her request, he burst out at last, ‘Yes, madam, why not? All is yours now. But I will be captain of it, and shall keep it for you as well as any man you can put in it.’
He survived till the middle of January 1557, when he died at Tantallon, and was buried at Abernethy. On his deathbed, Hume of Godscroft relates, one of his servants said: ‘My lord, I thought to have seen you die leading the van with many fighting under your standard,’ to which the earl replied by kissing the crucifix and saying, ‘Lo, here is the standard under which I shall die.’ The character of Angus has been very differently drawn by English and Scottish historians, and among the latter by adversaries and partisans of the house of Douglas. These describe him as treacherous and ambitious, intent, like his predecessors, on maintaining the interest of his family, which he preferred to his country. Those praise his courtesy, good temper, bravery, and patriotism. When the narrative of his life is impartially followed, what is most conspicuous is that his talents were improved by experience, and that his character was strengthened by adversity. The young and handsome courtier, who showed little capacity for business and timidity, if not lack of courage, in action, acquired skill in the management of men and affairs, and became an able and brave com-
