When the little Queen of Scotland had reached her seventh year, the king proposed to the Scots' regents that she should be married to his own son and heir, Edward of Carnarvon. He pledged himself that the kingdoms should not be forcibly united; Scotland should keep all its laws and liberties and be administered by Scots alone, without any interference from England. The regents did not mislike the scheme; they summoned the Parliament of the northern realm to meet at Brigham-on-Tweed, and there Edward's offers were accepted and ratified with the consent of the whole realm (July, 1290). [Sidenote: =Death of Margaret.=] The next step was to send to Norway for the young queen, for she had been living at her father's court till now, and had never visited her own kingdom. She set sail for Scotland in the autumn of the year 1290, but adverse winds kept her vessel tossed for weeks in the wild North Sea. The strain was too much for the frail child; when at last she came ashore at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, it was only to die. With her life ended the fairest opportunity of uniting the two realms on equal terms that had ever been known. [Sidenote: =Extinction of the royal line.--Rival claimants.=] Edward's scheme had fallen through, and his grief was great; but much greater was the dismay in Scotland, where the regents found themselves face to face with the calamity of the extinction of the whole royal house. There was no longer any king or queen in whose name the law of the realm could run, or the simplest duties of government be discharged. Gradually claimants for the crown began to step forward, basing their demands on ancient alliances with the old kingly line, but the nearest of these connections went back more than a hundred years, to female descendants of King David, who had died in 1153. In this strait the Scots determined to appeal to King Edward as arbitrator between the pretenders, whose rivalry seemed likely to split the kingdom up into a group of disorderly feudal principalities. Edward readily consented, seeing that in the capacity of arbitrator he could find an opportunity of making more real the old English right of suzerainty over the kingdom of Scotland. It will be remembered that as far back as the tenth century, the kings of the Scots had done homage to Edward the elder, and that they held the more important half of their realm, Lothian and Strathclyde, which together form the Lowlands, as grants under feudal obligations from the English crown. But the exact degree of dependence of Scotland on England had never been accurately fixed, though Scottish kings had often sat in English Parliaments, and sometimes served in the English armies. It might be pleaded by a patriotic Scot that, as Earl of Lothian, his king had certain obligations to the English sovereign, but that for his lands north of the Forth and Clyde he was liable to no such duties. This depended on the nature of the discharge given by Richard I. to