Spain; while the famous ordinance of the Parisian authorities regarding syphilis was issued on the 6th March 1497, only forty-eight days before that of Aberdeen.[621] In reference to the rapidity with which syphilis spread from the south and middle of Europe to this small and isolated kingdom of Scotland, it is necessary to remember that in the last years of the fifteenth century, and during the reign of James IV., the intercourse of this country with “France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Flanders was (to quote the words of the Scottish historian, Mr. Tytler) as regular and uninterrupted, not only in the more solemn way of embassies, but by heralds, envoys, and merchants, as that carried on with England.”[622] There was in actual operation, also, at that very date, another medium by which such a disease was very likely to be carried from the Continent to our shores, and diffused among the population of the larger towns. In November 1495, Perkin Warbeck, under the title of Prince Richard, Duke of York, arrived in Scotland, and was received with regal honours by King James, who bestowed upon him in marriage his cousin, the Lady Catherine Gordon. This pretended claimant to the English throne remained in Scotland till July 1497. He was preceded, accompanied, and followed to this country by gay and reckless “soldiers of fortune” from the Continent, Ireland, England, etc.—the men of all others most likely to transmit and diffuse such a disease as syphilis. These adventurers appear to have been quartered by the Scottish King upon various towns. Thus, the town-records of Aberdeen show that, as early as the 5th July 1495,—some months before Warbeck himself arrived in Scotland,—a burgh tax was imposed “to the sustentacioun of aught Inglismen of the Duk of Yorkis, direkit to the toune by our souerane lordis hiennes, and his letteris therapone.”—(_Spalding Club Extracts_, vol. i. p. 57.)