In October, Dr. Barlow, prior of Bisham, one of the king’s councillors, ‘a man sufficiently instructed,’ wrote Henry to James, ‘in the specialities of certain great and weighty causes,’[184] arrived in Scotland, and the queen-dowager Margaret procured him a private conversation with her son.[185] The pope’s partisans at once took the alarm, and conjured James not to read the books which Henry VIII. had sent to him; they depicted the unheard-of dangers to which he would expose his person, his crown, and his kingdom by following his uncle’s example. They had the best of it, and James commanded a reply to be written to Cromwell, that assuredly no means would be neglected of strengthening the bonds of friendship between the two sovereigns; but that, in Scotland, there could be no agreement with the King of England ‘_in the opinions concerning the authority of the pope and kirkmen_.’[186] ‘Here be,’ wrote Barlow to Cromwell, ‘plenty of priests, sundry sorts of religions, multitudes of monks, flocking companies of friars, yet among them all so many is there not a few, no not one, that sincerely preacheth Christ.’ ‘It shall be no more dyspleasant for me to depart,’ he wrote on May 23, 1536, ‘than it was for Lot to pass out of Sodom.’[187] Henry was not discouraged, and he sent Lord William Howard a second time, in February, 1535. At a solemn session which was held at Holyrood with great pomp, Howard delivered to James V., at one and the same time, the order of the Garter, which Charles V., Francis I., and King Ferdinand had already received, and a declaration touching the ecclesiastical supremacy. The king accepted the order with respect, and handed over the declaration to his bishops to do what they wished with it.[188] In vain had Henry given James a glimpse of the prospect of sitting on the throne of England by marrying his daughter Mary; the priests, and especially Beatoun, got the proposals rejected, from which they anticipated nothing but evil. They represented to him the risk which he would run if he went to London and put his head at the disposal of so treacherous and cruel a prince; and what admiration posterity would cherish for him, if at the time when all Europe was threatening the Church, he should remain true to the faith of his forefathers.