As in the previous reign, a distinguished ambassador from Henry VIII. visited the Court at Stirling. The messenger on this occasion was Lord William Howard, whose purpose in 1536 was to induce the Scottish King to meet his royal uncle in England. James’s excuses seemed to irritate the English envoy, whose audacity and plainness of speech amounted almost to discourtesy. The King, at any rate, warned by his Council, would not promise to accede to Henry’s wish; for his capture or some such calamitous occurrence was an event to be expected from the treacherous Tudor monarch. Mary of Guise, James’s second wife, as she journeyed from Fife to Edinburgh soon after her landing at Crail, crossed the Forth at Stirling, and beheld for the first time the towers of the castle in which she was afterwards to spend so many days. At this date the building known as the Palace was probably not completed, but nearly a year later, in the spring of 1539, when James V. came with his jousting gear to Stirling, he and his Consort may have lodged in the Renaissance addition, although it was still unfinished in 1541. The daughter of the first Duke of Guise took kindly to her adopted country and its people, and although in the years of her Regency, while Mary, her child, was in France, she underestimated the strength of the Reformation movement, and ruled mainly in the interests of her ambitious brothers, she nevertheless became a Scotswoman in sympathy, and learned to converse in the northern tongue as fluently as in French. It was in James V.’s reign that the Reformation movement made itself manifest in Scotland. The King, not without hesitation, kept true to the Church of Rome, but his subjects were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the ecclesiastical situation. Amongst the clergy themselves heretical doctrines were rapidly finding favour. Towards the close of James’s life a Friar named Kyllour, or Keillor, set forth Christ’s Crucifixion in the form of a play, and attracted large crowds at Stirling. One Good Friday morning the King was present at a performance held not far from the castle, and although the Friar’s earnestness roused the wrath of the greater part of the audience against the bishops, and provoked at the same time the indignation of such priests as were present, James retired to his palace at the end of the display without showing whether his sympathies lay on the side of Friar Keillor or on that of the orthodox clergy.[32]