A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lang

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James had determined to recall the exiled Catholic earls, undeterred by
the eloquence of "the last of all our sincere Assemblies," held with deep
emotion in March 1596. The earls came home; in September at Falkland
Palace Andrew Melville seized James by the sleeve, called him "God's
silly vassal," and warned him that Christ and his Kirk were the king's
overlords. Soon afterwards Mr David Black of St Andrews spoke against
Elizabeth in a sermon which caused diplomatic remonstrances. Black would
be tried, in the first instance, only by a Spiritual Court of his
brethren. There was a long struggle, the ministers appointed a kind of
standing Committee of Safety; James issued a proclamation dissolving it,
and, on December 17, inflammatory sermons led a deputation to try to
visit James, who was with the Lords of Session in the Tolbooth. Whether
under an alarm of a Popish plot or not, the crowd became so fierce and
menacing that the great Lachlan Maclean of Duart rode to Stirling to
bring up Argyll in the king's defence with such forces as he could
muster. The king retired to Linlithgow; the Rev. Mr Bruce, a famous
preacher credited with powers of prophecy, in vain appealed to the Duke
of Hamilton to lead the godly. By threatening to withdraw the Court and
Courts of Justice from Edinburgh James brought the citizens to their
knees, and was able to take order with the preachers.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.

James, in reducing the Kirk, relied as much on his cunning and
"kingcraft" as on his prerogative. He summoned a Convention of preachers
and of the Estates to Perth at the end of February 1597, and thither he
brought many ministers from the north, men unlike the zealots of Lothian
and the Lowlands. He persuaded them to vote themselves a General
Assembly; and they admitted his right to propose modifications in Church
government, to forbid unusual convocations (as in Edinburgh during the
autumn of 1596); they were not to preach against Acts of Parliament or of
Council, nor appoint preachers in the great towns without the Royal
assent, and were not to attack individuals from the pulpit. An attempt
was to be made to convert the Catholic lords. A General Assembly at
Dundee in May ratified these decisions, to the wrath of Andrew Melville,
and the Catholic earls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at
this period had not one supporter among the nobility. James had made
large grants of Church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from
their wonted conspiracies for a while. The king occupied himself much in
encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him
to the preachers.

In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and
vote in Parliament. In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the
'Basilicon Doron,' came to the knowledge of the clergy: it revealed his
opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of
the preachers to introduce a democracy "with themselves as Tribunes of
the People," a very fair definition of their policy. It was to stop them
that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep
the pulpiteers in order. They were refusing, in face of the king's
licence, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for
they took various powers into their hands.

Meanwhile James's relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay
his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly. Plots were
encouraged against him, but it is not probable that England was aware of
the famous and mysterious conspiracy of the young Earl of Gowrie, who was
warmly welcomed by Elizabeth on his return from Padua, by way of Paris.
He had been summoned by Bruce, James's chief clerical adversary, and the
Kirk had high hopes of the son of the man of the Raid of Ruthven. He led
the opposition to taxation for national defence in a convention of June-
July 1600. On August 5, in his own house at Perth, where James, summoned
thither by Gowrie's younger brother, had dined with him, Gowrie and his
brother were slain by John Ramsay, a page to the king.

This affair was mysterious. The preachers, and especially Bruce, refused
to accept James's own account of the events, at first, and this was not
surprising. Gowrie was their one hope among the peers, and the story
which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less
credible except the various and manifestly mendacious versions of the
Gowrie party. {156}

James's version of the occurrences must be as much as possible condensed,
and there is no room for the corroborating evidence of Lennox and others.
As the king was leaving Falkland to hunt a buck early on August 5, the
Master of Ruthven, who had ridden over from his brother's house in Perth,
accosted him. The Master declared that he had on the previous evening
arrested a man carrying a pot of gold; had said nothing to Gowrie; had
locked up the man and his gold in a room, and now wished James to come
instantly and examine the fellow. The king's curiosity and cupidity were
less powerful than his love of sport: he would first kill his buck.
During the chase James told the story to Lennox, who corroborated.
Ruthven sent a companion to inform his brother; none the less, when the
king, with a considerable following, did appear at Gowrie's house, no
preparation for his reception had been made.

The Master was now in a quandary: he had no prisoner and no pot of gold.
During dinner Gowrie was very nervous; after it James and the Master
slipped upstairs together while Gowrie took the gentlemen into the garden
to eat cherries. Ruthven finally led James into a turret off the long
gallery; he locked the door, and pointing to a man in armour with a
dagger, said that he "had the king at his will." The man, however, fell
a-trembling, James made a speech, and the Master went to seek Gowrie,
locking the door behind him. At or about this moment, as was fully
attested, Cranstoun, a retainer of Gowrie, reported to him and the
gentlemen that the king had ridden away. They all rushed to the gate,
where the porter, to whom Gowrie gave the lie, swore that the king had
not left the place. The gentlemen going to the stables passed under the
turret-window, whence appeared the king, red in the face, bellowing
"treason!" The gentlemen, with Lennox, rushed upstairs, and through the
gallery, but could not force open the door giving on the turret. But
young Ramsay had run up a narrow stair in the tower, burst open the
turret-door opening on the stair, found James struggling with the Master,
wounded the Master, and pushed him downstairs. In the confusion, while
the king's falcon flew wildly about the turret till James set his foot on
its chain, the man with the dagger vanished. The Master was slain by two
of James's attendants; the Earl, rushing with four or five men up the
turret-stair, fell in fight by Ramsay's rapier.

Lennox and his company now broke through the door between the gallery and
the turret, and all was over except a riotous assemblage of the town's
folk. The man with the dagger had fled: he later came in and gave
himself up; he was Gowrie's steward; his name was Henderson; it was he
who rode with the Master to Falkland and back to Perth to warn Gowrie of
James's approach. He confessed that Gowrie had then bidden him put on
armour, on a false pretence, and the Master had stationed him in the
turret. The fact that Henderson had arrived (from Falkland) at Gowrie's
house by half-past ten was amply proved, yet Gowrie had made no
preparations for the royal visit. If Henderson was not the man in the
turret, his sudden and secret flight from Perth is unexplained. Moreover,
Robert Oliphant, M.A., said, in private talk, that the part of the man in
the turret had, some time earlier, been offered to him by Gowrie; he
refused and left the Earl's service. It is manifest that James could not
have arranged this set of circumstances: the thing is impossible.
Therefore the two Ruthvens plotted to get him into their hands early in
the day; and, when he arrived late, with a considerable train, they
endeavoured to send these gentlemen after the king, by averring that he
had ridden homewards. The dead Ruthvens with their house were forfeited.

Among the preachers who refused publicly to accept James's account of the
events in Gowrie's house on August 5, Mr Bruce was the most eminent and
the most obstinate. He had, on the day after the famous riot of December
1596, written to Hamilton asking him to countenance, as a chief nobleman,
"the godly barons and others who had convened themselves," at that time,
in the cause of the Kirk. Bruce admitted that he knew Hamilton to be
ambitious, but Hamilton's ambition did not induce him to appear as
captain of a new congregation. The chief need of the ministers' party
was a leader among the great nobles. Now, in 1593, the young Earl of
Gowrie had leagued himself with the madcap Bothwell. In April 1594,
Gowrie, Bothwell, and Atholl had addressed the Kirk, asking her to favour
and direct their enterprise. Bothwell made an armed demonstration and
failed; Gowrie then went abroad, to Padua and Rome, and, apparently in
1600, Mr Bruce sailed to France, "for the calling," he says, "of the
Master of Gowrie"--he clearly means "the Earl of Gowrie." The Earl came,
wove his plot, and perished. Mr Bruce, therefore, was averse to
accepting James's account of the affair at Gowrie House. After a long
series of negotiations Bruce was exiled north of Tay.

UNION OF THE CROWNS.

In 1600 James imposed three bishops on the Kirk. Early in 1601 broke out
Essex's rebellion of one day against Elizabeth, a futile attempt to
imitate Scottish methods as exhibited in the many raids against James.
Essex had been intriguing with the Scottish king, but to what extent
James knew of and encouraged his enterprise is unknown. He was on ill
terms with Cecil, who, in 1601, was dealing with several men that
intended no good to James. Cecil is said to have received a sufficient
warning as to how James, on ascending the English throne, would treat
him; and he came to terms, secretly, with Mar and Kinloss, the king's
envoys to Elizabeth. Their correspondence is extant, and proves that
Cecil, at last, was "running the Scottish course," and making smooth the
way for James's accession. (The correspondence begins in June 1601.)

Very early on Thursday, March 24, 1603, Elizabeth went to her account,
and James received the news from Sir Robert Carey, who reached Holyrood
on the Saturday night, March 26. James entered London on May 6, and
England was free from the fear of many years concerning a war for the
succession. The Catholics hoped for lenient usage: disappointment led
some desperate men to engage in the Gunpowder Plot. James was not more
satisfactory to the Puritans.

Encouraged by the fulsome adulation which grew up under the Tudor
dynasty, and free from dread of personal danger, James henceforth
governed Scotland "with the pen," as he said, through the Privy Council.
This method of ruling the ancient kingdom endured till the Union of 1707,
and was fraught with many dangers. The king was no longer in touch with
his subjects. His best action was the establishment of a small force of
mounted constabulary which did more to put down the eternal homicides,
robberies, and family feuds than all the sermons could achieve.

The persons most notable in the Privy Council were Seton (later Lord
Dunfermline), Hume, created Earl of Dunbar, and the king's advocate,
Thomas Hamilton, later Earl of Haddington. Bishops, with Spottiswoode,
the historian, Archbishop of Glasgow, sat in the Privy Council, and their
progressive elevation, as hateful to the nobles as to the Kirk, was among
the causes of the civil war under Charles I. By craft and by illegal
measures James continued to depress the Kirk. A General Assembly,
proclaimed by James for July 1604 in Aberdeen, was prorogued; again,
unconstitutionally, it was prorogued in July 1605. Nineteen ministers,
disobeying a royal order, appeared and constituted the Assembly. Joined
by ten others, they kept open the right of way. James insisted that the
Council should prosecute them: they, by fixing a new date for an
Assembly, without royal consent; and James, by letting years pass without
an Assembly, broke the charter of the Kirk of 1592.

The preachers, when summoned to the trial, declined the jurisdiction.
This was violently construed as treason, and a jury, threatened by the
legal officers with secular, and by the preachers with future spiritual
punishment, by a small majority condemned some of the ministers (January
1606). This roused the wrath of all classes. James wished for more
prosecutions; the Council, in terror, prevailed on him to desist. He
continued to grant no Assemblies till 1608, and would not allow "caveats"
(limiting the powers of Bishops) to be enforced. He summoned (1606) the
two Melvilles, Andrew and his nephew James, to London, where Andrew
bullied in his own violent style, and was, quite illegally, first
imprisoned and then banished to France.

In December 1606 a convention of preachers was persuaded to allow the
appointment of "constant Moderators" to keep the presbyteries in order;
and then James recognised the convention as a General Assembly. Suspected
ministers were confined to their parishes or locked up in Blackness
Castle. In 1608 a General Assembly was permitted the pleasure of
excommunicating Huntly. In 1610 an Assembly established Episcopacy, and
no excommunications not ratified by the Bishop were allowed: the only
comfort of the godly was the violent persecution of Catholics, who were
nosed out by the "constant Moderators," excommunicated if they refused to
conform, confiscated, and banished.

James could succeed in these measures, but his plan for uniting the two
kingdoms into one, Great Britain, though supported by the wisdom and
eloquence of Bacon, was frustrated by the jealousies of both peoples.
Persons born after James's accession (the _post nati_) were, however,
admitted to equal privileges in either kingdom (1608). In 1610 James had
two of his bishops, and Spottiswoode, consecrated by three English
bishops, but he did not yet venture to interfere with the forms of
Presbyterian public worship.

In 1610 James established two Courts of High Commission (in 1615 united
in one Court) to try offences in morals and religion. The Archbishops
presided, laity and clergy formed the body of the Court, and it was
regarded as vexatious and tyrannical. The same terms, to be sure, would
now be applied to the interference of preachers and presbyteries with
private life and opinion. By 1612 the king had established Episcopacy,
which, for one reason or another, became equally hateful to the nobles,
the gentry, and the populace. James's motives were motives of police.
Long experience had taught him the inconveniences of presbyterial
government as it then existed in Scotland.

To a Church organised in the presbyterian manner, as it has been
practised since 1689, James had, originally at least, no objection. But
the combination of "presbyterian Hildebrandism" with factions of the
turbulent _noblesse_; the alliance of the Power of the Keys with the
sword and lance, was inconsistent with the freedom of the State and of
the individual. "The absolutism of James," says Professor Hume Brown,
"was forced upon him in large degree by the excessive claims of the
Presbyterian clergy."

Meanwhile the thievish Border clans, especially the Armstrongs, were
assailed by hangings and banishments, and Ulster was planted by Scottish
settlers, willing or reluctant, attracted by promise of lands, or planted
out, that they might not give trouble on the Border.

Persecution of Catholics was violent, and in spring 1615 Father Ogilvie
was hanged after very cruel treatment directed by Archbishop
Spottiswoode. In this year the two ecclesiastical Courts of High
Commission were fused into one, and an Assembly was coerced into passing
what James called "Hotch-potch resolutions" about changes in public
worship. James wanted greater changes, but deferred them till he visited
Scotland in 1617, when he was attended by the luckless figure of Laud,
who went to a funeral--in a surplice! James had many personal bickerings
with preachers, but his five main points, "The Articles of Perth" (of
these the most detested were: (1) Communicants must kneel, not sit, at
the Communion; (4) Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost must be observed; and
(5) Confirmation must be introduced), were accepted by an Assembly in
1618. They could not be enforced, but were sanctioned by Parliament in
1621. The day was called Black Saturday, and omens were drawn by both
parties from a thunderstorm which occurred at the time of the
ratification of the Articles of Perth by Parliament in Edinburgh (August
4, 1621).

By enforcing these Articles James passed the limit of his subjects'
endurance. In their opinion, as in Knox's, to kneel at the celebration
of the Holy Communion was an act of idolatry, was "Baal worship," and no
pressure could compel them to kneel. The three great festivals of the
Christian Church, whether Roman, Genevan, or Lutheran, had no certain
warrant in Holy Scripture, but were rather repugnant to the Word of God.
The king did not live to see the bloodshed and misery caused by his
reckless assault on the liberties and consciences of his subjects; he
died on March 27, 1625, just before the Easter season in which it was
intended to enforce his decrees.

The ungainliness of James's person, his lack of courage on certain
occasions (he was by no means a constant coward), and the feebleness of
his limbs might be attributed to pre-natal influences; he was injured
before he was born by the sufferings of his mother at the time of
Riccio's murder. His deep dissimulation he learnt in his bitter
childhood and harassed youth. His ingenious mind was trained to
pedantry; he did nothing worse, and nothing more congenial to the cruel
superstitions of his age, than in his encouragement of witch trials and
witch burnings promoted by the Scottish clergy down to the early part of
the eighteenth century.

His plantation of Ulster by Scottish settlers has greatly affected
history down to our own times, while the most permanent result of the
awards by which he stimulated the colonisation of Nova Scotia has been
the creation of hereditary knighthoods or baronetcies.

His encouragement of learning left its mark in the foundation of the
Town's College of Edinburgh, on the site of Kirk-o'-Field, the scene of
his father's murder.

The south-western Highlands, from Lochaber to Islay and Cantyre, were, in
his reign, the scene of constant clan feuds and repressions, resulting in
the fall of the Macdonalds, and the rise of the Campbell chief, Argyll,
to the perilous power later wielded by the Marquis against Charles I.
Many of the sons of the dispossessed Macdonalds, driven into Ireland,
were to constitute the nucleus of the army of Montrose. In the Orkneys
and Shetlands the constant turbulence of Earl Patrick and his family
ended in the annexation of the islands to the Crown (1612), and the
Earl's execution (1615).

CHAPTER XXIV. CHARLES I.

The reign of Charles I. opened with every sign of the tempests which were
to follow. England and Scotland were both seething with religious fears
and hatreds. Both parties in England, Puritans and Anglicans, could be
satisfied with nothing less than complete domination. In England the
extreme Puritans, with their yearning after the Genevan presbyterian
discipline, had been threatening civil war even under Elizabeth. James
had treated them with a high hand and a proud heart. Under Charles,
wedded to a "Jezebel," a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, the Puritan
hatred of such prelates as Laud expressed itself in threats of murder;
while heavy fines and cruel mutilations were inflicted by the party in
power. The Protestant panic, the fear of a violent restoration of
Catholicism in Scotland, never slumbered. In Scotland Catholics were at
this time bitterly persecuted, and believed that a presbyterian general
massacre of them all was being organised. By the people the Anglican
bishops and the prayer-book were as much detested as priests and the
Mass. When Charles placed six prelates on his Privy Council, and
recognised the Archbishop of St Andrews, Spottiswoode, as first in
precedence among his subjects, the nobles were angry and jealous. Charles
would not do away with the infatuated Articles of Perth. James, as he
used to say, had "governed Scotland by the pen" through his Privy
Council. Charles knew much less than James of the temper of the Scots,
among whom he had never come since his infancy, and _his_ Privy Council
with six bishops was apt to be even more than commonly subservient.

In Scotland as in England the expenses of national defence were a cause
of anger; and the mismanagement of military affairs by the king's
favourite, Buckingham, increased the irritation. It was brought to a
head in Scotland by the "Act of Revocation," under which all Church lands
and Crown lands bestowed since 1542 were to be restored to the Crown.
This Act once more united in opposition the nobles and the preachers;
since 1596 they had not been in harmony. In 1587, as we saw, James VI.
had annexed much of the old ecclesiastical property to the Crown; but he
had granted most of it to nobles and barons as "temporal lordships." Now,
by Charles, the temporal lords who held such lands were menaced, the
judges ("Lords of Session") who would have defended their interests were
removed from the Privy Council (March 1626), and, in August, the temporal
lords remonstrated with the king through deputations.

In fact, they took little harm--redeeming their holdings at the rate of
ten years' purchase. The main result was that landowners were empowered
to buy the tithes on their own lands from the multitude of "titulars of
tithes" (1629) who had rapaciously and oppressively extorted these tenths
of the harvest every year. The ministers had a safe provision at last,
secured on the tithes, in Scotland styled "teinds," but this did not
reconcile most of them to bishops and to the Articles of Perth. Several
of the bishops were, in fact, "latitudinarian" or "Arminian" in doctrine,
wanderers from the severity of Knox and Calvin. With them began,
perhaps, the "Moderatism" which later invaded the Kirk; though their
ideal slumbered during the civil war, to awaken again, with the teaching
of Archbishop Leighton, under the Restoration. Meanwhile the nobles and
gentry had been alarmed and mulcted, and were ready to join hands with
the Kirk in its day of resistance.

In June 1633 Charles at last visited his ancient kingdom, accompanied by
Laud. His subjects were alarmed and horrified by the sight of prelates
in lawn sleeves, candles in chapel, and even a tapestry showing the
crucifixion. To this the bishops are said to have bowed,--plain
idolatry. In the Parliament of June 18 the eight representatives of each
Estate, who were practically all-powerful as Lords of the Articles, were
chosen, not from each Estate by its own members, but on a method
instituted, or rather revived, by James VI. in 1609. The nobles made the
choice from the bishops, the bishops from the nobles, and the elected
sixteen from the barons and burghers. The twenty-four were all thus
episcopally minded: they drew up the bills, and the bills were voted on
without debate. The grant of supply made in these circumstances was
liberal, and James's ecclesiastical legislation, including the sanction
of the "rags of Rome" worn by the bishops, was ratified. Remonstrances
from the ministers of the old Kirk party were disregarded; and--the thin
end of the wedge--the English Liturgy was introduced in the Royal Chapel
of Holyrood and in that of St Salvator's College, St Andrews, where it
has been read once, on a funeral occasion, in recent years.

In 1634-35, on the information of Archbishop Spottiswoode, Lord Balmerino
was tried for treason because he possessed a supplication or petition
which the Lords of the minority, in the late Parliament, had drawn up but
had not presented. He was found guilty, but spared: the proceeding
showed of what nature the bishops were, and alienated and alarmed the
populace and the nobles and gentry. A remonstrance in a manly spirit by
Drummond of Hawthornden, the poet, was disregarded.

In 1635 Charles authorised a Book of Canons, heralding the imposition of
a Liturgy, which scarcely varied, and when it varied was thought to
differ for the worse, from that of the Church of England. By these
canons, the most nakedly despotic of innovations, the preachers could not
use their sword of excommunication without the assent of the Bishops.
James VI. had ever regarded with horror and dread the licence of
"conceived prayers," spoken by the minister, and believed to be
extemporary or directly inspired. There is an old story that one
minister prayed that James might break his leg: certainly prayers for
"sanctified plagues" on that prince were publicly offered, at the will of
the minister. Even a very firm Presbyterian, the Laird of Brodie, when
he had once heard the Anglican service in London, confided to his journal
that he had suffered much from the nonsense of "conceived prayers." They
were a dangerous weapon, in Charles's opinion: he was determined to
abolish them, rather that he might be free from the agitation of the
pulpit than for reasons of ritual, and to proclaim his own headship of
the Kirk of "King Christ."

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