THE KING OF SCOTS
Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had
greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the
character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular
feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought
peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth
of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of
a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled mass of
impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have
given scope to the nobleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its
bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the
throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the
natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its
kings.
[Sidenote: James Stuart.]
Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most men had looked forward to a
violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the
pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of
Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady
Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord
Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary title under the will of
Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted,
there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth,
had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in
the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox
by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no
general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the
realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The mass of the Catholics,
who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded
that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his
mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for
Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had
already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the
other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people,
bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and
upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and who had
till now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its
ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its
worship. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who
guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too
clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single
head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth
had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament
she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there;
and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king
from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and
to assure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than
James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient
voice.
[Sidenote: His youth.]
To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king
indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of
European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an
English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring nobles who
governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while
after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men;
but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.
"What Bothwellhaugh has done," Mary wrote joyously from her English
prison at the news, "has been done without order of mine: but I thank
him all the more for it." The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into
a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only
tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the
child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling;
and it was only when the regency passed into the strong hand of Morton
at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order,
that the land won a short breathing-space. Edinburgh, the last fortress
held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its
captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place;
and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But
hardly five years had passed when a union of his rivals and their adroit
proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a
fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get
hold of the king's person, to wield in his name the royal power, became
the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at
Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to
fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard;
or strove to baffle the nobles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from
France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to
Stirling only saved him from seizure at Doune; and a few months later,
as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on
his bridle-rein. "Better bairns greet than bearded men," was the gruff
answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king
saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.
[Sidenote: His purpose.]
Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of
brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight
of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical
courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in
himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about
him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious
cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his
"discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and
ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear
the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the
turbulent nobles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of
Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town
below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or
political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The
republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious
school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its
consecration of rebellion, its assertion of human equality, its
declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated
the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years
James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as "infamous
invectives," and would have had their readers punished "even as it were
their authors risen again." His temper and purpose were in fact simply
those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core;
and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which
the Stuarts had done.
[Sidenote: The work of the Stuarts.]
Their work had been the building up of the Scottish realm, its change
from a medley of warring nobles into an ordered kingdom. Never had
freedom been bought at a dearer price than it was bought by Scotland in
its long War of Independence. Wealth and public order alike disappeared.
The material prosperity of the country was brought to a standstill. The
work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national
unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of
division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves
feudalism overmastered the Crown. The nobles became almost wholly
independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce,
sank into insignificance. From the walls of Stirling the Scotch kings of
that earlier time looked out on a realm where they could not ride
thirty miles to north or to south save at the head of a host of armed
men. With James the First began the work of building the monarchy up
again from this utter ruin; but the wresting of Scotland from the grasp
of its nobles was only wrought out in a struggle of life and death. Few
figures are more picturesque than the figures of the young Scotch kings
as they dash themselves against the iron circle which girds them round
in their desperate efforts to rescue the Crown from serfdom. They carry
their life in their hands; a doom is on them; they die young and by
violent deaths. One was stabbed by plotters in his bedchamber. Another
was stabbed in a peasant's hut where he had crawled for refuge after
defeat. Another was slain by the bursting of a cannon. The fourth James
fell more nobly at Flodden. The fifth died of a broken heart on the news
of Solway Moss. But hunted and slain as they were, the kings clung
stubbornly to the task they had set themselves.
[Sidenote: The Stuarts and the Reformation.]
They stood almost alone. The Scottish people was too weak as yet to form
a check on the baronage; and the one force on which the Crown could
reckon was the force of the Church. To enrich the Church, to bind its
prelates closely to the monarchy by the gift of social and political
power, was the policy of every Stuart. A greater force than that of the
Church lay in the dogged perseverance of the kings themselves. Little by
little their work was done. The great house of Douglas was broken at
last. The ruin of lesser houses followed in its train, and under the
fifth of the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.
But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone
again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The nobles were
enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the
baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that
Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to
overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with
Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again
to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt
failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the nobles, triumphant
at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of
her child.
[Sidenote: James and the nobles.]
It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his
fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even
in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not
wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that
order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact
been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and
Morton had shown how easily the turbulent nobles could be bent by an
energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed,
James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship.
The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the
land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen
he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive
them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most
powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A
year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand,
and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and
Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; "there was no need of
words," James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with
protestations of loyalty; "weapons had spoken loud enough." But their
return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the
succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the
friendship of England; and once secure against English intervention the
king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A
significant ceremony showed that the strife with the nobles was at an
end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside
their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each
noble, "holding his chief enemy by the hand," walked in his doublet to
the market-cross of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.
[Sidenote: The Scotch people.]
The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was
master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he
was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst
the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This
was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of
small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The
peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant
subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a
political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in
the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence
the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for
existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour,
to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to
watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were
foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander
or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every
homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and
nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while
barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's
call on forays as pitiless, this was the rough school in which the
Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a
school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a
meaner race into slaves only hardened and ennobled the temper of the
Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he
drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the
caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the noble self dependence, the
patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere
did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was
because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil
was ready for the seed. The developement of a noble manhood brought with
it the craving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call
of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a
Church.
[Sidenote: Knox.]
One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.
In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on
Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen
creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and
toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he
behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon
he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into
blads and fly out of it." It was in vain that men strove to pen the
fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says
a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into
application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen
to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his
resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and
political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The
meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was
stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the
statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was
embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs
of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a
teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here,"
said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never
feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the
memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her
trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be
ashamed."
[Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]
The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the
ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The
new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an
ordered system of kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods,
while chosen delegates formed the General Assembly of the Kirk. In this
organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time
the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular
government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a
feeble and unimportant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of
prelates and nobles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the
Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border,
not a trace could be found in the assemblies which gathered round the
Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest
order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who
gathered to the General Assembly of the Kirk. Not only did
Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before
by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay
elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an
overpowering majority to the earlier Assemblies, it called the people at
large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the
administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the
outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution has
proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in
raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by
the change which passed from the moment of its establishment over the
face of Scottish history.
[Sidenote: The Kirk and the king.]
The sphere of action to which it called the people was in fact not a
mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere. Formally the Assembly meddled
only with matters of religion; but in the creed of the Calvinist, as in
the creed of the Catholic, the secular and the religious world were one.
It was the office of the Church to enforce good and to rebuke evil; and
social and political life fell alike within her "discipline." Feudalism
received its death-blow when the noble who had wronged his wife or
murdered his tenant sate humbled before the peasant elders on the stool
of repentance. The new despotism which was growing up under the form of
the monarchy found a sudden arrest in the challenge of the Kirk. When
James summoned the preachers before his Council and arraigned their
meetings as without warrant and seditious, "Mr. Andrew Melville could
not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
unresistible a manner that howbeit the king used his authority in most
crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered
the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but 'God's silly
vassal'; and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, though with
much hot reasoning and many interruptions: 'Sir, we will humbly
reverence your Majesty always--namely, in public. But since we have
this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is that
you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown, and with
you the country and kirk of Christ is like to wreck, for not telling you
the truth and giving of you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our
duty therein or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore,
sir, as divers times before, so now again I must tell you, there are two
kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and
his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose
kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom
Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and
severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and
discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful servants nor
members of Christ!'"
[Sidenote: The ministers and the people.]
It is idle to set aside words like these as the mere utterances of
fanaticism or of priestly arrogance. James and his Council would have
made swift work of mere fanatics or of arrogant priests. Why Melville
could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people
suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief
that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all
the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see a popular power
that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being
under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no
official position or material power, for the nobles had stripped the
Church of the vast endowments which had lured their sons and the royal
bastards within the pale of its ministry. The ministers of the new
communion were drawn from the burghers and peasantry or at best from the
smaller gentry; and nothing in their social position aided them in
withstanding the nobles or the Crown. Their strength lay simply in the
popular sympathy behind them, in their capacity of rousing national
opinion through the pulpit, of expressing it through the Assembly. The
claims which such men advanced, ecclesiastical as their garb might be,
could not fail to be national in their issues. In struggling against
episcopacy they were in fact struggling against any breaking-up or
impeding of that religious organization which alone enabled Scotland to
withstand the claims of the Crown. In jealously asserting the right of
the General Assembly to meet every year and to discuss every question
that met it, they were vindicating in the only possible fashion the
right of the nation to rule itself in a parliamentary way. In asserting
the liberty of the pulpit they were for the first time in the history of
Europe recognizing the power of public opinion and fighting for freedom
whether of thought or of speech. Strange to modern ears as their
language may be, bigoted and narrow as their temper must often seem, it
is well to remember the greatness of the debt we owe them. It was their
stern resolve, their energy, their endurance that saved Scotland from a
civil and religious despotism, and that in saving the liberty of
Scotland saved English liberty as well.
[Sidenote: Andrew Melville.]
The greatest of the successors of Knox was Andrew Melville. Two years
after Knox's death Melville came fresh from a training among the French
Huguenots to take up and carry forward his work. With less prophetic
fire than his master he possessed as fierce a boldness, a greater
disdain of secular compromises, a lofty pride in his calling, a bigoted
faith in Calvinism that knew neither rest nor delay in its full
establishment throughout the land. As yet the system of Presbyterian
faith and discipline, with the synods and assemblies in which it was
embodied, though it had practically won its hold over southern Scotland,
was without legal sanction. The demand of the ministers for a
restitution of the Church lands and the resolve of the nobles not to
part with their spoil had caused the rejection of the Book of Discipline
by the Estates. The same spirit of greed secured the retention of a
nominal episcopacy. Though the name of bishops and archbishops appeared
"to many to savour of Papistry," bishops and archbishops were still
named to vacant dioceses as milch-cows, through whom the revenues of
the sees might be drained by the great nobles. Against such
"Tulchan-bishops," as they were nicknamed by the people's scorn, a
"Tulchan" being a mere calf-skin stuffed with hay by which a cow was
persuaded to give her milk after her calf was taken from her, Knox had
not cared to protest; he had only taken care that they should be subject
to the General Assembly, and deprived of all jurisdiction or authority
beyond that of a Presbyterian "Superintendent." His strong political
sense hindered a conflict on such a ground with the civil power, and
without a conflict it was plain that no change could come. The Regent
Morton, Calvinist as he was, supported the cause of Episcopacy, and the
fact that bishops formed an integral part of the estates of the realm
made any demand for their abolition distasteful to the large mass of men
who always shrink from any constitutional revolution.
[Sidenote: Presbyterianism established.]
But Melville threw aside all compromise. In 1580 the General Assembly
declared the office of bishop abolished, as having "no sure warrant,
authority, or good ground out of the Word of God." In 1581 it adopted a
second Book of Discipline which organized the Church on the pure
Calvinistic model and advanced the full Calvinistic claim to its
spiritual independence and supremacy within the realm. When the Estates
refused to sanction this book the Assembly sent it to every presbytery,
and its gradual acceptance secured the organization of the Church. It
was at this crisis that the appearance of Esme Stuart brought about the
first reaction towards a revival of the royal power; and the Council
under the guidance of the favourite struck at once at the preachers who
denounced it. But their efforts to "tune the pulpits" were met by a bold
defiance. "Though all the kings of the earth should call my words
treason," replied one minister who was summoned to the Council-board, "I
am ready by good reason to prove them to be the very truth of God, and
if need require to seal them with my blood." Andrew Melville, when
summoned on the same charge of seditious preaching, laid a Hebrew Bible
on the Council-table and "resolved to try conclusions on that only."
What the Council shrank from "trying conclusions" with was the popular
enthusiasm which backed these protests. When John Durie was exiled for
words uttered in the pulpit, the whole town of Edinburgh met him on his
return, "and going up the street with bare heads and loud voices sang to
the praise of God till heaven and earth resounded."
[Sidenote: James and the Kirk.]
But it was this very popularity which roused the young king to action.
Boy of eighteen as he was, no sooner had the overthrow of the Douglases
and the judicial murder of Lord Gowrie freed James from the power of the
nobles than he faced this new foe. Theologically his opinions were as
Calvinistic as those of Melville himself, but in the ecclesiastical
fabric of Calvinism, in its organization of the Church, in its annual
assemblies, in its public discussion and criticism of acts of government
through the pulpit, he saw an organized democracy which threatened his
crown. And at this he struck as boldly as his forefathers had struck at
the power of feudalism. The nobles, dreading the resumption of church
lands, were with the king; and in 1584 an Act of the Estates denounced
the judicial and legislative authority assumed by the General Assembly,
provided that no subjects, temporal or spiritual, "take upon them to
convocate or assemble themselves together for holding of councils,
conventions, or assemblies," and demanded a pledge of obedience from
every minister. For the moment the ministers submitted; and James
prepared to carry out his victory by a policy of religious balance. The
Catholic lords were still strong in northern and western Scotland; and
firmly as the King was opposed to the dogmas of Catholicism he saw the
use he might make of the Catholics as a check on the power of the
Congregation. It was with this view that he shielded Lord Huntly and the
Catholic nobles while he intrigued with the Guises abroad. But such a
policy at such a juncture forced England to intervene. At a moment when
the Armada was gathering in the Tagus, Elizabeth felt the need of
securing Scotland against any revival of Catholicism; and her aid
enabled the exiled lords to return in triumph in 1585. For the next ten
years James was helpless in their hands. He was forced to ally himself
with Elizabeth, to offer aid against the Armada, to make a Protestant
marriage, to threaten action against Philip, to attack Huntly and the
Catholic lords of the north on a charge of correspondence with Spain and
to drive them from the realm. The triumph of the Protestant lords was a
triumph of the Kirk. In 1592 the Acts of 1584 were repealed; Episcopacy
was formally abolished; and the Calvinistic organization of the Church
at last received legal sanction. All that James could save was the right
of being present at the General Assembly, and of fixing a time and place
for its annual meeting. It was in vain that the young king struggled and
argued; in vain that he resolutely asserted himself to be supreme in
spiritual as in civil matters; in vain that he showed himself a better
scholar and a more learned theologian than the men who held him down.
The preachers scolded him from the pulpit and bade him "to his knees" to
seek pardon for his vanity; while the Assembly chided him for his
"banning and swearing" and sent a deputation to confer with his Queen
touching the "want of godly exercise among her maids."
[Sidenote: James and Presbyterianism.]
The bitter memory of these years of humiliation dwelt with James to the
last. They were fiercely recalled, when he mounted the English throne.
"A Scottish Presbytery," he exclaimed at the Hampton Court Conference,
"as well fitteth with monarchy as God and the Devil." Year after year he
watched for the hour of deliverance, and every year brought it nearer.
His mother's death gave fresh strength to his throne. The alliance with
England, Elizabeth's pledge not to oppose his succession, left him
practically heir of the English Crown. Freed from the dread of a
Catholic reaction, the Queen was at liberty to indulge in her dread of
Calvinism, and to sympathize with the fresh struggle which James was
preparing to make against it. Her attitude, as well as the growing
certainty of his coming greatness as sovereign of both realms, had no
doubt their influence in again strengthening the king's position; and
his new power was seen in his renewed mastery over the Scottish lords.
But this triumph over feudalism was only the opening of a decisive
struggle with Calvinism. If he had defeated Huntly and his
fellow-plotters, he refused to keep them in exile or to comply with the
demand of the Church that he should refuse their services on the ground
of religion. He would be king of a nation, he contended, and not of a
part of it. The protest was a fair one; but the real secret of the
king's policy towards the Catholics, as of his son's after him, was a
"king-craft" which aimed at playing off one part of the nation against
another to the profit of the Crown. "The wisdom of the Council," said a
defiant preacher, "is this, that ye must be served with all sorts of men
to serve your purpose and grandeur, Jew and Gentile, Papist and
Protestant. And because the ministers and Protestants in Scotland are
over strong and control the King, they must be weakened and brought
low."
[Sidenote: The struggle with the Church.]
It was with this end before him that James set finally to work in 1597.
Cool, adroit, firm in his purpose, the young king seized on some wild
outbreaks of the pulpit to assert a control over its utterances; a riot
in Edinburgh in defence of the ministers enabled him to bring the town
to submission by flooding its streets with Highlanders and Borderers;
the General Assembly itself was made amenable to royal influence by its
summons to Perth, where the cooler temper of the northern ministers
could be played off against the hot Presbyterianism of the ministers of
the Lothians. It was the Assembly itself which consented to curtail the
liberty of preaching and the liberty of assembling in presbytery and
synod, as well as to make the king's consent needful for the appointment
of every minister. What James was as stubbornly resolved on was the
restoration of Episcopacy. He wished not only to bridle but to rule the
Church; and it was only through bishops that he could effectively rule
it. The old tradition of the Stuarts had looked to the prelates for the
support of the Crown, and James saw keenly that the new force which had
overthrown them was a force which threatened to overthrow the monarchy
itself. It was the people which in its religious or its political guise
was the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so James
argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race, their cause was
the same. "No bishop," ran his famous adage, "no king!" To restore the
episcopate was from this moment his steady policy. But its actual
restoration only followed on the failure of a long attempt to bring the
Assembly round to a project of nominating representatives of itself in
the Estates. The presence of such representatives would have
strengthened the moral weight of the Parliament, while it diminished
that of the Assembly, and in both ways would have tended to the
advantage of the Crown. But, cowed as the ministers now were, no
pressure could bring them to do more than name delegates to vote
according to their will in the Estates; and as such a plan foiled the
king's scheme James was at last driven to use a statute which empowered
him to name bishops as prelates with a seat in the Estates, though they
possessed no spiritual status or jurisdiction. In 1600 two such prelates
appeared in Parliament; and James followed up his triumph by the
publication of his "Basilicon Doron," an assertion of the divine right
and absolute authority of kings over all orders of men within their
realms.
It is only by recalling the early history of James Stuart that we can
realize the attitude and temper of the Scottish Sovereign at the moment
when the death of Elizabeth called him to the English throne. He came
flushed with a triumph over Calvinism and democracy, but embittered by
the humiliations he had endured from them, and dreading them as the
deadly enemies of his crown. Raised at last to a greatness of which he
had hardly dreamed, he was little likely to yield to a pressure, whether
religious or political, against which in his hour of weakness he had
fought so hard. Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no echo in a king
whose ears were still thrilling with the defiance of Melville and his
fellow ministers, and who among all the charms that England presented to
him saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient Church, its
synods that met but at the royal will, its courts that carried out the
royal ordinances, its bishops that held themselves to be royal officers.
Nor were the hopes of political progress likely to meet with a warmer
welcome. Politics with a Stuart meant simply a long struggle for the
exaltation of the Crown. It was a struggle where success had been won
not by a reverence for law or a people's support, but by sheer personal
energy, by a blind faith in monarchy and the rights of monarchy, by an
unscrupulous use of every weapon which a king possessed. Craft had been
met by craft, violence by violence. Justice had been degraded into a
weapon in the royal hand. The sacredness of law had disappeared in a
strife where all seemed lawful for the preservation of the Crown. By
means such as these feudalism had been humbled and the long strife with
the baronage brought at last to a close. Strife with the people had yet
to be waged. But in whatever forms it might present itself, whether in
his new land or his old, it would be waged by James as by his successors
in the same temper and with the same belief, a belief that the welfare
of the nation lay in the unchecked supremacy of the Crown, and a temper
that held all means lawful for the establishment of such a supremacy.