On March 4, 1578, a strong band of nobles, led by Argyll, presented so
firm a front that Morton resigned the Regency; but in April 1578, a
Douglas plot, backed by Angus and Morton, secured for the Earl of Mar the
command of Stirling Castle and custody of the King; in June 1578, after
an appearance of civil war, Morton was as strong as ever. After dining
with him, in April 1579, Atholl, the main hope of Mary in Scotland, died
suddenly, and suspicion of poison fell on his host. But Morton's ensuing
success in expelling from Scotland the Hamilton leaders, Lord Claude and
Arbroath, brought down his own doom. With them Sir James Balfour, deep
in the secrets of Darnley's death, was exiled; he opened a correspondence
with Mary, and presently procured for her "a contented revenge" on
Morton.
Two new characters in the long intrigue of vengeance now come on the
scene. Both were Stewarts, and as such were concerned in the feud
against the Hamiltons. The first was a cousin of Darnley, brought up in
France, namely Esme Stuart d'Aubigny, son of John, a brother of Lennox.
He had all the accomplishments likely to charm the boy king, now in his
fourteenth year.
James had hitherto been sternly educated by George Buchanan, more mildly
by Peter Young. Buchanan and others had not quite succeeded in bringing
him to scorn and hate his mother; Lady Mar, who was very kind to him, had
exercised a gentler influence. The boy had read much, had hunted yet
more eagerly, and had learned dissimulation and distrust, so natural to a
child weak and ungainly in body and the conscious centre of the intrigues
of violent men. A favourite of his was James Stewart, son of Lord
Ochiltree, and brother-in-law of John Knox. Stewart was Captain of the
Guard, a man of learning, who had been in foreign service; he was skilled
in all bodily feats, was ambitious, reckless, and resolute, and no friend
of the preachers. The two Stewarts, d'Aubigny and the Captain, became
allies.
In a Parliament at Edinburgh (November 1579) their foes, the chiefs of
the Hamiltons, were forfeited (they had been driven to seek shelter with
Elizabeth), while d'Aubigny got their lands and the key of Scotland,
Dumbarton Castle, on the estuary of Clyde. The Kirk, regarding
d'Aubigny, now Earl of Lennox, despite his Protestant professions, as a
Papist or an atheist, had little joy in Morton, who was denounced in a
printed placard as guilty in Darnley's murder: Sir James Balfour could
show his signature to the band to slay Darnley, signed by Huntly,
Bothwell, Argyll, and Lethington. This was not true. Balfour knew much,
was himself involved, but had not the band to show, or did not dare to
produce it.
To strengthen himself, Lennox was reconciled to the Kirk; to help the
Hamiltons, Elizabeth sent Bowes to intrigue against Lennox, who was
conspiring in Mary's interest, or in that of the Guises, or in his own.
When Lennox succeeded in getting Dumbarton Castle, an open door for
France, into his power, Bowes was urged by Elizabeth to join with Morton
and "lay violent hands" on Lennox (August 31, 1580), but in a month
Elizabeth cancelled her orders.
Bowes was recalled; Morton, to whom English aid had been promised, was
left to take his chances. Morton had warning from Lord Robert Stewart,
Mary's half-brother, to fly the country, for Sir James Balfour, with his
information, had landed. On December 31, 1580, Captain Stewart accused
Morton, in presence of the Council, of complicity in Darnley's murder. He
was put in ward; Elizabeth threatened war; the preachers stormed against
Lennox; a plot to murder him (a Douglas plot) and to seize James was
discovered; Randolph, who now represented Elizabeth, was fired at, and
fled to Berwick; James Stewart was created Earl of Arran. In March 1581
the king and Lennox tried to propitiate the preachers by signing a
negative Covenant against Rome, later made into a precedent for the
famous Covenant of 1638. On June 1 Morton was tried for guilty
foreknowledge of Darnley's death. He was executed deservedly, and his
head was stuck on a spike of the Tolbooth. The death of this avaricious,
licentious, and resolute though unamiable Protestant was a heavy blow to
the preachers and their party, and a crook in the lot of Elizabeth.
THE WAR OF KIRK AND KING.
The next twenty years were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King,
whence arose "all the cumber of Scotland" till 1689. The preachers, led
by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror
of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and
of an unknown proportion of the people. The Reformation of 1559-1560 had
been met by no Catholic resistance; we might suppose that the enormous
majority of the people were Protestants, though the reverse has been
asserted. But whatever the theological preferences of the country may
have been, the justifiable fear of practical annexation by France had
overpowered all other considerations. By 1580 it does not seem that
there was any good reason for the Protestant nervousness, even if some
northern counties and northern and Border peers preferred Catholicism.
The king himself, a firm believer in his own theological learning and
acuteness, was thoroughly Protestant.
But the preachers would scarcely allow him to remain a Protestant. Their
claims, as formulated by Andrew Melville, were inconsistent with the
right of the State to be mistress in her own house. In a General
Assembly at Glasgow (1581) Presbyteries were established; Episcopacy was
condemned; the Kirk claimed for herself a separate jurisdiction,
uninvadable by the State. Elizabeth, though for State reasons she
usually backed the Presbyterians against James, also warned him of "a
sect of dangerous consequence, which would have no king but a
presbytery." The Kirk, with her sword of excommunication, and with the
inspired violence of the political sermons and prayers, invaded the
secular authority whenever and wherever she pleased, and supported the
preachers in their claims to be tried first, when accused of treasonable
libels, in their own ecclesiastical courts. These were certain to acquit
them.
James, if not pressed in this fashion, had no particular reason for
desiring Episcopal government of the Kirk, but being so pressed he saw no
refuge save in bishops. Meanwhile his chief advisers--d'Aubigny, now
Duke of Lennox, and James Stewart, the destroyer of Morton, now, to the
prejudice of the Hamiltons, Earl of Arran--were men whose private life,
at least in Arran's case, was scandalous. If Arran were a Protestant, he
was impatient of the rule of the pulpiteers; and Lennox was working, if
not sincerely in Mary's interests, certainly in his own and for those of
the Catholic House of Guise. At the same time he favoured the king's
Episcopal schemes, and, late in 1581, appointed a preacher named
Montgomery to the recently vacant Archbishopric of Glasgow, while he
himself, like Morton, drew most of the revenues. Hence arose tumults,
and, late in 1581 and in 1582, priestly and Jesuit emissaries went and
came, intriguing for a Catholic rising, to be supported by a large
foreign force which they had not the slightest chance of obtaining from
any quarter. Archbishop Montgomery was excommunicated by the Kirk, and
James, as we saw, had signed "A Negative Confession" (1581).
In 1582 Elizabeth was backing the exiled Presbyterian Earl of Angus and
the Earl of Gowrie (Ruthven), while Lennox was contemplating a _coup
d'etat_ in Edinburgh (August 27). Gowrie, with the connivance of
England, struck the first blow. He, Mar, and their accomplices captured
James at Ruthven Castle, near Perth (August 23, "the Raid of Ruthven"),
with the approval of the General Assembly of the Kirk. It was a Douglas
plot managed by Angus and Elizabeth. James Stewart of the Guard (now
Earl of Arran) was made prisoner; Lennox fled the country. In October
1582, in a Parliament at Holyrood, the conspirators passed Acts
indemnifying themselves, and the General Assembly approved them. These
Acts were rescinded later, and James had learned for life his hatred of
the Presbyterians who had treacherously seized and insulted their king.
{144}
In May 1583 Lennox died in Paris, leaving an heir. On June 27 James made
his escape, "a free king," to the castle of St Andrews: he proclaimed an
amnesty and feigned reconciliation with his captor, the Earl of Gowrie,
chief of the house so hateful to Mary--the Ruthvens. At the same time
James placed himself in friendly relations with his kinsfolk, the Guises,
the terror of Protestants. He had already been suspected, on account of
Lennox, as inclined to Rome: in fact, he was always a Protestant, but
baited on every side--by England, by the Kirk, by a faction of his
nobles: he intrigued for allies in every direction.
The secret history of his intrigues has never been written. We find the
persecuted and astute lad either in communication with Rome, or
represented by shady adventurers as employing them to establish such
communications. At one time, as has been recently discovered, a young
man giving himself out as James's bastard brother (a son of Darnley
begotten in England) was professing to bear letters from James to the
Pope. He was arrested on the Continent, and James could not be brought
either to avow or disclaim his kinsman!
A new Lennox, son of the last, was created a duke; a new Bothwell,
Francis Stewart (nephew of Mary's Bothwell), began to rival his uncle in
turbulence. Knowing that Anglo-Scottish plots to capture him again were
being woven daily by Angus and others, James, in February 1584, wrote a
friendly and compromising letter to the Pope. In April, Arran (James
Stewart) crushed a conspiracy by seizing Gowrie at Dundee, and then
routing a force with which Mar and Angus had entered Scotland. Gowrie,
confessing his guilt as a conspirator, was executed at Stirling (May 2,
1584), leaving, of course, his feud to his widow and son. The chief
preachers fled; Andrew Melville was already in exile, with several
others, in England. Melville, in February, had been charged with
preaching seditious sermons, had brandished a Hebrew Bible at the Privy
Council, had refused secular jurisdiction and appealed to a spiritual
court, by which he was certain to be acquitted. Henceforward, when
charged with uttering treasonable libels from the pulpit, the preachers
were wont to appeal, in the first instance, to a court of their own
cloth, and on this point James in the long-run triumphed over the Kirk.
In a Parliament of May 18, 1584, such declinature of royal jurisdiction
was, by "The Black Acts," made treason: Episcopacy was established; the
heirs of Gowrie were disinherited; Angus, Mar, and other rebels were
forfeited. But such forfeitures never held long in Scotland.
In August 1584 a new turn was given to James's policy by Arran, who was
Protestant, if anything, in belief, and hoped to win over Elizabeth, the
harbourer of all enemies of James. Arran's instrument was the beautiful
young Master of Gray, in France a Catholic, a partisan of Mary, and
leagued with the Guises. He was sent to persuade Elizabeth to banish
James's exiled rebels, but, like a Lethington on a smaller scale, he set
himself to obtain the restoration of these lords as against Arran, while
he gratified Elizabeth by betraying to her the secrets of Mary. This man
was the adoring friend of the flower of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney!
As against Arran the plot succeeded. Making Berwick, on English soil,
their base, in November 1585 the exiles, lay and secular, backed by
England, returned, captured James at Stirling, and drove Arran to lurk
about the country, till, many years after, Douglas of Parkhead met and
slew him, avenging Morton; and, when opportunity offered, Douglas was
himself slain by an avenging Stewart at the Cross of Edinburgh. The age
reeked with such blood feuds, of which the preachers could not cure their
fiery flocks.
In December 1585 Parliament restored Gowrie's forfeited family to their
own (henceforth they were constantly conspiring against James), and the
exiled preachers returned to their manses and pulpits. But bishops were
not abolished, though the Kirk, through the Synod of Fife, excommunicated
the Archbishop of St Andrews, Adamson, who replied in kind. He was
charged with witchcraft, and in the long-run was dragged down and reduced
to poverty, being accused of dealings with witches--and hares!
In July 1586 England and Scotland formed an alliance, and Elizabeth
promised to make James an allowance of 4000 pounds a-year. This, it may
be feared, was the blood-price of James's mother: from her son, and any
hope of aid from her son, Mary was now cut off. Walsingham laid the
snares into which she fell, deliberately providing for her means of
communication with Babington and his company, and deciphering and copying
the letters which passed through the channel which he had contrived. A
trifle of forgery was also done by his agent, Phelipps. Mary, knowing
herself deserted by her son, was determined, as James knew, to disinherit
him. For this reason, and for the 4000 pounds, he made no strong protest
against her trial. One of his agents in London--the wretched accomplice
in his father's murder, Archibald Douglas--was consenting to her
execution. James himself thought that strict imprisonment was the best
course; but the Presbyterian Angus declared that Mary "could not be
blamed if she had caused the Queen of England's throat to be cut for
detaining her so unjustly imprisoned." The natural man within us
entirely agrees with Angus!
A mission was sent from Holyrood, including James's handsome new
favourite, the Master of Gray, with his cousin, Logan of Restalrig, who
sold the Master to Walsingham. The envoys were to beg for Mary's life.
The Master had previously betrayed her; but he was not wholly lost, and
in London he did his best, contrary to what is commonly stated, to secure
her life. He thus incurred the enmity of his former allies in the
English Court, and, as he had foreseen, he was ruined in Scotland--his
_previous_ letters, hostile to Mary, being betrayed by his aforesaid
cousin, Logan of Restalrig.
On February 8, 1567, ended the lifelong tragedy of Mary Stuart. The
woman whom Elizabeth vainly moved Amyas Paulet to murder was publicly
decapitated at Fotheringay. James vowed that he would not accept from
Elizabeth "the price of his mother's blood." But despite the fury of his
nobles James sat still and took the money, at most some 4000 pounds
annually,--when he could get it.
During the next fifteen years the reign of James, and his struggle for
freedom from the Kirk, was perturbed by a long series of intrigues of
which the details are too obscure and complex for presentation here. His
chief Minister was now John Maitland, a brother of Lethington, and as
versatile, unscrupulous, and intelligent as the rest of that House.
Maitland had actually been present, as Lethington's representative, at
the tragedy of the Kirk-o'-Field. He was Protestant, and favoured the
party of England. In the State the chief parties were the Presbyterian
nobles, the majority of the gentry or lairds, and the preachers on one
side; and the great Catholic families of Huntly, Morton (the title being
now held by a Maxwell), Errol, and Crawford on the other. Bothwell (a
sister's son of Mary's Bothwell) flitted meteor-like, more Catholic than
anything else, but always plotting to seize James's person; and in this
he was backed by the widow of Gowrie and the preachers, and encouraged by
Elizabeth. In her fear that James would join the Catholic nobles, whom
the preachers eternally urged him to persecute, Elizabeth smiled on the
Protestant plots--thereby, of course, fostering any inclination which
James may have felt to seek Catholic aid at home and abroad. The plots
of Mary were perpetually confused by intrigues of priestly emissaries,
who interfered with the schemes of Spain and mixed in the interests of
the Guises.
A fact which proved to be of the highest importance was the passing, in
July 1587, of an Act by which much of the ecclesiastical property of the
ancient Church was attached to the Crown, to be employed in providing for
the maintenance of the clergy. But James used much of it in making
temporal lordships: for example, at the time of the mysterious Gowrie
Conspiracy (August 1600), we find that the Earl of Gowrie had obtained
the Church lands of the Abbey of Scone, which his brother, the Master of
Ruthven, desired. With the large revenues now at his disposal James
could buy the support of the baronage, who, after the execution in 1584
of the Earl of Gowrie (the father of the Gowrie of the conspiracy of
1600), are not found leading and siding with the ministers in a resolute
way. By 1600 young Gowrie was the only hope of the preachers, and
probably James's ability to enrich the nobles helped to make them stand
aloof. Meanwhile, fears and hopes of the success of the Spanish Armada
held the minds of the Protestants and of the Catholic earls. "In this
world-wolter," as James said, no Scot moved for Spain except that Lord
Maxwell who had first received and then been deprived of the Earldom of
Morton. James advanced against him in Dumfriesshire and caused his
flight. As for the Armada, many ships drifted north round Scotland, and
one great vessel, blown up in Tobermory Bay by Lachlan Maclean of Duart,
still invites the attention of treasure-hunters (1911).
THE CATHOLIC EARLS.
Early in 1589 Elizabeth became mistress of some letters which proved that
the Catholic earls, Huntly and Errol, were intriguing with Spain. The
offence was lightly passed over, but when the earls, with Crawford and
Montrose, drew to a head in the north, James, with much more than his
usual spirit, headed the army which advanced against them: they fled from
him near Aberdeen, surrendered, and were for a brief time imprisoned. As
nobody knows how Fortune's wheel may turn, and as James, hard pressed by
the preachers, could neglect no chance of support, he would never gratify
the Kirk by crushing the Catholic earls, by temperament he was no
persecutor. His calculated leniency caused him years of trouble.
Meanwhile James, after issuing a grotesque proclamation about the causes
of his spirited resolve, sailed in October to woo a sea-king's daughter
over the foam, the Princess Anne of Denmark. After happy months passed,
he wrote, "in drinking and driving ower," he returned with his bride in
May 1590.
The General Assembly then ordered prayers for the Puritans oppressed in
England; none the less Elizabeth, the oppressor, continued to patronise
the plots of the Puritans of Scotland. They now lent their approval to
the foe of James's minister, Maitland, namely, the wild Francis Stewart,
Earl of Bothwell, a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell. This young man had
the engaging quality of gay and absolute recklessness; he was dear to
ladies and the wild young gentry of Lothian and the Borders; he broke
prisons, released friends, dealt with wizards, aided by Lady Gowrie stole
into Holyrood, his ruling ambition being to capture the king. The
preachers prayed for "sanctified plagues" against James, and regarded
Bothwell favourably as a sanctified plague.
A strange conspiracy within Clan Campbell, in which Huntly and Maitland
were implicated, now led to the murder, among others, of the bonny Earl
of Murray by Huntly in partnership with Maitland (February 1592).
James was accused of having instigated this crime, from suspicion of
Murray as a partner in the wild enterprises of Bothwell, and was so hard
pressed by sermons that, in the early summer of 1592, he allowed the
Black Acts to be abrogated, and "the Charter of the liberties of the
Kirk" to be passed. One of these liberties was to persecute Catholics in
accordance with the penal Acts of 1560. The Kirk was almost an _imperium
in imperio_, but was still prohibited from appointing the time and place
of its own General Assemblies without Royal assent. This weak point in
their defences enabled James to vanquish them, but, in June, Bothwell
attacked him in the Palace of Falkland and put him in considerable peril.
The end of 1592 and the opening of 1593 were remarkable for the discovery
of "The Spanish Blanks," papers addressed to Philip of Spain, signed by
Huntly, the new Earl of Angus, and Errol, to be filled up with an oral
message requesting military aid for Scottish Catholics. Such proceedings
make our historians hold up obtesting hands against the perfidy of
idolaters. But clearly, if Knox and the congregation were acting rightly
when they besought the aid of England against Mary of Guise, then Errol
and Huntly are not to blame for inviting Spain to free them from
persecution. Some inkling of the scheme had reached James, and a paper
in which he weighed the pros and cons is in existence. His suspected
understanding with the Catholic earls, whom he merely did not wish to
estrange hopelessly, was punished by a sanctified plague. On July 24,
1593, by aid of the late Earl Gowrie's daughter, Bothwell entered
Holyrood, seized the king, extorted his own terms, went and amazed the
Dean of Durham by his narrative of the adventure, and seemed to have the
connivance of Elizabeth. But in September James found himself in a
position to repudiate his forced engagement. Bothwell now allied himself
with the Catholic earls, and, as a Catholic, had no longer the prayers of
the preachers. James ordered levies to attack the earls, while Argyll
led his clan and the Macleans against Huntly, only to be defeated by the
Gordon horse at the battle of Glenrinnes (October 3). Huntly and his
allies, however, dared not encounter King James and Andrew Melville, who
marched together against them, and they were obliged to fly to the
Continent. Bothwell, with his retainer, Colville, continued, with
Cecil's connivance, to make desperate plots for seizing James; indeed,
Cecil was intriguing with them and other desperadoes even after 1600.
Throughout all the Tudor period, from Henry VII. to 1601, England was
engaged in a series of conspiracies against the persons of the princes of
Scotland. The Catholics of the south of Scotland now lost Lord Maxwell,
slain by a "Lockerby Lick" in a great clan battle with the Johnstones at
Dryfe Sands.
In 1595, James's minister, John Maitland, brother of Lethington, died,
and early in 1596 an organisation called "the Octavians" was made to
regulate the distracted finance of the country. On April 13, 1596,
Walter Scott of Buccleuch made himself an everlasting name by the
bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong reiver, from the Castle
of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope. The period was
notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the Border,
celebrated in ballads.
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.