A few days before the death of Queen Mary in Fotheringay Castle, the
king, her son, ‘to manifest his natural affection towards his dearest
mother, whose preservation he always earnestly wished, required the
ministers to pray for her, at all preachings and common prayers, after
the following form: “The Lord illuminate and enlighten her spirit, that
she may attain to the knowledge of his truth, for the safety of soul
and body, and preserve her from the present peril.”
‘Some of the ministry agreed to that form of prayer, thinking it
very lawful, since it was his majesty’s pleasure; but some of them,
especially the ministers of Edinburgh, refused to pray but as they were
moved by the spirit.’
[Sidenote: 1586-7.]
‘On the 3d of February [five days before Mary’s execution], the king
appointed Patrick, Archbishop of St Andrews, a man evil thought of
by the ministry and others, to preach in the kirk of Edinburgh, and
resolved to attend the preaching himself.[141] When the day came, Mr
John Coupar, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, accompanied with the
rest of the brethren, came in and prevented the bishop, by taking
place in the pulpit before his coming into the kirk; and as the said
John was beginning the prayer, the king’s majesty commanded him to
stop: whereupon he gave a knock on the pulpit, using an exclamation in
these terms: “This day shall bear witness against you in the day of the
Lord. Wo be to thee, O Edinburgh! for the last of thy plagues shall
be worse than the first!” After having uttered these words, he passed
down from the pulpit, and, together with the whole wives in the kirk,
removed out of the same.’--_Moy. R._
Another account says: ‘The Bishop of St Andrews went up, and, after
the English form, began to beck in a low courtesy to the king; whereas
the custom of this kirk was first to salute God, to do God’s work,
and then, after sermon and divine worship, to give reverence and make
courtesy particularly to the king. But soon after the bishop was
entered into the pulpit, all the people in the kirk gave a shout and
loud cry, so as nothing could be heard, and almost all ran out of the
kirk, especially the women.... This carriage of the people made the
king rise up and cry: “What devil ails the people, that they may not
tarry to hear a man preach!”‘--_Row._
The archbishop ‘preached a sermon concerning prayer for princes,
whereby he convinced the whole people who remained in the kirk, that
the desire of the king’s majesty to pray for his mother was most
honourable and reasonable.’--_Moy. R._
It gives a striking idea of the difficulty attending the transmission
of intelligence in those days--in connection, it must be owned, in this
instance, with the deceitful and stealthy conduct of Elizabeth--that
Mary had been upwards of a fortnight dead before her son King James
was fully apprised of the fact in Edinburgh. On the 15th, he received
a message from Kerr of Cessford, the warden of the Borders, informing
him that the English warden had just communicated to him this sad
intelligence. Not believing it on this authority, the king went to hunt
at Calder, but at the same time sent his secretary to Berwick to make
inquiry. This gentleman returned on the 23d, with certain information
of Mary’s death. ‘This put his majesty into a very great displeasure
and grief, so that he went to bed that night without supper; and
on the morrow, by seven o’clock, went to Dalkeith, there to remain
solitary.’--_Moy. R._
[Sidenote: 1586-7.]
‘Certain it is that King James, her only son, was not a little moved to
hear such unparalleled and uncouth news, who loved his dearest mother
with the greatest piety that could be seen in a son.
[He] took exceeding grief to heart, not without deep displeasure for
the same; and much lamented and mourned for her many days.’--_Pa. And._
Many years after, when he had mounted the English throne, King James
told Sir James Harrington, that his mother’s death had been foreseen in
Scotland, ‘being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power
of [second] sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air.”
He did remark much on this gift, and said he had sought out of certain
books a sure way to attain knowledge of future chances.’[142]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1586-7.]
Attention was strongly fixed at this time on the confidence
manifested by such as were of the Catholic religion, chiefly gentry,
in entertaining Jesuits and seminary priests, who performed mass in
their houses, and even took possession of some of the ruinous parish
churches, doing what in them lay to seduce the people back to the old
faith. We are told, for instance, that Lord Maxwell openly caused mass
to be sung in the abbey-church of Lincluden, near Dumfries, on three
successive days at Christmas 1586. Pasch and Yule began again to be
kept by the common sort of people, and saints’ wells were much resorted
to for the cure of diseases. The General Assembly declared it to be
‘ane exceeding great grief to all such as have any spunk of the love
of God and his kirk,’ to see the land thus polluted with ‘idolatry’
and ‘pusionable doctrine.’ They considered the evil as chiefly owing
to the laxity of the state in the repression of papistry, and the
positive encouragement which it rendered in some instances to papists.
At the same time, the reformed religion was in miserable condition,
many of the parish kirks being ruinous and destitute of pastors, while
the pastors that did anywhere exist were defrauded of their revenues,
starved, and sometimes greatly abused in their very persons by the
papist gentle-folks. A great defection was seriously apprehended as
now imminent, unless some change should take place in the king’s
counsels and conduct. He was pathetically exhorted to execute the laws
against both the priests and their entertainers. It was demanded, in
particular, that all papist noblemen should be ‘presently exiled the
country,’ while certain of the priests should be sent away by the first
ships, with certification that on their daring to return they should
be hanged without further process.
According to the same General Assembly, the moral condition of the
country was awful, ‘ugly heaps of all kinds of sin lying in every nook
and part’ of it--no spot but what was overwhelmed as by ‘a spate’
[inundation], ‘with abusing of the blessed name of God, with swearing,
perjury, and lies, with profaning of the Sabbath-day with mercats,
gluttony, drunkenness, fighting, playing, dancing, &c., with rebelling
against magistrates and the laws of the country, with blood touching
blood, with incest, fornication, adulteries, and sacrilege, theft and
oppression, with false witness[ing], and finally with all kinds of
impiety and wrong.’ The poor at the same time ‘vaiging [wandering] in
great troops and companies through the country, without either law or
religion.’--_B. U. K._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1587.