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 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.
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. 25
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).