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'état 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.
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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 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, 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
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).