CHAPTER XIV. THE NEW KING, with Angus for his Governor, Argyle for his Chancellor, and with the Currs and Hepburns in office, was crowned at Scone about June 25th, 1488. He was nearly seventeen, no child, but energetic in business as in pleasure, though lifelong remorse for his rebellion nodded his heart. He promptly put down a rebellion of the late King's friends and of the late King's foe, Lennox, then strong in the possession of Dumbarton Castle, which, as it commands the sea entrance by Clyde, is of great importance in the reign of Mary and James VI. James III must have paid attention to the navy, which under Sir Andrew Wood already faced English pirates triumphantly. James IV spent much money on his fleet, buying timber from France, for he was determined to make Scotland a power of weight in Europe, but at the pinch his navy vanished like a mist. Spanish envoys and envoys from the Duchess of Burgundy visited James in 1488 to 1489. He was in close relations with France and Denmark and caused anxieties to the first Tudor King, Henry VII, who kept up the Douglas Alliance with Angus and bought over Scottish politicians. While James, as his account books show, was playing cards with Angus, that trader was also negotiating the sale of Hermitage Castle, the main hold of the middle border to England. He was detected, and the castle was entrusted to Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. It was still held by Queen Mary's Bothwell in 1567. The Hepburns rose to the earldom of Bothwell on the death of Ramsay, a favourite of James III, who, 1491, had arranged to kidnap James IV with his brother and hand them over to Henry VII, for 277 pounds, thirteen shillings, four pence. Nothing came of this, and a truce with England was arranged in 1491. Through four reigns, till James VI came to the English throne, the Tudor policy was to buy Scottish traders and attempt to secure the person of the Scottish monarch. Meanwhile, the church was rent by jealousies between the holder of the newly created Archbishop of Glasgow and the Archbishop of St Andrews and disturbed by the lawlards in the region which was later the centre of the fiercest covenators, Kyle in Ayrshire. But James laughed away the charges against the heretics, 1494, whose views were on many points those of John Knox. In 1493 to 1495, James dealt in the usual way with the Highlanders and the wicked blood of the Isles. Some were hanged, some imprisoned, some became surities for the peacefulness of their clans. In 1495, by way of tit for tat against English schemes, James began to back the claims of Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be Richard, Duke of York, escaped from the assassins employed by Richard III. Perkin, whoever he was, had probably been intriguing between Ireland and Burgundy since 1488. He was welcomed by James at Stirling in 1495, and was wedded to the king's cousin, Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntley, now supreme in the north. Rejecting a daughter of England and Spanish efforts at pacification, James prepared to invade England in Perkin's cause. The scheme was sold by Ramsay, the would-be kidnapper, and came to know more than a useless raid of September 1496, followed by a futile attempt and a retreat in July 1497. The Spanish envoy, Di Ayala, negotiated a seven-year's truce in September, after Perkin had failed and been taken at Taunton. The Celts had again risen while James was busy in the border. He put them down and made Argyle Lieutenant of the Isles. Between the Campbells and the Huntley Gordon's, as custodians of the peace, the fighting clans were expected to be more orderly. On the other hand, a son of Angus Og, himself usually reckoned a bastard of the Lord of the Isles, gave much trouble. Angus had married a daughter of the Argyle of his day. Their son, Donald Dubb, was kidnapped, or rather his mother was kidnapped before his birth for Argyle. He now escaped, and in 1503 found allies among the Chiefs. Did much scath was taken in 1506, but was as active as ever forty years later. The central source of these endless highland feuds was the family of the McDonald's, of the Isles, claiming the Earldom of Ross, resisting the lowland influences and those of the Gordon's and Campbell's, Huntley and Argyle, and seeking aid from England. With the capture of Donald Dubb in 1506, the Highlanders became for the while comparatively questionant. Under Lennox and Argyle they suffered in the defeat of Flotten. From 1497 to 1503, Henry VII was negotiating for the marriage of James to his daughter Margaret Tudor. The marriage was celebrated on August 8th, 1503, and a century later the great-grandson of Margaret, James VI, came to the English throne. But marriage does not make friendship. There had existed since 1491 a secret alliance, by which Scotland was bound to defend France if attacked by England. Henry's negotiations for the kidnapping of James were of April of the same year. Margaret, the young queen, after her marriage, was soon involved in bitter quarrels over her dowry with her own family. The slaying of a Sir Robert Kerr, warden of the Marches, by Heron in a border fray, 1508, left an unhealed sore, as England would not give up Heron and his accomplice. Henry VII had been Pacific, but his death in 1509 left James to face his hostile brother-in-law, the fiery young Henry VIII. In 1511 the Holy League under the Pope, against France, imperiled James's French ally. He began to build great ships of war. His sea-captain Barton, pirating about, was defeated and slain by ships under two of the Howards, sons of the Earl of Surrey, August 1511. James remonstrated. Henry was firm, and the border feud of Kerr and Heron was festering. Moreover Henry was a party to the League against France, and France was urging James to attack England. He saw, and wrote to the King of Denmark, that if France were down, the turn of Scotland to fall would follow. In March 1513 an English diplomatist, West, found James in a wild mood, distraught, like a Feyman. Chivalry, and even national safety, called him to war, while his old remorse drove him into a religious retreat, and he was on hostile terms with the Pope. On May 24th in a letter to Henry he made a last attempt to obtain a truce, but on June 30th Henry invaded France. The French Queen dispatched to James as to her true night, a letter and a ring. He sent his fleet to sea, it vanished like a dream. He challenged Henry through a herald on July 26th, and in face of strange and evil omens summoned the whole force of his kingdom, crossed the border on August 22nd, took Norum Castle on tweed, moved the holds of Aetel, Chillingham and Ford, which he made as headquarters, and awaited the approach of Surrey in the levees of the Stanley's. On September 5th he demolished Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the deep and sluggish water of Till at his feet. Surrey, commanding an army all but destitute of supplies, outmaneuvered James, led his men unseen behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and then smarged against him to Braxton Ridge, under Flodden Edge. James was ignorant of Surrey's movements till he saw the approach of his standards. In place of retaining his position he hurled his force down to Braxton. His gunners could not manage their new French ordnance, and though home with the border spears, and Huntley had a success on the right, the borderers made no more efforts, and on the left the Celts fled swiftly after the fall of Lenitz and Argyle. In the future Crawford and Roths were slain, and James, with the steady spearmen of his command, drove straight at Surrey. James, as the Spaniard Ayyayah said, was no general, he was a fighting man. He was outflanked by the Admiral Howard and Daker. His force was surrounded by charging horse and foot, and rained on by arrows. But the stubborn spearmen still made good, their dark and impenetrable wood, when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance's length of Surrey, so Surrey writes, and died. Riddled with arrows, his neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his body. Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phallings, but when dawn arrived only a force of border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field. Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master. There too lay his natural son, the young archbishop of St. Andrews, and the bishops of Kethness and the Isles. Scarce a noble or gentle house of the lowlands, but reckons an ancestor slain at Flauden. CHAPTER XIV. Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of supplies by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men, by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish King. It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James's adherence to the French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry. But he had passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter. If he rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew well that the turn of Scotland would soon come. The ambitions and the claims of Henry VIII were those of the first Edwards. England was bent on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the entire Tudor period England was the home and her monarch the ally of every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish crown. Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort. Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attest the great increase in comfort and in wealth. In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while 1496 Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of barons and freeholders of competent estate. Prior Hepburn founded the College of St. Leonard's in the University of St. Andrew's, and in 1507 Chapman received a royal patent as a printer. Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad example. But with Dunbar, Henry's son and others, Scotland had a school of poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of Chaucer. Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the revival of learning, and James, like Charles II, fostered the early movements of chemistry and physical science. But Flodden ruined all, and the country, under the long minority of James V, was robbed and distracted by English intrigues, by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor, by actual warfare between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place, by the ambitions and treasons of the Douglasses and other nobles, and by the arrival from France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III. The truth of the saying, woe to the kingdom whose king is a child, was never more bitterly proved than in Scotland between the day of Flodden and the day of the return of Mary Stuart from France, 1513 to 1561. James V was not only a child and fatherless, he had a mother whose passions and passionate changes in love resembled those of her brother Henry VIII. Consequently, when the inevitable problem arose, was Scotland during the minority to side with England or with France. The queen mother wavered ceaselessly between the party of her brother, the English king, and the party of France, while Henry VIII could not be trusted, and the policy of France in regard to England did not permit her to offer any stable support to the cause of Scottish independence. The great nobles changed sides constantly, each fighting for his own hand, and for the spoils of a church in which benefices were struggled for and sold like stocks in the exchange. The question was Scotland to ally herself with England or with France, later came to mean, was Scotland to break with Rome or to cling to Rome, owing mainly to the selfish and unscrupulous profidity of Henry VIII. James V was condemned, as the least of two evils, to adopt the Catholic side in the great religious revolution, while the statesmanship of the Beetons, Archbishops of St Andrews, preserved Scotland from English domination, thereby preventing the country from adopting Henry's church, the Anglican, and giving Calvinism and Presbyterianism the opportunity which was resolutely taken and held. The real issue of the complex faction fight during James's minority was thus of the most essential importance, but the constant shiftings of parties and persons cannot be dealt with fully in our space. James's mother had a natural claim to the guardianship of her son, and was left regent by the will of James IV, but she was the sister of Scotland's enemy Henry VIII. Beeton, Archbishop of Glasgow, later of St Andrews, with the Earl of Arryn, now the title of the Hamiltons, Huntley and Angus were to advise the Queen till the arrival of Albany, son of the brother of James III, who was summoned from France. Albany, of course, stood for the French alliance, but when the Queen Mother, August 6, 1514, married the new young Earl of Angus, the grandson and successor of the aged trader, Bell the Cat, the Earl began to carry on the unusual, unpatriotic policy of his house. The appointment to the sea of St Andrews was competed for by the poet, Gowen Douglas, uncle of the new Earl of Angus, and himself of the English party, by Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, who fortified the Abbey, and by Foreman, Bishop of Moray, a partisan of France, and a man accused of having induced James IV to declare war against England. After long and scandalous intrigues, Foreman obtained the sea. Albany was regent for a while and at intervals he repaired to France. He was in the favour of the Queen Mother when she later quarreled with her husband, Angus. At one moment Margaret and Angus fled to England, where was born her daughter, Margaret, later Lady Lennox and the mother of Henry Darnley. Angus, with home, now recross the border 1516, and was reconciled to Albany, against all unity in Scotland Henry intrigued, bribing with a free hand, his main object being to get Albany sent out of the country. In early autumn 1516, home, the leader of the borderers at Flaudon, and his brother were executed for treason. In June 1517 Albany went to Seagate and Council in France, when the Queen Mother returned from England to Scotland, where, if she retained any influence, she might be useful to her brother's schemes. But contrary to Henry's interests, in this year Albany renewed the old alliance with France, while in 1518 the Queen Mother desired to divorce Angus. But Angus was a serviceable tool of Henry, who prevented his sister from having her way, and now the heads of the parties in the distracted country were Aaron, Chief of the Hamilton's, and Beton, Archbishop of Glasgow, standing for France, and Angus representing the English Party. Their forces met at Edinburgh in the street battle of Clens the Causeway, wherein the Archbishop of Glasgow wore armour, and the Douglasses beat the Hamilton's out of the town, April 30th, 1520. Albany returned, 1521, but the nobles would not join with him in an English war, 1522. Again he went to France, while Surrey devastated the Scottish border, 1523. Albany returned while Surrey was burning Jedburah, was once more deserted by the Scottish forces on the tweed, and left the country forever in 1524. Angus now returned from England, but the Queen Mother cast her affections on young Henry Stuart, Lord Methvin, while Angus got possession of the Boy King, June 1526, and held him a reluctant ward in the English interest. Lennox was now the Chief foe of Aaron, and Angus, with whom Aaron had coalesced, and Lennox desired to deliver James out of Angus's hands. On July 26th, 1526, not far from Melrose, Walter Scott of Booklick attacked the forces guarding the Prince. Among them was Kerr of Sesford, who was slain by an Elliot when Booklick's men rallied at the rock called Tern again. Hence sprang a long-enduring blood feud of Scots and Kerrs, but Angus retained the Prince, and in a later fight in the cause of James's delivery Lennox was slain by the Hamilton's near Linnlithgau. The spring of 1528 was marked by the burning of a Hamilton, Patrick Abbot of Fern, at St. Andrews, for his Lutheran opinions. Angus had been making futile attacks on the border thieves, mainly the Armstrong's, who now became very prominent in picturesque robbers. He meant to carry James with him on one of these expeditions. But in June 1528 the young King escaped from Edinburgh Castle, and rode to Stirling, where he was welcomed by his mother and her partisans. Among them were Aaron, Argel, Morey, Tothwell, and other nobles, with Maxwell and the Lord of Booklick, Sir Walter Scott. Angus and his kin were forfeited. He was driven across the border in November to work what mischief he might against his country. He did not return till the death of James the Fifth. Meanwhile James was at peace with his uncle, Henry VIII. He, 1529 to 1530, attempted to bring the border into his peace, and hanged Johnny Armstrong of Gilnocky, with circumstances of treachery, says the ballad, as a ballad-maker was certain to say. Campbell's, McLean's, and McDonald's had all this while been burning each other's lands, and cutting each other's throats. James visited them, and partly quieted them, incarcerating the Earl of Argel. Bothwell and Angus now conspired together to crown Henry VIII in Edinburgh, but in May 1534 a treaty of peace was made, to last till the death of either monarch and a year longer. End of Chapter 14 Part 2 Chapter 15 of A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lange Read for LibriVox.org into the Public Domain. Chapter 15. James the Fifth and the Reformation. The new times were at the door. In 1425 the Scottish Parliament had forbidden Lutheran books to be imported. But they were, of course, smuggled in, and the seat of religious revolution fell on minds disgusted by the greed and anarchy of the clerical fighters and jobbers of benefices. James the Fifth, after he had shaken off the Douglasses and became a free king, had to deal with a political and religious situation, out of which, we may say, in the Scots phrase, there was no out gate. His was the dilemma of his father before Flodden. How, against the perfidious ambition, the foresin war, and the purchasing powers of Henry VIII, was James to preserve the national independence of Scotland? His problem was even harder than that of his father, because when Henry broke with Rome and robbed the religious houses, a large minority at least of the Scottish nobles, gentry and middle classes were, so far, heartily on the anti-Roman side. They were tired of Rome, tired of the profligacy, ignorance, and insatiable greed of the ecclesiastical dignitaries who, too often, were reckless cadets of the noble families. Many Scots had read the Lutheran books and disbelieved in transubstantiation, thought that money paid for prayers to the dead was money wasted, preferred a married and preaching to a celibate and lisentious clergy who celebrated mass, were convinced that saintly images were idols, that saintly miracles were impostors. Above all, the nobles coveted the lands of the church, the spoils of the religious houses. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the causes of the religious revolution were many. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy and of the dwellers and the abbeys had long been the bud of satire and of the fiercer indignation of the people. Benefices, great and small, were jobbed on every side between the popes, the kings and the great nobles. Ignorant and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionizing the study of the sacred books. The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce, and they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for their bastards. The kings set the worst example. Both James IV and James V secured the richest abbeys, and in the case of James VI the primacy for their bastard sons. All these abuses were of old standing. Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbeys of Jedbara, supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate churches to priests with a rite of succession to their sons. See the medieval church in Scotland by the late Bishop Dowden, chapter 19, MacLahos, 1910. Oppressive customs by which the utmost clath or a pecuniary equivalent was extorted as a kind of death duty by the clergy were sanctioned by excommunication. No grievance was more bitterly felt by the poor. The once-dreaded curses on evil doers became a popular jest. Purgatory was a mere excuse for getting money for masses. In short, the whole medieval system was morally rotten. The statements drawn up by councils which made vain attempts to check the stereotyped abuses are as candid and copious concerning all these things as the satires of Sir David Lindsay. Then came disbelief in medieval dogmas. The Lutheran and other heretical books were secretly purchased and their contents assimilated. Intercession of saints, images, pilgrimage, the doctrine of the Eucharist, all fell into contempt. As early as 1528, as we have seen, the first Scottish martyr for an evangelical religion, Patrick Hamilton, was burned at St. Andrew's.  As was usual he obtained when a little boy and abbey, that of Fern and Roscher. He drew the revenues but did not wear the costume of his place. In fact, he was an example of the ordinary abuses. Educated at Paris and Louvain, he came in contact with the criticism of Erasmus and the Lutheran controversy. He next read at St. Andrew's and he married. Suspected of heresy in 1427 he retired to Germany. He wrote theses called Patrick's places, which were reckoned heretical. He was arrested, was offered by Arch- Bishop Beaton a chance to escape, disdained it and was burned with unusual cruelty, as a rule heretics in Scotland were strangled before burning. There were other similar cases, nor could James interfere. He was bound by his coronation oath. Again he found in the bishops his best diplomatists, and they, of course, were all for the French alliance, in the cause of the independence of their country and church as against Henry VIII. Thus James, in justifiable dread of the unscrupulous ambition of Henry VIII, could not run the English course, could not accept the varying creeds which Henry, who was his own Pope, put forward as his spirit moved him. James was thus inevitably committed to the losing cause, the cause of Catholicism and of France, while the intelligence no less than the avarice of his nobles and gentry ran the English course. James had practically no choice. In 1536 Henry proposed a meeting with James as far within England as possible. Knowing, as we do, that Henry was making repeated attempts to have James kidnapped and Arch- Bishop Beaton also, we are surprised that James was apparently delighted at the hope of an interview with his uncle in England. Henry declined to explain why he desired a meeting when James put the question to his envoy. James said in effect that he must act by advice of his council, which so far as it was clerical opposed the scheme. Henry justified the views of the council later when James, returning from a visit to France, asked permission to pass through England. It is the King's honour not to receive the King of Scots in his realm except as a vassal, for there never came King of Scots into England in peaceful manner otherwise. Certain it is that, however James might enter England, he would leave it only as a vassal. Nevertheless his council, especially his clergy, are blamed for embroiling James with Henry by dissuading him for meeting his uncle in England. Manifestly they had no choice. Henry had shown his hand too often. At this time James, by Margaret Urskine, became the father of James, later the regent Mauret. Strange tragedies would never have occurred had the King first married Margaret Urskine, who, by 1536, was the wife of Douglas of Lochlaven. He is said to have wished for her a divorce that he might marry her. This could not be. He visited France and on New Year's Day, 1537, wedded Madeleine, daughter of Francis I. Six months later she died in Scotland. Marriage for the King was necessary, and David Beaton, later Cardinal Beaton and Archbishop of St. Andrews, obtained for his lord a lady coveted by Henry VIII, Mary of the Great Catholic House of Lorraine, widow of the Duke de Longville and sister of the popular and ambitious guises. The pair were wedded on June 10, 1538. There was fresh offense to Henry and a closer tie to the Catholic cause. The appointment of Cardinal Beaton to the Sea of St. Andrews, in succession to his uncle, gave James a servant of high ecclesiastical rank, great subtlety and indomitable resolution, but remote from chastity of life and from clemency to heretics. Martyrdom became more frequent, and George Buchanan, who had been a tutor of James's son by Margaret Urskine, thought well to open a window in his house where he was confined, walk out and depart to the Continent. Meanwhile Henry, no less than Beaton, was busily burning his own martyrs. In 1539 Henry renewed his intercourse with James, attempting to shake his faith in David Beaton and to make him rob his church. James replied that he preferred to try to reform it, and he enjoyed in 1540 Sir David Lindsay's satirical play on the vices of the clergy, and indeed of all orders of men. In 1540 James ratified the College of Justice, the fifteen Lords of Session, sitting as judges in Edinburgh. In 1541 the idea of a meeting between James and Henry was again mooted, and Henry actually went to York, where James did not appear. Henry, who had expected him, was furious. In August 1542, on a futile pretext, he sent Norfolk with a great force to harry the border. The English had the worst at the battle of Haddon Rig. Negotiations followed. Henry proclaimed that Scottish kings had always been vassals of England, and horrified his council by openly proposing to kidnap James. Henry's forces were now wrecking an abbey and killing women at the border. James tried to retaliate, but his levies, October 31st, at Fallowmore, declined to follow him across the border. They remembered Flotten. Moreover they could not risk the person of a childless king. James prepared, however, for a raid on a great scale on the western border, but the fact had been divulged by Sir George Douglas, Angus's brother, and had also been sold to Dacre, cheap by another scot. The English dispatches proved that Wharton had full time for preparation and led a competent force of horse, which, near Atheret, charged on the right flank of the Scots, who slowly retreated till they were entangled between the Esk and Amoras, and lost their formation in their artillery with twelve hundred men. A few were slain, most were drowned or were taken prisoners. The raid was no secret of the king and the priests, as Knox absurdly states, nobles of the reforming no less than of the Catholic party were engaged. The English had full warning and a force of three thousand men, not of four hundred farmers. The Scots were beaten through their own ignorance of the ground in which they had been burning and plundering. As to confusion caused by the claim of Oliver Sinclair to be commander, it is not corroborated by contemporary dispatches, though Sir George Douglas reports James's lament for the conduct of his favorite, Flood Oliver, Flood Oliver. The misfortune broke the heart of James. He went to Edinburgh, did some business, retired for a week to Linleth Gow, where his queen was awaiting her delivery, and thence went to Falkland, and died of nothing more specific than shame, grief, and despair. He lived to hear of the birth of his daughter, Mary, December 8, 1542. It came with a lass, and it will go with a lass, he is said to have muttered. On December 14th James passed away, broken by his impossible task, lost in the bewildering paths from which there was no out gate. James was personally popular for his gaiety in his adventures while he wandered in disguise. Humorous poems are attributed to him. A man of greater genius than his might have failed when confronted by a tyrant so wealthy, ambitious, cruel, and destitute of honour as Henry VIII. Constantly engaged with James's traitors in efforts to seize or slay him and his advisers. It is an easy thing to attack James because he would not trust Henry, a man who ruined all that did trust to his seeming favour. CHAPTER XVI. THE MINORITY OF MARRY STEWART When James died, Henry VIII seemed to hold in his hand all the winning cards in the game of which Scotland was the stake. He held Angus and his brother George Douglas. When he slipped them they would again wield the whole force of their house in the interests of England and of Henry's religion. Moreover, he held many noble prisoners taken at Solway—Glencarn, Maxwell, Casillus, Fleming, Gray, and others—and all of these, save Sir George Douglas, have not sticked, says Henry himself, to take upon them to set the crown of Scotland on our head. Henry's object was to get the child, the person of the cardinal, and of such as be chief hindrances to our purpose, and also the chief holds and fortresses in our hands. By sheer brigandage the reformer king hoped to succeed where the Edwards had failed. He took the oaths of his prisoners, making them swear to secure for him the child, Beton, and the castles, and later release them to do his bidding. Henry's failure was due to the genius and resolution of cardinal Beton, heading the Catholic Party. What occurred in Scotland on James's death is obscure. Later Beton was said to have made the dying king's hand subscribe a blank paper filled up by appointment of Beton himself as one of a regency council, of four or five. There is no evidence for the tale. What actually occurred was the proclamation of the earls of Aaron, Argel, Huntley, Moray, and Beton as regents, December 19, 1542. Aaron, the chief of the Hamilton's, was, we know, unless ousted by Henry VIII, the next heir to the throne after the newborn Mary. He was a good-hearted man, but the weakest of mortals, and his constant veerings from the Catholic and national to the English and reforming side were probably caused by his knowledge of his very doubtful legitimacy. Either party could bring up the doubt. Beton, having the ear of the Pope, could be specially dangerous, but so could the opposite party if once firmly seated in office. Aaron, in any case, presently ousted the archbishop of Glasgow from the Chancellor's ship and gave the seals to Beton, the man whom he presently accused of a shameless forgery of James's will. The regency soon came into Aaron's own hands. The Solway Moss prisoners, learning this as they journeyed north, began to repent of their oaths of treachery, especially as their oaths were known or suspected in Scotland. George Douglas prevailed on Aaron to seize and imprison Beton till he answered certain charges, but no charges were ever made public, none were produced. The clergy refused to christen or bury during his captivity. Parliament met, March 12, 1543, and still there was silence as to the nature of the accusations against Beton, and by March 22 George Douglas himself released the cardinal, of course for consideration, and carried him to his own strong castle of St. Andrews. Parliament permitted the reading but forbade the discussion of the Bible in English. Aaron was posing as a kind of Protestant. Ambassadors were sent to Henry to negotiate a marriage between his son Edward and the baby queen, but Scotland would not give up a fortress, would never resign her independence, would not place Mary in Henry's hands, would never submit to any but a native ruler. The airy castle of Henry's hopes fell into dust, built as it was on the oaths of traitors. Love of such a religion as Henry professed, retaining the mass and making free use of the stake in the gibbet, was not, even to Protestants, so attractive as to make them run the English course and submit to the English Lord Paramount.  But the scale was soon to turn, for every reforming sermon was apt to produce the harrying of religious houses, and every punishment of the robbers was persecution intolerable against which men sought English protection. Henry VIII now turned to Aaron for support. To Aaron he offered the hand of his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, who should later marry the heir of the Hamilton's. But by mid-April Aaron was under the influence of his bastard brother, the abbot of Paisley, later Archbishop Hamilton. The Earl of Lennox, a steward and keeper of Dumbarton Castle, arrived from France. He was hostile to Aaron, for if Aaron were illegitimate, Lennox was next heir to the crown after Mary. He was thus for the moment the ally of beaten against Aaron. George Douglas visited Henry and returned with his terms, Mary to be handed over to England at the age of ten and to marry Prince Edward at twelve. Aaron, by a prior arrangement, was to receive Scotland north of fourth, an auxiliary English army and the hand of Elizabeth for his son. To the English contingent Aaron preferred five thousand pounds in ready money. That was his price. Sadler, Henry's envoy, saw Mary of guise and saw her little daughter unclothed. He admired the child but could not disentangle the crosswebs of intrigue. The national party, the Catholic party, was strongest because least is united. When the Scottish ambassadors who went to Henry in spring returned, July twenty-first, the national party seized Mary and carried her to Stirling, where they offered Aaron a meeting, and, he said, the child queen's hand for his son. But Aaron's own partisans, Glencarn and Casillus, told Sadler that he fabled freely. Representatives of both parties accepted Henry's terms but delayed the ratification. Henry insisted that it should be ratified by August twenty-fourth, but on August sixteenth he seized six Scottish merchant ships. Though the treaty was ratified on August twenty-fifth, Aaron was compelled to insist on compensation for the ships, but on August twenty-eight Thieper claimed to be in a trader. In the beginning of September, Aaron favoured the wrecking of the Franciscan monastery in Edinburgh, and at Dundee the mob, moved by sermons from the celebrated martyr George Wishart, did sack the houses of Franciscans and the Dominicans. Beaton's Abbey of Ubreth and Abbey of Linderes were also plundered. Clearly it was believed that Beaton was down, and that church pillage was authorised by Aaron. Yet on September third Aaron joined hands with Beaton. The cardinal, by threatening to disprove Aaron's legitimacy and ruin his hopes of the Crown, or, in some other way, had dominated the waverer, while Henry, August twenty-ninth, was mobilising an army of twenty thousand men for the invasion of Scotland. On September ninth Mary was crowned at Stirling. But Beaton could not hold both Aaron and his rival Lennox, who committed an act of disgraceful treachery. With Glencarn he seized large supplies of money and stores sent by France to Dunbarton Castle. In fifteen forty-four he fled to England and to the protection of Henry, and married Margaret, daughter of Angus and Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. He became the father of Darnley, Mary's husband in later years, and the fortunes of Scotland were fatally involved in the feud between the Lennox-Stewards and the House of Hamilton. Meanwhile, November fifteen forty-three, Aaron and Beaton together broke and persecuted the Abbey robbers of Perthshire and Angus, making martyrs and incurring, on Beaton's part, fatal feuds with Leslie's, Gray's, Learmyth's, and Kirkaldi's. Parliament, December eleventh, declared the treaty with England The party of the Douglasses, equally suspected by Henry and Beaton, was crushed, and George Douglass was held a hostage, still betraying his country in letters to England. Martyrs were burned in Perth and Dundee, which merely infuriated the populace. In April fifteen forty-four, while Henry was giving the most cruel orders to his army of invasion, one wizard visited him with offers, which were accepted for the murder of the Cardinal. He and May the English army under Hartford took Leith, raised a jolly fire, says Hartford in Edinburgh. He burned the towns on his line of march and retired. On May seventeenth Lennox and Glencarn sold themselves to Henry, for ample rewards they were to secure the teaching of God's word, as the mere and only foundation once precedes all truth and honour. Aaron defeated Glencarn when he attempted his godly task, and Lennox was driven back into England. In June, Mary of Guise fell into the hands of nobles led by Angus, while the Fife, Perthshire and Angus-Lords, lately Beaton's deadly foes, came into the Cardinal's party. With him and Aaron in November were banded the Protestants who were to be his murderers, while the Douglasses in December were cleared by Parliament of all their offences, and Henry offered three thousand pounds for their trapping. Angus, in February fifteen forty-five, protested that he loved Henry best of all men, and would make Lennox Governor of Scotland, while Wharton, for Henry, was trying to kidnap Angus. Enraged by the English desecration of his ancestors' graves at Melrose Abbey, Angus united with Aaron, Norman Leslie, and Book Look to annihilate an English force at Ancrum Moor, where Henry's men lost eight hundred slain and two thousand prisoners. The loyalty of Angus to his country was now, by innocents like Aaron, thought assured. The plot for Beaton's murder was in fifteen forty-five negotiated between Henry and Casillus, backed by George Douglass and Crichton of Bunstead, as before was engaged a godly lord in Lothian. In August the Douglasses boasted that, as Henry's friends, they have frustrated an invasion of England with a large French contingent, which they pretended to lead, while they secured its failure. Meanwhile, after forty years, Donald Dubb, and all the great Western chiefs, none of whom could write, renewed the old alliance of fourteen sixty-three with England, calling themselves Old Enemies of Scotland. Their religious predilections, however, were not Protestant. They promised to destroy or reduce half of Scotland, and hailed Lennox's governor, as in Angus's offer to Henry, in spring fifteen forty-five. Lennox did make an attempt against Umbarten in November with Donald Dubb. They failed, and Donald died, without legitimate issue, at Drugheada. The McLeans, McLeods, and McNeils then came into the national party. In September fifteen forty-five, Hartford, with an English force, destroyed the religious houses at Melrose, Kelso, Dryburra, and Jedburra. Meanwhile, the two Douglasses sculked with the murderous traitor Casillus and Ayrshire, and Henry tried to induce French deserters from the Scottish flag to murder Beaton and Aaron. Beaton could scarcely escape forever from so many plots. His capture in January fifteen forty-six of George Wishart, an eminently learned and virtuous Protestant preacher, and an intimate associate of the murderous, double-died traitor Brunston, and of other Lothian pietists of the English Party, and his burning of Wishart at St. Andrews on March first fifteen forty-six, sealed the Cardinals' doom. On May twenty-ninth he was surprised in his castle of St. Andrews and slain by his former ally, Norman Leslie, Master of Ruffs, with Kerkaldi of Grange and James Melville, who seems to have dealt the final stab after preaching at his powerless victim. They insulted the corpse, and held St. Andrews' castle against all comers. How gallant a fight Beaton had waged against adversaries, how many and multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical we have seen. He maintained the independence of Scotland against the most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather bent on defending the lost cause of a church entirely and intolerably corrupt. The two causes were at the moment inseparable, and whatever we may think of the Church of Rome it was not more bloodily inclined than the church of which Henry was Pope, while it was less illogical not being the creature of a secular tyrant. If Henry and his party had won their game the Church of Scotland would have been Henry's church, would have been Anglican. Thus it was Beaton, who, by defeating Henry, made Presbyterian Calvinism possible in Scotland. CHAPTER XVII. Regency of Aaron. The death of Cardinal Beaton left Scotland and the church without a skilled and resolute defender. His successor in the sea, Archbishop Hamilton, a half-brother of the regent, was more lisentious than the Cardinal, who seems to have been constant to Mariette Ogilvy, and had little of his political genius. The murderers, with others of their party, held St. Andrew's Castle strong in its new fortifications, which the Queen Mother and Aaron the regent were unable to reduce. Receiving supplies from England by sea, and abetted by Henry VIII, the murderers were in treaty with him to work all his will, while some nobles, like Argil and Huntley, wavered, though the Douglas's now renounced their compact with England, and their promise to give the child queen and marriage to Henry's son. At the end of November, despairing of success in the siege, Aaron asked France to send men and ships to take St. Andrew's Castle from the assassins, who in December obtained an armistice. They would surrender, they said, when they got a pardon for their guilt from the Pope, but they begged Henry VIII to move the Emperor to move the Pope to give no pardon. Their mission, nonetheless, arrived in April 1547, but was mocked at by the garrison of the castle. The garrison and inmates of the castle presently welcomed the arrival of John Knox and some of his pupils. Knox, born in Haddington 1513 to 1515, a priest and a notary, had borne a two-handed soren and been of the bodyguard of Wilchard. He was now invited by John Rowe, the chaplain, to take on him the office of preacher, which he did, weeping so strong was his sense of the solemnity of his duties. He also preached and disputed with feeble clerical opponents in the town. The congregation in the castle, though devout, were ruffianly in their lives, nor did he spare rebukes to his flock. Before Knox arrived, Henry VIII and Francis II had died, the successor of Francis, Henri II, sent to Scotland Monsieur Dossel, who became the right-hand man of Mary of Guise in the government. Meanwhile the advance of an English force against the border, where they occupied Langham, caused Aaron to lead thither the national levies. But this gave no great relief to the besieged in the castle of St. Andrews. In mid-July a well-equipped French fleet swept up the east coast. Men were landed with guns. French artillery was planted on the cathedral roof and the steeple of St. Salvatore's college, and poured a plunging fire into the castle. In a day or two, on the last day of July the garrison surrendered. Knox, with many of his associates, was placed in the galleys and carried captive to France. On one occasion the galleys were within sight of St. Andrews, and the reformer predicted, so he says, that he would again preach there, as he did to some purpose. But the castle had not fallen before the English party among the nobles had arranged to betray Scottish fortresses to England, and to lead two thousand Scottish favourers of the word of God to fight under the flag of St. George against their country. An English host of fifteen thousand was assembled, and marched north accompanied by a fleet. On the 9th of September, 1547, the leader, Somerset, found the Scottish army occupying a well-chosen position near Musselburg.  By the next day the Scots, as when Cromwell defeated them at Dunbar, left an impregnable position on their eagerness to cut Somerset off from his ships, and were routed with great slaughter in the battle of Pinky. Somerset made no great use of his victory. He took and held Bouty Castle on Tay, fortified Inchome on the Firth of Forth, and devastated Holyroad. Mischief he did, to little progress. The child-queen was conveyed to an isle in the lock of Menteeth, where she was safe, and her marriage with the Dauphin was negotiated. In July 1548 a large French force under the Sur de Sey arrived, and later captured Haddington, held by the English, while despite some Franco-Scottish successes in the field, Mary was sent with her four marys to France, where she landed in August, the only passenger who had not been seasick. By April 1550 the English made peace, abandoning all their holds in Scotland. The great essential prize, the child-queen, had escaped them. The clergy burned to martyr in 1550. In 1549 they had passed measures for their own reformation. Too late and futile was the scheme. Early in 1549 Knox returned from France to England, where he was minister at Barrick and at Newcastle, a chaplain of the child Edward VI, and a successful opponent of Cranmer as regards kneeling at the celebration of the Holy Communion. He refused a bishopric for seeing trouble under Mary Tudor, from whom he fled to the Continent. In 1550-51 Mary of Guise, visiting France, procured for Aaron the Duchy of Chateau-Herald, and for his eldest son the command of the Scottish Archeguard, and by way of exchange in 1554 took from him the regency, surrounding herself with French advisers, notably De Rube and D'Oiselle. CHAPTER XVIII. In England, on the death of Edward VI, Catholicism rejoiced in the accession of Mary Tudor, which, by driving Scottish Protestant refugees back into their own country, strengthened there the party of revolt against the Church, while the Queen Mother's preference of French over Scottish advisers and her small force of trained French soldiers and garrisons caused even the Scottish Catholics to hold France in fear and suspicion. The French councillors, 1556, urged increased taxation for purposes of national defence against England, but the nobles would rather be invaded every year than tolerate a standing army in place of their old irregular feudal levies. Their own independence of the Crown was dearer to the nobles in gentry than safety from their old enemy. They might have reflected that a standing army of Scots, officers by themselves, would be a check on the French soldiers in the garrison. Perplexed and opposed by the great clan of Hamilton, whose chief, Aaron, was nearest heir to the Crown, Mary of Guise was now anxious to conciliate the Protestants, and there was a blink, as the Covenanters later said, a lull in persecution. After Knox's reliefs from the French galleys in 1549, he had played, as we saw, a considerable part in the affairs of the English Church, and in the making of the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI, but had fled abroad in the accession of Mary Tudor. From Dieppe he had sent a tract to England, praying God to stir up some Phineas or Jehu to shed the blood of abominable idolaters, obviously Mary of England and Philip of Spain. On earlier occasions he had followed Calvin in deprecating such sanguinary measures. The Scots, after a stormy period of quarrels with Anglican refugees in Frankfurt, moved to Geneva, where the city was under a despotism of preachers and of Calvin. Here Knox found the model of church government which, in a form if possible more extreme, he later planted in Scotland. There, in 1549 to 52, the church, under Archbishop Hamilton, beaten successor, had been confessing her iniquities in provincial councils, and attempting to purify herself on the lines of the tolerant and charitable catechism issued by the Archbishop in 1552. Apparently a modus vivendi was being sought, and Protestants were inclined to think they might be occasional conformists and attend mass without being false to their convictions. But in this brief lull, Knox came over to Scotland at the end of harvest, in 1555. On this point of occasional conformity he was fixed. The mass was idolatry, and idolatry by the law of God was a capital offense. Idolaters must be converted or exterminated. They were no better than amelokites. This was the central rock of Knox's position. Tolerance was impossible. He remained in Scotland, preaching and administering the sacrament in the Geneva way till June 1556. He associated with the future leaders of the Religious Revolution, Erskine of Dunn, Lord Lorne in 1558, Fifth Earl of Argel, James Stewart, Bastard of James V, and Lay Pryor of St. Andrews, and of Macon in France, and the Earl of Glencarn. William Maitland of Lethington, the flower of the Woods of Scotland, was to Knox a less congenial acquaintance. Not till May 1556 was Knox summoned to trial in Edinburgh, but he had a strong backing of the laity, as was the custom in Scotland, where justice was override by armed gatherings, and no trial was held. By July 1556 he was in France on his way to Geneva. The fruits of Knox's labours followed him, in March 1557, in the shape of a letter signed by Glencarn, Lorne, Lord Erskine, and James Stewart, Mary's Bastard Brother. They prayed Knox to return. They were ready to jeopardy lives and goods in the forward setting of the glory of God. This has all the air of risking civil war. Knox was not eager. It was October before he reached Dieppe on his homeward way. Meanwhile there had been hostilities between England and Scotland, as ally of France, then at odds with Philip of Spain, consort, King of England, and there were Protestant tumult in Edinburgh. Knox had scruples as to raising civil war by preaching at home. The Scottish nobles had no zeal for the English war, but Knox, who received at Dieppe discouraging letters from unknown correspondence, did not cross the sea. He remained at Dieppe preaching till the spring of 1558. In Knox's absence even James Stewart and Erskine of Dunne agreed to hurry on the marriage between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Francis, Dauphin of France, a feeble boy younger than herself. Their faces are pityably young as represented in their coronation medal. While negotiations for the marriage were begun in October, on December 3, 1557, a godly band or covenant for mutual aid was signed by Argel, then near his death in 1558, his son, Lauren, the Earl of Morton, son of the trader, Sir George Douglas, Glencarn and Erskine of Dunne, one of the commissioners who were to visit France for the royal marriage. They vowed to risk their lives against the congregation of Satan, the church, and in defense of faithful Protestant preachers. They will establish the blessed word of God in his congregation, and hence forth the Protestant party was commonly styled the congregation. Parliament, November 29, 1557, had accepted the French marriage, all the ancient liberties of Scotland being secured, and the right to the throne, if Mary died without issue, being confirmed to the house of Hamilton, not to the Dauphin. The marriage contract, April 19, 1558, did ratify these just demands, but on April 4, Mary had been induced to sign them all the way to France, leaving Scotland and her own claims to the English crown to the French king. The marriage was celebrated on April 24, 1558. In that week the last Protestant martyr, Walter Milne, an aged priest and a married man, was burned for heresy at St Andrew's. This only increased the zeal of the congregation. Among the Protestant preachers then in Scotland, of whom Willock and Englishman seems to have been the most reasonable, a certain Paul Methune, a baker, was prominent. He had been summoned July 28 to stand his trial for heresy, but his backing of friends was considerable, and they came before Mary of Guise in armor and with a bullying demeanor. She tried to temperize, and on September 3 a great riot broke out in Edinburgh. The image of St. Gill was broken, and the mob violently assaulted a procession of priests. The country was seething with discontent, and the death of Mary Tudor, November 17, 1558, with the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth encouraged the congregation. Mary of Guise made large concessions, only she desired that there should be no public meetings in the capital. On January 1, 1559, church doors were placarded with the beggars' warning. The beggars, really the brethren in their name, claimed the wealth of the religious orders. Threats were pronounced, revolution was menaced at a given date, quit Sunday, and the threats were fulfilled. All this was the result of a plan, not of accident. Mary of Guise was intending to visit France, not longing to burn heretics. But she fell into the worst of health, and her recovery was doubted in April 1559. Mark and Methun had been summoned to trial, February 2, 1559, for their preachings were always apt to lead to violence on the part of their hearers. The summons was again postponed, in deference to renewed menaces. A convention had met at Edinburgh to seek for some remedy, and the last provincial council of the Scottish Church, March 1559, had considered vainly some proposals made by moderate Catholics for internal reform. Again the preachers were summoned to Stirling for May 10, but just a week earlier Knox arrived in Scotland. The leader of the French Protestant preachers, Morrell, expressed to Calvin his fear that Knox may fill Scotland with his madness. Now was his opportunity. The regent was weak and ill. The congregation was in great force. England was at least not unfavorable to its cause. From Dundee Knox marched with many gentlemen, unarmed, he says, accompanying the preachers to Perth. Erskine of Dunn went as envoy to the regent at Stirling. She is accused by Knox of treacherous dealings. Other contemporary Protestant evidence says nothing of treachery. At all events on May 10 the preachers were outlawed for non-appearance to stand their trial. The brethren, the whole multitude with their preachers, says Knox, who were in Perth, were infuriated, and after a sermon from the reformer, wrecked the church, sacked the monasteries, and says Knox, denounced death against any priest who celebrated mass, a circumstance usually ignored by our historians, at the same time protesting, we require nothing but liberty of conscience. On May 31 a composition was made between the regents and the insurgents, whom Argol and James Stewart promised to join if the regent broke the conditions. Henceforth the pretext that she had broken faith was made whenever it seemed convenient, while the congregation permitted itself a godly liberty in consturing the terms of treaties. A band was signed for the destruction of idolatry by Argol, James Stewart, Glencarn, and others, and the brethren scattered from Perth, breaking down altars and idols on their way home. Mary of Guise had promised not to leave a French garrison in Perth. She did leave some Scots in French pay, and on this slim pretext of her treachery Argol and James Stewart proclaimed the regent perfidious, deserted her cause, and joined the crusade against idolatry. CHAPTER XIX The revolution was now under way, and as it had begun so it continued. There was practically no resistance by the Catholic nobility and gentry. In the lowlands, apparently, almost all were of the new persuasion. The Duke de Chateaurelte might hesitate while his son, the Protestant Earl of Aron, who had been in France as captain of the Scots guard, was escaping into Switzerland and thence to England. But on Aron's arrival there, the Hamilton saw their chance of succeeding to the crown in place of the Catholic Mary. The regent had but a small body of professional French soldiers. But the other side could not keep their feudal levies in the field, and they could not coin the supplies of church plate, which must have fallen into their hands, until they had seized the mint at Edinburgh, so money was scarce with them. It was plain to Knox and Cercaldi of Grange, and soon it became obvious to Maitland of Lethington, who, of course, forsook the regent, that aid from England must be sought, aid in money, and if possible in men and ships. Meanwhile the reformers dealt with the ecclesiastical buildings of St Andrews as they had done at Perth, Knox urging them on by his sermons. We may presume that the boys broke the windows and images with a sanctified joy. A mutilated head of the redeemer has been found in a latrine of the monastic buildings. As Commendator, or lay prior, James Stewart may have secured the golden sheath of the arm-bone of the apostle, presented by Edward I, and the other precious things, the sacred plate of the church, in a feign which had been the Delphi of Scotland. Lethington appears to have obtained most of the portable property of St. Salvatore's College except that beautiful monument of idolatry, the great silver mace presented by Kennedy, the founder, work of a Parisian silversmith in 1461. This, with maces of rude native work, escaped the spoilers. The monastery of the Franciscans is now leveled with the earth. Of the Dominican's chapel a small fragment remains. Of the residential part of the Abbey a house was left, when the lead had been stripped from the roof of the church it became a quarry. All churchmen's goods were spoiled and refved from them, for every man for the most part that could get anything pertaining to any churchman thought the same well one year, says a contemporary diary. Aaron himself, when he arrived in Scotland, robbed a priest of all that he had, for which Chateau Herald made compensation. By the middle of June the regent was compelled to remove almost all her French soldiers out of Fife. Perth was evacuated. The Abbey of Scone and the palace were sacked. The congregation entered Edinburgh, they seemed to have found the monasteries already swept bare, but they seized Holy Road and the stamps at the mint. The regent proclaimed that this was flat rebellion and that the rebels were intriguing with England. Knox denied it in the first part of his history, in origin a contemporary tract written in the autumn, but the charge was true, and Knox and Kirkhalde were since June the negotiators. Already his party were offering Aaron the air of the crown after Mary as a husband for Elizabeth, who saw him but rejected his suit. Aaron's father, Chateau Herald, later openly deserted the regent, July 1st. The death of Henri II, wounded in a tournament, did not accelerate the arrival of French reinforcements for the regent. The weaker brethren, however, waxed weary. Money was scarce, and on July 24th the congregation evacuated Edinburgh and Leith, after a treaty which they misrepresented, broke, and accused the regent of breaking. Knox visited England about August 1st, but felt dissatisfied with his qualifications for diplomacy. Nothing, so far, was gained from Elizabeth, save a secret supply of three thousand pounds. On the other hand, fresh French forces arrived at Leith, the place was fortified, the regent was again accused of profidity by the profiteus, and on October 21st the congregation proclaimed her deposition on the alleged authority of her daughter, now queen of France, whose seal they forged and used in their documents. One cocky was the forger. He saw Aaron use the seal on public papers. Cocky had made a die for the coins of the congregation, a crown of thorns with the words verbum day. Leith, manned by French soldiers, was, till in the summer of 1560 it surrendered to the congregation and all their English allies, the centre of Catholic resistance. In November the congregation, after a severe defeat, fled in grief from Edinburgh to Stirling, where Knox reanimated them, and they sent Leithington to England to crave assistance. Leithington, who had been in the service of the regent, is henceforth the central figure of every intrigue. Whitty, eloquent, subtle, he was indispensable, and he had one great ruling motive, to unite the crowns and peoples of England and Scotland. Unfortunately he loved the crafty exercise of his dominion over men's minds for its own sake, and when in some inscrutable way he entered the clumsy plot to murder Darnley, and knew that Mary could prove his guilt, his shiftings and changes puzzle historians. In Scotland he was called Michael Wiley, that is Machiavelli, and the necessary evil. In his mission to England Leithington was successful. By December 21st the English diplomatist, Sadler, informed Aaron that a fleet was on its way to aid the congregation, who were sacking Paisley Abbey and issuing proclamations in the names of Francis and Mary. The fleet arrived while the French were about to seize St Andrews, January 23, 1560, and the French plans were ruined. The regent, who was dying, found shelter in Edinburgh Castle which stood neutral. On February 27th, 1560, at Barrick, the congregation entered into a regular league with England, Elizabeth appearing as protectress of Scotland, while the marriage of Mary and Francis endured. Meanwhile, owing to the Huguenot disturbances in France, such as the tumult of Amboys, directed against the lives of Mary's uncles, the Cardinal and Duke de Geys, Mary and Francis could not help the regent, and Huntley, a Catholic, presently as if in fear of the Western clans, joined the congregation. Mary of Geys had found the great Northern Chief treacherous, and had disgraced him, and untrustworthy he continued to be. On May 7th the garrison of Leith defeated with heavy loss an Anglo-Scottish attack on the walls, but on June 16th the regent made a good end, in peace with all men. She saw Statoe Herald, James Stewart, and the Earl Marshall. She listened patiently to the preacher Willock. She bade farewell to all and died. A notable woman, crushed by an impossible task. The garrison of Leith, meanwhile, was starving on rats and horse-flesh. Negotiations began and ended in the Treaty of Edinburgh, July 6th, 1560. This treaty as between Mary, Queen of France and Scotland, on the one hand, and England on the other, was never ratified by Mary Stewart. She appears to have thought that one clause implied her abandonment of all her claims to the English succession, typified by her quartering of the royal English arms on her own shield. Thus there never was, nor could be, amity between her and her sister and her foe. Elizabeth, who was justly aggrieved by her assumption of the English arms, while Elizabeth quartered the arms of France. Again the ratification of the treaty as regarded Mary's rebels depended on their fulfilling certain clauses which, in fact, they instantly violated. Preachers were planted in the larger town, some of which had already secured their services. Knox took Edinburgh. Superintendents, by no means bishops, were appointed, an order which soon ceased to exist in the Kirk. Their duties were to wander about in their provinces, superintending and preaching. By request of the convention, which was crowded by persons not used to attend, some preachers drew up, in four days, a confession of faith, on the lines of Calvin's rule at Geneva. This was approved in past on August seventeenth. The makers of the document professed their readiness to satisfy any critic of any point from the mouth of God, out of the Bible, but the pace was so good that either no criticism was offered, or it was very rapidly satisfied. On August twenty-four, four acts were passed in which the authority of the Bishop of Rome was repudiated. All previous legislation, not consistent with the new confession, was rescinded. Against celebrants and attendants of the mass were threatened, one, confiscation and corporal punishment, two, exile, and three, for the third offense, death. The death sentence is not known to have been carried out in more than one or two cases. Professor Hume Brown writes that the penalties attached to the breach of these enactments, namely the abjuration of papal jurisdiction, the condemnation of all practices and doctrines contrary to the new creed, and of the celebration of mass in Scotland, were those approved and sanctioned by the example of every country in Christendom. But not, surely, for the same offenses, such as the saying or hearing of mass. Suits and ecclesiastical were removed into secular courts. August twenty-ninth. CHAPTER 19. THE GREAT PILLAGE, PART II. In the confession the theology was that of Calvin. Civil rulers were admitted to be of divine institution, their duty is to suppress idolatry, and they are not to be resisted when doing that which pertains to their charge. But a Catholic ruler, like Mary, or a tolerant ruler, as James the Sixth would feign have been, apparently may be resisted for his tolerance. Resisted James was, as we shall see, whenever he attempted to be lenient to Catholics. The Book of Discipline, by Knox and other preachers, never was ratified by the estates, as the confession of faith had been. It made admirable provisions for the payment of preachers and for teachers, for the universities, and for the poor. But somebody, probably Lethington, spoke of the proposals as devout imaginations. The Book of Discipline approved of what was later accepted by the General Assembly, the Book of Common Order and Public Worship. This book was not a stereotyped liturgy, but it was a kind of guide to the ministers in public prayers. The minister may repeat the prayers, or say something like in effect. On the whole he prayed as the spirit moved him, and he really seems to have been regarded as inspired. His prayers were frequently political addresses. To silence these, the infatuated policy of Charles I thrust the Laudian liturgy on the nation. The preachers were to be chosen by popular election after examination in knowledge and as tomorrows. There was to be no ordination by laying on of hands. Seeing the miracle is ceased, the using of the ceremony we deem not necessary. But if the preachers were inspired, the miracle had not ceased, and the ceremony was soon reinstated. Contrary to Geneva in practice, such festivals as Christmas and Easter were abolished. The Scottish Sabbath was established in great majesty. One rag of Rome was retained, clerical excommunication, the sword of church discipline. It was the cutting off from Christ of the excommunicated, who were handed over to the devil, and it was attended by civil penalties equivalent to universal boycotting, practical outlawry, and followed by hellfire, which sentence, lawfully pronounced on earth, is ratified in heaven. The strength of the preachers lay in this terrible weapon, borrowed from the armory of Rome. Private morals were watched by the elders, and offenders were judged in Kirk sessions. Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were the most prominent in popular sins. The main stay of the system is the idea that the Bible is literally inspired, that the preachers are the perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must imitate the old Hebrew persecution of idolaters, that is, mainly Catholics. All this meant a theocracy of preachers elected by the populace, and governing the nation by their general assembly, in which nobles and other laymen sat as elders. These peculiar institutions came hot from Geneva, and the country could never have been blessed with them, as we have observed, but for that instrument of providence, Cardinal Beaton. Had he disposed of himself and Scotland to Henry VIII, who would not have tolerated Presbyterian claims for an hour, Scotland would not have received the Geneva discipline, and the Kirk would have groaned under bishops. The Reformation supplied Scotland with a class of preachers who were pure in their lives, who were not accessible to bribes, a virtue in which they stood almost alone, who were firm in their faith, and soon had learning enough to defend it, who were constant in their parish work, and of whom many were credited with prophetic and healing powers. They could exercise ghosts from houses, devils from men possessed. The baldness of the services, the stern nature of the creed, were congenial to the people. The drawbacks were the intolerance, the spiritual pretension of the preachers to interference in secular affairs, and the superstition which credited men like Knox and later Bruce with the gifts of prophecy and other miraculous workings, and insisted on the burning of witches and warlocks, whereof the writer knows scarcely an instance in Scotland before the Reformation. The pulpit may be said to have discharged the functions of the press, a press which was all on one side, when, in 1562, Ninian Winsett, a Catholic priest and ex-schoolmaster, was printing a controversial tractate addressed to knots, the magistrates seized the manuscript at the printer's house, and the author was fortunate in making his escape. The nature of the confession of faith and of the claims of the ministers to interfere in secular affairs with divine authority was certain to cause war between the Crown and the Kirk. That war, whether open and armed, or a conflict in words, endured, till, in 1690, the weapon of excommunication with civil penalties was quietly removed from the ecclesiastical armory. Such were the results of a religious revolution hurriedly affected. The lords now sent an Embassy to Elizabeth about the time of the death of Amy Robsart, and while Amy's husband, Robert Dudley, was very dear to the English Queen, to urge vainly her marriage with Aaron. On December 5, 1560, Francis II died, leaving Mary Stuart Amir Dowager, while her kinsmen, the guises, lost power, which fell into the unfriendly hands of Catherine de' Medici. At once Aaron, who made knots his confidant, began to woo Mary with a letter and a ring. Her reply perhaps increased his tendency to madness, which soon became open and incurable by the science of the day. Here we must try to sketch Mary, Lauren Blanche in her white royal mourning. Her education had been that of the learned ladies of her age. She had some knowledge of Latin and new French and Italian. French was to her almost a mother tongue, but not quite. She had retained her scots, and her attempts to write English are at first curiously imperfect. She had lived in a profligate court, but she was not the wanton of hostile slanderers. She had all the guile of statesmanship, said the English-on-voy Randolph, and she long exercised great patience under daily insults to her religion and provocations from Elizabeth. She was generous, pitiful, naturally honorable, and most loyal to all who served her. But her passions, whether of love or hate, once roused, were tyrannical. In person she was tall, like her mother, and graceful with beautiful hands. Her face was somewhat long, the nose long and straight, the lips and chin beautifully molded, the eyebrows very slender, the eyes of a reddish-brown, long and narrow. Her hair was russet, drawn back from a lofty brow, her smile was captivating, she was rather fascinating than beautiful, her courage and her love of courage and others were universally confessed. In January 1561 the Estates of Scotland ordered James Stewart, Mary's natural brother, to visit her in France. In spring she met him, and an envoy from Huntley, Leslie, later Bishop of Ross, who represented the Catholic Party, and asked Mary to land in Aberdeen and march south at the head of the Gordons and certain northern clans. The proposal came from noblemen of Perthshire, Angus, and the North, whose forces could not have faced a lowland army. Mary, who had learned from her mother that Huntley was treacherous, preferred to take her chance with her brother, who, returning by way of England, moved Elizabeth to recognize the Scottish Queen as her heir. But Elizabeth would never settle the secession, and as Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, forbade her to travel home through England. CHAPTER XXI of A SHORT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND by Andrew Lang CHAPTER XXI Mary Landed in Leith She had told the English ambassador to France that she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hope to be unconstrained. Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure for a robinhood frolic. Her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that they had acted in despite of religion. The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her mass in her private chapel. Her priest was mobbed by the godly. On the following Sunday Knox denounced her mass, and had his first interview with her later. In vain she spoke of her conscience. Knox said that it was unenlightened. Lethington wished that he would deal more gently with the young princess, unpersuaded. There were three or four later interviews, but Knox strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord Ocaltree, a steward, was proof against the Queen's fascination. In spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary kept her temper, and for long cast in her lot with Leithington and her brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth. The court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with Bothwell, who though a Protestant had sided with Mary of guys during the brawls of 1559. He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate, reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well educated. In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided between the preachers and the queen, between God and the devil, says Knox. Then sport there was a rift between the preachers and the politicians, Leithington and Lord James, now Earl of Mar, on whom Mary leaned. The new Earl of Mar was furtively created Earl of Murray and enjoyed the gift after the overthrow of Huntley. In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth. Certainly Leithington hoped that Elizabeth would be able to do much with Mary in religion, meaning that, if Mary's claims to succeed Elizabeth were granted, she might turn Anglican. The request for a meeting, dallied with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while at home, Aaron, March thirty-first, accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary's person. Aaron probably told truth, but he now went mad. Bothwell was imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562. Leithington in June was negotiating for Mary's interview with Elizabeth. Knox bitterly opposed it. The preachers feared that the queen would turn Anglican and bishops might be let loose in Scotland. The masks for Mary's reception were actually being organized when in July Elizabeth, on the pretext of persecutions by the guises in France, broke off the negotiations. The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of which the origins are obscure. Mary, with her brother and Leithington, made a progress into the North, were affronted by and attacked Huntley, who died suddenly, October twenty-eight, at the fight of Corky, seized a son of his, who was executed, November second, and spoiled his castle which contained much of the property of the Church of Aberdeen. Mary's motives for destroying her chief Catholic subject are not certainly known. Her brother, Lord James, in February, made Earl of Marr, now received the lands and title of Earl of Murray. At some date in this year Knox preached against Mary because she gave a dance. He chose to connect her dance with some attack on the Huguenots in France. According to the book of Discipline, he should have remonstrated privately, as Mary told him. The dates are inextricable. Till the spring of fifteen-sixty-five the main business was the question of the queen's marriage. This continued to divide the ruling Protestant nobles from the preachers. Knox dreaded an alliance with Spain, a marriage with Don Carlos. But Elizabeth, to waste time, offered Mary the hand of Lord Robert Dudley, Lester, and strange as it appears Mary would probably have accepted him, as late as fifteen-sixty-five, for Elizabeth let it be understood that to marry a Catholic prince would be the signal for war, while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth's favorite, Dudley, she would be acknowledged as Elizabeth's heiress. Mary was young and showed little knowledge of the nature of woman. In fifteen-sixty-three came the affair of Châtellard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot, apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid himself under her bed at Holy Road, and again at Burntisland. Mary had listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but Châtellard went too far. He was decapitated in the market street of St. Andrews, February twenty-second, fifteen-sixty-three. It is clear, if we may trust Knox's account, singularly unlike Brant Homes, that Châtellard was a Huguenot. About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the center of Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating mass. This was in accordance with law, and to soften Knox the girl-queen tried her personal influence. He resisted the devil. Mary yielded and allowed Archbishop Hamilton and some fifty other clerics to be placed in prison courteous. The estates, which met on May twenty-seventh for the first time since the queen landed, were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of Discipline. They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of unspeakable cruelties. Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till their common interest brought them together in fifteen-sixty-five. In June fifteen-sixty-three, Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of Lennox, the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and a rival of the Hamilton's for the secession to the thrones, apparently for the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox's son Darnley, and then thwarting it. It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to send Lennox. Knox's favorite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley, despite his notorious character he sometimes favored the English Puritans. When Holy wrote had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary's absence in autumn fifteen-sixty-three, broke up the Catholic attendance on mass, such attendance in Mary's absence was illegal, and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox called together the godly. The council cleared him of the charge of making an unlawful convocation. They might want to make one any day themselves, and he was supported by the General Assembly. Similar conduct of the preacher's thirty years later gave James the sixth the opportunity to triumph over the Kirk. In June fifteen-sixty-four there was still discord between the Kirk and the lords, and in a long argument with Lethington, Knox maintained the right of the godly to imitate the slayings of idolaters by Phineas and Jehu, the doctrine bore blood-red fruits among the later covenanters. Elizabeth, in May fifteen-sixty-four, in vain asked Mary to withdraw the permission, previously asked for by her, to allow Lennox to visit Scotland and plead for the restitution of his land. The objection to Lennox's appearance had come, through Randall, from Knox. You may cause us to take the Lord Darnley, wrote Kirk Caldy to Cecil, to stop Elizabeth's system of delays, and serve James Melville after going on a mission to Elizabeth, warned Mary that she would never part with her minion, now Earl of Lester. Lester, in autumn fifteen-sixty-four, arrived and was restored to his estates, while Lester and Cecil worked for the sending of a son Darnley to Scotland. Lester had no desire to desert Elizabeth's court and his chance of touching her maiden heart. The intrigues of Cecil, Lester and Elizabeth, resemble rather a chapter in a novel than a page in history. Elizabeth notoriously hated Anne, whenever she could, thwarted all marriages. She desired that Mary should never marry, a union with a Catholic prince she vetoed, threatening war, and Lester she offered merely to drive time. But Mary, evasively tempted by hints, later withdrawn of her recognition as Elizabeth's successor, was, till the end of March fifteen-sixty-five, encouraged by Randall, the English ambassador at her court, to remain in hope of wedding Lester. Randall himself was not in the secret of the English entry, which was to slip Darnley at Mary. He came, February fifteen-sixty-five, Cecil and Lester had used earnest means to ensure his coming. On March seventeenth Mary was informed that she would never be recognized as Elizabeth's successor till events should occur which could never occur. On receiving this news Mary wept. She also was indignant at the long and humiliating series of Elizabeth's treacheries. Her patience broke down. She turned to Darnley thereby, as the English intrigues designed, breaking up the concord of her nobles. To Mary Darnley involved the feud of the Hamilton's and the return of Murray, whom Darnley had offended, of Chateau Herald, Argel and many other nobles to the party of Knox and the preachers. Lester would have been welcomed to Knox. Darnley was a Catholic, if anything, and a weak, passionate young fool. Mary, in the clash of interests, was a lost woman, as Randall truly said with sincere pity. Her long endurance, her attempts to run the English course were wasted. David Ricchio, who came to Scotland as a musician in 1565, was now high in her and Darnley's favour. Murray was accused of a conspiracy to seize Darnley and Lennox. The godly began to organize an armed force, June 1565, Mary summoned from exile Bothwell a man of the sword. On July 29 she married Darnley, and on August 6 Murray, who had refused to appear to answer the charges of treason brought against him, though a safe conduct was offered, was outlawed and proclaimed a rebel, while Huntley's son, Lord George, was to be restored to his estates. Thus everything seemed to indicate that Mary had been exasperated into a breaking with the party of moderation, the party of Murray and Lethington, and been driven into courses where her support, if any, must come from France and Rome. Yet she married without waiting for the necessary dispensation from the Pope. Her policy was henceforth influenced by her favour to Ricchio, and by the jealous and arrogant temper of her husband. Mary well knew that Elizabeth had sent money to her rebels, whom she now pursued through all the south of Scotland. They fled from Edinburgh, where the valiant brethren, brave enough in throwing stones at pilloried priests, refused to join them, and despite the feuds in her own camp, where Bothwell and Darnley were already on the worst terms, Mary drove the rebel lords across the border at Carlyle on October 8. CHAPTER XX. MARIAN SCOTLAND PART II. Mary seemed triumphant, but the men with her, Lethington and Morton, the Chancellor, were disaffected. Darnley was mutinous. He thought himself neglected. He and his father resented Mary's leniency to shuttle her alt, who had submitted and been sent to France. All parties hated Ricchio. There was to be a Parliament early in March 1566. In February Mary sent the Bishop of Dunblane to Rome to ask for a subsidy. She intended to reintroduce the spiritual estate into the house as electors of the lords of the Articles, tending to have done some good, attend to restoring the old religion. The nuncio, who was to have brought the Pope's money, later insisted that Mary should take the heads of Murray, Argyle, Morton, and Lethington. Whether she aimed at securing more than tolerance for Catholics is uncertain, but the Parliament, in which the exiled lords were to be forfeited, was never held. The other nobles would never permit such a measure. George Douglas, a stirring cadet of the Great House, was exciting Darnley's jealousy of Ricchio, but already Randall, February 5, 1566, had written to Cecil that the wisest were aiming at putting all in hazard to restore the exiled lords. The nobles in the last resort would all stand by each other. There was now a Douglas plot of the old sort to bring back the exiles, and Darnley, with his jealous desire to murder Ricchio, was but the cat's paw to light the train and explode Mary and her government. Rithvin, whom Mary had always distrusted, came into the conspiracy. Through Randall all was known in England. Bands were drawn up, signed by Argyle, safe in his own hills, Murray, Glencarn, Roth's, Boyd, Oakaltree, the father of Knox's young wife, and Darnley. His name was put forward, his rights and succession were secured against the Hamilton's. Room Two was to be defended. Many Douglas's, many of the Lothian Gentry, were in the plot. Murray was to arrive from England as soon as Ricchio had been slain and Mary had been seized. Randall knew all, and reported to Elizabeth's ministers. The plan worked with mechanical precision. On March 9th Morton and his company occupied Holy Road, going up the great staircase about eight at night, while Darnley and Rithvin, a dying man, entered the Queen's supper room by a privy-stare. Morton's men burst in, Ricchio was dragged forth and died under forty daggers. Bothwell, Athol, and Huntley, partisans of Mary, escaped from the palace. With them, Mary managed to communicate on the morrow, when she also held talk with Murray, who had returned with the other exiles. She had worked on the fears and passions of Darnley. By promises of amnesty the lords were induced to withdraw their guards next day, and in the following night, by a secret passage, and through the tombs of Kings, Mary and Darnley reached the horses brought by Arthur Erskine. It was a long, dark ride to Dunbar, but there Mary was safe. She pardoned and won over Glencarn, whom she liked, and Roth's, Bothwell, and Huntley joined her with a sufficient force. Rithvin and Morton fled to Barrick. Rithvin was to die in England, and Knox hastened into Kyle and Ayrshire. Darnley, who declared his own innocence and betrayed his accomplices, was now equally hated and despised by his late allies and by the Queen and Murray, indeed by all men, chiefly by Morton and Argyle. Lethington was in hiding, but he was indispensable, and in September was reconciled to Mary. On June 19 in Edinburgh Castle she bore her child, later James the Sixth. On her recovery Darnley was insolent and was the more detested, while Bothwell was high in favour. In October most of the Lord's signed, with Murray, a band for setting Darnley aside, not for his murder. He is said to have denounced Mary to Spain, France, and Rome for neglecting Catholic interests. In mid-October Mary was seriously ill at Jedborough, where Bothwell, wounded in an encounter with a border river, was welcomed, while Darnley, coldly rejected, went to his father's house on the Fourth. On her recovery Mary resided in the last days of November at Craigmiller Castle, near Edinburgh. Here Murray, Argyle, Bothwell, Huntley, and Lethington held council with her as to Darnley. Lethington said that a way would be found, a way that Parliament would approve, while Murray would look through his fingers. Lennox believed that the plan was to arrest Darnley on some charge and slay him if he resisted. At Stirling, December 17, when the young Prince was baptized with Catholic rites, Darnley did not appear. He sulked in his own rooms. A week later the exiles guilty of Riccio's murder were recalled, among them Morton, and Darnley, finding all his enemies about to be united, went to Glasgow, where he fell ill of smallpox. Mary offered a visit. She had had the malady as a child, and was rudely rebuffed. January 1 through 13th, 1567, but she was with him by January 21st. From Glasgow at this time was written the long and fatal letter to Bothwell, which places Mary s guilt in luring Darnley to his death beyond doubt, if we accept the letters as authentic. Darnley was carried in a litter to the lonely house of Kirklefield, on the south wall of Edinburgh. Here Mary attended him in his sickness. On Sunday morning, February 9, Mary left Edinburgh for Fife. On the night of Sunday the night, through Monday the 10th, the house where Darnley lay was blown up by gunpowder, and he with an attendant was found dead in the garden, how he was slain is not known. That Bothwell, in accordance with the ban signed by himself, Huntley, Argyle and Lethington, and aided by some border ruffians, laid and exploded the powder is certain. Morton was apprised by Lethington and Bothwell of the plot, but refused to join it without Mary s written commission, which he did not obtain. Against the queen there is no trustworthy direct evidence, if we distrust her alleged letters to Bothwell, but her conduct in protecting and marrying Bothwell, who was really in love with his wife, shows that she did not disapprove. The trial of Bothwell was a farce. Mary s abduction by him April 24th, and retreat with him to Dunbar was collusive. She married Bothwell on May 15. Her nobles, many of whom had signed a document urging her to marry Bothwell, rose against her, on June 15, 1567. She surrendered to them at Carberry Hill, while they, several of them deep in the murder plot, were not sorry to let Bothwell escape to Dunbar. After some piratical adventures being pursued by Kerkaldi, he made his way to Denmark, where he died a prisoner. Mary, first carried to Edinburgh, and there insulted by the populace, was next hurried to Loch Lavin Castle. Her alleged letters to Bothwell were betrayed to the lords June 21, probably through Sir James Balfour, who commanded in Edinburgh Castle. Perhaps Murray, who had left for France before the marriage to Bothwell, perhaps fear of Elizabeth or human pity, induced her captors, contrary to the Council of Lethington, to spare her life, when she had signed her abdication while they crowned her infant son. Murray accepted the regency. A parliament in December established the Kerk, acquitted themselves of rebellion, and announced that they had proof of Mary's guilt in her own writing. Her romantic escape from Loch Lavin, May 2, 1568, gave her but an hour of freedom. Defeated on her march to Dunbarton Castle in the battle of Langside Hill, she lost heart and fled to the coast of Galloway. On May 16, crossed the Solway to Workington in Cumberland, and in a few days was Elizabeth's prisoner in Carlisle Castle. Mary had hitherto been convinced but not a very obedient daughter of the Church. For example, it appears that she married Darnley before the arrival of the Pope's dispensation. At this moment Philip of Spain, the French envoy to Scotland, and the French court had no faith in her innocence of Darnley's death, and the Pope said he knew not which of these ladies were the better, Mary or Elizabeth. But from this time, while a captive in England, Mary was the centre of the hopes of English Catholics. In miniatures she appears as queen, quartering the English arms. She might further the ends of Spain, of France, of Rome, of English rebels, while her existence was a nightmare to the Protestants of Scotland and apparel to Elizabeth. After Mary's flight, Mary was, as has been said, regent for the crowned baby James. In his counsel were the sensual, brutal, but vigorous Morton, with Mar, later himself regent, a man of milder nature, Glen Karn, Ruthven, whom Mary detested, he had tried to make unwelcome love to her at Lochlevin, and the necessary evil, Lethington. How a man so wily became a party to the murder of Darnley cannot be known. Now he began to perceive that, if Mary were restored, as he believed that she would be, his only safety lay in securing her gratitude by secret services. On the other side were the Hamilton's, with their ablest man, the arch- bishop, the border spears who were loyal to Bothwell, and two of the conspirators in the murder of Darnley, Argole and Huntley, with Fleming and Harrys, who were much attached to Mary. The two parties, influenced by Elizabeth, did not now come to blows, but awaited the results of English inquiries into Mary's guilt, and of Elizabeth's consequent action. CHAPTER XXI of a short history of Scotland by Andrew Lane. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. CHAPTER XXI. The Unhappy Queen Prayed to see her, in whose hospitality she had confided, or be allowed to depart free. Elizabeth's policy was to lead her into consenting to reply to her subjects' accusations, and Mary drifted into the shuffling English inquiries at York in October, while she was lodged at Bolton Castle. Murray, George Buchanan, Lethington, now distrusted by Murray, and Morton produced, for Norfolk and other English commissioners at York, copies at least of the incriminating letters which horrified the Duke of Norfolk. Yet probably through the guile of Lethington he changed his mind, and became a suitor for Mary's hand. He bade her refuse compromise, whereas compromise was Lethington's hope. A free and full inquiry would reveal his own guilt in Donley's murder. The inquiry was shifted to London in December. Mary always being refused permission to appear and speak for herself. Nay, she was not allowed even to see the letters which she was accused of having written. Her own commissioners, Lord Harry's and Bishop Leslie, who as Mary knew in Harry's case, had no faith in her innocence, showed their want of confidence by proposing a compromise. This was not admitted. Morton explained how he got the silver casket with the fatal letters, poems to Bothwell and other papers. They were read in translations, English and Scots. Handwritings were compared, with no known result. Evidence was heard, and Elizabeth at last merely decided that she could not admit Mary to her presence. The English lords agreed, as the case does now stand, and presently many of them were supporting Norfolk in his desire to marry the accused. Mary was told, Jan. 10, 1669, that he had proved nothing which could make Elizabeth take any evil opinion of the Queen, her good sister. Nevertheless, Elizabeth would support him in his Government of Scotland, while declining to recognize James VI, this King. All compromises Mary now utterly refused.  Henceforth the tangled intrigues cannot be disengaged in a work of this scope. Elizabeth made various proposals to Mary, while involving her resignation as Queen, or at least the suspension of her rights. Mary refused to listen. Her party in Scotland, led by Chateau Herald, Harry's, Huntley and Argyle, did not venture to meet Murray in his party in war, and was counseled by Lethington, who still in semblance was of Murray's faction. Lethington was convinced that, sooner or later, Mary would return, and he did not wish to incur her particular ill will. He knew that Mary, as she said, had that in black and white which would hang him, for the murder of Darnley. Now Lethington, Huntley and Argyle were daunted, without stroke of sword by Murray, and a convention to discuss messages from Elizabeth and Mary met at Perth, July 25th to 28th, 1569, and refused to allow the annulment of her marriage with Bothwell, though previously they had insisted on its annulment. Presently Lethington was publicly accused of Darnley's murder by Crawford, a retainer of Lennox, as imprisoned, but was released by Kerkaldi, commander in Edinburgh Castle, which henceforth became the fortress of Mary's cause. The secret of Norfolk's plan to marry the Scottish Queen now reached Elizabeth, making her more hostile to Mary, and in surrection in the North broke out, the Earl of Northumberland was driven into Scotland, was betrayed by Hickey Armstrong and imprisoned at Le Cleven. Murray offered to hand over Northumberland to Elizabeth in exchange for Mary, her life to be guaranteed by hostages. But on January 23rd, 1570 Murray was shot by Hamilton of Bothwell Hall from a window of a house in Lindlithgau, belonging to Archbishop Hamilton. The murderer escaped and joined his clan. During his brief regency Murray had practically detached Huntley and Argyle from arms support of Mary's cause. He had reduced the border to temporary quiet by the free use of the gibbet, but he did not venture to face Lethington's friends and bring him to trial. If he had, many others would have been compromised. Murray was sly and avaricious, but had he been legitimate, Scotland would have been well-governed under his rigor and caution. Regencies of Lenox, Marr, and Morton. Randolph was now sent to Edinburgh to make peace between Mary's party and her foes impossible. He succeeded. The parties took up arms and Sussex ravaged the border in revenge of a raid by Booklet. On May 14th Lenox, with an English force, was sent north. He devastated the Hamilton country, was made regent in July, and in April 1571 had his revenge on Archbishop Hamilton, who was taken at the capture by Crawford of Dunbarton Castle, held by Lord Fleming, a post of vital moment to the Marians, and was hanged at Sterling for complicity in the slaying of Murray. George Buchanan, Mary's old tutor, took advantage of these facts to publish quite a fresh account of Donley's murder. The guilt of the Hamilton's now made that of Bothwell almost invisible. Edinburgh Castle, under curcaldi with Lethington, held out. Knox reluctantly retired from Edinburgh to St. Andrews, where he was unpopular, but many of Mary's lords deserted her, and though Lenox was shot, September 4th, in an attack by Booklet and Kerr of Fenneyhurst on Sterling Castle, where he was holding a Parliament, he was succeeded by Mar, who was inspired by Morton, a far stronger man. Presently the discovery of a plot between Mary, Norfolk, the English Catholics in Spain, caused the Duke's execution, and more severe incarceration for Mary. In Scotland there was no chance of peace. Morton and his associates would not resign the lands of the Hamilton's, Lethington and curcaldi. Lethington knew that no amnesty would cover his guilt, though he had been nominally cleared in the slaying of Darnley. One after the other of Mary's adherents made their peace, but curcaldi and Lethington, in Edinburgh Castle, seemed safe while money and supplies held out. Knox had prophesied that curcaldi would be hanged, but did not live to see his desire on his enemy, or on Mary, whom Elizabeth was about to hand over to Mar for instant execution. Knox died on November 24th, 1572. Mar, the regent, had pre-deceased him by a month, leaving Morton in power. On May 28th, 1573 the castle, attacked by guns and engineers from England, and cut off from water, struck its flag. The brave curcaldi was hanged. Lethington, who had been long moribund, escaped by an opportune death. The best soldier in Scotland and the most modern of her wits thus perished together. Concerning Knox, the opinions of his contemporaries differed. By his own account the leader of his party deemed him too extreme, and David Hume finds his ferocious delight in chronicling the murders of his foes rather amusing, though sad. Corals of religion apart Knox was a very good-hearted man, but where religion was concerned his temper was remote from the Christian. He was a perfect agitator. He knew no tolerance, he spared no violence of language, and in diplomacy, when he diplomatized, he was no more scrupulous than another. Only vigorous and personal as literature his history needs constant correction from documents. While to his secretary, Bannetine, Knox seemed a man of God, the light of Scotland, the mirror of godliness, many silent, douche-spoke among whom he labored probably agreed in the allegation quoted by a diarist of the day, that Knox had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late cardinal. In these years of violence of the Douglas Wars, as they were called, two new tendencies may be observed. In January 1572 Morton induced an assembly of preachers at Leith to accept one of his clan, John Douglas, as Archbishop of St. Andrews. Other bishops were appointed, called Tulcan bishops, from the Tulcan a refugee of a calf employed to induce cows to yield their milk. The church revenues were drawn through these unapostolic prelates and came into the hands of the State, or at least of Morton. With these bishops, superintendents co-existed but not for long. The horns of the meter already began to appear above Presbyterian parity, and Morton is said to have remarked that there would never be peace in Scotland till some preachers were hanged. In fact, there never was peace between Kirk and State till a deplorable number of preachers were hanged by the governments of Charles II and James II. A meeting of preachers in Edinburgh after the Bartholomew Massacre in the autumn of 1572 demanded that it shall be lawful to all subjects in this realm to invade them and every one of them to death. The persons to be invaded to the death are recalcitrant Catholics, grit or small, persisting in remaining in Scotland. The alarmed demands of the preachers were merely disregarded by the Privy Council.  There was no expulsion of all Catholics who dared to stay, no popular massacre of all who declined to go. While Morton was in power he kept the preachers well in hand. He did worse. He starved the ministers and thrust into the best livings wanton young gentlemen, of whom his kinsmen, Archibald Douglas, and accomplice in Darnley's death and a trebly dyed traitor was the worst. But in 1575 the great Andrew Melville, an erudite scholar and a most determined person, began to protest against the very name of Bishop in the Kirk, and in Adamson, made by Morton's successor of John Douglas at St. Andrew's, Melville found a mark and a victim. In economics, as an English diplomatist wrote to Cecil in November 1572, the country, despite the Civil War, was thriving, the nobleman's great credit decaying, the ministry and religion increases, and the desiring, then, to prevent the practice of the papacy. The Englishmen, in November, may refer to the petition for persecution of October 20, 1572. The death of old Chateaurel Heraldt now left the headship of the Hamilton's in more resolute hands. Morton was confronted by opposition from Argyle, Athol, Buchen, and Mar, and Morton, in 1576 to 1577, made approaches to Mary. When the young James the Sixth came to his majority, Morton's enemies would charge him with his guilty foreknowledge through Bothwell of Darnley's murder. So he made advances to Mary in hope of an amnesty. She suspected a trap and held aloof. On March 4, 1578, a strong band of nobles, led by Argyle, 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, Athol, 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 Abroth, 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 stewards, and as such were concerned in the feud against the Hamilton's. The first was a cousin of Darnley, brought up in France, namely Esme Stuart Daubigny, 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 Stuart, son of Lord Ocultry, and brother-in-law of John Knox. Stuart 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 stewards, Daubigny and the captain, became allies. In a parliament at Edinburgh, November 1579, their foes, the chiefs of the Hamilton's, were forfeited. They had been driven to seek shelter with Elizabeth, while Daubigny got their lands and the key of Scotland, Dumbarton Castle, on the estuary of Clyde. The Kirk, regarding Daubigny, 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 Huntley, Bothwell, Argyle, and Lefington. 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 Hamilton's, Elizabeth sent Bows 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, Bows was urged by Elizabeth to join with Morton and lay violent hands on Lennox, August 31st, 1580, but in a month Elizabeth cancelled her orders. Bows 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 31st, 1580, James Stewart accused Morton in presence of the Council of Complicity in Darnley's murder. He was put in ward. Elizabeth threatened war. The preacher 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 Barrick. James Stewart was created Earl of Aron. 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 1st Morton was tried for guilty foreknowledge of Darnley's death.  The death of this avaricious, lisentious, 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 a never-present terror of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and of an unknown proportion of the people. The information of 1559 to 1560 had been met by no Catholic resistance. We might suppose that the enormous majority of the people were Protestants, though the reverse had 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 a 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, uninvatable 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, Dubin Yee, now Duke of Lenox, and James Stewart, the destroyer of Morton, now to the prejudice of the Hamilton's, Earl of Arryn, were men whose private life, at least in Arryn's case, was scandalous. If Arryn were a Protestant he was impatient of the rule of the Pulpeteers, and Lenox 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 vanquened Archbishopric of Glasgow, while he himself, like Morton, drew most of the revenues. Hence arose Chumultz, and late in 1581 and in 1582, Presley 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. End of Chapter 22, Part 1, read by Cibella Denton. For more free audio books or to volunteer, please visit Libra Vol.