35. Death of Mary.—The captive Queen, whose influence in the affairs of her own country had ceased with the surrender of Edinburgh, had, during her long imprisonment, been the cause of many plots against the peace of England and the life of Elizabeth. For her share in Babington's Plot, the object of which was the assassination of Elizabeth, she was tried, found guilty, and condemned to death. She was beheaded at Fotheringhay, February 8, 1587. Though James made some show of feelings of grief and anger at the news of his mother's death, no steps were taken to avenge it, and the matter soon seemed to be forgotten.
36. Marriage of the King.—As James was now of age, his counsellors were looking about for a suitable wife for him. Frederick the Second King of Denmark had lately sent offering to pay up the money for which the Orkney and Shetland Isles had been given in pledge, and as Scotland had no wish to give them back, it was thought that the difficulty might be got over by choosing one of his daughters, who would most likely bring the islands as her dowry. This proposal was agreed to by Frederick. His daughter Anne was betrothed to James, and Keith, the Earl Marshal, was sent to Copenhagen to act as proxy for the King in the marriage ceremony and to bring home the bride. On their way home the wedding party were storm-stayed and obliged to put into a Norwegian Port, and the King, to the surprise of every one, suddenly made up his mind to go himself to fetch his bride. He joined her at Upslo, but as nothing could make him brave the long sea voyage again till the winter was over they returned together to Copenhagen, and did not come to Scotland till the next spring, May 1, 1590.
37. Abolition of Episcopacy.—For some time the government and the church had been at variance about the bishops. The General Assembly of 1581 had declared the episcopal order to be contrary to the Word of God, and had adopted the Second Book of Discipline as the rule of the government of the Church. This book was drawn up by Andrew Melville, who had succeeded Knox as the spiritual leader of the reformed Church. He was a zealous presbyterian, and it was mainly owing to him that the Scottish Church adopted that form of church government. The Ruthven lords had been the champions of the presbyterian or no-bishop party, and, while they were in power, the ministers upheld by them had taken more and more authority upon themselves. In theory they placed the church far above the civil power, and they taught that the chief magistrate, the King, ought to be subject to them in all matters of conscience and religion. They also claimed the right of the old Church in interfering with people's private affairs. Each minister looked on himself as bishop over his own flock, and would not submit to having any overseer set over him again. But, as the removal of the bishops as spiritual peers would have been the removal of one of the three Estates—that one too that had always been on the side of the crown—and as their existence served as a pretext to the nobles for drawing their revenues, it was clearly the interest both of the crown and of the nobles to maintain them. In 1588 Philip of Spain fitted out a great fleet for the invasion of England. This caused a great panic throughout Scotland. The people feared that Philip might conquer England and bring it again under the dominion of the Pope, in which case the subjection of Scotland must soon follow. The Covenant for the maintenance of the Protestant religion, which had been signed in 1581, was renewed and signed all over the land. So great was the dread of the bishop of Rome that the people looked on all bishops with suspicion, and in 1592 an act was passed by which the whole order was swept away and the presbyterian polity established. Thenceforth the church was to be governed by a series of courts, the members of which were presbyters. The ministers of several parishes formed a presbytery, these again were grouped together into synods, while supreme over all was the General Assembly, composed of ministers and lay elders from the several presbyteries, which was to meet once a year at Edinburgh, and at which the King or his commissioner was to be present.
38. The Spanish Blanks.—Still a large party adhered to the old Church. The chiefs of this party were Huntly in the north and the Maxwells on the Border. They were always suspected of scheming for its restoration, and, as the King could not or would not proceed against them, he was supposed to favour their plans. In 1592 eight suspicious papers were seized on the person of George Kerr, the Lord Newbottle's brother, who was leaving Scotland by the western coast. These papers, called the Spanish blanks, were signed by Huntly, Errol, and Angus, but had no other writing on them. Kerr, after being put to the torture, declared that these blank papers were to be filled up by two Jesuits who were commissioned to offer the services of the nobles who had signed them to the King of Spain, to aid him in the re-establishment of the old religion. This discovery filled every one with horror. Angus was seized; but as Huntly retreated to his own country in the north, Argyle, his rival in the Highlands, was sent with full power against him. The two armies met at Glenlivat, not far from the scene of the well-remembered fight of Harlaw. Huntly had but two thousand men, raised chiefly in the northern Lowlands, but they defeated Argyle's swarm of Highlanders, October 1594. But the Romish party was too weak to follow up the victory, and in 1597 Huntly and Errol publicly renounced their old faith, and joined the established Church.
39. Religious Tumults.—The King and the Church were not long at peace. He called certain of their ministers to account before the council for what they had said in the pulpit. The ministers looked upon this interference as an attack on their privileges. The people supported them, and the result was a riot, so serious that the Court had to flee to Linlithgow. Upon this the King threatened to take away the courts of justice from Edinburgh. The fear of this damped the spirit of the mob, and after the return of the Court the ministers who had withstood the King fled to England. The Estates soon after passed an act by which the King might confer on any minister the title of bishop or abbot, but only so as to give him a seat in Parliament; the title was not to imply any lordship over his brethren.
40. The Gowrie Plot.—On the morning of the fifth of August, 1600, as James was setting out hunting from Falkland Palace, he was met by Alexander Ruthven, the younger brother of the Earl of Gowrie, who told him with a great air of mystery that he had discovered a man burying a pot of money in a field, and that he thought the affair so suspicious that he had taken him prisoner, and begged the King to come to Gowrie House in Perth to see him. James went, taking with him Mar, Lennox, and about twenty other gentlemen. After dinner Alexander took the King aside, and, when his attendants missed him, they were told that he had gone back to Falkland. They were preparing to follow him there when some of them heard cries from a turret. They recognized the King's voice, and they presently saw his head thrust out of a window calling for help. They had much ado to make their way to him, but they found him at last in a small room struggling with Alexander, while a man dressed in armour was looking on. Alexander Ruthven and Gowrie were both killed in the scuffle which followed. A tumult rose in the town, for the Earl had been Provost and was very popular with the townsfolk, and the King and his followers had to make their escape by the river. The doom of traitors was passed on the dead men, and their name was proscribed, but, as no accomplice could be discovered, it was hard to say what was the extent or object of their plot. The whole affair was very mysterious, the only witnesses being the King himself and Henderson the man in armour. Some of the ministers thought it so suspicious that they refused to return thanks for the King's safety, as they thought the whole affair an invention of his own. Eight years later some letters were discovered in the hands of one Sprot, a notary at Eyemouth, which threw some more light on the mystery. They were written by Logan of Restalrig, and revealed a plan between him and the Ruthvens for bringing some prisoner, who was not named, but might possibly be the King, to Fast Castle, a fortress belonging to Logan, standing on a rock at the entrance to the Forth. Sprot was found guilty of treason, and was put to death for not revealing all he knew about the plot long before.
41. Union of the Crowns.—When Elizabeth died, James was the nearest heir to the throne of England by right of descent from Margaret, elder daughter of Henry the Seventh. But her right had been passed over by Henry the Eighth, who had in the will, which he was empowered by Parliament to make, settled the succession on the heirs of his younger sister, Mary. As it was politically convenient to the English Privy Council that James should succeed Elizabeth on her death, they sent off post haste to summon him to come and take the crown. His questionable right was made good by the voice of the people in his first Parliament. He entered London May 6, 1603. Hitherto he had had less money and less power than almost any other prince in Europe; he now became suddenly one of the richest and most powerful among them. This union of the crowns made the third break in the history of Scotland. The gallant struggle for freedom which had drawn forth all the energies of the nation during the past three centuries was now over. It was now to be united to the powerful neighbour that had so long threatened its independence. The representative of the ancient royal Celtic line, which the national reverence for hereditary royalty had upheld unbroken through the strain of seven long minorities, now became king of the larger and richer kingdom of England, which had been ruled by one foreign dynasty after another ever since the Norman Conquest.
42. State of the Nation.—In Scotland the feudal system was still unshaken. To it the great barons owed their power, and the Reformation, which in England had strengthened the crown, had in Scotland only thrown more wealth and more power into the hands of the nobles. Hitherto the people had been only dependents of the great feudal barons, whose burthens they bore in return for their protection. Still they could not have been very badly off, for in Scotland there were no peasant wars, as in France and England. It was the Reformation which first brought them out as a separate body in the state. Their condition was now much worse than it had formerly been. The crown brought its increased power to bear upon the nobles, who in their turn, slaves and flatterers at the foreign Court and tyrants at home, used their feudal rights for the oppression of the people, who could hope for no redress from their absent King.
43. Summary.—We have, in this chapter, traced the progress of the Reformation, and noted the changes which it made in the state of the nation. Though the Reformation did not begin so soon in Scotland as in Germany and England, it made more striking changes and overthrew the old Church more completely than it did in either of those countries. It first gave to the people an independent national life. Until it roused them to separate action, they had been swayed by no party feelings, but had blindly followed the lead and fought in the feuds of their feudal superiors, without paying any heed to the cause for which they laid down their lives. The Reformation also broke off the alliance with France which had subsisted ever since the War of Independence. All the events of this period are closely connected with the change of religion, and it is marked by more civil war, more bloodshed, more crimes of violence, more party strife, more treachery and wrong and robbery, than any other period in the history of Scotland. It was the bad faith of Mary of Lorraine which first drove the Reformers to take up arms in defence of their opinions. Under their own native queen they hoped to enjoy liberty of conscience, and as they looked to her to redress their grievances they welcomed her return with much loyal feeling. By the craftiness and dissimulation of her policy in public affairs, and by the scandals of her private life, she changed their loyal affection into loathing and contempt, and finally forfeited the crown. During the long minority which followed, the country was desolated by a civil war, and the crown was impoverished by the grasping greediness of the nobles. When the King came of age, he showed himself quite unequal to the task of ruling and uniting the different rival factions in the church and in the state, and allowed himself to be governed by one worthless favourite after another. Nor were the ecclesiastical affairs of this period at all more settled than the secular. The form of church government was changed four times before the presbyterian polity was finally established in 1592. The lands of the old Church had been seized by the most worthless of the nobles instead of being set apart for the support of the new Church, so that the ministers could with difficulty secure a bare subsistence. During such an unhappy state of affairs there could be little social or intellectual development. There were however among the Reformers many men distinguished for their learning and brilliant talents. Of these the most conspicuous were George Buchanan, tutor to the young king, who wrote a fabulous history of Scotland and other books in very elegant Latin, and John Knox, who wrote a History of the Reformation, remarkable for the vigour, clearness, and simplicity of its style. Sir James Melville, who was also an accomplished courtier, and stood high in favour both with Mary and with James, gives an excellent picture of these disturbed times in his very entertaining memoirs. The Prayer Book of the Reformed Church was also translated into Gaelic. It was published in 1567, and was the first Celtic book that had ever yet been printed.