A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland

by Mary Platt Parmele

But kings and nobles went on as before with their absorbing game. The infant James V. was proclaimed king. The conditions which had disgraced the minority of his predecessors were repeated, and until he was eighteen he was virtually a prisoner; then with relentless severity he turned upon the traitors. The Reformation which was assuming great proportions was beginning to creep into Scotland. The Catholic King, with a double intent, placed Primates of the Church in all the great offices, and the excluded nobles began to lean toward the new faith. Luther's works were prohibited and stringent measures adopted to drive heretical literature out of the land. When, for reasons we all know, Henry VIII. became an illustrious convert to Protestantism, he tried to bring about a marriage between his nephew, James, and his young daughter, Princess Mary; at the same time urging his nephew to join him in throwing off the authority of the Pope. But James made a choice pregnant with consequences for England. He married, in 1538, Mary, daughter of the great Duke of Guise in France; thus rejecting the peaceful overtures of his uncle, Henry VIII., and confirming the French alliance and the anti-Protestant policy of his kingdom. Henry was displeased, and commenced an exasperating course toward Scotland. There was a small engagement with the English at Solway Moss, which ended in a panic and defeat of the Scots. This so preyed upon the mind of the King that his spirit seemed broken. The news of the birth of a daughter—Mary Stuart—came to him simultaneously with that of the defeat. He was full of vague, tragic forebodings, sank into a melancholy, and expired a week later (1542). The little Queen Mary at once became the centre of state intrigues. Henry VIII. secured the co-operation of disaffected Scotch nobles in a plan to place her in his hands as the betrothed of his son, Prince Edward. A treaty of alliance was drawn and signed, agreeing to the marriage, with the usual condition of the feudal lordship of the English King over Scotland. The Scottish Parliament, through the efforts of Cardinal Beaton, rejected the proposal, and the furious Henry declared war, with instructions to sack, burn, and put to death without mercy, Cardinal Beaton's destruction being especially enjoined. The Cardinal, in the meantime, was trying to stamp out the Reform-fires which were spreading with extraordinary swiftness. There were executions and banishments. Wishart, the Reformer and friend of John Knox, was burned at the stake. Following this there was a conspiracy for the death of the Cardinal, who was assassinated, and his Castle of St. Andrew became the stronghold of the conspirators. John Knox, for his own safety, took refuge with them, and upon the surrender of the castle to a French force, Knox was sent a prisoner to the French galleys.

The infant Queen, now six years old, was betrothed to the grandson of Francis I. and conveyed by Lord Livingston to France for safe-keeping until her marriage. Her mother, Mary of Guise, was Regent of Scotland, and doing her best to stem the tide of Protestantism. The spread of the Reformed faith was amazing. It took on at first a form more ethical than doctrinal. It was against the immoralities of the clergy that a sternly moral people rose in its wrath, and, on the other hand, it was the reading of the Scriptures, and interpreting them without authority, for which men were condemned to the stake, their accusers saying, "What shall we leave to the bishops to do, when every man shall be a babbler about the Bible?" Carlyle says the Reformation gave to Scotland a soul. But it might have fared differently had not a co-operating destiny at the same time given Scotland a John Knox! Knox was to the Reformed Church in Scotland what the body of the tree is to its branches. He not only poured his own uncompromising life into the branches, but then determined the direction in which they should inflexibly grow. Knox had been the friend and disciple of Calvin in Geneva. The newly awakened soul in Scotland fed upon the theology of that great logician as the bread of heaven, and Calvinism was forever rooted in the hearts and minds of the people.

The marriage of Queen Mary with the Dauphin had been quickly followed by the death of Henry II., and her young consort was King of France. Queen Elizabeth, in response to an appeal from the Reformed Church, sent a fleet and soldiers to meet the powerful French force which would now surely come. But the reign of Francis II. was brief. In 1560 tidings came that he was dead. Mary now resolved to return to her own kingdom. Elizabeth tried to intercept her by the way, but she arrived safely and was warmly welcomed. She was nineteen, beautiful, gifted, rarely accomplished, had been trained in the most brilliant and gayest capital in Europe, and was a fervent Catholic. She came back to a land which had by Act of Parliament prohibited the Mass and adopted a religious faith she considered heretical, and a land where Protestantism in its austerest form had become rooted, and where John Knox, its sternest exponent, held the conscience of the people in his keeping. What to her were only simple pleasures, were to them deadly sins. When the Mass was celebrated after her return, so intense was the excitement, the chapel-door had to be guarded, and Knox proclaimed from the pulpit, that "an army of 10,000 enemies would have been less fearful to him" than this act of the Queen.

During the winter in Edinburgh the gayeties gave fresh offence. Knox declared that "the Queen had danced excessively till after midnight." And then he preached a sermon on the "Vices of Princes," which was an open attack upon her uncles, the Guises in France. Mary sent for the preacher, and reproved him for disrespect in trying to make her an object of contempt and hatred to her people, adding, "I know that my uncles and ye are not of one religion, and therefore I do not blame you, albeit you have no good opinion of them." The General Assembly passed resolutions recommending that it be enacted by Parliament that "all papistical idolatry should be suppressed in the realm, not alone among the subjects, but in the Queen's own person." Mary, with her accustomed tact, replied, that she "was not yet persuaded in the Protestant religion, nor of the impiety in the Mass. But although she would not leave the religion wherein she had been nourished and brought up, neither would she press the conscience of any, and, on their part, they should not press her conscience."

We cannot wonder that Mary was revolted by the harshness of John Knox; nor can we wonder that he was alarmed. A fascinating queen, with a rare talent for diplomacy, and in personal touch with all the Catholic centres in Europe, was a formidable menace to the Reformed Church in Scotland, and would in all probability have temporarily overthrown it, had not the course of events been unexpectedly arrested. Every Court in Europe was scheming for Mary's marriage. Proposals from Spain, France, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and the Earl of Leicester in England were all considered. Mary's preference was for Don Carlos of Spain; but when this proved impossible, she made, suddenly, an unfortunate choice. Henry Stewart, who was Lord Darnley, the son of the Earl of Lennox, was, like herself, the great grandchild of Henry VII. That was a great point in eligibility, but the only one. He was a Catholic, three years younger than herself, good-looking, weak and vicious. The marriage was celebrated at Holyrood in 1565, and Mary bestowed upon her consort the title of king. This did not satisfy him. He demanded that the crown should be secured to him for life; and that if Mary died childless, his heirs should succeed. With such violence and insolence did Darnley press these demands, and so open were his debaucheries, that Mary was revolted and disgusted. Her chief minister was an Italian named Rizzio, a man of insignificant, mean exterior, but astute and accomplished. There seems no reason to believe that Darnley was ever jealous of the Italian, but he believed that he was an obstacle to his ambitious designs and was using his influence with Mary to defeat them. He determined to remove him. While Rizzio and the Queen were in conversation in her cabinet, Darnley entered, seized and held Mary in his grasp, while his assassins dragged Rizzio into an adjoining room and stabbed him to death. Who can wonder that she left him, saying, "I shall be your wife no longer!" But after the birth of her infant, three months later, her feelings seem to have softened, and it looked like heroic devotion when she went to his bedside while he was recovering from small-pox, and had him tenderly removed to a house near Edinburgh, where she could visit him daily.

It will never be known whether Mary was cognizant of or, even worse, accessory to Darnley's murder, which occurred at midnight a few hours after she had left him, February 9, 1567.

Suspicion pointed at once to the Earl of Bothwell. The Court acquitted him, but public opinion did not. And it was Mary's marriage with this man which was her undoing. Innocent or guilty, the world will never forgive her for having married, three months after her husband's death, the man believed to be his murderer! Even her friends deserted her. A prisoner at Lochleven Castle, she was compelled to sign an act of abdication in favor of her son. A few of the Queen's adherents, the Hamiltons, Argyles, Setons, Livingstons, Flemings, and others gathered a small army in her support and aided her escape, which was quickly followed by a defeat in an engagement near Glasgow. Mary then resolved upon the step which led her by a long, dark, and dreary pathway to the scaffold. She crossed into England and threw herself upon the mercy of her cousin, Elizabeth.

Immediately upon the Queen's abdication her son, thirteen months old, was crowned James VI. of Scotland. There was a powerful minority which disapproved of all these proceedings; so now there was a Queen's party, a King's party, the latter, under the regency of Moray, having the support of the Reformed clergy. These conditions promised a bitter and prolonged contest, which promise was fully realized; and not until 1573 was the party of the Queen subdued. During the minority of the King a new element had entered into the conflict. The Reformation in Scotland had, as we have seen, under the vigorous leadership of John Knox, assumed the Calvinistic type. In England, during the reign of Elizabeth, a more modified form had been adopted—an episcopacy, with a house of bishops, a liturgy, and a ritual. To the Scotch Reformers this was a compromise with the Church of Rome, no less abhorrent to them than papacy. The struggle resolved itself into one between the advocates of these rival forms of Protestantism, each striving to obtain ascendancy in the kingdom, and control of the King. Some of the most moderate of the Protestants approved of restoring the ecclesiastical estate which had disappeared from Parliament with the Reformation, and having a body of Protestant clergy to sit with the Lords and Commons. These questions, of such vital moment to the consciences of many, were to others merely a cloak for personal ambitions and political intrigues. When James was seventeen years old, the method already so familiar in Scotland, was resorted to. In order to separate him from one set of villanous plotters, he was entrapped by another by an invitation to visit Ruthven Castle, where he found himself a prisoner, and when the plot failed, the Reformed clergy did its best to shield the perpetrators, who had acted with their knowledge and consent.

But James had already made his choice between the two forms of Protestantism, and the basis of his choice was the sacredness of the royal prerogative. A theology which conflicted with that, was not the one for his kingdom. He would have no religion in which presbyters and synods and laymen were asserting authority. The King, God's anointed, was the natural head of the Church, and should determine its policy. Such was the theory which even at this early time had become firmly lodged in the acute and narrow mind of the precocious youth, and which throughout his entire reign was the inspiration of his policy. In the proceedings following the "Ruthven Raid," as it is called, he openly manifested his determination to introduce episcopacy into his kingdom.