‘In this mean time was ane great ferly in Montrose. By the space of six hours, the water thereof was dry in the sea, and during the whilk space the people past within the said sea, and got sundry fishes.... After the whilk space, the people on the sands perceiving the water as ane popill pitt, frae the whilk they fled to land, and syne it was sea again suddenly, and never nane perishit hereinto. Also there was ane hill callit ... , whilk burnt by the said space; men riding by the way, the manes and coils of their horses burnt, the wands of their hands burnt; poor men passing on the way, the staves in their hands burnt, and when they wald dight [wipe] off the fire thereof, it wald entres again.’—D. O.
REGENCY OF MORTON: 1572-1578.
The Earl of Morton had no sooner assumed the reins of government, than his vigorous talents began to be felt. The chief strength of Mary’s friends was in Edinburgh Castle, held for her by Kirkaldy of Grange. All the means at the Regent’s command proving insufficient to reduce this fortress, he obtained from England an army of 1500 men, commanded by Sir William Drury, and provided with artillery. The castle stood a siege of three weeks, and was then obliged to yield (May 29, 1573). With mean vindictiveness, Morton sent the gallant Kirkaldy to the gallows. Maitland of Lethington might have shared the same fate, if it had not been anticipated either by a natural death or suicide. The other chiefs of the queen’s party were spared. After this event, the friends of Mary could no longer make an appearance anywhere in her favour. The new government remained triumphant, and peace was restored to a bleeding and exhausted country.
Morton was, on the whole, a serviceable, though not a just or clement ruler. It was his policy, arising from his love of money, to punish his adversaries rather by fines than bloodshed. All the persons of note who had befriended the queen, he caused to give security for their future behaviour. The smallest offence forfeited the pledge, and the cautioners were then mulcted without mercy. Under this ruling passion, he tampered with the coin, sold justice, and cheated the church of its revenues. It was supposed that he had concealed large treasures in his castle of Dalkeith; but we have no certain account of their ever being found, and probably the popular notions on the subject were exaggerated.
Under Morton, a slight move was made towards the establishment of a kind of episcopacy in the church, though the persons he appointed to the sees were mere creatures who consented to be receivers of the revenues on his account. The general feeling of the people continued to be decidedly in favour of the simple presbyterian polity, and the Regent’s interference with the purity of that system was one cause of his loss of popularity, and of his subsequent ruin. While the recognised champion of the Protestant interest in Scotland, and, as such, the protégé of Elizabeth, he disliked the presbyterian clergy. He not only refused to countenance by his presence any of their assemblies, but ‘threatened some of the most zealous with hanging, alleging that otherwise there could be no peace or order in the country.’[83] The noted efforts of King James to bring the church into a prelatic conformity with England, had in reality an exemplar in the doings of the Regent Morton.
Meanwhile the young king was reared in great seclusion in Stirling Castle, under the care of the celebrated scholar George Buchanan. His acquirements, at a very early age, were such as to raise great hopes of his future rule. Killegrew, the English ambassador, reports having heard him, at eight years of age, translate the Bible, ad aperturam libri, from Latin into French, and from French into English, ‘so well as few men could have added anything to his translation.’ But, in reality, his character was a strange mixture of cleverness and weakness, of wit and folly. His greatest deficiency was in a courageous will to pursue the ends of justice. He could clearly enough apprehend the disease, and speak and write about it plausibly; but he could do little towards its cure, because he shrank from all strong measures except against poor and inferior people, and those who had wounded his own pettier feelings.
The regency of Morton came to a premature conclusion in consequence of a combination raised against him by the Earls of Athole and Argyle; and James became nominally the acting ruler (March 1578), ere he had completed his twelfth year.
1572. Nov. 18.
‘... in the morning, was seen a star northward, very bright and clear, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, at the back of her chair; which, with three chief fixed stars of the said constellation, made a geometrical figure lozenge-wise, of the learned men called rhombus. This star, at the first appearing, seemed bigger than Jupiter, and not much less than Venus when she seemeth greatest ... the said star never changed his[84] place ... and so continued (by little and little appearing less) the space of sixteen months; at what time it was so small, that rather thought, by exercise of oft viewing, might imagine the place, than any eye could judge the presence of the same.’—Holinshed.