The Scotland of Queen Mary and the Religious Wars 1513-1638

By Agnes Mure MacKenzie

History of the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the 16th-17th century.
“BY the end of the Dark Ages, Scotland, or most of our Scotland, was a kingdom. By the High Middle Ages, she had become a nation, and towards the end of the thirteenth century she was on the verge of a willing and friendly union with her neighbour nation, that for a hundred years had been at peace with her, an apparent friend. Then a child queen died: and Scotland, for the next three hundred years, had to fight a war for mere national existence, and that against enormously heavy odds. Nevertheless, by the end of the Middle Ages, by the years between the fall of the Eastern Empire and the discovery of the New World, she was, miraculously, still a nation, with her native culture vigorous and vital, and a status in the general affairs of Europe out of proportion to her little size.
I have elsewhere attempted to give some account of two hundred and seventeen years of that long war. This book takes up the story at a point where it still had eighty-three years of its course to run, or ninety if one counts to its full close, the crowning of James King of Scots as King of England. But the end of it was not the end of war, for fifteen years after Flodden begins another, that for two centuries and a third thereafter made ‘blood and fire and pillars of smoke’ in Scotland, ‘the horsemen mounting, the flashing sword, and the spear’ for the star called Wormwood had fallen into her waters, and the strife of men in arms within their own country, that bursts out at least once in a lifetime through those years, is only the surface of a deeper conflict, that did not end when the clans went down at Drummossie.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Porirua Publishing
• Release date: Apr 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781991141491

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

PREFACE 5

CHRONOLOGY 8

I — FIFTY-FIVE YEARS: 1513-1568 12

CHAPTER I — AFTER FLODDEN 12

A YEAR AND NINE MONTHS: 1513-15 12

CHAPTER II — THE RIVAL REGENTS 15

THIRTEEN YEARS: 1515-28 15

CHAPTER III — THE WIND FROM GERMANY 21

ELEVEN YEARS: 1517-28 21

CHAPTER IV — THE KING OF THE COMMONS 27

SEVEN YEARS: 1528-35 27

CHAPTER V — THE WIND FROM FRANCE AND ENGLAND 32

NINE YEARS: 1527-36 32

CHAPTER VI — ADEW, FAREWEILL! 36

SEVEN YEARS: 1535-42 36

CHAPTER VII — THE ROUGH WOOING 41

SIX YEARS: 1542-48 41

CHAPTER VIII — ENGLAND, THE QUEEN, AND GENEVA 48

NINE YEARS: 1548-57 48

CHAPTER IX — THE LORDS OF THE CONGREGATION 55

THREE YEARS: 1557-60 55

CHAPTER X — THE NEW RELIGION 60

FOURTEEN MONTHS: 1560-1 60

CHAPTER XI — THE WHITE QUEEN 68

THREE YEARS: 1561-64 68

CHAPTER XII — THE QUEEN’S MARRIAGE 77

THREE YEARS AND A QUARTER: 1564-68 77

II — SEVENTY YEARS: 1568-1638 90

CHAPTER XIII — A FUGUE OF REGENCY 90

FIFTEEN YEARS: 1568-83 90

CHAPTER XIV — THE WISE FOOL 102

NINE MONTHS: 1583-84 102

CHAPTER XV — KING AND DUCE 105

EIGHTEEN YEARS: 1574-92 105

CHAPTER XVI — THE KING MAKES A STAND 115

FOUR YEARS: 1592-6 115

CHAPTER XVII — THE END OF THE ENGLISH WAR 125

SEVEN YEARS: 1596-1603 125

CHAPTER XVIII — THE BALANCE CHANGES 128

FOURTEEN YEARS: 1596-1610 128

CHAPTER XIX — PEN-GOVERNMENT 142

FIFTEEN YEARS: 1610-25 142

CHAPTER XX — THE HASTY ALLY 149

FIFTEEN YEARS: 1610-25 149

CHAPTER XXI — THE ABSENTEE KING 156

THIRTEEN YEARS: 1625-37 156

CHAPTER XXII — THE KIRK RENT IN SUNDER 171

SEVENTEEN MONTHS: 1637-8 171

APPENDIX I — THE SWORD-SIDE ANCESTRY OF THE SECOND HOUSE OF STEWART 183

APPENDIX II — THE NEGATIVE CONFESSION 184

APPENDIX III — THE NATIONAL COVENANT 186

BIBLIOGRAPHY 191

PRIMARY MATERIAL 191

EARLY HISTORIANS 192

MODERN HISTORIANS 193

FOREIGN HISTORY 194

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THE SCOTLAND OF QUEEN MARY

AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS

1513-1638

BY

AGNES MURE MACKENZIE

M.A., D.Litt.

Author of

Robert Bruce King of Scots and The Rise of the Stewarts

PREFACE

BY the end of the Dark Ages, Scotland, or most of our Scotland, was a kingdom. By the High Middle Ages, she had become a nation, and towards the end of the thirteenth century she was on the verge of a willing and friendly union with her neighbour nation, that for a hundred years had been at peace with her, an apparent friend. Then a child queen died: and Scotland, for the next three hundred years, had to fight a war for mere national existence, and that against enormously heavy odds. Nevertheless, by the end of the Middle Ages, by the years between the fall of the Eastern Empire and the discovery of the New World, she was, miraculously, still a nation, with her native culture vigorous and vital, and a status in the general affairs of Europe out of proportion to her little size.

I have elsewhere attempted to give some account of two hundred and seventeen years of that long war. This book takes up the story at a point where it still had eighty-three years of its course to run, or ninety if one counts to its full close, the crowning of James King of Scots as King of England. But the end of it was not the end of war, for fifteen years after Flodden begins another, that for two centuries and a third thereafter made ‘blood and fire and pillars of smoke’ in Scotland, ‘the horsemen mounting, the flashing sword, and the spear’ for the star called Wormwood had fallen into her waters, and the strife of men in arms within their own country, that bursts out at least once in a lifetime through those years, is only the surface of a deeper conflict, that did not end when the clans went down at Drummossie.

This book deals with a little more than half of the time from Flodden to the ‘Forty-Five—with the century and a quarter from 1513 to 1638. That period falls into two clear divisions. The first goes from Flodden to 1568, and shows the overlapping of two ages: it serves at once as epilogue, and conclusion, to the story of Scotland under the First House of Stewart, and as the prologue to another age, the Scotland of the Second House of that name. Its surface pattern is that familiar already through the greater part of the fifteenth century—the tumultis and cumberis of a minority interwoven, as they earlier had been, with the inveterate enmity of England, then stabilisation under the power of the Crown as a young king grows to manhood and takes his place; the old friendship with France, that on the very eve of its final breach was to become an actual Union of Crowns; the colour and brilliance of the old court life reviving for a brief decade, or little more; the literature of the courtier and the scholar still carrying on a rich and accomplished tradition. But new elements were beginning to develop, even before the young king’s early death: by his daughter’s brief time they had come to be dominant. The old Church, that had supported the Stewart kings, backed above all their consistent policy of Scottish unity and independence, friendship with France and a place for Scotland in Europe, was stricken with disease, and now lay dying: and a new religion drove north to challenge it. The merchant-commons whose power the Stewarts had fostered had little sympathy with it at its best, and for many reasons were powerfully drawn to the new one. They too now, for the sake of the new religion, followed the course certain nobles had always taken, of an alliance with England against the Crown. The customary Stewart minority received a new and violent complication: the young queen who accepted the recurrent task of drawing the warring elements together faced a harder problem than any of her house, was betrayed to yield her power, and went down: and the end of the old Stewart Scotland, the token of victory for the new religion, is a small boat sailing south across the Solway, on a May morning of 1568.

The seventy years thereafter show two main matters. There is the last flicker of the long English war, and then what seemed a triumphant issue from it, yet removed two very strong uniting factors, the power of a Crown that stood for the nation as such, and the constant open assaults upon that nation that had welded her since the age of Edward the Hammer. Overlapping with that in time, and connected with it, there is the division of the new religion into two parties, of steadily divergent principles; the vigorous attempt of one of these to establish in Scotland a Totalitarian State; its defeat by a Crown traditionally impatient of government in the interests of a class. Then, under the rule of an absentee sovereign, the cleavage of Right and Left grows steadily deeper, until in the year 1638 the church that had been established in 1560 splits into separate and opposed communions, and not only politics but the whole national life group under their banners for a long civil war.

I have tried to trace as clearly as I might the complicated pattern of warring issues, and to do another thing, commonly neglected: that is, to indicate what these issues were. In Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s lively essay on the history of England, there is a passage so relevant to ours, as commonly presented to Scottish readers, that I need not apologise for a long quotation.

We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument...in which unmeaning words...were systematically substituted for the names of the chief...objects in dispute: if we were told that...a mob was roused to fury by an exhibition of the boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the 16th and 17th centuries...In no case can justice be done to what was finest in their [the Puritans’] characters as well as first in their thoughts if we never by any chance ask what ‘it’ was they wanted to impose or to practise....We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested.

One does not need to point the application. It is enough to say that while every Scot has frequently heard the National Covenant mentioned, and most are brought up to hold strong views about it, the number who have seen it is rather small. I have quoted it in full in an appendix. To print thus all the great ‘documents’ of the time would need a library rather than a book, but I have at least attempted to give an outline of what the contending parties believed, and fought for, and to base that outline not on the assumption that one side held a monopoly of virtue and the other of all our fashions in dislike, but on their own statements of what they believed, and desired. A veneration for our fore-fathers is perhaps less common than it used to be: but so much of piety one owes the dead as to let them die at least for their own beliefs.

I am indebted to those writers and editors whose names appear in the bibliography, and not least to those with whose views I disagree; and to the Earl of Leven and Melville for permission to reproduce the Leven portrait of Queen Mary.

ST. JOHN’S WOOD, August, 1936.

CHRONOLOGY

THE dates throughout this book are in modern reckoning, counting 1st January as the beginning of the year. The purpose of this list is not to give a summary of events in Scotland, but to fit these into the framework of contemporary Europe.

1509.—Calvin born.

1511.—James V born.

1513.—English War reopens. Flodden. Death of James IV. Accession of James V. Election of Leo X. Balboa reaches the Pacific.

1514.—Albany summoned. Queen Margaret marries Angus.

1515.—Truce with England. Albany Regent. Queen flies to England. Knox born. Death of Louis XII. Accession of Francis I. Francis invades Italy. Marignano.

1516.—Franco-Swiss Peace. Treaty of Noyon. Death of Ferdinand.

1517.—Luther challenges Tetzel.

1518.—Spanish in Mexico.

1519.—Charles V Emperor. Death of Leonardo da Vinci.

1520.—Death of Raphael. Field of the Cloth of Gold. Luther burns Pope’s Bull.

1521.—Death of Leo X. Election of Adrian VI. Diet of Worms. Sorbonne condemns Lutheranism.

1522.—War with England. Death of Gavin Douglas. Portuguese sail round the World. Henry VIII allies with Charles. Luther’s New Testament.

1523.—Surrey on Borders. Albany falls. Election of Clement VII.

1524.—Albany returns to France. Struggle of Queen and Angus. French invade Italy. Peasant Revolt in Empire.

1525.—Truce with England. First act against Lutheran propaganda. Pavia. League of Lutheran Princes.

1526.—Treaty of Madrid. Name of Protestants first used.

1527.—League against Charles. Sack of Rome. Death of Machiavelli. England formally renounces claim to France.

1528.—Patrick Hamilton burnt. James escapes from Douglases. Five years’ truce with England.

1529.—Treaty of Cambrai.

1530.?—Death of William Dunbar. Confession of Augsburg.

1531.—Schmalkaldic League. Religious War in Switzerland.

1532.—Henry VIII rejects papal supremacy.

1533.—Divorce of Queen Katharine. Birth of Elizabeth. Death of Ariosto.

1534.—Peace for King’s lifetime. English Act of Supremacy. Death of Clement VII. Election of Paul III.

1535.—Edict of Coucy.

1536—Suppression of lesser English monasteries. Execution of Anne Boleyn. Pilgrimage of Grace. Death of Erasmus. Calvin’s Institutes. Calvin in Geneva. Denmark and Norway adopt Lutheranism.

1537.—James marries Madeleine.

1538.—James marries Marie de Guise. Treaty of Nice.

1539.—Suppression of greater English monasteries.

1540.—Founding of Society of Jesus.

1542.—Hadden Rig. Solway Moss. Birth of Mary. Death of James V. Accession of Mary.

1543.—Henry propose for marriage. Marriage treaty. Treaty denounced. French alliance renewed. Death of Copernicus.

1544—Hertford’s invasion. Vernacular prayers in England. Death of Marot. Peace of Crépy.

1545.—Ancrum Moor. Hertford again invades. Council of Trent.

1546.—Execution of Wishart. Murder of Beaton. France regains Boulogne. Death of Luther. Schmalkaldic War.

1547.—Fall of St. Andrews Castle. Pinkie. Death of Henry VIII. Accession of Edward VI. Death of Francis I. Accession of Henri II.

1548.—Mary betrothed and sails to France.

1549.—Knox in Geneva. English Act of Uniformity and First Book of Common Prayer. Death of Paul III.

1550.—Election of Julius III.

1552.—Henri II at war with Charles.? Birth of Spenser. Second English Prayer-book.

1553.—Death of Edward VI. Accession of Mary of England.

1554.—Marie Regent. Anglo-Spanish Union of Crowns.

1555.—Knox in Scotland. Death of David Lindsay. Peace of Augsburg. French Protestants organise. Death of Julius III. Election of Marcellus II and Paul IV.

1556.—Abdication of Charles V. Division of Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs.

1557.—Band of the Congregation. Anglo-French War.

1558.—Mary marries Dauphin. French recover Calais. Death of Mary of England. Accession of Elizabeth. Dissolution of Anglo-Spanish Union.

1559.—Last Provincial Council. Franco-Scottish Union of Crowns. Death of Henri II. Accession of Francis II. Death of Rabelais. Treaty of Câteau Cambrésis. Death of Paul IV. Election of Pius IV.

1560.—Treaty of Berwick. Death of Queen Marie. Treaty of Edinburgh. Reformation Parliament. Confession of Faith. First General Assembly. Conspiracy of Amboise. Death of King Francis. Dissolution of Franco-Scottish Union.

1561.—First Book of Discipline. Knox’s Liturgy. Mary in Scotland.

1562.—Mary breaks Huntly. Religious Wars open in France.

1563.—End of Council of Trent.

1564.—Death of Michael Angelo. Birth of Shakespeare and Galileo. Death of Calvin. Death of Ferdinand I. Maximilian II Emperor.

1565.—Mary marries Darnley. Death of Pius IV. Election of Pius V.

1566.—Murder of Rizzio. Birth of James VI. Religious War in Netherlands.

1567.—Murder of Darnley. Mary marries Bothwell. Carberry. Mary deposed. Moray Regent.

1568.—Mary escapes. Langside. Mary imprisoned in England. Trial of Mary. Bannatyne MS.

1570.—Moray murdered. Lennox Regent.

1571.—Dumbarton captured. Lennox killed. Mar Regent. Lepanto.

1572.—Revival of titular Episcopate. Mar dies. Morton Regent. First English Presbytery. St. Bartholomew. Death of Pius V. Election of Gregory XIII.

1573.—Fall of Edinburgh Castle. Final defeat of Marians.

1574.—Melville in Scotland. Death of Charles IX. Accession of Henri III.

1575.—Raid the Reidswire.

1576.—‘Spanish Fury’ at Antwerp. Death of Maximilian II. Rudolf II Emperor.

1578.—Fall of Morton.

1579.—Esmé Stuart in Scotland. Shepheardes Kalendar and Euphues.

1580.—Execution of Morton

1581.—First Scottish presbytery set up. Second Book of Discipline.

1582.—Raid of Ruthven. Flight of Lennox.

1583.—James assumes rule.

1584.—James breaks Gowrie Conspirators. ‘Black Acts’. Murder of William of Orange.

1585.—Alliance with England. Birth of William Drummond. Death of Ronsard. Guise allies with Spain. Death of Gregory XIII. Election of Sixtus V.

1586.—Babington’s Plot. Mary condemned.

1587.—Mary executed. Ecclesiastical property attached to Crown.

1588.—Spanish Armada.

1589.—James marries Anne. Death of Henri III. Maurice of Nassau Stadtholder.

1590.—Death of Sixtus V. Election of Urban VII and Gregory XIV.

1591.—Election of Innocent IX.

1592.—Presbyterian government of Church. Election of Clement VIII.

1593.—Spanish Blanks. Sweden adopts Lutheranism. Abjuration of Henri of Navarre.

1594.—Birth of Prince Henry.

1595.—Death of Tasso.

1596.—Last action of Three Hundred Years’ War. Fall of Melville. English storm Cadiz.

1597.—Kirk reorganised.

1598.—Death of Philip II. Accession of Philip III. Peace of Vervins Edict of Nantes.

1599—Death of Spenser.

1600.—Titular bishoprics revived in Kirk. Birth of Charles I.

1603.—Anglo-Scottish Union of Crowns.

1604.—Hampton Court Conference. Anglo-Spanish Peace.

1606.—Conjunction of presbyterian and episcopalian government of Kirk. Birth of Corneille.

1607.—Conditional Act of Union.

1608.—Birth of Milton.

1609.—Statutes of Iona. Netherlands independent.

1610.—Restoration of full episcopate. Settlement in Ulster. Death of Henri IV. Accession of Louis XIII.

1612.—Death of Prince Henry. Marriage of Princess Elizabeth. Death of Rudolf II. Mathias Emperor.

1616.—Death of Cervantes. Death of Shakespeare.

1617.—James visits Scotland.

1618.—Five Articles adopted. Opening of Thirty Years’ War.

1619.—Death of Mathias. Ferdinand II Emperor. Frederick crowned in Bohemia.

1621.—Settlement in Acadie. Death of Philip III. Accession of Philip VI.

1622.—Birth of Molière.

1624.—Richelieu Chief Minister.

1625.—Death of James VI and I. Accession and marriage of Charles I Act of Revocation.

1626—Charles reorganises Privy Council.

1628.—Petition of Right. Strafford minister. Laud Bishop of London.

1629.—Charles settles teinds. Anglo-French Peace.

1630.—Charles dissolves English Parliament. Anglo-Spanish Peace. Swedes land in Germany.

1631.—Leipzig.

1632.—Lützen. Death of Gustavus Adolphus.

1633.—Coronation of Charles. Strafford in Ireland. Laud Archbishop.

1634.—Court of High Commission. Nordlingen.

1635.—Peace of Prague. France allies with Netherlands and Sweden against Spain.

1636.—Book of Canons.

1637.—Book of Common Prayer. The Tables. Ship-money troubles. Death of Ferdinand II. Ferdinand III Emperor.

1638.—National Covenant. Trial of Bishops. Division of the Kirk. France at war with Austria.

I — FIFTY-FIVE YEARS: 1513-1568

In Conduct one is no more the critic in the study (which is the scientific intellect), nor the spectator in the auditorium (which is the appreciative imagination), nor the author of the play (which is the constructive imagination), but an actor in a play not yet composed, and of whose leading idea the different actors have wholly different conceptions.

Archbishop Temple, Mens Creatrix.

CHAPTER I — AFTER FLODDEN

A YEAR AND NINE MONTHS: 1513-15

Yesterday fair sprang die flouris.

Today they ar al slain with shouris.

William Dunbar.

IN the years before Flodden, Scotland’s star was bright. The razed and ruined country of the late fourteenth century, when the prosperity of the thirteenth seemed a ghostly remembrance of a golden age, had flowered like a bush of whin after the winter. Intellectually, she was vividly alive, her literature the most vital in North Europe. Economically, though she. was not wealthy, as the trading countries would have counted wealth, she was thriving at least, with means for dignity, grace, and spaciousness of life. Politically, she was a power in Europe, with alliances over the breadth of the Continent. The long English war, that had drained her strength for more than two hundred years, was ended: England had sought peace and alliance. The thing that had hampered resistance alike and recovery, her own disunion, seemed to be healed at last. James IV, by the time he reached his early thirties, with the promise of many years of brilliant rule, had made peace between the nobles and the Crown, and won the half-independent Isles and the West to be an integral part of the Scottish kingdom.

It is true that the picture is not wholly bright. The country (not least its spiritual leaders) shared the disease pandemic then in Europe, the divorce of mind and spirit, the lack of discipline alike for either and for the body that should have been their servant, the furious self-rooted arrogance and the coarsening of fibre that mark the age. Yet the arrogance, like a cresset on a tower, held the flame if often the smoke of a blaze of life, flaring up as space seemed suddenly unbounded and time brought near, the golden past made immediate to inherit in the age that its heirs knew as rebirth, Renaissance. Scotland, in the last decade of James IV, stood where England was to stand a lifetime later, at the opening of the great age called Elizabethan: but our promise was shattered, for seven generations, when a little stream that runs into the Till was swollen with more than the wild September rain—with the blood of a King of Scots, almost all his peers, and many thousands of his most loyal commons.

The King who had striven for the peace of Europe, sought to call Christendom to protect its march, died on the smooth green slope below Branxton Edge on the 9th of September in the year 1513, and the leaders of that generation died beside him. Their sons were suddenly at the head of affairs: and the King’s son was a child of seventeen months, whose heirs were a brother who was yet unborn, and then a foreign prince, a traitor’s son, and after him a reckless, greedy fool. There was the sudden gap between generations that our age experienced in the nineteen-twenties: and the situation that faced these new young men would have tried the wisest of experienced statesmen. The English War was reopened. Its assaults had always been by diplomacy as much as by force of arms: and there no Plantagenet could touch the Tudors, those delighted intelligent pupils of Louis XI. To help them, as ever, there were now those nobles whose immediate personal interest, checked by the Crown, impelled them to counter it by an alliance with England: and there was a new complicating factor. The young Queen Regent herself was an English princess, with the strong Tudor passions little balanced by a small allowance of the Tudor brains. The old Stewart allies were France, the Church, and the Commons. France could spare no help: she was in immediate danger, in that war of all Europe that forced the Flodden campaign. Such other Continental alliances as the general war had not broken were not in case to give any immediate help: Scandinavia indeed had a civil war of her own, that was shortly to split her into two separate kingdoms. The Church was decaying, and its virtual head, the wise and saintly Elphinstone, was dying. The Commons had not begun yet, under the influence of the new religion (Luther was thirty then, but still a monk, and Calvin a child of four in Picardy) to join with the nobles and England against the Crown: they were in fact the most stable element in the situation, but they also had lost heavily at Flodden, and since ‘military age’ in that generation meant sixteen to sixty, a disproportionate with his previous allies, Spain and the Emperor, ant made peace with King Louis: but though Scotland, as Louis’s ally, shared the peace, the King could not afford to argue over terms, and Henry went out of his way to include in them a slight to Scots good faith, that did not promise well for future relations. Internal affairs were also growing worse, for the government had virtually collapsed, and by late summer lacked even a nominal head, for

the Quene wes moved to ane sudden manage, quhilk sho did sore efterwart repent, for apon the vj day of August sho mariet Archebald Erie of Angus for hir plesour, without the King of Ingland hir broderis assent, or the counsell of the nobilitie of Scotland.

The country was splitting into hostile factions. Some of the nobles, the great mass of the people, and the Church, as ever, were for the French alliance, as the surest support of Scottish independence: the other nobles, not least the Queen’s new husband, saw their market in England, and he and his exceedingly powerful house supported her in trying to retain the Regency forfeited by her remarriage. Arran and Home, the Warden of the East March, opposed them in arms, and in November took the Queen’s castle of Stirling, and brought her, virtually prisoner, to Edinburgh. In very little more than a year from Flodden, Dacre, the English Warden opposite Home, was writing with zest, and truth, to the English Council,

There was never so mekill myschefe, robbery, spoiling, and vengeance in Scotland than there is nowe, without hope of remedye; which I pray our Lord God to continewe.

The last phrase sums the English policy towards Scotland through most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and all the sixteenth: nor did they leave the whole task to the Almighty.

The Estates, however, had hope of remedye. The Queen had removed any possible legal opposition to Albany: he was invited again, and this time accepted, reaching Scotland in the May of 1515, and being formally appointed as Guardian and Governor until the little King should be eighteen. While he was still on the sea, the new King of France, Francis I, who had acceded at the New Year, had offered to renew the Auld Alliance, refusing to ratify the recent peace with England unless on terms agreeable to Scotland. The reply of the Estates is far from downcast. It bears that in spite of recent heavy misfortunes the country is still in case to hold her own, cum Mala nondum Animo excederint. She may hope yet accepta rependere Dampna, and does not desire a ‘peace at any price,’ but is willing to make one for the sake of old friendship, and to work towards that European policy that was the dearest ambition of James IV, a union of the Princes of Christendom against the advancing power of Asia. Such a League, indeed, might have saved much Christian torment, for the Turks in the course of the last hundred years had swept from the Dardanelles up to the Danube, swamped the last remnants of the great Eastern Empire, and won a foothold in Italy itself: within the next decade they all but took Vienna, whose fall might have opened Europe to the Rhine. That, in all the immediate confusion of the time, this statesmanlike vision of international action should still be closely present to their minds (and save for those countries actually threatened, only Scotland showed any sort of care about it) shows that the characteristic outlook of the age of ‘the Jameses’ had not yet been lost by the more responsible men.

CHAPTER II — THE RIVAL REGENTS

THIRTEEN YEARS: 1515-28

John: Alack, thou dost usurp authority.

Philip: Excuse, it is to beat usurping down.

Eleanor: Who is it thou dost call usurper, France?

Constance: Let me make answer: thy usurping son.

W. Shakespeare, King John.

FOR the next thirteen years the general surface pattern is that familiar in Stewart minorities, a struggle of rivals for the Regency, and the continual intervention of England. For the first nine, the struggle resolves, in the main, into Albany’s attempt to hold the power against Angus and the Queen, who had Henry’s support. That honest and badly worried gentleman did his best to serve the interests of his ward: but handicapped in every possible way, and ignorant of the country and even the language, his task might well have beaten a stronger man. He had no sooner accepted his appointment than the Queen’s party began a campaign of slander for which his father’s record gave ammunition...though possibly, too, that record stiffened him, and he held to his task as loyally as he did in part to clear his house’s reputation from the ugly stain of the Treaty of Fotheringay. His first and most needful step on his arrival was to secure possession of his ward. That small person in his scarlet petticoats, his cap of gold taffeta with ruby ribbons, was the substructure of the Crown of Scotland: and the Queen and King Henry were already plotting that he should be carried to England.

Albany stopped that: but Margaret was Queen Dowager, the first subject of the kingdom, and the boy’s mother. The Duke attempted to conciliate her, by recognising her place, and inviting her co-operation. She refused, and continued her intrigues with her brother, while Home (whose sister Angus had divorced to marry her) supported them, attempting to arrange an English invasion. The Duke was forced to take the children from her, and put them in safe-keeping, making careful provision for their upbringing.{1}

Home’s invasion missed fire. He was captured, but corrupted his gaoler Arran, whom Albany’s recognition as Regent and Guardian had thrust a step further from the royal succession, and the pair of them fled to England. They were joined in their flight by Angus and the Queen, to whom a few days later was born a daughter, Margaret Douglas, who was to be Countess of Lennox and Darnley’s mother. The three men made a band to abduct the King: the Queen attempted, from England, to recover the Regency, and was told—the point has some constitutional interest—that not only had remarriage voided her claim, but that the disposal of the government lay not in the dead King’s will, but with the Estates. Albany’s position was made more difficult by the sudden death of the little Duke of Ross, which left him, of course, heir presumptive to the Throne. The Queen at once declared that the child had been poisoned. (Four of his five elder brothers and sisters had died as infants.) Albany, however, declined to take offence, and played for the regular Stewart policy, of alliance with France and peace, if it might be, with England. He suggested the King’s marriage to Francis’s daughter, who was then a year old, but contrived to arrange a truce with England as well, attempted to conciliate the Queen, and pardoned her husband Angus, who returned and was restored to his estates.

It seemed as if matters then might settle down. The more stable elements in the country supported Albany, and wished peace within and without, uniting in resistance to English aggression, but desirous of peace if Scotland were let alone. They had, however, to reckon with Henry VIII, who had already shown himself to be her most dangerous neighbour since Edward III. That the new Regent should achieve control and restore the country to stability, was the last thing he desired: his Scottish policy, indeed, seems dominated not merely by political interest or even greed for an extended dominion, but by a sheer personal lust of destructiveness, overriding and cancelling any politic end. Now he used his relationship to his little nephew to base an attempt at controlling Scottish affairs, in a manner that shows the odd naïveté that was one of his more marked characteristics. At Midsummer of 1516, taking a very high avuncular tone, he wrote to the Parliament of another country and demanded that they should forth-with dismiss the Regent they had recently elected. They replied with an ironic courtesy, overtly to his communiqué, actually to its implications: they thank him for his interest in his nephew, quha is, God have loving, in gude hele and Princely appearans, and add a vote of thanks to the excellent Regent, who is not only nerrest of Stok Ryall, but has left his Maister, his Lady, his Leving, and indurit grete Panis and Charges in the Kingis service. As for the accusations Henry has made,

We have perfyte Knawlege that the Governour is reddy and maist diligent for all furthir Surty in Keping of the Kingis Grace...and We firmly belief he walde notht Attempte in the Contrare to have the Kinrikis of Frans, Inglaand with Scotlaand....For Conservatione of the Kingis person we ar determyt to spend our livis in contrare all thame that walde attempt again his Hienes Estate{2} and Realme.

The firm tone was needed in the circumstances, for Henry, naturally, had encouraged the recalcitrants. They intrigued with Dacre, that expert at the game, who a few weeks later was reporting to Henry,

I labor and studeis all that