whereabouts of the sovereign power in the constitution; and we have seen that the existing law of the constitution gave no certain answer to this question.2

3

It was fairly obvious that this question of the relation of Crown and Parliament would be closely bound up with fiscal and economic questions. The regular revenue of the Crown, and the produce of the subsidies tenths and fifteenths granted by Parliament, were decreasing at a time when the influx of the precious metals from the New World was causing the purchasing power of money to decline. Even Elizabeth, with all her parsimony, had been obliged to sell crown lands, and had died in debt; and it was not likely that any other monarch would be able to run the state so cheaply as she. It was clear also that the growing Parliamentary opposition would be as much religious as political. A large number of men desired relaxations in the rites ceremonies and doctrines of the Church of England, which would have enabled them conscientiously to conform to it. For the peaceful settlement of these questions there was needed a a monarch with all and more than all Elizabeth's tact and understanding both of her people and of her own constitutional position. Unfortunately her successor was to all intents and purposes a foreigner, without tact, completely ignorant of all those conventions which had guided the Tudor sovereigns in their dealings with their Parliaments and their people, and holding a very definite creed as to the absolute position which he, as king, ought to occupy in the state. The Scotch antecedents, the early training, and the personal qualities of James I., made a conflict inevitable upon all the many outstanding problems of the day-political, financial, and religious.

When James I. succeeded to the English throne, Scotland was still a poor and backward country." It was, in Clarendon's picturesque phrase, "but the wilderness to the English garden." Feudal anarchy of an early medieval type was still rampant. The king was merely a feudal chieftain; and there was no hesitation in levying war against him and taking him prisoner in

2 Vol. iv 200-209; below 20-29, 83-87.

1 Vol. iv 208-209; vol. v 430. 3" Parsimonious as she was, Elizabeth had been compelled, during the last five years of her reign, to sell land to the value of £372,000, and had besides contracted a debt of £400,000. There was indeed, when James came to the throne, a portion still unpaid of the subsidies which had been voted in the time of his predecessor, which was estimated as being about equal in amount to the debt, yet if this money were applied to the extinction of the debt, it was difficult to see how the expenses of the Government were to be met," Gardiner, Hist. of England i 293, and the authorities there cited; cp. Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (C.S.) Introd.

* See Proceedings at the Hampton Court Conference (1604) 2 S.T. 70; below 123-126.

5 Maitland, Camb. Mod. Hist. ii 550-552; vol. iv 248 n. I.

in order to get control of the kingdom. Family feuds were able to rage unchecked. With the victory of the Reformation, however, other elements had come into Scottish life, and the foundations of modern Scotland had been laid. In the sixteenth century, it is true, it might seem that these other elements had merely aggravated the existing disorder. The Scotch reformed church had become a power which could and did oppose the king, not only if he hindered the teaching of its doctrines and the enforcement of its discipline, but even if he declined to conform to its views as to the government of the state; and the magnates used the new religious dissensions, and prosecuted their old feuds as Catholics and Protestants. "Faith may be changed; works are much what they were, especially the works of the magnates. The blood feud is no less a blood feud because one family calls itself Catholic and another calls itself Protestant. The 'band' is no less a 'band' because it is styled a 'Covenant' and makes free with holy names. "4 But, even in the sixteenth century, we should take a very superficial view of the effects of the Reformation upon Scotland, if we supposed that this was its chief result.

The Scotch church had been organized by Knox on the Calvinistic model; and Calvin had given to all those churches which fell under his influence both a theology and an organization as logical and as definite as the theology and organization of the Roman church. He had thus made these churches the fighting force of Protestantism which saved the Reformation in its hour of trial. Their theology was in some respects less liberal than that of the Roman church; but they taught a far stricter morality-there were no priestly mediators who could absolve the sinner or dispense with the observance of the law." democratic organization gave them the driving force which enabled them to withstand the shock of the counter-reformation;

Their

1 See A. Lang, Hist. of Scotland ii 371-373 for Bothwell's plot of 1593, and chap. xvii for the Gowrie conspiracy of 1600; "it is to be noted," says Lang, “that such attempts continued to be made almost till the year when he attained the crown of England," ibid 368.

2" From the Orkneys to the Oykel, one set of feuds was raging; others were active from the Lawes to Kintyre; others from the Borders to Peebles, Hawick and Biggar. When there happened to be no great feud, involving every family of the gentry, the minor lairds were fighting among themselves. There were constant sieges and burnings of houses, from the great castle to the little peel tower. . . . In the volume of the Privy Council Register for 1613. . . we have a list of running feuds. There are forty-two feuds, exclusive of the Highlands and the Islands, and these are not feuds of the sweeping character of Huntly versus Argyll, or Stewart versus Hamilton," ibid 541.

The combinations of lawless nobles and powerful preachers, must, but for the English succession, have been fatal to Scottish civilization," ibid 368.

Maitland, Camb. Mod. Hist. ii 551.

5 Fairbairn, ibid 365-366; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of England i 46.

and the democratic principles which they taught gave them their influence upon the politics of the future.1 And the narrowness and intolerance of their theology, which, to our eyes, is one of their main defects, was then a positive advantage; for they were thus the better able to teach authoritatively to the poorer and humbler classes, to whom they appealed, a set of logical principles both intelligible and capable of arousing enthusiasm.2 They thus gave to these classes, at once a political education by teaching them to govern themselves in their General Assemblies and Church Courts, and a political ideal by teaching them to apply to the conduct and policy of their rulers the same tests as those which they applied to their own conduct. In these Assemblies and Courts a democratic form and theory of government were arising which claimed, as against kings and nobles alike, not only the supreme spiritual, but also the supreme political power in the state. These ideas were destined to have an enduring effect upon Scotch life and character; and a large, though a transitory, effect upon the course of the contest between king and Parliament in England during this period.

5

James had spent his youth in contests with his turbulent nobles and this newly organized Kirk. He had been kidnapped by his nobles, and defied by the ministers of the Kirk. But he had at length managed, with some skill, to secure for himself

7

1 Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century 42-48; cp. Basilikon Doron, Works of James I. (ed. 1616) 160-" Some fierie spirited men in the ministerie, got such a guiding of the people at that time of confusion [the Reformation] as finding the gust of government sweet, they begouth to fantasie to themselves a Democraticke forme of government: and having (by the iniquitie of time) beene overwell baited upon the wracke, first of my Grandmother, and next of mine owne mother, and after usurping the libertie of the time in my long minoritie, settled themselves so fast upon that imagined Democracie, as they fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis: and so in a popular government by leading the people by the nose to beare the sway of all the rule."

2Presbyterianism in Scotland, as expounded by Knox or Buchanan, and inwoven with politics by Murray and Morton, was a system of clericalism as much more irritating and meddlesome, as it was stronger and more popular in its basis, than that of Papal sovereignty," Figgis, Divine Right of Kings (1st ed.) 133.

3 Gardiner, Hist. of England i 47; History of the Civil War i 226.

4" Under the eye of the minister of the parish, the kirk session gathered to inflict penalties on offenders, and in the kirk session no regard was paid to worldly rank," Gardiner, Hist. of England i 47.

Figgis, Divine Right (1st ed.) 187-195; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of England i 47-48. & Above 7 n. I.

7 Gardiner, op. cit. i 55-65; and he never forgot what he had suffered from the ministers, as the Puritans found at the Hampton Court Conference, and as the following passage from the Basilikon Doron, Works 161, shows: "I protest before the great God . that ye shall never finde with any Hie-land or Border Theeves greater ingratitude, and more lies and vile perjuries, than with these phanaticke spirits."

8" He had contrived to dominate the two strongest opposing currents, the lawlessness of the nobles and the pretensions of the preachers," A. Lang, Hist. of Scotland ii 478.

some measure of independence by playing off these rival powers one against the other. In 1594 the ministers had helped him to suppress the insurrection of the Earls of Huntly, Errol, and Angus.1 On the other hand, the nobles in 1597 assisted the king to suppress the tumults raised by certain of the ministers, who wished to dictate the policy of the state, and declined to submit themselves to the jurisdiction of its courts. The king had thus been able to gain, on the one hand, a definite and a permanent superiority over his nobility, and, on the other, to curb the pretensions of the Kirk; and, in order to further the latter object, he had, in 1598, induced an irregular convention of the Kirk to allow him to appoint bishops to sit in Parliament.*

2

These events of James's earlier life had set a permanent mark upon his character and intellectual outlook.

He was good-natured and a lover of peace, and intellectually inclined to tolerance-but in practice showing little to those who disputed his own pet theories. And we shall see that he had constructed theories upon many of the political and ecclesiastical questions of the day; for he was learned in a bookish academic way, and a keen disputant. But his environment and upbringing had accentuated his natural defects. He was king in a feudal society. In such a society there was but scant recognition of "the divinity that should hedge a king;" and, in a state that was at the mercy of lawless nobles, there was much corruption and extravagance, and little organisation." James never acquired a dignified bearing; he was always extravagant, always inclined to gratify the whim of the moment without counting the cost, and singularly blind to the corruption which was rampant at his court. At the same time he had been educated by learned men; and he had acquired all the defects of a learned pedant. He could criticize a theory, but he could not judge a man; and he was so vain of his own powers, so

2 Ibid 65.

1 Gardiner, Hist. of England i 50-52. "This victory (over Huntly, Errol, and Angus) may be considered to be the turning-point of James's reign in Scotland. It established decisively . . . that the king had now a national force at his disposal which even the greatest of the nobility were unable to resist. The Scottish aristocracy would long be far too powerful for the good of their fellow countrymen, but they would no longer be able to beard their Sovereign with impunity," ibid 52.

4A. Lang, Hist. of Scotland ii 433-434; it was settled in 1600 that the king was to choose each bishop from a list of six selected by the Kirk, ibid 434.

5 Maitland, Camb. Mod. Hist. ii 552-" Douglases and Hamiltons and others, hereditary sheriffs and possessors of regalities,' were slow to forget that these crowned stewards of Scotland were no better than themselves. What had come with a lass' might go with a lass,' and was in no wise mysterious;” see vol. ii 213, 255-256, vol. iii 460-463 for similar ideas in England in the Middle Ages.

How the distracted Scotland, torn by family feuds, ungoverned, unpoliced, could ever have reached a milder civilization, except by way of union of the Crowns and English influence, does not appear," A. Lang, Hist. of Scotland ii 562.

set on his own fancies, that, "whoever would put on an appearance of deference, and would avoid contradicting him on the point on which he happened to have set his heart at the moment, might lead him anywhere." 1 Such a man was predestined to fall into the hands of flatterers and favourites; and his want of natural dignity led him to show his fondness for them in ways which made him ridiculous. Elizabeth had had her favourites; but she never allowed them to gain uncontrolled power. And, though she gave them places and titles, she possessed in an eminent degree the Tudor power of attracting and using the ablest man of the day. This power was denied to the Stuarts; and James allowed his favourites to assume a large control over the government of the state. The contrast between James and his predecessors, and between their respective courts, could not but excite contemptuous criticism.

And yet he had views as to the dignity of his office, and as to the nature of his duties, as clear and strong as those of any Tudor. The state of his kingdom had forced upon him, as the state of their kingdom had forced upon the Tudors, the need for suppressing the turbulent nobility, and securing an even-handed administration of the law. It was characteristic of the man that this need had produced, not practical measures of reform, but a definite theory as to the place which a king should occupy in the state. That it had had this result upon James's mind was due in part to the natural bent of his mind, but chiefly to the influence of the Calvinistic system in which he had been educated.

The Calvinistic system explained and regulated, with the neat logical precision of the lawyer, all the relations of God to man, and of man to man. It dominated the intellectual life of Scotland for many generations, and has played no small part in giving to Scotchmen that "power of reducing human actions to formulæ or principles," and that comprehensive outlook upon

3

1 Gardiner, Hist. of England i 49.

2" And although the crime of oppression be not in this ranke of unpardonable crimes, yet the over common use of it in this nation, as if it were a vertue, especially by the greatest ranke of subjects in the land, requireth the King to be a sharpe censurer thereof. Be diligent therefore to trie, and awful to beate downe the hornes of the proud oppressours: embrace the quarrell of the poore and distressed, as your owne particular neither spare ye anie paines in your owne person, to see their wrongs redressed," Basilikon Doron, Works of James I. (ed. 1616) 158; "the greatest hinderance to the execution of our Laws in this countrie, are these heritable Shirefdoms and Regalities, which being in the hands of the great men, do wracke the whole countrie," ibid 163.

3" There appears to be in the genius of the Scottish people-fostered no doubt, by the abstract metaphysical education of their Universities, but also, by way of natural taste, supporting that education, and rendering it possible and popular-a power of reducing human actions to formulæ or principles," Bagehot, Literary Studies ii 247.