Volume V Part 4 (1/2)

CHAPTER II

THE KING OF SCOTS

Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled ma.s.s of impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have given scope to the n.o.bleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its kings.

[Sidenote: James Stuart.]

Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most men had looked forward to a violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary t.i.tle under the will of Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted, there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth, had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The ma.s.s of the Catholics, who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people, bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and who had till now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its wors.h.i.+p. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there; and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and to a.s.sure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient voice.

[Sidenote: His youth.]

To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring n.o.bles who governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men; but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.

”What Bothwellhaugh has done,” Mary wrote joyously from her English prison at the news, ”has been done without order of mine: but I thank him all the more for it.” The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling; and it was only when the regency pa.s.sed into the strong hand of Morton at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order, that the land won a short breathing-s.p.a.ce. Edinburgh, the last fortress held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place; and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But hardly five years had pa.s.sed when a union of his rivals and their adroit proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get hold of the king's person, to wield in his name the royal power, became the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard; or strove to baffle the n.o.bles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to Stirling only saved him from seizure at Doune; and a few months later, as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on his bridle-rein. ”Better bairns greet than bearded men,” was the gruff answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.

[Sidenote: His purpose.]

Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his ”discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and ignorance.” It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the turbulent n.o.bles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its consecration of rebellion, its a.s.sertion of human equality, its declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as ”infamous invectives,” and would have had their readers punished ”even as it were their authors risen again.” His temper and purpose were in fact simply those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core; and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which the Stuarts had done.

[Sidenote: The work of the Stuarts.]

Their work had been the building up of the Scottish realm, its change from a medley of warring n.o.bles into an ordered kingdom. Never had freedom been bought at a dearer price than it was bought by Scotland in its long War of Independence. Wealth and public order alike disappeared.

The material prosperity of the country was brought to a standstill. The work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves feudalism overmastered the Crown. The n.o.bles became almost wholly independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce, sank into insignificance. From the walls of Stirling the Scotch kings of that earlier time looked out on a realm where they could not ride thirty miles to north or to south save at the head of a host of armed men. With James the First began the work of building the monarchy up again from this utter ruin; but the wresting of Scotland from the grasp of its n.o.bles was only wrought out in a struggle of life and death. Few figures are more picturesque than the figures of the young Scotch kings as they dash themselves against the iron circle which girds them round in their desperate efforts to rescue the Crown from serfdom. They carry their life in their hands; a doom is on them; they die young and by violent deaths. One was stabbed by plotters in his bedchamber. Another was stabbed in a peasant's hut where he had crawled for refuge after defeat. Another was slain by the bursting of a cannon. The fourth James fell more n.o.bly at Flodden. The fifth died of a broken heart on the news of Solway Moss. But hunted and slain as they were, the kings clung stubbornly to the task they had set themselves.

[Sidenote: The Stuarts and the Reformation.]

They stood almost alone. The Scottish people was too weak as yet to form a check on the baronage; and the one force on which the Crown could reckon was the force of the Church. To enrich the Church, to bind its prelates closely to the monarchy by the gift of social and political power, was the policy of every Stuart. A greater force than that of the Church lay in the dogged perseverance of the kings themselves. Little by little their work was done. The great house of Douglas was broken at last. The ruin of lesser houses followed in its train, and under the fifth of the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.

But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The n.o.bles were enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that Mary Stuart could withstand the n.o.bles who banded themselves together to overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the n.o.bles, triumphant at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of her child.

[Sidenote: James and the n.o.bles.]

It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and Morton had shown how easily the turbulent n.o.bles could be bent by an energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed, James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kings.h.i.+p.

The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most powerful of the Protestant n.o.bles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand, and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; ”there was no need of words,” James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with protestations of loyalty; ”weapons had spoken loud enough.” But their return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the friends.h.i.+p of England; and once secure against English intervention the king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A significant ceremony showed that the strife with the n.o.bles was at an end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each n.o.ble, ”holding his chief enemy by the hand,” walked in his doublet to the market-cross of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.

[Sidenote: The Scotch people.]

The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour, to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's call on forays as pitiless, this was the rough school in which the Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a meaner race into slaves only hardened and enn.o.bled the temper of the Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the n.o.ble self dependence, the patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil was ready for the seed. The developement of a n.o.ble manhood brought with it the craving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a Church.

[Sidenote: Knox.]

One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.

In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit ”he behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into blads and fly out of it.” It was in vain that men strove to pen the fiery words of the great preacher. ”In the opening up of his text,” says a devout listener, ”he was moderate; but when he entered into application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write.” What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his resolute a.s.sertion of a Christian order before which the social and political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The meanest peasant, once called of G.o.d, felt within him a strength that was stronger than the might of n.o.bles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the ma.s.ses which was embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a teaching soon showed themselves in a new att.i.tude of the people. ”Here,”

said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, ”here lies one who never feared nor flattered any flesh”; and if Scotland still reverences the memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her trader learned to look in the face of n.o.bles and kings and ”not be ashamed.”

[Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]

The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an ordered system of kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods, while chosen delegates formed the General a.s.sembly of the Kirk. In this organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a feeble and unimportant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of prelates and n.o.bles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border, not a trace could be found in the a.s.semblies which gathered round the Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who gathered to the General a.s.sembly of the Kirk. Not only did Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an overpowering majority to the earlier a.s.semblies, it called the people at large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church const.i.tution has proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by the change which pa.s.sed from the moment of its establishment over the face of Scottish history.

[Sidenote: The Kirk and the king.]