THE WAR OF KIRK AND KING.

The next twenty years were occupied with the strife of Kirk and King, whence arose “all the cumber of Scotland” till 1689.  The preachers, led by the learned and turbulent Andrew Melville, had an ever-present terror of a restoration of Catholicism, the creed of a number of the nobles and of an unknown proportion of the people.  The Reformation of 1559-1560 had been met by no Catholic resistance; we might suppose that the enormous majority of the people were Protestants, though the reverse has been asserted.  But whatever the theological preferences of the country may have been, the justifiable fear of practical annexation by France had overpowered all other considerations.  By 1580 it does not seem that there was any good reason for the Protestant nervousness, even if some northern counties and northern and Border peers preferred Catholicism.  The king himself, a firm believer in his own theological learning and acuteness, was thoroughly Protestant.

But the preachers would scarcely allow him to remain a Protestant.  Their claims, as formulated by Andrew Melville, were inconsistent with the right of the State to be mistress in her own house.  In a General Assembly at Glasgow (1581) Presbyteries were established; Episcopacy was condemned; the Kirk claimed for herself a separate jurisdiction, uninvadable by the State.  Elizabeth, though for State reasons she usually backed the Presbyterians against James, also warned him of “a sect of dangerous consequence, which would have no king but a presbytery.”  The Kirk, with her sword of excommunication, and with the inspired violence of the political sermons and prayers, invaded the secular authority whenever and wherever she pleased, and supported the preachers in their claims to be tried first, when accused of treasonable libels, in their own ecclesiastical courts.  These were certain to acquit them.

James, if not pressed in this fashion, had no particular reason for desiring Episcopal government of the Kirk, but being so pressed he saw no refuge save in bishops.  Meanwhile his chief advisers—­d’Aubigny, now Duke of Lennox, and James Stewart, the destroyer of Morton, now, to the prejudice of the Hamiltons, Earl of Arran—­were men whose private life, at least in Arran’s case, was scandalous.  If Arran were a Protestant, he was impatient of the rule of the pulpiteers; and Lennox was working, if not sincerely in Mary’s interests, certainly in his own and for those of the Catholic House of Guise.  At the same time he favoured the king’s Episcopal schemes, and, late in 1581, appointed a preacher named Montgomery to the recently vacant Archbishopric of Glasgow, while he himself, like Morton, drew most of the revenues.  Hence arose tumults, and, late in 1581 and in 1582, priestly and Jesuit emissaries went and came, intriguing for a Catholic rising, to be supported by a large foreign force which they had not the slightest chance of obtaining from any quarter.  Archbishop Montgomery was excommunicated by the Kirk, and James, as we saw, had signed “A Negative Confession” (1581).