James was accused of having instigated this crime, from suspicion of Murray as a partner in the wild enterprises of Bothwell, and was so hard pressed by sermons that, in the early summer of 1592, he allowed the Black Acts to be abrogated, and “the Charter of the liberties of the Kirk” to be passed.  One of these liberties was to persecute Catholics in accordance with the penal Acts of 1560.  The Kirk was almost an imperium in imperio, but was still prohibited from appointing the time and place of its own General Assemblies without Royal assent.  This weak point in their defences enabled James to vanquish them, but, in June, Bothwell attacked him in the Palace of Falkland and put him in considerable peril.

The end of 1592 and the opening of 1593 were remarkable for the discovery of “The Spanish Blanks,” papers addressed to Philip of Spain, signed by Huntly, the new Earl of Angus, and Errol, to be filled up with an oral message requesting military aid for Scottish Catholics.  Such proceedings make our historians hold up obtesting hands against the perfidy of idolaters.  But clearly, if Knox and the congregation were acting rightly when they besought the aid of England against Mary of Guise, then Errol and Huntly are not to blame for inviting Spain to free them from persecution.  Some inkling of the scheme had reached James, and a paper in which he weighed the pros and cons is in existence.  His suspected understanding with the Catholic earls, whom he merely did not wish to estrange hopelessly, was punished by a sanctified plague.  On July 24, 1593, by aid of the late Earl Gowrie’s daughter, Bothwell entered Holyrood, seized the king, extorted his own terms, went and amazed the Dean of Durham by his narrative of the adventure, and seemed to have the connivance of Elizabeth.  But in September James found himself in a position to repudiate his forced engagement.  Bothwell now allied himself with the Catholic earls, and, as a Catholic, had no longer the prayers of the preachers.  James ordered levies to attack the earls, while Argyll led his clan and the Macleans against Huntly, only to be defeated by the Gordon horse at the battle of Glenrinnes (October 3).  Huntly and his allies, however, dared not encounter King James and Andrew Melville, who marched together against them, and they were obliged to fly to the Continent.  Bothwell, with his retainer, Colville, continued, with Cecil’s connivance, to make desperate plots for seizing James; indeed, Cecil was intriguing with them and other desperadoes even after 1600.  Throughout all the Tudor period, from Henry VII. to 1601, England was engaged in a series of conspiracies against the persons of the princes of Scotland.  The Catholics of the south of Scotland now lost Lord Maxwell, slain by a “Lockerby Lick” in a great clan battle with the Johnstones at Dryfe Sands.

In 1595, James’s minister, John Maitland, brother of Lethington, died, and early in 1596 an organisation called “the Octavians” was made to regulate the distracted finance of the country.  On April 13, 1596, Walter Scott of Buccleuch made himself an everlasting name by the bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong reiver, from the Castle of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope.  The period was notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the Border, celebrated in ballads.