but regard as a crime.  But while this excuse may be made for the deed itself, there can be no apology for the manner of it.  The Queen of England stooped to urge her servants to murder her kinswoman; when they refused, she was mean enough to contrive so as to throw the responsibility upon her secretary, Davison.  After Mary’s death, she wrote to King James and expressed her sincere regret at having cut off the head of his mother by accident.  James accepted the apology, and, in the following year, made preparations against the Armada.  Had the son of Mary Stuart been otherwise constituted, it would scarcely have been safe for Elizabeth to persevere in the execution of his mother; an alliance between Scotland and Spain might have proved dangerous for England.  But Elizabeth knew well the type of man with whom she had to deal, and events proved that she was wise in her generation.  And James, on his part, had his reward.  Elizabeth died in March, 1603, and her successor was the King of Scots, who entered upon a heritage, which had been bought, in the view of his Catholic subjects, by the blood of his mother, and which was to claim as its next victim his second son.  Within eighty-five years of his accession, his House had lost not only their new kingdom, but their ancestral throne as well.  In all James’s references to the Union, it is clear that he regarded that event from the point of view of the monarch; had it proved of as little value to his subjects as to the Stuart line there would have been small reason for remembering it to-day.  The Union of England and Scotland was one of the events most clearly fore-ordained by a benignant fate:  but it is difficult to feel much sympathy for the son who would not risk its postponement, when, by the possible sacrifice of his personal ambition, he might have saved the life of his mother.

There are certain aspects of James’s life in Scotland that explain his future policy, and they are, therefore, important for our purpose.  In the first place, he spent his days in one long struggle with the theocratic Church system which had been brought to Scotland by Knox and developed by his great successor, Andrew Melville.  The Church Courts, local and central, had maintained the old ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and they dealt out justice with impartial hand.  In all questions of morality, religion, education, and marriage the Kirk Session or the Presbytery or the General Assembly was all-powerful.  The Church was by far the most important factor in the national life.  It interfered in numberless ways with legislative and executive functions:  on one occasion King James consulted the Presbytery of Edinburgh about the raising of a force to suppress a rebellion,[82] and, as late as 1596, he approached the General Assembly with reference to a tax, and promised that “his chamber doors sould be made patent to the meanest minister in Scotland; there sould not be anie meane gentleman in Scotland more subject to the good order and discipline