A violent hatred of the temporal claims of the Church also affected James’s attitude to Roman Catholicism.  His Catholic subjects in Scotland had not been in a position to do him any harm, and the son of Mary Stuart could not but have some sympathy for his mother’s fellow-sufferers.  Accordingly, we find him telling his first Parliament:  “I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our Mother Church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruption”.  But, after the Gunpowder Plot, and when he was engaged in a controversy with Cardinal Perron about the right of the pope to depose kings, he came to prove that the pope is Antichrist and “our Mother Church” none other than the Scarlet Woman.  His Scottish experience revealed clearly enough that the claims of Rome and Geneva were identical in their essence.  There is on record an incident that will serve to illustrate his position.  In 1615, the Scottish Privy Council reported to him the case of a Jesuit, John Ogilvie.  He bade them examine Ogilvie:  if he proved to be but a priest who had said mass, he was to go into banishment; but if he was a practiser of sedition, let him die.  The unfortunate priest showed in his reply that he held the same view of the royal supremacy as did the Presbyterian clergy.  It was enough:  they hanged him.

Once more, James’s Irish policy seems to have been influenced by his experience of the Scottish Highlands.  He had conceived the plan which was afterwards carried out in the Plantation of Ulster—­“planting colonies among them of answerable inland subjects, that within short time may reforme and civilize the best-inclined among them; rooting out or transporting the barbarous or stubborne sort, and planting civilitie in their roomes".[87] Although James continued to carry on his efforts in this direction after 1603, yet it may be said that the English succession prevented his giving effect to his scheme, and that it also interfered with his intentions regarding the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, which remained to “wracke the whole land” till after the Rising of 1745.

On the 5th April, 1603, King James set out from Edinburgh to enter upon the inheritance which had fallen to him “by right divine”.  His departure made considerable changes in the condition of Scotland.  The absence of any fear of an outbreak of hostilities with the “auld enemy” was a great boon to the borders, but there was little love lost between the two countries.  The union of the crowns did not, of course, affect the position of Scotland to England in matters of trade, and beyond some thirty years of peace, James’s ancient kingdom gained but little.  King James, who possessed considerable powers of statesmanship, if not much practical wisdom, devised the impossible project of a union of the kingdoms in 1604.  “What God hathe conjoyned”, he said, “let no man separate.  I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawful wife....  I hope, therefore, that no man will be so unreasonable