306

"WHAT HAS YOUR HOUSE DONE?"

was never so affectionate as when he was treacherous; he never betrayed but with a kiss. Moreover, Gray had taught him distrust of Archbishop Beaton, and of the Jesuits. The Master told Fontaine that Father Holt, his confessor, had refused him absolution unless he revealed all that he knew of Mary's affairs, and that ever since he had "hated Jesuits like the devil.” The dislike was mutual. There was a Father Edmund Hay (he who with others advised Mary to exterminate Murray, Lethington, Argyll, and others, just before Darnley's murder), and about Father Edmund, Gray later wrote thus to Archibald Douglas: "Of late, being in Stirling with his majesty, a gentleman, to you well enough known, brought to me a man who confessed that Mr Edmund Hay, the Jesuit, had dealt with him to take my life. I offered him 20 angels to get trial of it, and after I had gotten trial, 500 marks. He received the angels, and brought me a letter, whereof receive copy." Three schemes had been laid to shoot Gray. We hear no more of what was probably a mere plan by the informant to get the angels.7

Meanwhile Gray, said Fontaine, had been bought by England: Fontaine saw the gold, angels and rose nobles to the value of 5000 crowns. To Nau, Fontaine was even more explicit than to Mary. James was very clever, he said, but immeasurably conceited, timid, rustic and mannerless in dress, bearing, and in the society of ladies. Bodily he was weak, but not unhealthy. Hunting and favourites were his delight; in business he was indolent, though capable of bursts of energy. "Like a horse with a turn of speed, but no staying power," is a modern rendering of James's own description of himself. He could never be still in one place, but wandered vaguely up and down the room-the James of 'The Fortunes of Nigel.'8

The treachery of James towards his mother might answer Macnamara's question to Prince Charles (1753), "What has your House done, sir, that Heaven should pursue them with a curse?” The callous dissimulation and perfidy of James may furnish the reply. He was now eighteen: his whole life had been passed under terrorism; he had again and again been captured, his existence threatened; menaces against him had rained from the pulpits. He could trust nobody: the ambassadors of his cousin and godmother, Elizabeth, had been, and still were, his dangerous foes. Even Mary he could not confide in his natural selfishness was

PERFIDY OF JAMES.

307

whetted by the prize of the English succession: his high notions of prerogative were inflamed by his own condition of slavery. From infancy he had resorted to dissimulation, the weapon of the weak. Hunsdon, later, wrote, as to James and Arran, that they might be trusted "yf they be nott worse than dyvelis.”

James, under his wretched circumstances and training, had become what he was. An orphan, for all that he knew orphaned by his mother's hand; a king, who wept when alone with a kind of gamekeeper, because, for all that he knew, he was the son of an Italian fiddler; no prince was ever so unhappily born, bred, and trained. Thus it may be that, on occasion, James was 66 worse than devils," in Hunsdon's words. But while Arran and Gray were about betraying Mary to Elizabeth, Davison, dining with James, observed "the poor young prince, who is so distracted and wearied with their importunities, as it pitied me to see it, and, if I be not abused, groweth full of their fashions and behaviours, which he will sometimes discourse of in broad language, as he that is not ignorant how they use him." 10

From June onwards the double intrigue (of Davison and the partisans of the exiles to seize the castle; of Cecil, Arran, Gray, and Hunsdon to sell Mary) went forwards, enlivened by a noisy scene of insults between Arran and Craig, a recalcitrant preacher. James had issued a letter against the fugitive divines which he would have their brethren to subscribe. Craig at this time refused (July 4).11 Towards the end of the year he and most of the ministers took this test, with a qualification. On July 12 one of the recalcitrants, Howeson, was examined before James at Falkland. He had preached on the favourite text, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to obey you rather than God, judge ye." The suppressed premise on all these occasions was that the preachers were the only judges of what God commanded, and somehow His commandments were almost always opposed to those of the State. "In case they preach treason in the pulpit," they said, "the king, the Assembly, and they to be judge what they preach, and whether it be treason or not." The preachers were to have the casting vote as to the treasonable nature of their own sermons. In James, and in such men as he was likely to have for counsellors, the State was poorly represented. But no human community could endure to be governed by sermons, and the strife was not decided till after more than a century of broils and bloodshed.

12

308 THE CASTLE PLOT AND THE BORDER MEETING.

While these unseemly religious skirmishes were going on, James (July 10) appointed Arran to treat with Hunsdon, to the disgust of Walsingham, who was deep in the plot for holding the castle against the king.13 The news of the murder of the Prince of Orange, which reached Edinburgh at this time, is said not to have been ungrateful to James, but it naturally increased the alarm of Protestants everywhere. The castle plot was presently detected, just as Arran was about to ride to meet Hunsdon. Arran from Falkland (August 5) announced apparently another, and probably false, plot to Hunsdon in the language of contemporary piety: we give the substance of the epistle below.* 14 Calderwood, the Protestant historian, tells us that Arran "made a fashion of apprehending" Drummond of Blair, who confessed to this conspiracy. But the castle scheme, judging from the letters of Davison and Walsingham, was genuine.15 The exiled lords denied their complicity. Alexander Erskine was removed from the command of the castle, which was put into Arran's hands, while Erskine (whom Elizabeth was about to supply with money) fled into England.16 On August 14 Hunsdon reported his meeting with Arran at Faulden Kirk.17 Arran was accompanied by nearly 5000 horse, but the English and Scottish soldiers were arrayed at a distance of two miles from each other, some forty gentlemen of each side attending the chief negotiators. Arran's vows of goodwill were such as Hunsdon thought could be trusted, "unless he be worse than a divell." The more important parts of Hunsdon's commission dealt with James's harbouring of Jesuits, such as Father Holt; his intended "association " with Mary, and his intrigues with the Pope, France, and Spain. to Jesuits, Arran replied that Elizabeth entertained James's rebels. There was no truth, he said, in the story of the association with Mary. James had never sent any message to the Pope, or dealt

As

* 14 MY VERIE GOOD LORD,—... But the same daie and in the verie artickell of tyme of this my formr conclusion, God Almightie, the god onlie of all truth moved the hart of a wicked conspirator to utter a plat of Treason concluded betwixt them his Mate Reabells, and some their faverours amongst us wth all their conclusions of their divelishe execution against his moste innocent Matie, and other worthie nobellmen of his Councell, uppon the wch sens that same tyme I have bene contyneuallie occupied in examynations and triall taking and in apprhending some knowne giltie. In eande (all praise to God) so farr have I pffited that their same psons have confessed the whole purpose, and subscribed their deposicions themselves, as I hope by Gods Grace to lett yor L. see shortlie face to face. . . .-Yor L. moste loving &c. State Papers, MS. Scot., Eliz., vol. xxxvi. No. 12, i.

ARRANE."

LATIN AND GREEK OF ARRAN.

309 with Spain or France. This was a deliberate lie, as James's extant letters to these Powers demonstrate. Arran promised to betray Catholic dealings with James to the the prejudice of Elizabeth. Hunsdon then asked that the exiled lords might not be forfeited by the approaching Parliament. Arran had an easy task in proving the treason of these exiles, and the aid lent to them by Bowes, Elizabeth's ambassador. Only a fortnight ago their latest conspiracy had been revealed. Hunsdon remarks that, but for the share of Erskine in the castle plot, he might have procured the pardon of Mar, but that James was irreconcilable to Angus and the Douglases, who held him in deadly feud for the sake of the Regent Morton.

James, indeed, as regards the Douglases, was situated much as James V. had been when Henry VIII. harboured an earlier Angus and Sir George Douglas. The Douglases had done their best to slay him when a babe unborn; Douglases had taken part in his father's murder; Morton had been his mother's bitter foe, and had dominated himself, and to this brood of rebels the arms of England were always open. The present Angus was a Puritan devotee, and allied with James's enemies, the preachers. "A harde matter to doe any thinge for them," the Douglases,— Hunsdon confesses. After nearly five hours of talk, Arran presented to Hunsdon the Master of Gray, for whom James asked a safe-conduct to Elizabeth. But three weeks earlier James had promised his mother to send one of his gentlemen to demand her release, 18 and now he was despatching the young and beautiful Gray for her undoing. Arran then professed that James (or he himself, the sentence is obscure) "never saw Jesuit in his life, and did assure me that if there were any in Scotland, they should not do so much harm in Scotland as their ministers will do in England, if they preach such doctrine as they did in Scotland." Elizabeth, who had her own Puritans, "a sect of perilous consequence" to deal with, presently silenced the exiled Scottish preachers.

On the same day (August 14) Hunsdon also wrote to Burleigh insisting on Arran's good faith, and practical kingship of Scotland, a point not to be forgotten in judging the unhappy James. "They do not stick to say that the king beareth the name, but he [Arran] beareth the sway." "He seems to be very well learned. Latin is rife with him and sometimes Greek." "Avec du Grec on ne

310

THE MASTER WILL BETRAY MARY.

peut gâter rien ! Hunsdon complained that the pious exiles vapoured about Berwick with pistols, and were continually crossing into Scotland. They ought to be removed inland, a thing which Elizabeth did not grant till about Christmas. Hunsdon was explicit about Gray, he was to "discover the practices" against Elizabeth. "He is very young, but wise and secret. . . . He is no doubt very inward with the Scottish queen and all her affairs, both in England and France, yea, and with the Pope." 19 Perhaps because Hunsdon's wishes and ambitions prompted him, he was fairly won over by Arran, while Cecil's nephew, Sir Edward Hoby, wrote letters in the same sense. There was in Arran an air of splendid mastery. Hoby regarded him as practically king de facto. While all the rest of the company wore secret armour, Hoby believed that Arran and the Master of Gray wore none, though Arran did not conceal his knowledge that many of his retinue would gladly cut his throat.20 He placed his king and himself at the feet of Cecil, Mary's most persistent enemy.

On Arran's return to Edinburgh he was welcomed by the guns of the castle, a novel honour, and Parliament, which presently met, ran its course. In Edinburgh Davison, chagrined by Arran's success, describes to Walsingham the forfeitures which fed the avarice of the favourite's wife. The brutal treatment of Lady Gowrie by Arran is especially insisted upon. He pushed her down in the street when she wished to present a petition (August 24). Her genealogy has been doubted, but she was a Stewart of the line of Methven, third husband of Margaret Tudor, and a woman of high ambitions. This August Parliament was busy with confirming the forfeitures of the exiles, and of the heirs of Gowrie. An Act was passed by which all "beneficed persons," preachers and teachers, were compelled to sign approval of the ordinances of the Parliament in May, with promise of submission to bishops. The penalty for refusal was loss of benefice.21 Many preachers presently did subscribe, with a qualifying clause.

Meanwhile from Berwick Hunsdon reported to Cecil the usefulness of the Master of Gray, who knows, and will reveal, all the plans of Mary. "The king here, nor the Earl of Arran, know nothing of those practices but by him, and so the Earl swore to me" (August 29),22

From Edinburgh James went to Falkland. Hither, if we are to believe a Border ruffian, Jock Grahame of Peartree, that rogue was