THE ASSEMBLY OF ABERDEEN (1605).

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reconciled Puritans to the surplice and the ring, or induced Anglicans to tolerate the absence on occasion of these objects. To the Puritans preaching was the one thing supremely needful, and being, as a rule, the more intelligent of the clergy, they were apt to have the larger congregations. James had no objection to good preaching which did not interfere with secular affairs. But he fired up at some reference to "the bishop and his presbyters," and broke into language highly unworthy of his blood and of the occasion. The Nonconformists should conform, he said, otherwise he "would harry them out of the land, or else do worse." He was said to have "spoken by inspiration of the Spirit." Sir John Harington, who was present, said "the Spirit was rather foul-mouthed." James bade the Puritan divines "away with their snivelling." "He wished that those who would take away the surplice might want linen for their own breech." 16 No question, however essentially trivial, which involved the consciences of men could be handled in this temper. Large numbers of Nonconformist divines were ejected from their livings. The House of Commons was justly offended. James was sowing the wind with both hands, and his measures against the Catholic priests brought on the Gunpowder Plot.

The Synod of Fife had been active, as usual, in Scotland, and sent representatives to Aberdeen, for a meeting of the General Assembly (July 1604), though James had prorogued that Assembly, as it clashed with a meeting of the Commissioners to consider the Union of the two countries. The parliament of July listened to a letter from the king about the Union, and restored some forfeited Bothwellites, Douglas of Spot and Thomas Cranstoun.17 On September 27, James issued an order forbidding the preachers to gather conventions without the Royal assent. 18 In July 1605 James again put off the Assembly. Having heard that the ministers meant to meet, he forbade this action (June 20, 1605). The royal commissioner, Straiton of Lauriston, went to the northern town and attempted to dissuade the gathered preachers, nineteen in all, from disobeying the king. However, they were resolute, though the Moderator of the last Assembly was not present to hand on the golden chain of continuity. They had elected a moderator and a clerk, when Straiton, the royal commissioner, interrupted their proceedings. They asserted themselves to be a lawful Assembly, which Straiton denied. He bade them quit the Assembly, under pain of horning, and they obeyed, adjourning to a day not appointed by

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DECLARED SEDITIOUS.

James. Straiton asserted, the friends of the preachers deny, that he had forbidden the Assembly, by proclamation at the Cross, before it was constituted. Much legal argument turned on the truth or falseness of this averment. About ten more ministers came on July 5, and threw their lot in with the other nineteen brethren. Among these was Mr Welsh, in early youth a Border thief, next a highly unpopular minister at Selkirk. Ayr was now his charge, and he had He was an uncommonly resolute

married a daughter of John Knox. man, and a descendant of his was a famous Covenanting minister. Few persons did more, in the pulpit, in prison, or in exile, than Mr Welsh to hand on the old Presbyterian claims and principles.

What James ought to have done in this pass is not very clear. The Assembly at Aberdeen had been held, so to speak, in order to keep the right of way open. The Kirk, by the law of 1592, had a distinct right to a yearly General Assembly, but the conditions of royal acquiescence and appointment of day and place might be diversely interpreted by lawyers, nor dare we venture on so thorny a subject. The preachers had good reason to fear that James was about to withdraw the right of meeting. They represent themselves as meeting legally, dispersing obediently, and treat Straiton's assertion that he had proclaimed the Assembly unlawful, before it was constituted, as “a false and deadly lie." 19 Very probably the king's best plan would have been to let the thing pass and avoid making martyrs. However, on July 19, 1605, he wrote to the Council, denouncing the preachers as seditious, and avowing his intention to oppose the beginnings of treason. The ministers had spoken of obeying "as far as might stand with the Word of God and the testimony of their conscience," that is, just as far as they pleased. Their prorogation till September was without the king's assent requested or granted; on this point James asked for legal opinion, as he meant to use the rigour of the law. 20 This was James's blunder: the Privy Council, left to themselves, would not have prosecuted in a cause so doubtful and perilous. James believed, probably correctly, that the stauncher preachers had passed the year in forming a strong party and securing votes. He found that the northern Presbyterians were no longer to be trusted to "go solid" for him. Among the nineteen preachers who met, and the ten who adhered to them, were representatives from Nig, near Tain; from Hawick, on the Border; from Fife, and from Ayr in the south-west Lowlands. The length and breadth of Presbyterian Scotland were engaged, "from north and

south, and east and west, they summoned their array," though the numbers actually present at Aberdeen were small. Their motive, as we said, was to keep the right of way open; for this purpose, before dispersing, they fixed a date for an Assembly in late September.

It is dangerous to deal with the law of the case, but, probably, James might have out-manoeuvred the godly. "That golden Act," as Calderwood styles it, the fifth Act of the twelfth Parliament of James VI. (June 5, 1592), regulated thus the meetings of the General Assembly: "And thus ratifies and approves the General Assemblies appointed by the said Kirk, and declares, that it shall be lawful to the Kirk and ministers, every year at the least, and oftener, pro re nata (as occasion and necessity shall require), to hold and keep General Assemblies, providing that the King's Majesty and his Commissioners with them, to be appointed by his Highness, be present at the General Assemby before the dissolving thereof; nominate and appoint time and place when and where the next General Assemby of the Kirk shall be kept and holden." 21 Now the king and his commissioners were not present at Aberdeen. Straiton, the commissioner, was in the town, and wandered feebly in and out of the little gathering. But neither he nor James appointed time and place for the next Assembly. The preachers themselves did so, and thereby broke, we think, the golden Act. James need have taken no official notice of them. He might have appointed a date for an Assembly, not the preachers' date. It is almost certain that the majority of the representatives would have attended the King's Assembly, not the apparently illegal Assembly convoked for September by the nineteen. These zealous men would have been obliged either to hold their own September Assembly in opposition to the king's, or, by coming to his Assembly, to confess, practically, the illegality of their own. Possibly two Assemblies would have met and mutually excommunicated each other. The Kirk would have been broken up into two factions, as it was, much later, by the Protesters and Remonstrants, and by the Indulged and the refusers of the Indulgence. But this easy stratagem, so congenial both to James and to the lawyer minds of the Kirk, did not occur to the angry monarch. He entered on a system of prosecution which irritated men's tempers, made martyrs, and could not be carried through save by bullying and cajoling and disreputable influences. James had no great cause for anxiety. He was safe in

England. It is improbable that the great nobles would have backed the Kirk: the king they could not seize on the old plan of the old French ballade: il n'y a rien tel que d'enlever. However, James insisted on prosecutions, and the Council reluctantly obeyed.

They called before them Forbes, the Moderator at Aberdeen, and Welsh of Ayr. These men they warded in Blackness, and summoned the others for August 1. The four commissioners of the Synod of Fife were ordered to join Forbes and Welsh, wherefore God sent a plague, and the Chancellor's son died. Sir George Hume, of the house of Manderstoun, now Earl of Dunbar, was none the less made Great Commissioner, "to govern all Scotland, Kirk, and commonweal.” Certain ministers wrote to him, warning him against the "new and young bishops." They themselves "will give place to no bishops"; "in this opinion we will die; and so, we are assured, will the best, yea, even the greatest part of the ministry of the Kirk of Scotland." They will stand for a bishopless Kirk as the poorest subject would "for a cot and a kailyard." This was the real ground of quarrel, for this the Assembly of Aberdeen had been held. The Kirk fought against the insidious introduction of bishops having authority; men "created," as one of them said, by the king, and, being his creatures, whom he made and could unmake, certain to obey him in everything. The two irreconcilable and intolerable forces, the absolutisms of preachers and of prince, are henceforth at war. In the end the king lost his unendurable prerogative; the Kirk kept out bishops, but had to abandon its insufferable pretensions. As for the letter of the law, it went where it must go in revolutions-each faction accusing the other of its infringement.

On July 25 the Assembly for September was proclaimed illegal, as it apparently was. The offenders of Aberdeen were summoned before the Council for October. The Synod of Fife voted for postponing the September Assembly to May 1606, and thought of trying to gain the consent of the king, but abandoned that idea. They appointed a solemn fast, a favourite form of agitation. James Melville wrote an apology. The law of 1592, that golden Act, not being, perhaps, quite to his purpose, he averred that Christ "gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven" to pastors, doctors, and elders. The nineteen, then, who assembled at Aberdeen, "had the warrant and power of Jesus Christ so to do," an argument of the force of which, when Cromwell came, we may say solvitur ambulando. James

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did now fix a General Assembly for the last Tuesday of July, meaning, doubtless, of the year following (1606), but by accident or design the year was not specified. The prisoned brethren were summoned for October 24 to hear themselves charged with seditious assembling. They declined the jurisdiction, as Black had done in 1596. They were remitted to their prisons, while a Papist was merely banished the country, a thing "very evil taken by all good men." The Gunpowder Plot, occurring on November 5, caused the afflicted to think that James would cease to pursue Puritans and preachers. But the king is said to have remarked that, while the Papists sought his life, the preachers sought his crown.

Early in 1606 Mar and Dunbar were sent down to try the prisoners, a task which Dunbar sought to escape from by working privately with the accused, through a minister. "Never so light a confession" of error would satisfy James. They were not to be moved. Next day they were told, before the Council, that if they would "pass from " the Assembly and declinature, "for the time and place," resuming their case again when they pleased, they might go free. They asked leave to consult the Presbyteries; this was not granted. The prisoners were indicted of treason. They had counsel; Mr Thomas Hope acquitted himself well. They argued that to decline the Council's jurisdiction was not treason; Mar and two others alone upheld them in this distinction. The King's Advocate, Hamilton, according to James Melville, threatened the jury; and Mr Forbes "horribly threatened" the Council and nobles present. He also dwelt on Joshua and the Gibeonites, and on Saul, whose sons were hanged, "the quhilk he applyit to the king." This was not, perhaps, very tactful. Under these spiritual and temporal threats the jury, worked on by the Council (who said that capital punishment was not intended), found the prisoners guilty by a majority of nine to six (or of seven to six). They were taken back to prison, their sentence being deferred.22

There is a point in this trial usually omitted by modern historians (who side with the Kirk), but frankly put forward by James Melville. The King's Advocate threatened the jury, all men of family and land, that, if they acquitted the accused, "he would protest against them for error wilfully committed, and so their life, lands, and goods to fall into the king's hands." Hamilton's argument, according to Melville, ran that it was proved treason to decline the jurisdiction; the jury had only to decide whether the accused had declined it