who had
till now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its
ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its
worship. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who
guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too
clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single
head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth
had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament
she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there;
and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king
from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and
to assure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than
James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient
voice.

[Sidenote: His youth.]

To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king
indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of
European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an
English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring nobles who
governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while
after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men;
but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.
"What Bothwellhaugh has done," Mary wrote joyously from her English
prison at the news, "has been done without order of mine: but I thank
him all the more for it." The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into
a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only
tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the
child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling;
and it was only when the regency passed into the strong hand of Morton
at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order,
that the land won a short breathing-space. Edinburgh, the last fortress
held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its
captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place;
and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But
hardly five years had passed when a union of his rivals and their adroit
proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a
fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get
hold of the king's