the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.
But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone
again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The nobles were
enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the
baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that
Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to
overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with
Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again
to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt
failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the nobles, triumphant
at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of
her child.

[Sidenote: James and the nobles.]

It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his
fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even
in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not
wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that
order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact
been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and
Morton had shown how easily the turbulent nobles could be bent by an
energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed,
James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship.
The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the
land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen
he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive
them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most
powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A
year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand,
and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and
Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; "there was no need of
words," James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with
protestations of loyalty; "weapons had spoken loud enough." But their
return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the
succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the
friendship of England; and once secure against English intervention the
king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A
significant ceremony showed th