nabled him to bring the town
to submission by flooding its streets with Highlanders and Borderers;
the General Assembly itself was made amenable to royal influence by its
summons to Perth, where the cooler temper of the northern ministers
could be played off against the hot Presbyterianism of the ministers of
the Lothians. It was the Assembly itself which consented to curtail the
liberty of preaching and the liberty of assembling in presbytery and
synod, as well as to make the king's consent needful for the appointment
of every minister. What James was as stubbornly resolved on was the
restoration of Episcopacy. He wished not only to bridle but to rule the
Church; and it was only through bishops that he could effectively rule
it. The old tradition of the Stuarts had looked to the prelates for the
support of the Crown, and James saw keenly that the new force which had
overthrown them was a force which threatened to overthrow the monarchy
itself. It was the people which in its religious or its political guise
was the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so James
argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race, their cause was
the same. "No bishop," ran his famous adage, "no king!" To restore the
episcopate was from this moment his steady policy. But its actual
restoration only followed on the failure of a long attempt to bring the
Assembly round to a project of nominating representatives of itself in
the Estates. The presence of such representatives would have
strengthened the moral weight of the Parliament, while it diminished
that of the Assembly, and in both ways would have tended to the
advantage of the Crown. But, cowed as the ministers now were, no
pressure could bring them to do more than name delegates to vote
according to their will in the Estates; and as such a plan foiled the
king's scheme James was at last driven to use a statute which empowered
him to name bishops as prelates with a seat in the Estates, though they
possessed no spiritual status or jurisdiction. In 1600 two such prelates
appeared in Parliament; and James followed up his triumph by the
publication of his "Basilicon Doron," an assertion of the divine right
and absolute authority of kings over all orders of men within their
realms.

It is only by recalling the early history of James Stuart that we can
realize the attitude and temper of the Scottish Sovereign at the moment
when the death of Elizabeth called him to the English thr