he performance would seem to have
had as great an effect upon the young King as had the play in _Hamlet_
upon the majesty of Denmark. James turned to Beatoun (the Cardinal,
nephew and successor of Archbishop James) the Chancellor in indignant
remonstrance. Were these things so? and if they were, would not the
bishops and other powerful ecclesiastics join to repress them? Let them
do so at once, cried the sovereign: or if not he should send half a
dozen of the proudest of them to King Henry to be dealt with after his
methods. Even Churchmen had occasionally to brook such threats from an
excited prince. Beatoun answered with courtier-like submission that a
word from the King was enough, upon which James, not wont to confine
himself to words, and strong in the success with which he had overcome
one of his Estates, the lords, now so quiet under his hand, replied that
he would not spare many words for such an issue. This characteristic
scene is very interesting. But probably when the memory of what he had
heard faded from the busy King, and the tumult of public events gained
possession again of his ear and mind, he forgot the sudden impression,
or contented himself with the thought that Beatoun and the bishops must
put order in their own affairs. Pitscottie tells us in respect to a
projected visit to England, vaguely thought of and planned several years
before this time, that "the wicked bishops of Scotland would not thole"
a meeting between James and Henry. "For the bishops feared that if the
King had met with King Henry that he would have moved him to casten down
the abbeys, and to have altered the religion as the King of England had
done before. Therefore the bishops bade him to bide at home, and gave
him three thousand pounds of yearly rent out of their benefices." It is
to be feared that history has no evidence of this voluntary munificence,
but James found the ecclesiastical possessions in Scotland very useful
for the purposes of taxation, and in this respect did not permit Beatoun
to have his own way.

When the young King was in his twenty-fourth year he found himself
able--many previous negotiations on the subject having come to
nothing--to pay a visit to the Continent in his own person in order to
secure a wife. It is a greater testimony to the personal power and
vigour of James than any mere details could give that, within eight
years of the time when, a boy of sixteen, he had escaped from the power
of the Douglas,