icious priest and his exactions, the confessors who bullied a dying
penitent into gifts which injured his family, and all the well-worn
scandals by which in every time of reformation the coarser imagination
of the populace is stirred. If James himself was startled into an angry
demand how such things could be after he had witnessed the performance
of David Lindsay's play, which was trimmed into comparative decency for
courtly ears, it may be supposed what was the effect of that and still
broader assaults, upon the unchastened imagination of the people. The
Reformation progressed by great strides by such rude yet able help as
well as by the purer methods of religion. The priests, however, do not
seem to have made war on the balladmakers, as the great King of England
would have had his nephew do. Buchanan, indeed, whose classic weapons
had been brought into this literary crusade, and who also had his fling
at the Franciscans as well as his coarser and more popular brethren, was
imprisoned for a time, and had to withdraw from his country, but the
poets of the people, far more effective, would seem to have escaped.

All this, however, probably seemed of but little importance to James in
comparison with the greater affairs of the kingdom of which his hands
were full. When the episode of his marriages was over, and still more
important an heir secured, he returned to that imperial track in which
he had acquitted himself so well. All would seem to have been in order
in the centre of the kingdom; the Borders were as quiet as it was
possible for the Borders to be; and only the remote Highlands and
islands remained still insubordinate, in merely nominal subjection to
the laws of the kingdom. James, we are told, had long intended to make
one of the royal raids so familiar to Scottish history among his
doubtful subjects of these parts, and accordingly an expedition was very
carefully prepared, twelve ships equipped both for comfort and for war,
with every device known to the time for provisioning them and keeping
them in full efficiency. We are told that the English authorities
looking on, were exceedingly suspicious of this voyage, not knowing
whither such preparations might tend, while all Scotland watched the
setting out of the expedition almost as much in the dark as to its
motive, and full of wonder as to where the King could be going. Bonfires
were blazing on all the hilltops in rejoicing for the birth of a prince
when James t