r motives. He
wished--and this was always the main Governmental reason for the
preference of Episcopacy--to keep the clergy under his control; and he
sought also to please Elizabeth, on whom he was dependent for the
stability of his own position, by bringing the Scottish Church into some
degree of conformity with the Anglican.

The Assembly, while accepting the compromise had done what it could to
safeguard its own constitution by putting it on record that it had
assented to the continuance of the bishops only in their civil capacity,
and in order to give a legal claim on the benefices to those who held
them, and that it allowed the bishops no superiority within the Church
over the ordinary ministers, or, at any rate, over the superintendents.

There is no doubt that it was only the hope, on the part of the Church,
that she would secure a portion at least of her patrimony by it that
reconciled her to this scheme. The ministers had little heart in the
business, and the best of them did not conceal their dislike of the
arrangement and their fear of the evils to which it would lead. It is
easier to blame the Church for what she did than to say what she ought
to have done. It would have been a more heroic, and probably a safer
course, to refuse the compromise and at once to bring on the struggle
with the Government which she had to face in the end. If Melville had
been on the ground at the time, there is little doubt that one man at
least would have had both the wisdom to recommend that course and the
courage to pursue it.

The Tulchan system had only been in operation for two years when he came
back from the Continent; but that was long enough to realise the
Church's fears and to make her restive. The ministers who accepted the
bishoprics became troublers of the Church, took advantage of their
titular superiority over their brethren to push for a position of
greater authority, and were more and more evidently the pliant tools of
the Court. The Church, moreover, gained nothing in the way of a better
provision for the ministry--the nobles seized the benefices and kept
them.

On encountering the growing dissatisfaction of the ministers with his
project, the Regent threatened the freedom of the Assembly, and put
forward a claim on behalf of the Crown to supreme authority within the
Church. There lay the crux of the situation, the great central issue in
the controversy that was being thrust upon the Scottish people, that wa