without the Royal
assent, and were not to attack individuals from the pulpit. An attempt
was to be made to convert the Catholic lords. A General Assembly at
Dundee in May ratified these decisions, to the wrath of Andrew Melville,
and the Catholic earls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at
this period had not one supporter among the nobility. James had made
large grants of Church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from
their wonted conspiracies for a while. The king occupied himself much in
encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him
to the preachers.

In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and
vote in Parliament. In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the
'Basilicon Doron,' came to the knowledge of the clergy: it revealed his
opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of
the preachers to introduce a democracy "with themselves as Tribunes of
the People," a very fair definition of their policy. It was to stop them
that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep
the pulpiteers in order. They were refusing, in face of the king's
licence, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for
they took various powers into their hands.

Meanwhile James's relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay
his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly. Plots were
encouraged against him, but it is not probable that England was aware of
the famous and mysterious conspiracy of the young Earl of Gowrie, who was
warmly welcomed by Elizabeth on his return from Padua, by way of Paris.
He had been summoned by Bruce, James's chief clerical adversary, and the
Kirk had high hopes of the son of the man of the Raid of Ruthven. He led
the opposition to taxation for national defence in a convention of June-
July 1600. On August 5, in his own house at Perth, where James, summoned
thither by Gowrie's younger brother, had dined with him, Gowrie and his
brother were slain by John Ramsay, a page to the king.

This affair was mysterious. The preachers, and especially Bruce, refused
to accept James's own account of the events, at first, and this was not
surprising. Gowrie was their one hope among the peers, and the story
which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less
credible except the various and manifestly mendacious versions of the
Gowrie party.