manner, with corruption; and a very competent estimator has stigmatized him as "famous for his superciliousness and hoisting matters of prerogativea."

Early in the summer, James carried into effect the design which he had long entertained of revisiting Scotland. The ostensible motives for this journey were, of course, his affection for his native kingdom, and the promise which he had given on leaving it, that he would often return; but its real object was the establishment of the ecclesiastical system of England on the ruins of that haughty presbytery which continued to hold out an example of such encouragement to the pretensions of the English puritans.

To dazzle his ancient subjects by the full display of the pomp and riches of a king of Great Britain was a part of the policy of James; and he was careful to secure the attendance of a numerous and splendid train of courtiers, at the head of whom shone the new earl of Buckingham, the perfect mirror of magnificence, and the only cherished object of his doting eyes.

Bacon, who now bore the office of lord-keeper, was left behind, and invested with a kind of viceregal power, which he is said to have exercised with all the arrogance of a new favorite of fortune.

From Berwick the king proceeded by slow and solemn journeys to Edinburgh, welcomed at every town or mansion which he visited in his passage by

a Whitelock's Memorials of the English affairs, p. 296.

pane

panegyrical orations or congratulatory poems, all of which were in Latin,-the Scotch not choosing, probably, to provoke the ridicule of the English courtiers by any specimens of the literature of their ancient and once cultivated language, already degraded to a provincial dialect by the transfer of the seat of empire. The universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews prepared solemn disputations to he held before his majesty, who characteristically testified his satisfaction in a string of puns on the names of the exhibitors, which appeared to himself so witty that he caused them to be turned both into English and Latin verse. These duties of royalty once performed, the king hastened from Edinburgh to enjoy his sylvan sports amid the scenes in which he had first learned to love them.

In the mean time, his ministers were occupied in the arduous task of preparing to enforce upon a reluctant people the scheme of ecclesiastical domination which it was the highest ambition of the monarch to bring to effect. Episcopacy had been already established in Scotland; but it remained to introduce the ceremonies of the Anglican church and the high-commission court,—that inquisitorial tribunal by which these innovations were to be settled and their perpetual observance guarantied. In the parliament assembled at Edinburgh on the king's return, a refractory spirit was first manifested by the peers, who dreaded, from a sovereign thus zealous in the cause of the hierarchy, some attempt to recover for its use the church-lands, which had stimulated

stimulated and rewarded the zeal of their ancestors in the good work of the reformation. Great difficulty was experienced in procuring a nomination of lords of the articles conformable to the wishes of the king; and he was on the point of dissolving the parliament in anger, when some mode equally effectual and secret was discovered of overcoming this opposition. An act was now proposed, as the basis of all further proceedings, declaring, "that in ecclesiastical affairs, whatever should be determined by the king, with the advice of the prelates and a competent number of the clergy, should receive the operation and force of law." This was, in other words, declaring the sovereign head of the church, and giving up for ever the presbyterian worship and discipline,—the idol of the people. The clergy, in well-founded alarm, hastened to prepare a protestation, which was presented to the parliament just as the act was about to receive the royal assent. was judged inexpedient to carry it through: but nothing was gained to the religious liberties of the country by this apparent victory of their champions; for the king now claimed, by his inherent prerogative and absolute power, all that the proposed law could have given him. He immediately established a court of high-commission, and one of its first acts was the deprivation of three clergymen who had been active in the drawing and presenting of this remonstrance; by a further exertion of lawless power, two of them were also committed to prison, and a third banished his country for life.

It

Five articles were propounded to the assembled clergy under the intimidation of these examples of royal vengeance, which were the following: That the eucharist should be received kneeling: That it should be administered in private to the sick: That baptism should be privately administered in cases of necessity: That episcopal confirmation should be given to youth: That the great festivals in commemoration of the principal events in the history of Christ should be duly celebrated.

The rites and practices enjoined by these articles were precisely those which the English puritans peculiarly objected to in the service of their own church, as relics of popery; and what aggravated the tyranny and folly of forcing them upon the Scotch was, that even the English bishops held them to be things in their own nature indifferent; for which reason alone, indeed, they maintained that the church had the right of instituting them, and decreeing their perpetual observance.

The afflicted clergy, overawed by the peremptoriness of the king, yielded for the time a qualified assent to some of the articles, but implored upon their knees the convocation of a general assembly. This, after many precautions to insure its subserviency to the royal pleasure, was granted; and the articles were the next year confirmed by its authority, though not without extreme reluctance and many dissenting voices: the new ordinances, moreover, were observed by none excepting the creatures of the court; the body of the people, inflexible

in their religious prepossessions, continued to set at nought both the mandates of the king and the decrees of an assembly which they regarded as irregularly convoked. What was worse, their disobedience was in general displayed with impunity;-for James, destitute alike of treasure and of troops, possessed no means of enforcing submission to the dictates of that prerogative in the omnipotence of which he gloried. The Scotch nation however gave him full credit for his intentions; it felt itself insulted, as well as aggrieved, by the imposition of an English ritual, an English episcopacy; and it viewed the defection of the king from that presbyterian establishment which he had formerly declared the purest church in christendom, and which he had repeatedly protestéd that he would maintain inviolate, as a base apostasy in which it would be infamous to concur. James on his part was incensed at all the resistance which had been opposed to his absolute power, and rather provoked than conciliated by the few and reluctant concessions of the clergy; and he turned away his steps from his native soil in anger, and probably with the resolution to return no morea.

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In the mean time his English court had been the theatre of intrigues, petty and sordid in their nature and objects, but memorable as well as mortifying from the eminence of the parties concerned.

Sir Edward Coke, whose appetite for power and personal distinction was scarcely inferior to his at

* See Laing's History of Scotland, under the year 1617.

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