A boy king
James VI was recognized as king of Scotland on 29 July 1567, while his mother lay imprisoned at Loch Leven. The book says he was thirteen, but he was born in June 1566, so he was about thirteen months old (we flag the slip and leave it). He was eight months old when Darnley, his supposed father, was killed, and when he saw his mother for the last time he was barely ten months old. Mary was to him a mere name, and the picture he had of her was clouded by insult and an old, sad affair. He was brought up by self-seeking nobles and by tutors who were his mother's enemies. He learned Latin and Greek literature well enough, theology to excess and morals very little, and he became one of the most learned drinkers in Europe. The Earl of Moray, Lennox, Mar and Morton served in turn as his regents (the Persian list is garbled and we give the usual order), but all of them except one died unnatural deaths. Rival nobles fought each other to make the king a shield for their own power. In 1582 some Protestant lords, with the help of the Scottish church, held him prisoner in Ruthven Castle, fearing that he would fall under the influence of Esme Stuart, his Catholic relative.
A shrewd and clumsy king
After his release he promised to defend the Protestant faith and made a treaty with Protestant England, and at seventeen he took the reins as king in fact (1583). James had no equal among kings. His manners were rough, his behavior unlovely, his voice loud, and his talk a mixture of rudeness and pedantry. One who did not much love him said that no one in Scotland could match him in knowledge of languages, sciences and statecraft, but the same man said that James was infinitely self-willed. Perhaps this trait, which had saved him from a sea of troubles, led him, who could not remember the start of his reign, to think that he would always be king. A man who could keep his throne in Scotland and wear the larger crown of England until a natural death was surely not lacking in wit and cunning. He married Anne, a Danish princess who leaned toward Catholicism, but he cared little for women, and spent so much time among his courtiers that it was remarked on. (The Persian text calls him unfaithful in the matter of his wife, a phrase unclear in context; we leave aside the gossip.)
Between Catholics and Calvinists
James had to find his way by guile among the angry zealots of his age. The Guise family in France, Philip in Spain and the pope in Rome all urged him to bring Scotland back into the Catholic Church, while the Scottish church watched lest he stray from Calvin's doctrine. James burned no bridges behind him: he wrote politely to the Catholic powers and wanted to ease his harshness toward Catholics. In secret he freed a Jesuit who had been imprisoned and winked at the escape of another. But the plots of the Catholics angered him, he came under the influence of the victorious Protestants, and he favored the spread of Calvinism in Scotland.
The Kirk's power and discipline
Getting along with the Scottish church was no easy task. Until 1583 most of its ministers were Scots clergy who, though they lacked pay and learning enough, were almost unmatched in piety and courage. They worked to repair ruined churches, found schools, give alms and defend peasants against landlords, and they preached long sermons that did the work of pamphlets and newspapers. In church sessions, provincial synods and the General Assembly the new ministers won the same privileges as the Catholic priests had had. Since they claimed to be inspired by God, they believed in the infallibility of the church and thought they could not err in faith and morals, and so they were far stricter in private and public matters than the lax priests before them. They fined anyone who avoided church, and made offenders do public penance or punished them. Alarmed by the amount of immoral conduct, they charged the elders of the church to suppress it sternly and to report to church sessions and provincial synods. Troubled by the indecency of English plays, they tried to shut the theaters of Scotland, and when they failed, they forbade people to attend. Like their predecessors they counted dancing a great crime and pursued witches harshly. They also pressed parliament to make celebrating Mass three times a capital offense, but this law was not carried out.
When the Scottish church learned of the St. Bartholomew massacre in France, it called for a massacre of Scottish Catholics, but the government would not cooperate.
Apart from its claims of divine inspiration and infallibility, the Scottish church was one of the freest institutions of its day. The parish minister was chosen by the leaders of the church, but their choice depended on the approval of the people, and the common people also took part in sessions and in the provincial synods and General Assembly.
These liberal practices angered the aristocratic parliament and the king. James, who claimed and perhaps believed that he reigned by God's will, said: some hot-headed ministers have so mastered the people's minds that they have found the taste of governing sweet and have thought of founding a free government. They speak ill of me in their sermons, not because I have faults but because I am king, which in their eyes is the greatest sin. The medieval struggle between church and state had begun again.
Melville and the war on bishops
At this point the struggle took the form of an attack by ministers on the bishops. The bishops, inherited from the Catholic Church, had once been chosen by the ministers, but in fact the regent or the king appointed them, and they paid a large part of church revenues to the state. The ministers, who found no warrant in Scripture for government by bishops, resolved to abolish them on the ground that they did not suit the new church order.
Their leader, Andrew Melville, an ardent Scot, had the character to succeed John Knox. After his studies at St. Andrews he entered the University of Paris and learned the principles of Calvin's teaching from Beza in Geneva. On returning to Scotland (1574) he was at once, at twenty-nine, chosen principal of the University of Glasgow, where he changed the program and discipline. In 1578 he took part in writing the Second Book of Discipline, which held that rule by bishops was useless given the equality of ministers. Melville wanted a complete separation of church and state, an idea that influenced the separation of the two in the United States (the book's claim); yet he allowed ministers to teach magistrates how to exercise power according to the word of God. James, who wished to rule despotically like Henry VIII or Elizabeth, thought bishops necessary in the church and counted them as the link between church and state.
In 1580 the General Assembly called the office of bishop a foolish invention of man, ordered all bishops to lay down their duties and ask the Assembly to receive them as simple ministers, and threatened excommunication if they refused. The government rejected the Second Book of Discipline and declared that no excommunication was valid unless the state approved it. In 1581 Lennox, then regent according to the book (this conflicts with the earlier list of regents, and the Lennox of 1581 was probably Esme Stuart, which we flag), named Robert Montgomery archbishop of Glasgow. The ministers of that city refused to accept him, but when he began to perform services, the General Assembly under Melville excommunicated him (1582); Montgomery gave way and withdrew. Melville was accused of defiance, and since he would not stand trial in a secular court, he was convicted of contempt and forced to flee to England (1584). James then made parliament declare it treason to disobey civil law, for ministers to meddle in state affairs, to resist the bishops, or to hold any assembly without the king's leave. Many ministers, rather than obey, followed Melville into exile.
The reign of fear and the Kirk's victory
James, who had tasted the pleasure of power, set up a harsh regime. He punished ministers for praying for their exiled brethren, and had two of them put to death for corresponding with the fugitives and two more on a charge of plotting.
The clergy and the people, with the stubbornness and firmness that marked the Scots, resisted. Some published pamphlets abusing the king without giving their names, and made songs about the cruelty of his rule. Even some women, in their criticism, judged him deserving of hell. His bishops gradually drew less and less of the church revenues and so paid less into the treasury; as a result James was deprived of money, the instrument of his will, and grew weaker every year, until in 1592 parliament, with his reluctant consent, gave the church its freedom, restored to it all judicial powers and matters of discipline, and ended the bishops' influence.
After this the exiles returned.