THE NATIONAL REVIEW.

OCTOBER 1856.

ART. I.-THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.

The History of the Kirk of Scotland. By Mr. David Calderwood, sometime Minister of Crailing. Edited from the original Ms. in the British Museum. By the Rev. R. Thompson. Printed for the Wodrow Society. Edinburgh, 1845.

Gowrie; or, the King's Plot. By G. P. R. James. London: Sims and M'Intyre.

In the months of August and September, in the year 1600, a controversy was going forward in Edinburgh of a very singular description. James VI., king of Scotland and king-expectant of England, had declared himself to have been exposed to a frightful danger, from which he had been delivered by a series of miracles. There was no apparent ambiguity in the circumstances; and in the main features of the story no deficiency of evidence. The hand of a ruffian had been on the king's throat; the point of a dagger at his breast. In facts so palpable as these he could not easily be mistaken; and while he published in the form of a proclamation an elaborate narrative of the attack upon him, he was anxious that his subjects should at once be made aware of the misfortune which they had so narrowly escaped, and should unite with him in an expression of gratitude to the Power which had interfered so signally in his behalf. The ministers of the church in Edinburgh were therefore invited to assist in this proper and natural proceeding; and on so remarkable an occasion objection could not have been easily anticipated. The duty which was laid before them was obvious, and ought to have been welcome; to hesitate was almost to declare themselves accomplices in the treason.

The ministers, on their part, had no thought of disloyalty; and yet such was their singular opinion of the king's character,

No. VI, OCTOBER 1856.

S

that the course which seemed so plain was full of difficulty. They did not wish to affront James; but still they hesitated. The injunctions of the council were delivered to them; instead of obeying these injunctions, they held a meeting to discuss the conduct which they were to pursue.

At length, after a debate, they repaired with their reply to the lords; and in spite of the direct and elaborate narrative which had been laid before them, they declared "that they were not certain of the treason, and therefore could make no mention of it." They would say in general, "that the king had been delivered from a great danger;" further than this they could not and would not commit themselves. James's own letters were produced. If the contents of them were more than naked lies, the conspiracy seemed as certain as evidence could make it; the council inquired if they would consent at least to read these letters. The ungracious divines replied that they could not read the king's letters to their congregations when they doubted the truth of them. It were better, and safer, to introduce a qualifying clause, and say, "if the report be true." Perhaps no anointed sovereign, heathen or Christian, was ever placed by his subjects in so uncomplimentary a situation. The lords of the council threatened; but threats were never efficacious with Scotch clergy. James himself hurried back to Edinburgh to reason them out of their incredulity; but his words were as powerless as his writings. They would offer no thanksgivings for an escape from a conspiracy unless they were assured that there had been a conspiracy from which to escape; in other words, unless they could satisfy themselves that the king was not lying to them. "Conviction," they said, "was the gift of God;" and "it had not pleased God," in the present instance, that they should be convinced.

We propose, with the assistance of the Calderwood papers, which contain all the known particulars, to examine the occasion of this embarrassing collision,-the famous so-called plot of the Earl of Gowrie and his brother to imprison or destroy the king. The ministers, it will be seen, were not wholly wrong; and yet James hardly deserved the position in which they placed him. If we could forget the fearful features of the story, the quarrel, which lingered for years, would form one of the most grotesque episodes in the history of these islands. At all events, both in itself and in its consequences, it is curiously illustrative of the condition of Scotland in the last years in which that country existed as a separate kingdom.

To enable our readers to understand the circumstances (or to understand them at least as far as they are ever likely to be understood), we must refresh their recollection with a few words

of preamble. Most people have read some history of North Britain in the sixteenth century: we believe, however, that they never met with any history more difficult to remember, because it is a mere record of anarchy;-a string of incidents linked together in order of time, but with no organic connection.

The sixty years which followed the death of James V. may be described briefly as a period in which every conceivable element of disorder combined to make government impossible. Minorities, civil wars, wars of religion, treasons, villanies, depositions, had followed one upon another with scarcely an interval; and the sixth James, who was in all likelihood conceived in crime, whose cradle was in the midst of murder, and whose earliest recollections must have been thronged with images of terror, grew to manhood the victim of a series of revolutions, in which the seizure of his own person was the unvarying preliminary movement. When we turn the pages of the annals of that time, we wonder that any good could have befallen at last a nation among whom such things were possible; we wonder, at least, till we remember the Reformation, which alone formed the late and nobler type of the Scottish people. There was, however, this difference between the Reformation in Scotland and in England, that here it was the work of the government,-there it established itself in spite of the government; and the attitude of mutual opposition outlived its proper causes. The original discord. was never properly appeased; and Protestantism, while it purified and ennobled the masses of the population, was unable to extend its renovating influence among the court and the aristocracy. The Protestant faith, in its proper spirit and sense, except for the few years which followed the expulsion of Mary, was regarded by the ruling classes with jealousy and dread; and far from being able to lend tone and strength to authority, its chief business, and unfortunately at last its chief pleasure, was to tie the hands of a treacherous nobility, which was ever on the watch for its destruction.

Thus even the Reformers were driven to increase the social disorder by weakening the executive authority; and for the repression of the normal forms of human wickedness there was no power any where. Every petty lord or chieftain was a king in his own eyes and in the eyes of his vassals. They lived each as they pleased, doing good or doing evil as their disposition prompted them; and faction, treason, and revenge, tore the heart of the country. The sword was the only ruler. Enormous crimes were followed by enormous retaliations; and the spasmodic efforts of justice by fresh villanies. Beton and David Rizzio were despatched by Lynch-law when their existence had become intolerable. Darnley, in his turn, died for Rizzio; and

Beton's executioners slept all in bloody graves; while the few who were alive to the shame of Scotland, and struggled for order and justice,―men like the Regent Murray, Lennox, Morton, and Ruthven,-paid for their perilous heroism by assassination or on the scaffold.

And these larger tragedies were but the symbols of the ferocity by which the whole lives of men were saturated. Scott's great scene in the dungeon at Torquilstone was borrowed from the literal history of those frightful years: a wretched churchman was roasted on the bars of his prison fire-place by the Earl of Cassilis, till he signed away his lands. Lady Forbes and all her household were burnt alive by the Gordons in the flames of their own castle. Every town and hamlet, every grange and tower, had its separate tale of horror; and the story of Scotland until James VI. came to man's estate might be written in blood. In the frightful dissolution of social order, even justice could be executed only by formal crime; and, bred in the midst of these convulsions, a king in name, but powerless as a cockboat in a hurricane, the boy grew up the nucleus of every conspiracy, the plaything of a ferocious nobility. Statesmen on whom he could lean, dignified by established authority and length of years, there were none for him. The conception of statesmen, as experience had brought them in contact with himself, was of hard fierce men, alternately cruel tyrants and the victims of rivals like themselves. The guardian of one day passing to the scaffold on the next was the familiar issue of each oscillation of fortune.

This was not a happy training for any man, still less for a man compounded of materials such as those out of which nature had framed James Stuart. In a happier sphere, he might have grown up an innocent and not perhaps a wholly useless person. That, educated as he was, he became nothing worse than England and Scotland knew him to be, may be fairly reckoned to his credit. He could not have been great-the dwarf cannot be cultivated into the giant, or the mule into the war-horse-but his constitution was harmless, and could have been turned to good of a kind; with good fortune he might have made a useful Cathedral-dean or University-professor.

Circumstances, however, were not so kind to him. At the close of the civil wars of 1570-73, when the Reformers were for a time absolute, he was committed-being then six years old-to the care of Buchanan. The choice was not a wise one. Buchanan was an excellent scholar, he had large knowledge of books, and skill in book instruction; but, although his course in public life had been upright and just, he was a passionate polemic. A book in which he had exposed the queen's complicity in her husband's murder was notorious through the world; and the public accuser

of the mother was ill selected as the guardian of the child. Nor had the prince either friend or relation who could lend to his life any intervals of cheerfulness. His father and his uncle were murdered; Mary was a prisoner in England; and while the Protestants were in power, her name was only mentioned in his hearing coupled with execrations. Affection, in the human sense of the word, there was no human heart to feel for James, or to warm into life any answering emotion in himself: his heart, if he was born with one, soon became dry as the dust.

While Buchanan, again, taught him books and grammar, he had not found it necessary to teach him the use of an authority of which the Protestants intended to leave him but the name. The supremacy in matters temporal of the spiritual power over the secular was held as absolutely by the General Assembly as by Gregory VII.; and James, as a matter of course, being left to form his own notions, arrived at a conclusion exactly the opposite. Hence, as much by their fault as by his own, he grew up in a false relation with the ministers of the Kirk; and when he came to manhood, and was no longer an absolute cipher, we can scarcely wonder that they agreed worse and worse. Of governing Scotland, in the real sense of the word, he was altogether incapable. His occupation soon resolved itself into a foolish and undignified struggle with the Assembly. The ministers did not choose to remember that he was no longer a child. They lectured him in private; they preached at him in their pulpits; the king's manner, the king's actions, the king's words, were the topics of favourite disquisition with which, week after week, the Edinburgh congregations were entertained. James, on the other hand, very naturally hating them, intrigued against their liberties; and in prosecuting his quarrel, made himself as ridiculous and mischievous as themselves. While the country was being wrecked for want of government, the king of it was busying himself in ecclesiastical polemics. As the ministers would erect a counterfeit of the papal theory, so James would have his counterfeit of the opposing theory. He would be the Henry VIII. of Scotland, head of the Kirk, the ass in the lion's skin, the supreme authority in all causes, spiritual and civil, in his dominions.

We might smile at the grotesqueness of the dispute, were it not for the frightful consequences. It is not with impunity, however, that men who are in high place in this world can indulge in these unseemly triflings; and while the king and the clergy were bickering idly for pre-eminence, the crimes, black and horrible,— for the repression of which king and clergy, if they had known it, alike existed, grew like the weeds in a neglected garden. A few witches and warlocks here and there were "wirried and burnt;" but there was the limit of the executive authority. The retainers