Page:The Queens of England.djvu/478

432 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. The last year of James as a mere Scottish king was probably the quietest he had passed in hi-s troubled sovereignty. As his succession to the English throne drew nearer, his authority in his hereditary kingdom grew more strong. Many of his ene- mies had perished, others had become impoverished ; and all began to think it a wiser and more profitable game to join their king in a foray on the incalculable wealth of England, than to confine their turbulence against him for the poor prizes of his barren and intractable Scotland. But what tamed the laity, made the clergy more furious. They saw their sover- eign, seated on the English throne, and surrounded by the pomps of prelacy, newly armed with engines of oppression against themselves ; and never was kirk so rebellious, or king so abusive. He protested before the great God that highland* caterans and border thieves were not such ungrateful liars and vile perjurers as these "Puritan pests in the church;" and, in return, synod after synod flamed up against his libels as unprincely and ungodly. He was in the thickest fury of this contention when the sycophants who had bribed Elizabeth's waiting-women for tidings of her last breath, hurried head- long into Scotland to salute him as English king. He set out upon his happy journey southward on the 5th of April, 1603. The queen did not accompany him. She had been delivered of a third son, who was christened Robert and died soon after its birth, in the preceding year ; she was now again with child ; and it was arranged that she should follow within a certain period after the king's departure. But of that departure she at once availed herself to renew from a better vantage-ground the old struggle for the custody of her eldest son ; and the trouble she gave the nobles with whom the king had left authority, receives amusing expression in the letters of the time. The president of the council writes, that to utter anything like reason or wisdom was but to incense her majesty further against them all, and to augment her passions to greater peril. The peril already incurred had cost the life of a young prince, born prematurely, and dead as soon as born. The Lord Fife adds that this passion of her majesty could not "be sa weil mitigat and moderat as by seconding and obeying all her directions, quhilk always is subject to zour sacred majistey's answers and resolves as oracles." His sacred maj- esty's answers for once deserved to be oracular, for he really wrote sensibly enough. He counseled his wife to leave her