The earl of Marr, the young king's tutor and guardian, was elected to the dangerous post of regent of Scotland, which he filled but a few months. The perplexities of his new position certainly cut short his existence. Marr appears to have done all in his power, to establish the episcopal church of Scotland, which is, in some instances, much nearer the ancient faith than the church of England. Therefore, the prevailing tone of James's domestic education must have tended to a religion, which was considered as the reformed catholic church. Nevertheless, a professor of every one of the creeds, then contending for supremacy in Scotland, was to be found among the infant monarch's preceptors; George Buchanan, his principal pedagogue, being a calvinist; master Peter Young, his preceptor, was of the reformed episcopal church, while two deprived abbots balanced the scale in favour of the catholics.

"Now, the young king was brought up at Stirling Castle," says Melville," by Alexander Erskine, (his governor,) and my lady Marr, and had, for principal preceptors, master George Buchanan and master Peter Young, the abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, (branches of the house of Erskine,) and the laird of Dromwhassel, his majesty's master of the household." The description of these coadjutors, whose united labours formed the mind of the royal oddity, king James, are thus admirably sketched:-"Alexander Erskine was a nobleman of true gentle nature, well loved and liked by every man, for his good qualities and great discretion-in no-wise factious or envious, a friend of all honest men; he desired rather to have such as were of good conversation, to be about the young king than his own nearer kin, if he thought them not so fit. The laird of Dromwhassel, on the contrary, was ambitious and greedy; his greatest care was to advance himself and his friends. The two abbots were wise and modest; my lady Marr was Stirling, a mortal wound in the back, from one captain Calder. The brave earl of Marr roused the men of Stirling, they beat off the assassins, and carried the wounded regent to the castle, where his grandson king James, The first care of the dying man was to ask, "If the babe was safe?" and being told the attack had not reached the infant king, "Then," said the regent, "all is well!" He died that night, with apparent resignation and piety. Calder was broke on the wheel, the first instance of that atrocious punishment in the history of our island.-(Archbishop Spottiswoode's History of Reformation in Scotland, p. 257.)

was.

1 Melville's Memoirs, p. 261-2.,

wise and sharp, and held the young king in great awe, and so did master George Buchanan. Master Peter Young was gentler, and seemed to conduct himself warily, as a man unwilling to lose the sovereign's favour."

But it was the celebrated George Buchanan who took the practical part of the king's education, and is said to have treated him with great severity, and to have defied lady Marr, when she wept at the stripes the schoolmaster deemed it his duty to inflict. Yet we find that Melville considered lady Marr as a sharp governess herself, more likely to recommend a larger portion of castigation than to mourn over the share administered by the pedagogue. Melville gives a sarcastic sketch of Buchanan, hit off with the bold pencil of one who draws from the life. "Master George was a stoic philosopher, but looked not far before him; a man of notable qualities for his learning, pleasant in company, rehearsing at all times moralities short and feckful. He was of guid religion,—for a poet, but he was easily abused, and so facile that he was led by any company that he haunted; he was revengeful and variable, changing his opinions with every private affront." It was a most repulsive circumstance that the infant James should have been educated by his mother's most bitter maligner. Nor was this man fit to govern a young prince. Most of James's faults must have sprung from his tuition by a vain, violent, and capricious pedagogue. If he had not been domesticated with persons of kinder dispositions, this prince must have proved a demon, instead of what he was-an odd-tempered, goodnatured humorist.

The earl of Morton, of the house of Douglas, now obtained the regency; he was the great enemy of the young king's mother, and was afterwards convicted as one of the murderers of his father, lord Darnley,

Meantime, the faithful Erskines kept sedulous guard on their young monarch, at Stirling Castle. War, religious and civil, was raging round this palace-fortress, but, owing to the providential law which consigned its hereditary government to the head of the family of Marr, together with the personal guardianship of any heir or minor king of Scotland,

1 Buchanan had been professed as a friar, in France, where the story goes that Mary queen of Scots had, when queen-dauphiness, with earnest prayers and tears, saved him from being burnt for heresy; if this was the case, he made her an ill return. M. Le Pesant: Life of Mary, 1646.

it remained safe, for several years, from the attacks of the numerous enemies to royalty.

The favourite companion of the young king was Thomas Erskine, who, born on the same day as himself, had shared his majesty's cradle and his sports, but not his pacific nature; for, in after-life, Thomas was the valiant captain of his guard, in very dangerous times. James loved, with an enduring attachment through life, every person with whom he was domesticated in Stirling Castle, excepting Buchanan.'

Meantime, the humorous oddities of the young king became more confirmed as his mind unfolded; he was fond of little animals, and very good-natured to his young companions, but had a nick-name for every one, and a pet name for all his intimates. One day, he was playing at quoits, with the young earl of Marr, who was but a few years older than himself, when he cried out, "Jonnie Marr has slaited me!" The word "slaiting," it seems, in the north, means taking a sharp advantage in games of the kind. From this incident the young king always called Marr " Jonnie Slaites." Many were the affectionate letters addressed, by the royal hand, to Marr, beginning with this nick-name."

The royal child was not permitted long to be occupied exclusively with these healthful sports, or with the studies fitting for his age. Faction and civil war broke in upon such pursuits, no doubt, greatly to the injury of his character; and, in the year 1577, the guileful Morton, driven to desperation by the wrath of the oppressed people, affected to surrender his regency into the hands of the young monarch; hands only fit for the cricket-ball, the slate, or copy-book. Certainly there is a near analogy between semi-barbarians and children, which may prove an excuse for contemporary historians, who discuss with gravity the progress that Morton made in the favour of his majesty of eleven years! and very seriously vituperate the heinous tendency of James to favourites when he was at that sage age, and how, by this influence, Morton prevailed on the king to dissolve a council of regency of twelve nobles, and continue him in his office! Meantime, one of the princes of the blood

1 James mentions Buchanan's scandalous chronicle on his mother with detestation in his Basilicon. Works of king James, p. 167.

2 Erskine MS. Memoirs, quoted in the Bannatyne Club publications. Marr was born in 1562. He survived his royal friend and ward just long enough to see the shadows of the approaching troubles of Charles I. He died, aged seventy-two, in 1634.

royal, Esmé Stuart, earl of Lenox, and lord d'Aubigny, came from France, and assumed authority about the young king's person. Morton was, soon after, convicted of Darnley's death, and of an intention of surrendering James into the hands of Elizabeth. He was beheaded, and acknowledged, at least, privacy in the conspiracy which destroyed Darnley. The government of the kingdom fell into the hands of the nearest relatives of the blood-royal, of whom, the earl of Lenox aforesaid was the principal person. Jealousies existed regarding the tendency of the latter to catholicism, and great anarchy prevailed. At last, in 1582, on the 13th of October, a general insurrection of the presbyterian party took place, and, in an expedition, called the Raid of Ruthven, led by the fanatic earl of Gowrie, they got possession of the king's person, who was forthwith consigned to a species of captivity, attended with personal violence and restraint. When James offered some resistance, Andrew Melville, a preacher, shook the youthful monarch by the arm, and called him "God's seely vassal," which, however, only meant to say, that he was God's harmless or helpless vassal, an epithet which the youth and powerless state of the young king rendered truly appropriate.

The fearful examples of the long series of crowned victims, his unhappy ancestors, who had preceded him on the throne of Scotland, not one of whom, had for centuries attained the age of forty, and the strange situation in which he was placed, planted dissimulation in the heart of the boy from mere self-defence. He pretended a certain degree of imbecility and fatuity-after the example of Brutus, at the court of the Tarquins-and affected great timidity, when his conduct, in many a fearful crisis it was his lot to encounter, proves that he possessed not only great sagacity, but no little courage. Those who persist in believing

James a fool and a coward, must find it difficult to account how he could have made the daring escapade, when he was but sixteen, from the restraint in which he was held by Gowrie and his colleagues, at a time when his mother, queen Mary, wrote in despair from her prison," that her son was utterly lost and ruined, and that the regal dignity had passed utterly from her family." From an old inn, near St. Andrew's Castle, he escaped, by the assistance of his relative, the crownel or colonel Stuart, to the protection of his great uncle, the earl of March, who held garrison at that

castle; and a revolution followed. The earl of Gowrie was, soon after, beheaded, and the harassed country enjoyed some breathing time, while the furious contentions of the two religious factions of episcopacy and presbytery, confined themselves merely to the warfare of the pen and the tongue, in which it must be owned they were truly indefatigable.

"Our king, this year, (1685,)" saith a queer old chronicle1 of delectable quaintness, "was become a brave prince in bodie and stature, so weel exerciset in reading, that he could perfitlie record all things he had either heard or read. Therefore that noble king, Frederic II. of Denmark, who had then twa doghters, was willing (gif it suld please our king) either to give him the choice of thaim, or that he would accept the ane of thaim, as it suld please the father to bestow quhilk suld be the maist comely, and the best for his princelie contentment." King James received the Danish ambassadors, who brought this civil offer, at Dunfermline, but advised them instantly to depart for St. Andrew's, as the plague was raging in the palace; he said he would send his own horses to carry them thither. An unfortunate misunderstanding occurred, for the Danish ambassadors, having sent on their own horses and baggage, and finding the promised escort did not arrive, actually left Dunfermline on foot! James was in consternation when he found the neglect that his perverse and disobedient people

had put upon the envoys of his courteous ally. This was the more to be regretted, since king Frederic had ordered the Danish embassy, in case king James was not eager for the marriage, to demand restitution of the Orkney and Shetland Isles, which were the rightful property, not of Scotland, but of Denmark. James's marriage was, in fact, at this juncture, an object of interest and contention between his mother, the captive Mary queen of Scots, and his godmother, queen Elizabeth. The views of these queens were, of course, in direct contradiction to each other. Mary wished her son to offer his hand to one of the daughters of Philip II., king of Spain, and of her early friend, Elizabeth of France. The queen of England insisted on his marriage with the princess of Sweden, grand-daughter of Gustavus Vasa, and, at the same time, a protestant; if he accepted this offer, Elizabeth declared she would be at

1 Historie of King James the Sext.