gers, lately enemies, the mistaken jealousies of trade, were added to the other causes of distrust and suspicion.

These considerations might have checked the ardent expectations of speculators upon the immediate practicability of incorporating the two nations; but in nothing are men so apt to be deceived as in political theories. Unfortunately such is the intractability of the material, that, however beautiful the elevation, and well arranged the plan may be in the drawing, scarcely one of the superstructures, which political architects have attempted to rear, at once, and by previously laid down rules, have either been convenient or durable. We are indebted to the arrangement of circumstances, and the adaptation of means to the end, by that over-ruling " providence which ever shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may," for almost all that is valuable in the constitution of society, or the formation of governments. It is humbling to reflect how little either of national prosperity or happiness has been the result of human foresight; or how little rulers and people are taught wisdom by experience.

THE

HISTORY OF SCOTLAND.

Book III.

SCOTLAND, at the accession of James to the English throne, presented an extremely wretched picture of a factious, poor, ill-governed kingdom, hastening to anarchy, and surrounded with barbarism.

The borders were inhabited by lawless banditti, who lived by rapine and plunder. The Highlands were possessed by a different race, of a strange language, but equally unacquainted with the restraints of government, or the manners of civilized life, their kindness was limited to their clan, and their loyalty to their chief; and the gloomy indolence of the mountains was only interrupted by conflicts among the ferocious chieftains, or plundering incursions on their wealthier neighbours. The islands were the haunts of, perhaps, more unreclaimed savages than either, whose piracies infested the western coasts, and who were often troublesome, but seldom advantageous to the Scottish crown. The Lowlands, harassed by the licentiousness which a weak government, and the partial administration of justice, never fail to produce, were, besides, distracted by religious dissension, which the mischievous, intermeddling policy of their polemical king increased and prolonged.

Nor was the accession of James productive of any of the expected advantages. Its first effects were hurtful. The loss of the pageantries, trappings, and immediate retainers of the prince, was severely felt in a metropolis which had no commerce, and hardly any other source from which to supply the deficiency thus occasioned in the circulation of

money, and the consequent want of employment among the lower ranks, many of whom depended for subsistence upon the expenditure of the royal retinue. The removal of the king to a more wealthy country increased the splendour of the court, and the nobles of his poorer state, attracted round him by the hope of advantage, were induced to imitate the manners, and rival the expense of their richer competitors for royal favour. They thus exhausted their fortunes at a distance, and impoverished their tenants, by drawing from them the supplies necessary to support their rank in their visits to England; and the intercourse between the two nations being so slender, the money expended never returned to Scotland, whose exports, limited to a few raw materials, were insufficient to replace the continual drain. The cessation of hostilities between the two nations, and the pacific maxims of the monarch, diminished the importance of military followers among the nobles, and the produce of their estates, heretofore consumed in rude and plentiful hospitality on the spot, was now converted into money, and expended on foreign luxuries and artificial grandeur, in a distant capital, where it did not produce half the influence or the power, but, while it was doubly exhausting to the vassal and his lord, ruptured the ties that held them together, and in depressing the cultivators of the soil, at the same time reduced the noble, from the proud station of a chief, to the mean and beggarly rank of a courtier, constraining him to act the tyrant to his dependants, and in turn bow the knee to a

master.

James was fully aware of the difference in his situation, which the possession of the wealth and power of England had produced; and he was not a prince to forego any oppor tunity of exerting or extending his prerogative. He accordingly employed the means which his personal aggrandizement afforded him, to support the despotic claims he had advanced while in Scotland, but which his circumscribed finances had hitherto prevented his being able to sustain; and the Scottish nobles, who had alternately resisted and obeyed his mandates in his native kingdom, now, either dreading the effects of his vengeance, or courting the favour of his good fortune, re

ceived his commands without a remark, and obeyed them without a murmur.-To the church the union of the two crowns 1: was peculiarly disastrous, as it enabled the king to allure and reward deserters from the ranks of presbytery, and facilitated the introduction of the Episcopal form, whose dignitaries, being his own creatures, he found at all times supple and subservient to his purposes of encroachment.

A few weeks after his arrival in London, the king was joined by his queen in no pleasant mood. On his journey, which had been prolonged beyond his expectation, he despatched John Spotswood, created archbishop of Glasgow, in room of Beaton who had died at Paris, to attend her on her journey; but the family of Marr, to whom the care of her eldest son, prince Henry, had been intrusted, refused to allow him to accompany his mother to England, and the queen, incensed at the treatment, fevered and miscarried; nor was it till about the end of the month of June that she could with great difficulty be prevailed on to see the earl, previously to the coronation. When his majesty advised her to thank God for the peaceable possession they had obtained of the kingdom of England, which, he said, was chiefly owing to the earl's good offices in his last embassy, in wrath she replied-for she seems to have been a woman of high spirit-" She would rather never have seen England, than have been beholden to him for it." This affair was brought before the council, and an act passed, on the humble submission of Marr, declaring: -That he had done nothing in that business derogatory to the honour of the queen, as the refusal, on the part of his family to restore the prince to his mother, was without his knowledge.

This domestic incident was not the only untoward circumstance that occurred previously to the coronation. A conspiracy, still unexplained, was detected, for which two Catholic priests, lord Gray a Puritan, lord Cobham, and Sir Walter Raleigh, men of very opposite principles, were brought to trial. The two priests were executed, lords Gray and Cobham pardoned after they were upon the scaffold, and Sir Walter Raleigh reprieved and confined to the tower, but after an interval of fifteen years, to the everlasting infamy of

James, he was beheaded, upon this sentence, although the evidence of his participation, or even accession, to the conspiracy was more than doubtful.*

At last, on the 27th of July, St. James'-his saint's dayamid the desolation and melancholy occasioned by a terrible pestilence, the king and queen were solemnly inaugurated at Westminster; but the splendid pageants, erected in honour of their majesties, through which the procession passed, were left without spectators, and the terrific annunciations of death were heard in the solitudes of one part of the city, while the royal cavalcade was hurrying through the streets of the other. Immediately after the coronation, the king issued a mandate, forbidding the nobility to repair to London before winter, and the court left the capital.

Long ere he left Scotland, James had meditated a union between the two kingdoms, but he considered uniformity in religious worship as a prerequisite to accomplish, or at least what was necessary to consolidate his scheme. In England, as in Scotland, there were two parties in the church—the one entirely subservient to the court, the other differed from them in several points of polity and worship, and from the greater strictness of their lives, doctrine, and discipline, were denominated Puritans. These last, considering that James

*Prince Henry is reported to have said, when once speaking of Sir Walter Raleigh: "I wonder at my father. Oh! were I a king, I would not keep so noble a bird in so vile a cage."

+ The scrupulousness of the Puritans has been ridiculed as if they contended merely for trifles, and philosophers now smile at the pertinacity with which they refused to conform to the cut of a robe, or the use of a ceremony which may be considered as unimportant. The defenders of high church principles, who attempt to extenuate the conduct of the king and bishops, by representing the subjects of dispute as trifles, unintentionally pronounce the severest censure upon those who so rigorously enforced them; nothing but the most downright despotism, the veriest wantonness of tyranny, would persist in forcing another to obey in a trifle of no importance, merely for the pleasure of extorting cbedience, when the other accounted that trifle a matter of conscience. But the Puritans had studied human nature too deeply, and were too well acquainted with the influence that show and form have upon the inultitude to account either trifles; nor do they deserve the name of philosophers who affect to despise them. In politics in our day, we have seen what fearful energy they can be made to possess. A cockade, or short hair, are