In 1582 Elizabeth was backing the exiled Presbyterian Earl of Angus and the Earl of Gowrie (Ruthven), while Lennox was contemplating a coup d’etat in Edinburgh (August 27).  Gowrie, with the connivance of England, struck the first blow.  He, Mar, and their accomplices captured James at Ruthven Castle, near Perth (August 23, “the Raid of Ruthven"), with the approval of the General Assembly of the Kirk.  It was a Douglas plot managed by Angus and Elizabeth.  James Stewart of the Guard (now Earl of Arran) was made prisoner; Lennox fled the country.  In October 1582, in a Parliament at Holyrood, the conspirators passed Acts indemnifying themselves, and the General Assembly approved them.  These Acts were rescinded later, and James had learned for life his hatred of the Presbyterians who had treacherously seized and insulted their king. {144}

In May 1583 Lennox died in Paris, leaving an heir.  On June 27 James made his escape, “a free king,” to the castle of St Andrews:  he proclaimed an amnesty and feigned reconciliation with his captor, the Earl of Gowrie, chief of the house so hateful to Mary—­the Ruthvens.  At the same time James placed himself in friendly relations with his kinsfolk, the Guises, the terror of Protestants.  He had already been suspected, on account of Lennox, as inclined to Rome:  in fact, he was always a Protestant, but baited on every side—­by England, by the Kirk, by a faction of his nobles:  he intrigued for allies in every direction.

The secret history of his intrigues has never been written.  We find the persecuted and astute lad either in communication with Rome, or represented by shady adventurers as employing them to establish such communications.  At one time, as has been recently discovered, a young man giving himself out as James’s bastard brother (a son of Darnley begotten in England) was professing to bear letters from James to the Pope.  He was arrested on the Continent, and James could not be brought either to avow or disclaim his kinsman!

A new Lennox, son of the last, was created a duke; a new Bothwell, Francis Stewart (nephew of Mary’s Bothwell), began to rival his uncle in turbulence.  Knowing that Anglo-Scottish plots to capture him again were being woven daily by Angus and others, James, in February 1584, wrote a friendly and compromising letter to the Pope.  In April, Arran (James Stewart) crushed a conspiracy by seizing Gowrie at Dundee, and then routing a force with which Mar and Angus had entered Scotland.  Gowrie, confessing his guilt as a conspirator, was executed at Stirling (May 2, 1584), leaving, of course, his feud to his widow and son.  The chief preachers fled; Andrew Melville was already in exile, with several others, in England.  Melville, in February, had been charged with preaching seditious sermons, had brandished a Hebrew Bible at the Privy Council, had refused secular jurisdiction and appealed to a spiritual court, by which he was certain to be acquitted.  Henceforward, when charged with uttering treasonable libels from the pulpit, the preachers were wont to appeal, in the first instance, to a court of their own cloth, and on this point James in the long-run triumphed over the Kirk.