A mission was sent from Holyrood, including James’s handsome new favourite, the Master of Gray, with his cousin, Logan of Restalrig, who sold the Master to Walsingham.  The envoys were to beg for Mary’s life.  The Master had previously betrayed her; but he was not wholly lost, and in London he did his best, contrary to what is commonly stated, to secure her life.  He thus incurred the enmity of his former allies in the English Court, and, as he had foreseen, he was ruined in Scotland—­his previous letters, hostile to Mary, being betrayed by his aforesaid cousin, Logan of Restalrig.

On February 8, 1567, ended the lifelong tragedy of Mary Stuart.  The woman whom Elizabeth vainly moved Amyas Paulet to murder was publicly decapitated at Fotheringay.  James vowed that he would not accept from Elizabeth “the price of his mother’s blood.”  But despite the fury of his nobles James sat still and took the money, at most some 4000 pounds annually,—­when he could get it.

During the next fifteen years the reign of James, and his struggle for freedom from the Kirk, was perturbed by a long series of intrigues of which the details are too obscure and complex for presentation here.  His chief Minister was now John Maitland, a brother of Lethington, and as versatile, unscrupulous, and intelligent as the rest of that House.  Maitland had actually been present, as Lethington’s representative, at the tragedy of the Kirk-o’-Field.  He was Protestant, and favoured the party of England.  In the State the chief parties were the Presbyterian nobles, the majority of the gentry or lairds, and the preachers on one side; and the great Catholic families of Huntly, Morton (the title being now held by a Maxwell), Errol, and Crawford on the other.  Bothwell (a sister’s son of Mary’s Bothwell) flitted meteor-like, more Catholic than anything else, but always plotting to seize James’s person; and in this he was backed by the widow of Gowrie and the preachers, and encouraged by Elizabeth.  In her fear that James would join the Catholic nobles, whom the preachers eternally urged him to persecute, Elizabeth smiled on the Protestant plots—­thereby, of course, fostering any inclination which James may have felt to seek Catholic aid at home and abroad.  The plots of Mary were perpetually confused by intrigues of priestly emissaries, who interfered with the schemes of Spain and mixed in the interests of the Guises.

A fact which proved to be of the highest importance was the passing, in July 1587, of an Act by which much of the ecclesiastical property of the ancient Church was attached to the Crown, to be employed in providing for the maintenance of the clergy.  But James used much of it in making temporal lordships:  for example, at the time of the mysterious Gowrie Conspiracy (August 1600), we find that the Earl of Gowrie had obtained the Church lands of the Abbey of Scone, which his brother, the Master of Ruthven, desired.  With the large revenues now at his disposal