In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and vote in Parliament.  In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the ‘Basilicon Doron,’ came to the knowledge of the clergy:  it revealed his opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of the preachers to introduce a democracy “with themselves as Tribunes of the People,” a very fair definition of their policy.  It was to stop them that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep the pulpiteers in order.  They were refusing, in face of the king’s licence, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for they took various powers into their hands.

Meanwhile James’s relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly.  Plots were encouraged against him, but it is not probable that England was aware of the famous and mysterious conspiracy of the young Earl of Gowrie, who was warmly welcomed by Elizabeth on his return from Padua, by way of Paris.  He had been summoned by Bruce, James’s chief clerical adversary, and the Kirk had high hopes of the son of the man of the Raid of Ruthven.  He led the opposition to taxation for national defence in a convention of June-July 1600.  On August 5, in his own house at Perth, where James, summoned thither by Gowrie’s younger brother, had dined with him, Gowrie and his brother were slain by John Ramsay, a page to the king.

This affair was mysterious.  The preachers, and especially Bruce, refused to accept James’s own account of the events, at first, and this was not surprising.  Gowrie was their one hope among the peers, and the story which James told is so strange that nothing could be stranger or less credible except the various and manifestly mendacious versions of the Gowrie party. {156}

James’s version of the occurrences must be as much as possible condensed, and there is no room for the corroborating evidence of Lennox and others.  As the king was leaving Falkland to hunt a buck early on August 5, the Master of Ruthven, who had ridden over from his brother’s house in Perth, accosted him.  The Master declared that he had on the previous evening arrested a man carrying a pot of gold; had said nothing to Gowrie; had locked up the man and his gold in a room, and now wished James to come instantly and examine the fellow.  The king’s curiosity and cupidity were less powerful than his love of sport:  he would first kill his buck.  During the chase James told the story to Lennox, who corroborated.  Ruthven sent a companion to inform his brother; none the less, when the king, with a considerable following, did appear at Gowrie’s house, no preparation for his reception had been made.