The ungainliness of James’s person, his lack of courage on certain occasions (he was by no means a constant coward), and the feebleness of his limbs might be attributed to pre-natal influences; he was injured before he was born by the sufferings of his mother at the time of Riccio’s murder.  His deep dissimulation he learnt in his bitter childhood and harassed youth.  His ingenious mind was trained to pedantry; he did nothing worse, and nothing more congenial to the cruel superstitions of his age, than in his encouragement of witch trials and witch burnings promoted by the Scottish clergy down to the early part of the eighteenth century.

His plantation of Ulster by Scottish settlers has greatly affected history down to our own times, while the most permanent result of the awards by which he stimulated the colonisation of Nova Scotia has been the creation of hereditary knighthoods or baronetcies.

His encouragement of learning left its mark in the foundation of the Town’s College of Edinburgh, on the site of Kirk-o’-Field, the scene of his father’s murder.

The south-western Highlands, from Lochaber to Islay and Cantyre, were, in his reign, the scene of constant clan feuds and repressions, resulting in the fall of the Macdonalds, and the rise of the Campbell chief, Argyll, to the perilous power later wielded by the Marquis against Charles I. Many of the sons of the dispossessed Macdonalds, driven into Ireland, were to constitute the nucleus of the army of Montrose.  In the Orkneys and Shetlands the constant turbulence of Earl Patrick and his family ended in the annexation of the islands to the Crown (1612), and the Earl’s execution (1615).

CHAPTER XXIV.  CHARLES I.

The reign of Charles I. opened with every sign of the tempests which were to follow.  England and Scotland were both seething with religious fears and hatreds.  Both parties in England, Puritans and Anglicans, could be satisfied with nothing less than complete domination.  In England the extreme Puritans, with their yearning after the Genevan presbyterian discipline, had been threatening civil war even under Elizabeth.  James had treated them with a high hand and a proud heart.  Under Charles, wedded to a “Jezebel,” a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, the Puritan hatred of such prelates as Laud expressed itself in threats of murder; while heavy fines and cruel mutilations were inflicted by the party in power.  The Protestant panic, the fear of a violent restoration of Catholicism in Scotland, never slumbered.  In Scotland Catholics were at this time bitterly persecuted, and believed that a presbyterian general massacre of them all was being organised.  By the people the Anglican bishops and the prayer-book were as much detested as priests and the Mass.  When Charles placed six prelates on his Privy Council, and recognised the Archbishop of St Andrews, Spottiswoode, as first in precedence among his subjects, the nobles were angry and jealous.  Charles would not do away with the infatuated Articles of Perth.  James, as he used to say, had “governed Scotland by the pen” through his Privy Council.  Charles knew much less than James of the temper of the Scots, among whom he had never come since his infancy, and his Privy Council with six bishops was apt to be even more than commonly subservient.