rse", and prepared the way for the Puritan
revolution. If the English succession enabled the king to suppress the
Scottish Assembly, the Assembly had its revenge, for the fear of it
brought a snare, and James may justly be considered one of the founders
of English dissent.

A violent hatred of the temporal claims of the Church also affected
James's attitude to Roman Catholicism. His Catholic subjects in Scotland
had not been in a position to do him any harm, and the son of Mary
Stuart could not but have some sympathy for his mother's
fellow-sufferers. Accordingly, we find him telling his first Parliament:
"I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our Mother Church, although
defiled with some infirmities and corruption". But, after the Gunpowder
Plot, and when he was engaged in a controversy with Cardinal Perron
about the right of the pope to depose kings, he came to prove that the
pope is Antichrist and "our Mother Church" none other than the Scarlet
Woman. His Scottish experience revealed clearly enough that the claims
of Rome and Geneva were identical in their essence. There is on record
an incident that will serve to illustrate his position. In 1615, the
Scottish Privy Council reported to him the case of a Jesuit, John
Ogilvie. He bade them examine Ogilvie: if he proved to be but a priest
who had said mass, he was to go into banishment; but if he was a
practiser of sedition, let him die. The unfortunate priest showed in his
reply that he held the same view of the royal supremacy as did the
Presbyterian clergy. It was enough: they hanged him.

Once more, James's Irish policy seems to have been influenced by his
experience of the Scottish Highlands. He had conceived the plan which
was afterwards carried out in the Plantation of Ulster--"planting
colonies among them of answerable inland subjects, that within short
time may reforme and civilize the best-inclined among them; rooting out
or transporting the barbarous or stubborne sort, and planting civilitie
in their roomes".[87] Although James continued to carry on his efforts
in this direction after 1603, yet it may be said that the English
succession prevented his giving effect to his scheme, and that it also
interfered with his intentions regarding the abolition of hereditary
jurisdictions, which remained to "wracke the whole land" till after the
Rising of 1745.

On the 5th April, 1603, King James set out from Edinburgh to enter upon
the inheritance which had fallen to