e man believed to be his murderer! Even her friends deserted her. A
prisoner at Lochleven Castle, she was compelled to sign an act of
abdication in favor of her son. A few of the Queen's adherents, the
Hamiltons, Argyles, Setons, Livingstons, Flemings, and others gathered
a small army in her support and aided her escape, which was quickly
followed by a defeat in an engagement near Glasgow. Mary then resolved
upon the step which led her by a long, dark, and dreary pathway to the
scaffold. She crossed into England and threw herself upon the mercy of
her cousin, Elizabeth.

Immediately upon the Queen's abdication her son, thirteen months old,
was crowned James VI. of Scotland. There was a powerful minority which
disapproved of all these proceedings; so now there was a Queen's party,
a King's party, the latter, under the {291} regency of Moray, having
the support of the Reformed clergy. These conditions promised a bitter
and prolonged contest, which promise was fully realized; and not until
1573 was the party of the Queen subdued. During the minority of the
King a new element had entered into the conflict. The Reformation in
Scotland had, as we have seen, under the vigorous leadership of John
Knox, assumed the Calvinistic type. In England, during the reign of
Elizabeth, a more modified form had been adopted--an episcopacy, with a
house of bishops, a liturgy, and a ritual. To the Scotch Reformers
this was a compromise with the Church of Rome, no less abhorrent to
them than papacy. The struggle resolved itself into one between the
advocates of these rival forms of Protestantism, each striving to
obtain ascendancy in the kingdom, and control of the King. Some of the
most moderate of the Protestants approved of restoring the
ecclesiastical estate which had disappeared from Parliament with the
Reformation, and having a body of Protestant clergy to sit with the
Lords and Commons. These questions, of such vital moment to the
consciences of many, were to others merely a cloak for {292} personal
ambitions and political intrigues. When James was seventeen years old,
the method already so familiar in Scotland, was resorted to. In order
to separate him from one set of villanous plotters, he was entrapped by
another by an invitation to visit Ruthven Castle, where he found
himself a prisoner, and when the plot failed, the Reformed clergy did
its best to shield the perpetrators, who had acted with their knowledge
and conse