here is something in this story which has touched the
universal heart, and the world still weeps over it. But we do not hear
that it ever cost her son one pang. James was twenty years old when
Elizabeth signed the fatal paper, and if he ever made an effort to save
his mother or shed a single tear over her fate, history does not
mention it. Perhaps it was in recognition of this, or it may have been
in reward for his championship of episcopacy, that Elizabeth made James
her heir and successor. Whatever {295} was the impelling motive, the
protracted struggle between the two nations came to a strange ending;
not the supremacy of an English king in Scotland, as had been so often
attempted, but the reign of a Scottish king in England. Elizabeth died
in 1603, leaving to the son of Mary her crown, and a few days later
James arrived in London, was greeted by the shouts of his English
subjects, and crowned James I., King of England, upon the Stone of
Destiny.

The limits of this sketch do not permit more than the briefest mention
of the period between the union of the crowns, and the legislative
union, a century later, when the two kingdoms became actually one. Its
chief features were the resistance to encroachments upon the polity and
organization of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, the cruelty and
oppressions used by Charles I. to enforce the use of the liturgy of the
Church of England, the formation of the "National Covenant," a sacred
bond by which the Covenanters solemnly pledged an eternal fidelity to
their Church, the alliance between the Scotch Covenanters and English
Puritans, and the consequences to Scotland {296} of the overthrow of
the monarchy by Cromwell. Still later (1689) came the rising of the
Highland chiefs and clans, the Jacobites, as the adherents of the
Stuarts are called, an attempt by the Catholics in the North to bring
about the restoration of the exiled King or his son, the Pretender.

Statesmen in England, and some in Scotland, believed there would be no
peace until the two countries were organically joined. In the face of
great opposition a treaty of union was ratified by the Scottish
Parliament in 1707. The country was given a representation of
forty-five members in the English House of Commons, and sixteen peers
in the House of Lords, and it was provided that the Presbyterian Church
should remain unchanged in worship, doctrine, and government "to the
people of the land in all succeeding