e dregs of time, and receive no alteration these
forty-five years or more?"

CHAPTER II

THE KING OF SCOTS

Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had
greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the
character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular
feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought
peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth
of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of
a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled mass of
impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have
given scope to the nobleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its
bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the
throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the
natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its
kings.

[Sidenote: James Stuart.]

Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most men had looked forward to a
violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the
pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of
Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady
Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord
Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary title under the will of
Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted,
there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth,
had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in
the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox
by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no
general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the
realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The mass of the Catholics,
who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded
that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his
mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for
Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had
already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the
other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people,
bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and
upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and