person, to wield in his name the royal power, became
the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at
Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to
fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard;
or strove to baffle the nobles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from
France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to
Stirling only saved him from seizure at Doune; and a few months later,
as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on
his bridle-rein. "Better bairns greet than bearded men," was the gruff
answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king
saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.

[Sidenote: His purpose.]

Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of
brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight
of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical
courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in
himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about
him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious
cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his
"discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and
ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear
the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the
turbulent nobles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of
Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town
below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or
political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The
republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious
school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its
consecration of rebellion, its assertion of human equality, its
declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated
the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years
James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as "infamous
invectives," and would have had their readers punished "even as it were
their authors risen again." His temper and purpose were in fact simply
those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core;
and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which
the Stuarts had done.