at the strife with the nobles was at an
end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside
their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each
noble, "holding his chief enemy by the hand," walked in his doublet to
the market-cross of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.

[Sidenote: The Scotch people.]

The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was
master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he
was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst
the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This
was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of
small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The
peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant
subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a
political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in
the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence
the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for
existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour,
to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to
watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were
foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander
or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every
homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and
nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while
barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's
call on forays as pitiless, this was the rough school in which the
Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a
school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a
meaner race into slaves only hardened and ennobled the temper of the
Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he
drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the
caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the noble self dependence, the
patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere
did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was
because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil
was ready for the seed. The developement of a noble manhood brought with
it the c