the payment of this tax says much for the loyalty of the
Scotch priesthood and their unity with the people at this crisis of the
national history. In the second year, however, grumblings arose. It is
comprehensible that a nation unaccustomed to this pressure should
respond to it in a moment of enthusiasm, yet become uneasy under the
repetition when the enthusiasm had probably died away, especially if a
fear arose that it might become permanent. King James, however, adopted
a course not at all usual with governments when the power to exact has
once been placed in their hands. When the popular murmur came to his
ears he stopped at once the unpopular demand. How the paying of the
ransom was carried on, and how the maintenance of the King's state we
need not inquire. The Crown lands were no doubt extensive still. Some
years later another experiment of the same kind was made; the new tax,
however, being only twopence in the pound, and its object the payment of
expenses of a mission sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the
baby-princess Margaret and the equally juvenile dauphin--an object which
does not appear to have appealed to the sympathies of the people, since
we are told that it was the cause of immediate murmurs, the King not
only stopped the unpopular tax but returned the money to those who had
paid it--a most admirable but seldom followed example.

The curious system afterwards employed by all the Scots kings of tours
or "raids" of justice throughout the kingdom seems to have originated in
James's energetic reign, but he carried not only the officers of the
law, but occasionally his entire Parliament with him, moving about to
the different centres of Scotland with great impartiality. Sometimes
they met at Edinburgh, in the Great Parliament Hall in the Castle, and
made "many good laws if they could have been kept," says the chronicler;
sometimes at Perth, a favourite residence of the King; and on one
memorable occasion so far north as Inverness, where, impatient of
continual disquietude in the Highlands, James went to chastise the
caterans and bring them within the reach of law. This he did with a
severe and unsparing hand, seizing a number of the most eminent chiefs
who had been invited to meet him there, and executing certain dangerous
individuals among them without mercy. These summary measures would seem
to have borne immediate fruit in the almost complete subjugation of the
Highlands. But it was hard to