f some letters which proved that
the Catholic earls, Huntly and Errol, were intriguing with Spain. The
offence was lightly passed over, but when the earls, with Crawford and
Montrose, drew to a head in the north, James, with much more than his
usual spirit, headed the army which advanced against them: they fled from
him near Aberdeen, surrendered, and were for a brief time imprisoned. As
nobody knows how Fortune's wheel may turn, and as James, hard pressed by
the preachers, could neglect no chance of support, he would never gratify
the Kirk by crushing the Catholic earls, by temperament he was no
persecutor. His calculated leniency caused him years of trouble.

Meanwhile James, after issuing a grotesque proclamation about the causes
of his spirited resolve, sailed in October to woo a sea-king's daughter
over the foam, the Princess Anne of Denmark. After happy months passed,
he wrote, "in drinking and driving ower," he returned with his bride in
May 1590.

The General Assembly then ordered prayers for the Puritans oppressed in
England; none the less Elizabeth, the oppressor, continued to patronise
the plots of the Puritans of Scotland. They now lent their approval to
the foe of James's minister, Maitland, namely, the wild Francis Stewart,
Earl of Bothwell, a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell. This young man had
the engaging quality of gay and absolute recklessness; he was dear to
ladies and the wild young gentry of Lothian and the Borders; he broke
prisons, released friends, dealt with wizards, aided by Lady Gowrie stole
into Holyrood, his ruling ambition being to capture the king. The
preachers prayed for "sanctified plagues" against James, and regarded
Bothwell favourably as a sanctified plague.

A strange conspiracy within Clan Campbell, in which Huntly and Maitland
were implicated, now led to the murder, among others, of the bonny Earl
of Murray by Huntly in partnership with Maitland (February 1592).

James was accused of having instigated this crime, from suspicion of
Murray as a partner in the wild enterprises of Bothwell, and was so hard
pressed by sermons that, in the early summer of 1592, he allowed the
Black Acts to be abrogated, and "the Charter of the liberties of the
Kirk" to be passed. One of these liberties was to persecute Catholics in
accordance with the penal Acts of 1560. The Kirk was almost an _imperium
in imperio_, but was still prohibited from appointing the time and place
of its own Gener