ctavians" was made to
regulate the distracted finance of the country. On April 13, 1596,
Walter Scott of Buccleuch made himself an everlasting name by the
bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong reiver, from the Castle
of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope. The period was
notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the Border,
celebrated in ballads.

James had determined to recall the exiled Catholic earls, undeterred by
the eloquence of "the last of all our sincere Assemblies," held with deep
emotion in March 1596. The earls came home; in September at Falkland
Palace Andrew Melville seized James by the sleeve, called him "God's
silly vassal," and warned him that Christ and his Kirk were the king's
overlords. Soon afterwards Mr David Black of St Andrews spoke against
Elizabeth in a sermon which caused diplomatic remonstrances. Black would
be tried, in the first instance, only by a Spiritual Court of his
brethren. There was a long struggle, the ministers appointed a kind of
standing Committee of Safety; James issued a proclamation dissolving it,
and, on December 17, inflammatory sermons led a deputation to try to
visit James, who was with the Lords of Session in the Tolbooth. Whether
under an alarm of a Popish plot or not, the crowd became so fierce and
menacing that the great Lachlan Maclean of Duart rode to Stirling to
bring up Argyll in the king's defence with such forces as he could
muster. The king retired to Linlithgow; the Rev. Mr Bruce, a famous
preacher credited with powers of prophecy, in vain appealed to the Duke
of Hamilton to lead the godly. By threatening to withdraw the Court and
Courts of Justice from Edinburgh James brought the citizens to their
knees, and was able to take order with the preachers.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.

James, in reducing the Kirk, relied as much on his cunning and
"kingcraft" as on his prerogative. He summoned a Convention of preachers
and of the Estates to Perth at the end of February 1597, and thither he
brought many ministers from the north, men unlike the zealots of Lothian
and the Lowlands. He persuaded them to vote themselves a General
Assembly; and they admitted his right to propose modifications in Church
government, to forbid unusual convocations (as in Edinburgh during the
autumn of 1596); they were not to preach against Acts of Parliament or of
Council, nor appoint preachers in the great towns