the unworthy uses to which it was put. Hector Boece, John
Major, and Ninian Winzet were all three faithful sons of the Church, and
all three cried aloud at the venality, avarice, and luxurious living of
the higher clergy. "But now, for many years," wrote Major, "we have been
shepherds whose only care it is to find pasture for themselves, men
neglectful of the duties of religion. By open flattery do the worthless
sons of our nobility get the governance of convents _in commendam_, and
they covet these ample revenues, not for the good help that they thence
might render to their brethren, but solely for the high position that
these places offer." To the same effect Ninian Winzet wrote after the
judgment had come. "The special roots of all mischief," he says, "be the
two infernal monsters, pride and avarice, of the which unhappily has
up-sprung the election of unqualified bishops and other pastors in
Scotland."

This spectacle of the national Church, with its disproportionate wealth
and its selfish, incompetent, and often degraded officials, could not
but be a growing offence to the developing intelligence of the nation;
and to quicken this feeling there were minor grievances which were an
ancient ground of complaint on the part of the laity against their
spiritual advisers. On every important event of his life the poor man
was harassed by exactions which Sir David Lyndsay has so keenly touched
in his _Satire of the Three Estates_. Says the Pauper in the interlude:

"Quhair will ye find that law, tell gif ye can,
To tak thine ky, fra ane pure husbandman?
Ane for my father, and for my wyfe ane uther,
And the third cow, he tuke fra Mald my mother."

And Diligence replies:

"It is thair law, all that they have in use,
Tocht it be cow, sow, ganer, gryse, or guse."

If the poor had these grounds of discontent, the rich likewise had
theirs; and they made bitter complaint against the protracted processes
in the consistorial courts, and the frequent appeals to the Roman Curia,
by which both their means and their patience were exhausted.

It was in the face of feelings such as these that, in the spring of
1559, the Queen Regent entered on her new line of policy toward her
refractory subjects. Her first steps were taken with her usual prudence.
A provincial council of the clergy was summoned to meet on March 1st for
the express purpose of dealing with the religious difficulty. It was the
last provincial