attacks subsequently, however, withdraw-| independence, it has had its law troubles, ing his royal veto. In Spain, Naples, the more than one action for libel having been · Papal Dominions, those of Austria, Russia, commenced against it. James Silk Buckand Prussia, the hunched-back jester has ingham, the traveller and author, took this been often under ban as an unholy thing, or course, in consequence of the publication of only tolerated in a mutilated form. Up to articles disparaging a club of his originating, the commencement of the late war, strict known as the "British and Foreign Inmeasures of this kind were in operation stitute." A Jew clothes-man, named Hart, upon the Russian frontier, but "Punch" obtained a small sum as damages from now is freely accorded ingress in the Czar's" Punch." dominions probably as a means of keeping up the feeling of antagonism toward England.

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But Alfred Bunn, lessee of Drury Lane Theatre, libretto-scribbler, and author of certain trashy theatrical books, though most vehemently "pitched into, " Its success has provoked innumerable resorted to other modes than legal redress. rivals and imitators, from the days of He produced a pamphlet of a shape and Judy," Toby," "The Squib," "Joe appearance closely resembling his tormentor, Miller," "Great Gun," and "Puppet filled not only with quizzical, satirical, and Show, to those of "Diogenes" and rhyming articles directed against Lemon "Falstaff." None have achieved permanent a'Beckett, and Jerrold (characterizing them popularity, and future attempts would most as Thick-head, Sleek-head, and Wronglikely be attended with similar failure, as "Punch" has a firm hold on the likings of the English people, and especially LondonIt fairly amounts to one of their institutions. Like all journals of merit and

ers.

head), but with the caricature cuts of each. Whether in direct consequence or not, it is certain that "the poet Bunn" was unmolested in future.

THE WIND. A truly mysterious agent is the all sorts of manufacture. As an entertainer it is wind, viewless itself, yet having an eye withal unrivalled. How sublimely it brings up the toward which if one finds himself moving he thunder shower; how beautifully it floats along will be sure to feel its force if he does not see its the sky the billowy cloud. It causes the hail or form. It is strong-armed also, beating down op-rain-drop to patter against the window; and, if position with relentless strength. Its voice is terrible sometimes, and sometimes softer than a flute. Now it has the plaint of an eolian harp; then, life-like, whistles loud and clear. It sobs among the pine cones, rustles in the chestnuts' summer leaves, and rattles in the bare branches and falling foliage of the autumn. Almost noiselessly does this invisible tenant of the space above us seem to creep, though in fact unseen, along the waving grass and corn, which bend in reverence as it passes.

The wind has been said already to have an eye. It has breath too, now smiting in the sirocco or simoon, now cutting down men with the norther and prostrating in the hurricane. Generally it may be inferred that it possesses a good character. The common saying, that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, implies that usually it is a good creature enough. It blows our vessels to pieces sometimes, indeed, but then how many more does it blow, with their rich freight of men and merchandise, across the oceans? Winds derive their character, as men do, from the country of their origin. Those from the land of boreas are apt to be savage in their attacks as the white bears of the pole, while those from the tropics softly kiss our cheeks and woo us to repose.

It makes itself useful in a thousand ways, one of which is turning mills and powerfully helping

you are a good-for-nothing sloven or slattern in your housekeeping, it will drive the snow or water through the broken pane or dilapidated roof. While fishing in the lake or lying under a shady tree upon its banks, the wind is ever ready to amuse one. Now it stirs up myriads of ripples, running after one another over its surface, and now it fans the lounger with the big branches of the chestnut above his head.

It is not always, however, that it appears as master of the revels. In the character of avenger it now and then rushes upon the stage and makes its audience tremble. Wide forests are instantly laid low by its irresistible yet viewless arm; dwellings are torn asunder and crushed beneath its weight; men and animals are lifted up and whirled about like snow-flakes in a winter's storm. So it is on the land.

At sea its power is terrific. The ocean is lashed into rolling mountains. Earth and the heavens meet and mingle together in night and chaos. The elements put forth their voices, but above all their horrible thunder the wind rides triumphant and utters its trumpet summons to the universal uproar of battle. It rages, it screams, it shrieks. Over all other sounds, the blast of the invisible is heard; and that power which is the cause of the boiling of the deep, the agony of the cracking ship, yet is itself forever unseen. -Newark Daily Advertiser.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 650.-8 NOVEMBER, 1856.

From The National Review.

THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.

At length, after a debate, they repaired with their reply to the lords; and in spite of

The History of the Kirk of Scotland. By the direct and elaborate narrative which Mr. David Calderwood, sometime Minister had been laid before them, they declared of Crailing. Edited from the original Ms." that they were not certain of the treason, in the British Museum. By the Rev. R. and therefore could make no mention of it." Thompson. Printed for the Wodrow So- They would say in general," that the king ciety. Edinburgh, 1845. had been delivered from a great danger; Gowrie; or, the King's Plot. By G. P. further than this they could not and would R. James. London: Sims and M'Intyre. not commit themselves. James's own letIn the months of August and September, ters were produced. If the contents of them in the year 1600, a controversy was going were more than naked lies, the conspiracy forward in Edinburgh of a very singular seemed as certain as evidence could make it: description. James VI., king of Scotland the council inquired if they would consent and king-expectant of England, had declared at least to read these letters. The ungrahimself to have been exposed to a frightful cious divines replied that they could not danger, from which he had been delivered read the king's letters to their congregations by a series of miracles. There was no ap- when they doubted the truth of them. It parent ambiguity in the circumstances; and were better, and safer, to introduce a qualiin the main features of the story no de-fying clause, and say, "if the report be The hand of a ruffian true." Perhaps no anointed sovereign, ficiency of evidence. had been on the king's throat; the point of heathen or Christian, was ever placed by a dagger at his breast. In facts so palpable his subjects in so uncomplimentary a situaas these he could not easily be mistaken; tion. The lords of the council threatened; were never efficacious with and while he published in the form of a pro- but threats clamation an elaborate narrative of the at- Scotch clergy. James himself hurried back: tack upon him, he was anxious that his sub- to Edinburgh to reason them out of their injects should at once be made aware of the credulity; but his words were as powerless misfortune which they had so narrowly es- as his writings. They would offer no caped, and should unite with him in an ex- thanksgivings for an escape from a conspipression of gratitude to the Power which racy unless they were assured that there had had interfered so signally in his behalf. been a conspiracy from which to escape; in The ministers of the church in Edinburgh other words, unless they could satisfy themwere therefore invited to assist in this proper selves that the king was not lying to them. and natural proceeding; and on so remarka-"Conviction," they said, "was the gift of ble an occasion objection could not have God:" and "it had not pleased God," in been easily anticipated. The duty which the present instance, that they should be was laid before them was obvious, and convinced. ought to have been welcome; to hesitate was almost to declare themselves accomplices in

the treason.

The ministers, on their part, had no thought of disloyalty; and yet such was there singular opinion of the king's character, that the course which seemed so plain was full of difficulty. They did not wish to affront James; but still they hesitated. The injunctions of the council were delivered to them; instead of obeying these injunctions, they held a meeting to discuss the conduct which they were to pursue.

DCL. LIVING AGE.

21 VOL. XV.

We propose, with the assistance of the Calderwood papers, which contain all the known particulars, to examine the occasion of this embarrassing collision, the famous so-called plot of the Earl of Gowrie and his brother to imprison or destroy the king. The ministers, it will be seen, were not wholly wrong; and yet James hardly deserved the position in which they placed him. If we could forget the fearful features of the story, the quarrel, which lingered for years, would form one of the most grotesque episodes in the history of these islands.

At all

1

events, both in itself and in its consequen- | tunately at last its chief pleasure, was to tie

ces, it is curiously illustrative of the condi- the hands of a treacherous nobility, which tion of Scotland in the last years in which was ever on the watch for its destruction. that country existed as a separate kingdom. Thus even the Reformers were driven to To enable our readers to understand the increase the social disorder by weakening circumstances (or to understand them at the executive authority; and for the represleast as far as they are ever likely to be un-sion of the normal forms of human wickedderstood), we must refresh their recollection with a few words of preamble. Most people have read some history of North Britain in the sixteenth century: we believe, however, that they never met with any history more difficult to remember, because it is a mere record of anarchy; a string of incidents linked together in order of time, but with no organic connection.

The sixty years which followed the death of James V. may be described briefly as a period in which every conceivable element of disorder combined to make government impossible. Minorities, civil wars, wars of religion, treasons, villanies, depositions, had followed one upon another with scarcely an interval; and the sixth James, who was in all likelihood conceived in crime, whose cradle was in the midst of murder, and whose earliest recollections must have been thronged with images of terror, grew to manhood the victim of a series of revolutions, in which the seizure of his own person was the unvarying preliminary movement. When we turn the pages of the annals of that time, we wonder that any good could have befallen at last a nation among whom such things were possible; we wonder, at least, till we remember the Reformation, which alone formed the late and nobler type of the Scottish people. There was, however, this difference between the Reformation in Scotland and in England, that here it was the work of the government,

ness there was no power any where. Every petty lord or chieftain was a king in his own eyes and in the eyes of his vassals. They lived each as they pleased, doing good or doing evil as their disposition prompted them; and faction, treason, and revenge, tore the heart of the country. The sword was the only ruler. Enormous crimes were followed by enormous retaliations; and the spasmodic efforts of justice by fresh villanies. Beton and David Rizzio were despatched by Lynch-law when their existence had become intolerable. Darnley, in his turn, died for Rizzio; and Benton's executioners slept all in bloody graves; while the few who were alive to the shame of Scotland, and struggled for order and justice, men like the Regent Murray, Lennox, Morton, and Ruthven, paid for their perilous heroism by assassination or on the scaffold.

And these larger tragedies were but the symbols of the ferocity by which the whole lives of men were saturated. Scott's great scene in the dungeon at Torquilstone was borrowed from the literal history of those frightful years: a wretched churchman was roasted on the bars of his prison fire-place by the Earl of Cassilis, till he signed away his lands. Lady Forbes and all her household were burnt alive by the Gordons in the flames of their own castle. Every town and hamlet, every grange and tower, had its separate tale of horror; and the story of there it Scotland until James VI. came to man's established itself in spite of the government; estate might be written in blood. In the and the attitude of mutual opposition out- frightful dissolution of social order, even lived its proper causes. The original discord justice could be executed only by formal was never properly appeased; and Protes- crime; and, bred in the midst of these contantism, while it purified and ennobled the vulsions, a king in name, but powerless as a masses of the population, was unable to cockboat in a hurricane, the boy grew up extend its renovating influence among the the nucleus of every conspiracy, the playcourt and the aristocracy. The Protestant thing of a ferocious nobility. Statesmen on faith, in its proper spirit and sense, except whom he could lean, dignified by established for the few years which followed the expul- authority and length of years, there were sion of Mary, was regarded by the ruling none for him. The conception of statesmen, classes with jealousy and dread; and far as experience had brought them in contact from being able to lend tone and strength to with himself, was of hard fierce men, alterauthority, its chief business, and unfor-nately cruel tyrants and the victims of rivals

like themselves. The guardian of one day | own notions, arrived at a conclusion exactly passing to the scaffold on the next was the the opposite. Hence, as much by their familiar issue of each oscillation of fortune. fault as by his own, he grew up in a false relation with the ministers of the Kirk; and when he came to manhood, and was no longer an absolute cipher, we can scarcely wonder that they agreed worse and worse.

This was not a happy training for any man, still less for a man compounded of materials such as those out of which nature had framed James Stuart. In a happier sphere, he might have grown up an innocent Of governing Scotland, in the real sense of and not perhaps a wholly useless person. That, educated as he was, he became nothing worse than England and Scotland knew him to be, may be fairly reckoned to his credit. He could not have been great-the dwarf cannot be cultivated into the giant, or the mule into the war-horse- but his constitution was harmless, and could have been turned to good of a kind; with good fortune he might have made a useful Cathedral-dean or University-professor.

would erect a counterfeit of the papal theory, so James would have his counterfeit of the opposing theory. He would be the Henry VIII. of Scotland, head of the Kirk, the ass in the lion's skin, the supreme authority in all causes, spiritual and civil, in his dominions.

the word, he was altogether incapable. His occupation soon resolved itself into a foolish and undignified struggle with the Assembly. The ministers did not choose to remember that he was no longer a child. They lectured him in private; they preached at him in their pulpits; the king's manner, the king's actions, the king's words, were the topics of favorite disquisition with which, week after week, the Edinburgh congregations were entertained. James, on the other Circumstances, however, were not so kind hand, very naturally hating them, intrigued to him. At the close of the civil wars of against their liberties; and in prosecuting 1570-73, when the Reformers were for a his quarrel, made himself as ridiculous and time absolute, he was committed-being mischievious as themselves. While the then six years old to the care of Buchanan. country was being wrecked for want of govThe choice was not a wise one. Buchanan ernment, the king of it was busying himself was an excellent scholar, he had large in ecclesiastical polemics. As the ministers knowledge of books, and skilled in book instruction; but, although his course in public life had been upright and just, he was a passionate polemic. A book in which he had exposed the queen's complicity in her husband's murder was notorious through the world; and the public accuser of the mother was ill selected as the guardian of the child. We might smile at the grotesqueness of Nor had the prince either friend or relation the dispute, were it not for the frightful who could lend to his life any intervals of consequences. It is not with impunity howcheerfulness. His father and his uncle were ever, that men who are in high place in this murdered; Mary was a prisoner in Eng-world can indulge in these unseemly triland; and while the Protestants were in flings; and while the king and the clergy power, her name was only mentioned in his were bickering idly for pre-eminence, the hearing coupled with execrations. Affec- crimes, black and horrible, for the represtion, in the human sense of the word, there sion of which king and clergy, if they had was no human heart to feel for James, or to known it, alike existed, - grew like the warm into life any answering emotion in weeds in a neglected garden. A few witches himself: his heart, if he was born with one, and warlocks here and there were "wirried soon became dry as the dust. and burnt; " but there was the limit of the While Buchanan, again, taught him books executive authority. The retainers of the and grammar, he had not found it necessary noble houses fought in Edinburgh streets beto teach him the use of an authority of fore James' eyes; he looked on in helpless which the Protestants intended to leave him impotence, for what was he to stay them? but the name. The supremacy in matters Twice after he had come to man's estate he temporal of the spiritual power over the was attacked in his own palace to be secular was held as absolutely by the General abducted like a girl. And men whom he Assembly as by Gregory VII.; and James, denounced as traitors appeared carelessly in as a matter of course, being left to form his their places at the council-board. If he

complained, his answer was a smile of in- | mother to take good night, he rapped rudely solence. at the king's chamber-door, which was

The state to which the nation was re-opened by the Earl of Athol. The king duced may be seen from the following extracts, taken almost at random from Calderwood:

gifts, his combined vanity and imbecility, may have protected him from the full consciousness of his humiliation; yet a school more unfitted for the cultivation of any kind of virtue, kingly or other, it is hard to con

would have gone to the queen's chamber, but the door was locked; and the Duke of Lennox), Athol, Ochiltree, Spinie, and Dunipace, went between him and the door. The "James Gray, brother of the master of king seeing no other refuge, asked what they Gray, ravished a gentlewoman, apparent meant? Came they to seek his life? Let heir to her father John Carnegie; but was them take it: they would not get his soul. rendered again to her father. She was Bothwell, sitting upon his knees, and again ravished by the said James out of M'Colville with him, said he sought not his Robert Gowsser's house in Edinburgh, where life, but came to seek his hignness' pardon she and her father remained for the time; for the raid of the Abbey, and the raid of she was hailled down a close to the North Falkland Loche, and conveyed over in a boat. They viously made to seize or kill James) — offer(attempts which he had preset her on a man's saddle and conveyed her ing to thole an assize for witchcraft, and for away, her hair hanging about her face. The seeking the king's life; and upon these and Lord Hume keeped the High Street with such other conditions they agreed, and his armed men till the fact was accomplished. majesty pardoned him all bygans." Upon Monday, the 11th of June (1593), the provost, enterprising with some bailiffs beThe royal robes must have been a bitter tween ten and eleven at night to apprehend livery when the wearer of them was exposed James Henderson who had been at the to treatment such as this. James's peculiar ravishing, was repulsed. A debosched minister, named Bishop, took the provost by the throat, after he had charged Henderson to ward. The Laird of Hatton withstood that any man should have him-yea, they shot at the provost. The following day the provost went to the king and complained. The ceive. It is to be remembered, too, that as king desired to know if they could complain no act of his own gave him the crown, so he of any that was about him. In the mean was not at liberty to lay aside. Unfitted by time my Lord Hume, the chief author of the nature to govern an ordinary household, he riot, was standing by. They answered noth- was compelled, whether he would or no, to ing, because they expected for no justice. govern a kingdom - or to seem to govern it Here, too, is an account of a piteous scene - at all events to maintain himself in his once witnessed in Edinburgh streets: outward position. If he could have thrown himself, when he made the discovery of his weakness, on the people and on the Reformation—if he had sought help from Elizabeth and called to his counsels the few nobles who were inclined to the English allihave given away; and if he had escaped asance, his difficulties would in great measure sassination, his course might have been easy. Such conduct, however, required a courage which had not been given to him, and qualities which no other Scotchman of his day possessed. The Reformers had taught him to hate them; he naturally looked for his friends among his mother's supporters; and all around him moving in crooked courses, it is little wonder that he followed with the stream, and took his mould from the influences which bore upon him.

"In the same year, at afternoon, the 22nd of July, there came certain poor women out of the south country with fifteen bloody shirts, to complain to the king that their husbands, sons, and servants were cruelly murdered in their own houses by the Laird of Johnstone, themselves spoiled, and nothing left them. The poor women, seeing they could not get satisfaction, caused the bloody shirts to be carried by pioneers through the town of Edinburgh. The people were much moved, and cried out for vengeance against the king and his council.”

It was a wild miserable world; but how little the king could do to set it right might have been seen but two days later. We quote the next entry as it stands :

"On Tuesday, the 24th of July, the Earl Bothwell came to the palace of Holyrood House. At the back gate which openeth to the Lady Gowrie's house, as the Lady Athol was coming from the king and queen to her

--

When he was twenty-three years old he married; and at the birth of his first child there was some short-lived national enthu