Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/60

 over him, and accounted a very Julian the Apostate by his former brethren, yet he was now to be confirmed in his primacy, with all the high rights and immunities that could be comprised within the office. This was announced by a royal letter, under the great seal, and, as such, was indignantly termed by the ministers the King's Bull, "giving and granting to his well-beloved clerk and orator, Patrick, archbishop of St Andrews, power, authority, and jurisdiction to exercise the same archbishopric by himself, his commissioners, and deputies, in all matters ecclesiastical, within the diocese of St Andrews, and sheriffdoms which have been heretofore annexed thereto." In this way he would be able to sit as presiding moderator in that Assembly where he should have stood as a culprit, and silence the charges which he could not have answered. But this, his culminating point, was also that of his downfall. The banished lords, who had withdrawn themselves to England, now took counsel upon the oppressed state of their country, and resolved to redress it after the old Scottish fashion. They therefore approached the border, where they could communicate with their allies, and appoint musters of their retainers; and at length, all being in readiness, Angus, Mar, Glammis, and the Hamiltons entered Scotland, and rapidly marched to Stirling, at the head of eight thousand armed men, to reason with their misguided sovereign. He soon found himself, like many of his ancestors, the pupil of Force and Necessity, and was compelled to yield to their stern remonstrances; while Arran was again, and for the last time, banished into that obscurity from which he should never have been summoned.

The return of the exiled lords, and the banishment of Arran from court, produced a breathing interval to the kirk; and the ministers who had been dispersed, warded, or silenced, were enabled to resume their charges unquestioned. It was now time, therefore, to redress the evils that had been inflicted upon the church, and these too by members of its own body, during the last two years of trial, if its polity and discipline were to be something more than an empty name. It was a stern duty, as Adamson was soon to feel. He had laboured for the eversion of the kirk, and the persecution of its ministers, under an unconstitutional authority against which he had protested and subscribed; and for all this he must answer before the court to which the assize of such delinquencies pertained. The synod of St Andrews, which had been closed during the persecution, was to be re-opened, and their first work was to be the trial of their own archbishop, whom their laws recognized as a simple presbyter, and nothing more. This solemn meeting was therefore convoked in April, 1586, to which a great concourse assembled; and thither also came the archbishop, "with a great pontificality and big countenance," for he boasted that he was in his own city, and possessed of the king's favour, and therefore needed to fear no one. He also placed himself close by the preacher, who was Mr James Melville, as if determined to outbrave the whole assembly. The discourse was a vindication of the polity of the church, and a rehearsal of the wrongs it had suffered; and then, "coming in particular," says Melville himself, "to our own kirk of Scotland, I turned to the bishop, sitting at my elbow, and directing my speech to him personally, I recounted to him, shortly, his life, actions, and proceedings against the kirk, taking the assembly there to witness, and his own conscience before God, if he was not an evident proof and example of that doctrine; whom, being a minister of the kirk, the Dragon had so stung with the poison and venom of avarice and ambition, that, swelling exorbitantly out of measure, threatened the wreck and destruction of the whole body, unless he were time-