Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/59

] James I. endeavoured to remedy this by erecting a separate House of Commons, like that with whose working he was so familiar in England. This would have completely curbed the power of the aristocracy, but they took care to murder James before the scheme could be carried out. He ordered every sheriffdom, except Clackmannan and Kinross, to send "twa or maa wyse men;" the two just mentioned to send "ane of thamo" each. Unfortunately, the order, through the king's death, remained a dead letter, and the Scottish Parliament continued to the end one house.

The powers of the Scottish Parliament were, by a peculiar institution, thrown almost wholly into the hands of the crown and aristocracy. The first thing which Parliament did, on assembling, was to appoint three committees. The first was called the committee "pro articulis advisandi;" the second "ad judicia;" and the third "ad caitsas." The business of the members of the third was to sit as judges of all civil causes brought before Parliament; of the second, of all criminal prosecutions; and the first—far the most important, as it regarded the constitution—was to sit as a Parliamentary grand jury upon all petitions, proposals, and overtures, and to form such of them as they thought fit into bills to be laid before the house. It is clear that the whole legislative power of the realm was vested in this committee, for it determined entirely what should and what should not come before Parliament. It is true that all the committees were composed of members of the three estates, which gave them an air of great fairness; but this apparent equilibrium was totally destroyed by another law, which gave seat and vote in each of these committees to all the lords of Parliament which chose to claim them, by which the whole power was vested in the hands of the aristocracy. Hence the members of this particular committee became called the "Lords of the Articles."





Another great foundation of James I. was the Court of Session, which has become in Scotland the great central and supreme tribunal of justice. But on its establishment the justiciar-general—an office long abolished in England, as giving too much power to any subject—was the officer of the law, and dispenser of justice in Scotland, and he held courts of justice, called justice-airs, twice a year in every county in the kingdom. The chamberlain, another great officer, held also his chamberlain-airs in the royal boroughs of the kingdom, from which there lay appeal to another court, called the Court of the Four-Boroughs, these being Edinburgh, Stirhug, Eoxburgh, and Berwick; and after these fell into the hands of the English, Lanark and Linlithgow, which sent commissioners to this court. James I. also at this period abolished various hereditary offices and grants, which gave too much power to particular nobles over the subject; but many of these after his death were revived, and the hereditary powers and jurisdictions of the barons continued for three centuries longer to be a cause of oppression to the people.

In our narrative of the different reigns of this period we have noticed the spread of Wycliffism, and the persecuting resistance of the church. Henry V., and after him every monarch of the century, supported the pretensions of the clergy, and let loose the horrors of persecution upon their subjects. The civil wars for a time checked these persecutions, the very storm, as Fuller observed, being the shelter of the persecuted; but they afterwards revived in all their virulence. Though the schism in the papacy which agitated all Europe from the death of Gregory XI. in 1378 to the election of Nicholas V. in 1447, and the resignation of Felix V. in 1449, had greatly undermined