Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/476

 456 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 61. to the estates which. Henry VIII. had granted to his grandfather, and which the Countess had enjoyed till her death. The rents, amounting to five or six thousand pounds a year, would cover all the demands, and supply the modest necessities of the Scotch Crown. To grant such a request as this was on the surface no more than justice. But there was more meant by it than appeared. To admit that an alien could inherit land in England, would concede one point at least on which the lawyers contested the Scotch succession, and doubtless Morton and his friends had not overlooked this particular feature in the case. By ratifying the Leith treaty, the King relinquished all claims which could be advanced either by himself or his mother during Elizabeth's life, nor did he ask for a distinct recognition of his pros- pective right afterwards ; but it was an opportunity for her to satisfy indirectly the passionate aspiration of all parties in Scotland, and in so satisfying them remove the causes which had so often given her enemies an ad- vantage. It would have been easy for her, without mentioning James in words, to have attached conditions of creed by Act of Parliament to the succession to the throne. If the Scotch aristocracy saw the English crown before them so conditioned, their Protestantism would be all the more assured ; and James, growing to manhood, dependent for half his revenue on England, and for his prospects on his staunchness in the faith, would have been proof against all temptations from his mother and her French relations. But the mention of a successor always drove Eliza-