least of Morton. With these bishops, superintendents co-existed, but not
for long. "The horns of the mitre" already began to peer above
Presbyterian parity, and Morton is said to have remarked that there would
never be peace in Scotland till some preachers were hanged. In fact,
there never was peace between Kirk and State till a deplorable number of
preachers were hanged by the Governments of Charles II. and James II.

A meeting of preachers in Edinburgh, after the Bartholomew massacre, in
the autumn of 1572, demanded that "it shall be lawful to all the subjects
in this realm to invade them and every one of them to the death." The
persons to be "invaded to the death" are recalcitrant Catholics, "grit or
small," persisting in remaining in Scotland. {137}

The alarmed demands of the preachers were merely disregarded by the Privy
Council. The ruling nobles, as Bishop Lesley says, would never gratify
the preachers by carrying out the bloody penal Acts to their full extent
against Catholics. There was no expulsion of all Catholics who dared to
stay; no popular massacre of all who declined to go. While Morton was in
power he kept the preachers well in hand. He did worse: he starved the
ministers, and thrust into the best livings wanton young gentlemen, of
whom his kinsman, Archibald Douglas, an accomplice in Darnley's death and
a trebly-dyed traitor, was the worst. But in 1575, the great Andrew
Melville, an erudite scholar and a most determined person, began to
protest against the very name of bishop in the Kirk; and in Adamson, made
by Morton successor of John Douglas at St Andrews, Melville found a mark
and a victim. In economics, as an English diplomatist wrote to Cecil in
November 1572, the country, despite the civil war, was thriving; "the
noblemen's great credit decaying, . . . the ministry and religion
increaseth, and the desire in them to prevent the practice of the
Papists." The Englishman, in November, may refer to the petition for