and of the Estates to Perth at the end of February 1597, and thither he
brought many ministers from the north, men unlike the zealots of Lothian
and the Lowlands. He persuaded them to vote themselves a General
Assembly; and they admitted his right to propose modifications in Church
government, to forbid unusual convocations (as in Edinburgh during the
autumn of 1596); they were not to preach against Acts of Parliament or of
Council, nor appoint preachers in the great towns without the Royal
assent, and were not to attack individuals from the pulpit. An attempt
was to be made to convert the Catholic lords. A General Assembly at
Dundee in May ratified these decisions, to the wrath of Andrew Melville,
and the Catholic earls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at
this period had not one supporter among the nobility. James had made
large grants of Church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from
their wonted conspiracies for a while. The king occupied himself much in
encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him
to the preachers.

In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and
vote in Parliament. In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the
'Basilicon Doron,' came to the knowledge of the clergy: it revealed his
opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of
the preachers to introduce a democracy "with themselves as Tribunes of
the People," a very fair definition of their policy. It was to stop them
that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep
the pulpiteers in order. They were refusing, in face of the king's
licence, to permit a company of English players to act in Edinburgh, for
they took various powers into their hands.

Meanwhile James's relations with England, where Elizabeth saw with dismay
his victory over her allies, his clergy, were unfriendly. Plots were