As further evidence of his trust in the Melvilles, King James invited them to accompany him in October 1594 in his expedition to the north against Bothwell and the catholic earls. While the king was still in the north he sent James Melville to Edinburgh and other powerful towns to collect subscriptions from the presbyterians in payment of the forces raised for the expedition. Afterwards he was, in 1596, a member of various commissions appointed to expostulate with the king for allowing Huntly and Errol to return to Scotland. In November he was also appointed one of a commission to wait on the king to represent that the kirk had developed a ‘most dangerous suspicion’ of the king's intentions, and to crave for its removal; but the commissioners of the assembly were ordered on the 24th to leave Edinburgh and to depart home to their flocks and congregations within twenty-four hours (Reg. P. C. Scotl. v. 333). After the ministers convened by the king at Perth in February 1596–7 had at the king's request declared themselves a lawful assembly, Melville withdrew from the meeting. He also in the synod of Fife opposed, in February 1598, the proposal of the king that ministers should have a vote in parliament, pointing out that the proposal was merely part of a scheme for the furthering of episcopacy, for unless they were bishops or prelates they would not be allowed to vote. Although less choleric than his uncle, and a more skilful tactician, he loyally supported his uncle in all his difficulties, and was equally persistent in his endeavours to thwart the schemes of the king in behalf of episcopacy. On being assured in 1604 that the king hated him ‘worse than any man in Scotland, because he crossed all his turns and was a ringleader to others,’ he replied to his informer, ‘My resolve is this:
Nec sperans aliquid, nec extimescens
Exarmaveris impotentis iram.’
In May 1606 Melville was summoned along with his uncle and other ministers to a conference in September with the king in London in regard to the ecclesiastical state of Scotland. After its unsatisfactory termination, and the imprisonment of Andrew Melville in the Tower, 30 April 1607, he was on 6 May permitted to depart from London, but ordered not to proceed further north than Newcastle-on-Tyne, and to confine himself within ten miles of the town during the king's pleasure. At Newcastle various attempts were made to win him over, by offers of high preferment, to the policy of the king, but bribes and threats equally failed to move him. On the death of his wife in 1607 he obtained leave to go to Scotland for a month to take order about his private affairs, but was required to return immediately afterwards and remain at Newcastle. In 1610 a proposal was made to transfer him to Carlisle, but at his earnest request it was not persisted in. The Earl of Dunbar on his way to Scotland, in April of this year, as the king's commissioner, called on him at Newcastle and advised him to ‘apply himself to pleasure the king.’ Dunbar took Melville with him as far as Berwick-on-Tweed, but, finding him immovable in his resolution not to conform to episcopacy, he left him there with an expression of regret that he was unable in the circumstances to do him any service. Ultimately a proposal was made about the end of 1613 for his return to Scotland, but cares and disappointments had already shattered his health, and he had not proceeded far on his journey to Edinburgh to confer on the subject when a severe attack of illness compelled him to return to Berwick. He died there on 13 Jan. 1613–14.
By his first wife, Elizabeth, daughter of John Dury, minister of Edinburgh, Melville had four sons and three daughters: Ephraim, minister of Pittenweem; Andrew, died young; Andrew, schoolmaster of Hoddesdon; John, minister of Newton; Margaret, Isabel, and Anne. By his second wife, Deborah, daughter of Richard Clerke, vicar of Berwick, whom he married about 1611, he left no issue. The sum total of his personal estate, as stated in his will, was 137l. 6s. 10d.
Melville was author of: 1. A poem entitled ‘Description of the Spainyarts Naturall, out of Julius Scaliger, with sum Exhortationes for Warning of Kirk and Countrey,’ printed, according to his own account, in 1592, but no copy is now known to exist. 2. ‘A Spiritval Propine of a Pastour to his People, Heb. v. 12,’ Edinburgh, 1598, printed as a catechism for the use of his people at an expense to himself of four hundred merks (very rare; copy wanting title-page in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, and complete copy in the British Museum). 3. A poem called ‘The Black Bastill, or a Lamentation of the Kirk of Scotland, compiled by Mr. James Melville, sometime minister at Anstruther, and now confyned in England,’ 1611, of which the manuscript was at one time in the possession of Robert Graham, esq., of Redgorton, Perthshire, and an abridgment was published in 1634, and republished in ‘Various Pieces of Fugitive Scottish Poetry, principally of the Seventeenth Century,’ ed. David Laing, Edinburgh, 1825. 4. A poem of sixty-nine stanzas in the same manuscript entitled ‘Thrie may keip Counsell, give Twa be away,
