unseemly, for he advanced to the hallowed walls of the virgin Queen with as little fastidiousness, as if he had been about to enter the dingy habitation of some Scottish baron in one of the closes of the Canongate, so that a porter, who espied him from the gate, rushed out and rebuked his indecorum with a cudgel. But, amidst all his Scapin-like tricks in the English metropolis, from which he seems to have derived for the time a comfortable revenue, Adamson was not unmindful of the real object of his journey, which he pursued with a diligence worthy of a better cause. He endeavoured to enlist the prejudices of the Queen against the ministers of Scotland, and such of the nobility as favoured them; he consulted with the bishops upon the best means of conforming the Scottish to the English church; and, aware of the purpose of his own court to banish or silence the best of the clergy, he wished them to send learned and able ministers to supply the pulpits of those who were to be displaced. But, not content with this, he endeavoured to bring the kirk of Scotland into discredit with the foreign Reformed churches of France, Geneva, and Zurich, by sending to them a list of garbled or distorted passages, as propositions extracted from the Scottish confession, and craving their opinion as to their soundness. It was a crafty device, and might have been attended with much mischief, had it not been that an antidote to the bane was at this time in England, in the person of Mr Andrew Melville, a more accomplished scholar, as well as a more able and eloquent writer, than Adamson himself. He drew up a true statement of the subjects propounded, and sent them to the foreign churches, by which the archbishop's design was speedily frustrated. But the work of mere ecclesiastical diplomacy does not seem to have been sufficient for the restless and scheming mind of Adamson, so that he was suspected of intriguing with the French and Spanish ambassadors, and connecting himself with the plot of Throckmorton, the object of which was the liberation of Mary, and the restoration of Popery. It was a strange period of plots and conspiracies, where Protestant, Papist, and Puritan, priest and layman, foreigner and Englishman, were often mingled together as in a seething and bubbling cauldron, for the concoction of a charm by which a cure for every public evil was to be effected. It was immediately on the detection of this Throckmorton conspiracy, and the apprehension of its author, that the archbishop secretly withdrew from England and returned home, after having been employed fully six months in these, and other such devices, in London.
While Adamson had thus been occupied in England, in the establishment of Episcopacy, the government at home had not been idle; and the worthless Earl of Arran, who, since the suppression of the Raid of Ruthven, had returned to court, and acquired a greater ascendancy over the weak mind of James than ever, proceeded to put his plan in execution of silencing, imprisoning, and banishing the best and most distinguished of the Scottish clergy. It was thus that the flocks were to be brought to helplessness, and a new order of shepherds introduced. The list of the persecuted was a large one; but among the most illustrious of these were some of the most distinguished lights of the Scottish Reformation, such as Andrew Melville, John Davidson, Walter Balcanquhal, and James Lawson. Of these we can only particularize the last, as his closing scene was but too intimately connected with the history of Patrick Adamson. Lawson had been the friend and fellow-labourer of Knox, whom he succeeded as minister of Edinburgh; and in this important charge, while he was closely connected with all the principal ecclesiastical movements of the period, he was
