Fourteen years had passed since James had quitted Scotland, and he had never visited his hereditary kingdom; he had no money for that purpose; but the States of Holland, free from the war with Spain since the recognition of their independence in 1609, had recently paid their debts to England, and the journey to Scotland was resolved upon. The king besides had a great task to achieve there; he was laboring to establish religious uniformity among his subjects. Twelve years previously he had undertaken to found the episcopacy in Scotland. Persecution, imprisonment, exile had by degrees disposed of the chiefs of the resistance. Welch and Decry, condemned to death, then to banishment, had retired abroad. Old Andrew Melvil, called to London for a conference, and forcibly detained, as his nephew had already been, had left the latter in his prison in Scotland, where he died. At this period Melvil was living at Sedan, ever indomitable in his aversion to the episcopacy and his support of the rights of a free-born Scot. { 26} James had in Scotland an agent as able as he was unscrupulous. Sir George Hume, whom he had made Earl of Dunbar, succeeded at length, partly by intimidation, partly by corruption, in imposing silence upon the Scottish clergy. Two courts of high commission still more tyrannical than those of London, were sitting at St. Andrew's and Glasgow when the king arrived in Scotland, in 1617. Parliament presented for the royal sanction the bill which definitively constituted the episcopal Church; but a remonstrance from the clergy arrested the arm of the king as he extended the sceptre to give the authority of law to the project; the bill was withdrawn, the episcopacy was held to be established by the royal prerogative, and the refractory were cited before the high commission. Calderwood went to swell the band of Scottish exiles upon the Continent, and the people, deprived of the religious form which pleased them and to which they were accustomed, allowed their resentment to slumber until the day when the Covenant was to protest against the work of the father as developed by the son.
King James had been much vexed in Scotland by the strict observance of the "Sabbath." When he set out to return to England, he composed a work to which he gave the authority of law, under the title of _The Book of Sports_. Under the pretext of regulating the pleasures permitted on Sunday, this new ordinance forbade the respectful observances which marked among the Puritans the rest of the seventh day. The _Book of Sports_ was ill received by the majority of the population. They refused to be merry by compulsion, and the new arm, more dangerous to royalty than to the Puritans, lay in the arsenal of despotism, until Archbishop Laud subsequently drew it forth for his own injury as well as that of his master.