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although not lofty, was acute and sagacious ; and the kingcraft 
he had learned at the feet of Buchanan, he applied to an end 
very remote from that intended by his instructor. If the Scottish 
monarchs of old were less fettered by the restraints of constitu- 
tional law and parliamentary privilege than their brothers in Eng- 
land, the latter had one advantage, of which James, when in 1603 
he took possession of his new dominions, was not slow to avail him- 
self. The king of England was a far more remote and inaccessible 
potentate than his royal brother of Scotland. The latter was never 
secure from being invaded, scolded, and rebuked by some faithful 
counsellor, at any hour of any day. Thus his ordinary life was 
superintended and criticised by his subjects, and his plans and 
projects were discussed with a freedom which the regal state of 
Whitehall rendered impossible. James, with the Tweed safely 
between him and his loving Scots, breathed freely, and matured 
gradually but effectively, in private and unmolested, those visions 
of kingly power which had been the fruit of the lessons of his 
ardent master. 
Very slowly, but very deliberately and skilfully, did the king 
develop his policy. To diminish the power of parliament in one 
end of the island, and that of the Presbyterian party in the other, 
was the instrument by which he hoped to make the British throne 
the seat of a true king — not such a monarch as Buchanan’s ideal of 
a patriot king presented, but an embodiment of that divine essence 
of royalty which could place him alongside the arbitrary models on 
the Continent. Such was his ambition, and had he not died 
prematurely it is possible he might have succeeded. He went 
to work so cautiously that he excited no public, and hardly 
any private, discontent. He temporised, he flattered, he threatened, 
but never struck until he was certain he could do so safely. 
The invisible threads of the royal cobweb stretched across and 
across the island without the nation perceiving, from one day 
to the next, how far they had gone on their way to despotism, or 
how much more dim and distant were their liberties. 
But the fabric perished at his death. The unpractised and 
clumsier hand of his son tore away the slender filaments, and in 
1644 the contest between the king and the parliament was at its 
height. 
