Note 644 — Chapter I · SUMMARY.

Many noble virtues also does this loyal cotemporary impute to his late lord, without mentioning one of his failings. These unhappily produced results of the most fatal kind. The following fact, related without comment, by Balfour, speaks volumes, and tells more against the sovereign than all the vituperations of Knox: “King James this year (1536) likewise gives to his four base sons the abbeys and priories of Melrose, Kelso, Coldinghame, and Holyrood House.” The eldest of those illegitimate scions of royalty was but eight years old. Did the most formidable schismatic ever inflict so deadly a wound on any Church as imposing such incumbents on her offices and lands? Lesley, as a bishop of the Church whose downfall the vices of this monarch were thus preparing, would probably have drawn the inference, if he had not fettered his pen by dedicating his History of Scotland to James’s royal daughter, Queen Mary, who had too much cause to rue her father’s early immoralities.