JAMES VI was proclaimed King of Scotland in 1567 upon the abdication of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. When he assumed power in 1583 he established a strong central authority, and was determined to eradicate Presbyterianism, which he detested, and assert the supremacy of the State over the Scottish Church. The following extract from The Story of the Scottish Church by Thomas McCrie, (pages 88 and 89), explains and illustrates his hostility to the Church. McCrie states:
“The real secret of James’ antipathy to presbyters was his ambition to be regarded as head of the Church, a claim to which Presbyterianism, from its very nature, stands directly opposed. His sentiments on this subject were discovered in two publications. The first of these, which is entitled The True Law of Free Monarchies, is an unvarnished defence of arbitrary power, and may help us to understand the meaning of his favourite maxim, ‘No bishop, no king.’ The king, according to James, is to be a free and absolute monarch,’ at liberty to do what he pleases with his people, ‘who,’ says he, are not permitted to make any resistance but by flight, as we may see by the example of brute beasts and unreasonable creatures, among whom we never read or hear of any resistance to their parents, except among the vipers.’ In the other treatise, Basilicon Doron, which was addressed to his son, Prince Henry, he maintains that the office of a king is partly civil and partly ecclesiastical; that a principal part of his function consists in ruling the Church; that it belongs to him to judge when preachers wander from their text; that parity among ministers is irreconcilable with monarchy, and the mother of confusion; and in short, that Episcopacy should be set up, and the principal Presbyterian ministers banished from the country.’
“With principles so opposite to the spirit of freedom and of the Scottish Church, it is not surprising that James and the Presbyterian ministers should have been perpetually at variance. The clergy, jealous of their religious rights, openly and vehemently denounced the king’s proceedings from the pulpit; and the king, on the other hand, threatened all with civil pains who ventured to condemn his measures, or question his authority as supreme potentate of the Church. ‘There would never be peace,’ he said, ’till the marches were rid between them.’
“Determined, however, to ‘rid the marches’ in his own person, he summoned one of the most zealous of their number, Mr. David Black, minister of St. Andrews, to answer before the Privy Council for certain treasonable speeches, as he termed them, which he had uttered in the pulpit. Black, in his own name, and in that of his brethren of the ministry, sent in a declination to the council, denying their authority to sit as judges of his doctrine, in the first instance, or till he was tried by the Church courts. They saw clearly that this prosecution was put out as a zaeler, to ascertain how far the Church would yield; and, to use their own language, they feared ‘that their yielding on this occasion would be held as an acknowledgment of his majesty’s jurisdiction in matters that are mere spiritual, which might move his majesty to attempt further in the spiritual government of the house of God, and end in either a plain subverting of the spiritual judicature, or at least a confounding thereof with [the] civil, if at any time profane and ambitious magistrates might by such dangerous beginnings find the hedge broken down, to make a violent irruption upon the Lord’s inheritance; which the Lord forbid.’ This faithful struggle for the liberties of the Church issued, as might have been expected, in the defeat of the weaker party, and Black was banished from St. Andrews.”