The _entente cordiale_ between the King and the ministers was not of long duration. His promises of amended government were soon forgotten; the lawlessness of the nobles continued unchecked; agents of Rome were again busy in the country in collusion with the Popish nobles, and nothing was done to counteract them. In these circumstances the ministers could not keep silence, and none of them spoke more strongly against the laxity of the Government than Robert Bruce, the man the King had so recently and so specially honoured, who reproached James with the fact that during his absence in Denmark more reverence was paid to his shadow than had been shown since his return to his person. The outrages perpetrated by the King's illegitimate cousin, the madcap Bothwell, were largely laid to James's door, as the doings of a spoiled favourite of the Court: and the unpunished murder of the popular Earl of Moray, the 'Bonnie Earl,' by Huntly--one of the worst crimes even of that lawless time, and of complicity in which the King himself was suspected--aggravated the discontent of the nation. It was at such a time of disorder and irritation in the country that the measure was passed by Parliament--the Act of 1592--by which all previous legislation in favour of Episcopacy was swept off the statute-book and the Church re-established on the basis of the Second Book of Discipline. Had this Act been passed two years earlier, it might have been ascribed to the goodwill of the King; but in the circumstances in which it was brought forward, it was regarded as a piece of policy, adopted on the recommendation of the Chancellor for the purpose of recovering for the King the popularity he had lost during that interval, by the causes we have mentioned. CHAPTER VII THE POPISH LORDS--MELVILLE AND THE KING AT FALKLAND PALACE 'The king he movit his bonnet to him, He ween'd he was a king as weel as he.' _Johnie Armstrong._ The end of the Church's troubles in Scotland was still far off. No sooner had the constitution of 1592, which promised to secure her peace and liberty, been set down in the statute-book, than the forces of reaction, headed by the Crown, began to work for the undoing of it; and the Church was to pass through a century of almost continuous struggle and of many and bitter disappointments--a century which had great part in the making of Scotland--before that constitution was finally ratified.