It was the most superb moment of King James’s life. He was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,—or, at all events, ever since February 1586–7, when the captivity of his mother came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,—his constant thought had been of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount, there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him on the part of large sections of the English community; and that especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,—though she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,—she had always resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister since the death of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.