From and after the 5th of April 1603 Holyrood, though not quite left to the rats, was no longer the home of royalty. King James’s parting promise that he would revisit his native kingdom at least once every three years passed out of his mind; and not till 1617, fourteen years after the ecstatic delight of his removal to the banks of the Thames, did he find it worth while to recross the Tweed. Holyrood, with the other royal palaces of Scotland, was then refurbished for his temporary accommodation; but with that exception, and the further exception of two subsequent visits of Charles I. to Edinburgh, there was to be no sight of a sovereign face for many a day in the towered edifice under Arthur Seat. For Scotland as a whole, indeed, the five-and-thirty years which intervened between 1603 and 1638 may be described as that period of her history during which, though still retaining a nominal apparatus of independent autonomy, in the shape of a resident Scottish Privy Council and an occasional meeting of a Scottish Parliament, she was governed essentially and in the main from London through the post. “This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it,” said King James in a speech of rebuke to his somewhat troublesome English Parliament on the 31st of March 1607: “here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write, and it is done; and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now,—which my ancestors could not do by the sword.” The words were perfectly true; and they remained true for his son and successor, Charles I., till that point in his reign when the soul of Scotland flashed out again in her “National Covenant,” electrifying the dormant Puritanism of England, and initiating the great Seventeenth Century Revolution in all the British Islands.