How the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth prevented this marriage I must not pause to relate. The Danish Princess espoused a reigning duke, and James was on the point of engaging himself to Katherine of Navarre, when the offer of the hand of Anne the younger daughter of Frederick being made to him, coupled with the alternative of his either taking Anne, or losing the islands, he “prayed and advised with God, for a fortnight,” and wisely resolved to wed with “pretty Anne.” The matter progressed anything but smoothly for a time. At length, after endless vexations, the young princess was married by proxy, in August, 1589, and set sail, soon after, for Scotland under convoy of a dozen gallant ships, and with prospects of a very unpleasant voyage. A terrible storm blew bride and convoy on to the inhospitable coast of Norway, and although two or three witches were executed for raising this storm out of very spite, the matter was not mended. Disaster pursued the fleet, and death overtook several who sailed in it, till the coast of Scotland was fairly in sight. The Scotch witches, or perhaps other causes not less powerful than witches, in those seas, in the fall of the year, then blew the fleet back to the mouth of the Baltic. “I was commissioned,” said Peter Munch, the admiral, “to land the young queen in Scotland; it is clear, therefore, that I can not return with her to Denmark. I will put her majesty ashore, therefore, in Norway.” The conclusion was not logically attained, but the fact was as we have described it. Letters reached James announcing to him the deplorable condition in which his queen was lying at Upslo, on the Norwegian coast--storm-bound and half-famished. After many projects considered for her relief, James resolved to set forth and seek the princess himself. It is in this passage of his life that we have an illustration of the degree in which he surpassed all other kings who have sat on the English throne--as a gallant knight _es amours_. Toward the end of October, of this year, in the very stormiest portion of the season, James went, privately, on board a diminutive vessel, with a very reluctant party of followers and confederates, leaving behind him, for the information of the astonished lieges, a promise to be back in twenty days; and for their especial profit, a solemn exhortation to live peaceably till he arrived again among them, with his wife.