It would be hard, at this distance of time and without his excuse, to say in our haste with Knox that there was not one righteous man among the Lords of the Congregation who had assisted him to establish the reformed religion in Scotland; but it is certain that the large majority looked only to the fat revenues of the old Church, and remembered only her insolence in the day of her power. For a century and a half she had been enriched and strengthened by successive sovereigns as a bulwark against the fiercest and most independent aristocracy in Europe. Under James the Fifth her haughty and dissolute prelates had filled the highest offices of State, while the nobles were despoiled, imprisoned, and banished at their will. The hour of reckoning had now come, and it was to be exacted to the uttermost farthing. But though the reformers were allowed to indulge their pious zeal unchecked in the work of destruction, they were soon made aware that their dangerous allies had no mind to see a new ecclesiastical tyranny set up in the place of the old one. Within less than a year of the establishment of the reformed religion the greater part of the estates of the Catholic Church (estimated at rather more than one-third of the whole wealth of the kingdom) had passed by various and mostly violent ways into the hands of the aristocracy. This was their paramount idea of the Reformation, an idea by which they were determined to stand fast, though all the pulpits in the kingdom should cry shame on them. Murray and Morton, those strong sons of Zeruiah, treated the arguments and the anger of Knox with the same contemptuous indifference, while the astute and mocking Maitland laughed in his face at his scheme of Church government as at "a devout imagination." A miserable pittance doled out of the share of the plunder allotted to the Crown was all that the great Reformer could secure for the maintenance of his new Church. Well might he cry, in the bitterness of his disappointment, "I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided betwixt God and the devil." During Mary's short reign, and under the regents who succeeded her, the wealth and influence of the nobles had risen still higher at the expense of the Crown when not at the expense of the Church. James, on attaining his majority, had indeed done something to better the position of the former, and when more firmly seated on his throne he had done something to better the position of the latter. But, in his own homely phraseology, he knew the stomach of his people too well to put a high hand to these delicate matters. His Act of Annexation only applied to so much of the old Church lands as still remained unalienated, while it practically gave the sanction of Parliament to the titles of those on which the nobles had already laid arbitrary hands. Even of the property then resumed to the Crown he made throughout his reign many and large grants to his favourites. The tithes he did not touch,