“Notwithstanding the indiction,” says Baillie, “our hopes were but slender ever to see the downsitting of our passionately-desired Assembly with the Commissioner’s consent, for daily he found himself more and more disappointed in his expectation to obtain these things which it seems he put the King in hopes might be gotten. Episcopacy to be put in place of safety, above the reach of the Assembly’s hand, was now seen to be impossible, if his engines for this purpose, by the skill of his party, was turned back upon him. The Council had subscribed the King’s Covenant, as it was exponed at the first in the 1581 year. His declaration, that Episcopacy was then in our Church, and will, that the Assembly should be discharged to meddle in the trial of this matter, could not be gotten concluded in a Council act. Sundry of the Lords of the Session being required to subscribe the Covenant in that his sense, refused; with a protestation, that the exposition of these parts which might make for or against Episcopacy, should be referred to the determination of the ensuing Assembly. Noblemen and ministers did not dissemble their mind in their discourse of the unlawfulness, at least the inexpediency, of this office in our Church, and so their design by any means to have it presently put down. This put his Grace in great perplexity; for he conceived, as some said, by the words and writs of sundry of our nobles of chief respect, that the Assembly might have been gotten persuaded to establish, at least to permit, or pass by untouched, that office: when the contrary appeared, he was at a nonplus; for his instructions had made the place of bishops a _noli me tangere_; but their persons were permitted to the doom of the severest mouth among us, where their miscarrying had required censure. His next disappointment was in the matter of the Covenant. He thought to have gotten the King’s Covenant universally subscribed, and ratified hereafter in the Assembly; so that the other, which had been subscribed by us before, might be quietly, without any infamous condemning of it, suppressed and buried. But far above and against all his thoughts, that Covenant was universally refused; and, among these few that put their hands to it, divers avowed their mind, in all things, to be the same with those who had sworn the first. The missing of this intention increased his Grace’s malcontentment. In two other designs also he found himself much deceived. He thought, an act for the freedom of the practice of Perth Articles, might have contented us; and without condemning the matters themselves, before the Parliament by supplication had been brought to the casing of the standing law; but an universal inclination appeared in all to have the things themselves tried without delay, and acts presently found anent them, as their nature required. Sicklike his instructions carried him to the removal of the high commission, books of canons, ordination, service, but to