The chronicler wrote of the year 1571; but there are on record few meetings of the Scottish Parliament at which the "prophecie" might not with propriety have been made. "This parliament" throughout nearly all its history "hes a hole into it." The ruler of Scotland might be the king; the supreme power might be in the hands of this or that noble or of this or that combination of nobles; or it might belong to the General Assembly of the Church: but rarely indeed was the country governed or guided by the Estates. The people of Scotland have ever had a wholesome horror of works of supererogation. The Parliament did not meet to rule the country, but it did meet nevertheless, and those who summoned it had a definite purpose in view. What that purpose was may be best understood if we take, as an illustration, one small section of Scottish history and note the action of the parliaments that met during these years. The reign of Queen Mary nominally lasted from 1542 to 1567; her actual period of rule commenced with her arrival in Scotland in the summer of 1561, and ended six years later. During these six years, four parliaments were summoned. The first of these met in June 1563. While it transacted some details of business, the main purpose of its meeting was the forfeiture of the Earl of Huntly. But the forfeiture of Huntly was already an accomplished fact, and it gained nothing in reality from the ghastly scene when sentence was pronounced upon the half-embalmed corpse of the rebel lord. A year later Parliament again met, and annulled the sentence of forfeiture which had been pronounced, in 1544, upon the Earl of Lennox. A contemporary inserted in his diary the innocent remark: "In this parliament, thair was nathing done, except the reductioun of the said proces of forfaltoure."[11] But the Earl of Lennox had already been some months in Scotland. In the spring of 1566, a parliament was summoned which never met. It was called together to pass sentence of forfeiture upon the Earl of Murray and his accomplices in the "Run-about-Raid," and the murder of Rizzio prevented its assembling. But the insurgent lords had been exiles for nearly a year. Finally, in April 1567, Parliament made certain ratifications of lands--mainly to nobles against whom sentences had been passed by the secret council for their share in the Run-about-Raid and in the Rizzio murder. But all these lords had returned and had for some time been in quiet possession of their estates. The explanation of all these forfeitures and reductions of forfeitures belongs to political history. The student of the constitution will note that the Parliament had no voice in the matter. The Estates were convoked because their sanction gave an unquestionable legality to what had already been done by the executive power, whatever that might be. Their function was that of the official who places the necessary stamp upon an agreement. If the official were to decline to stamp the paper, questions about