When, however, James VI. manifested a wish to see the English company which arrived in Edinburgh in 1599, by granting it a license to act, the General Kirk Session of the city denounced all players and their patrons--the former as unruly and immodest, the latter as irreligious and indiscreet. This opposition led to a conference between the Session and the angry King, at which the former were obliged to withdraw their denunciations, which had been made from all the pulpits; and they authorised all men "to repair to the said comedies and plays without any pain, reproach, censure, or slander, to be incurred by them." Individual ministers were sorely discontent with such proceedings of the Session; and this feeling increased, when a play, "Marciano, or the Discovery," was acted in 1662, "with great applause, before His Majesty's High Commissioner, and others of the nobility, at the Abbey of Holyrood House, on St. John's night." In the preface of this very play, the drama in Scotland was likened to a "drunken swaggerer in a country church!" It does not appear that any regular theatre existed in Edinburgh previous to 1679, when the brothers Fountain held from Charles II. the patent of "Masters of the Revels, within the Kingdom of Scotland."[66] The Fountains not only erected a playhouse, but they subsequently sought to suppress all balls and entertainments held in the dancing-masters' schools, as discouraging to the playhouse, which "the petitioners had been at great charge in erecting." Accordingly, such balls, unless duly licensed, were suppressed. As Mr. Robert Chambers remarks in his _Domestic Annals of Scotland_, "It sounds strange to hear of a dancing-master's ball in our city, little more than a month after the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and while a thousand poor men were lodging on the cold ground in the Greyfriars' Churchyard!"