The assembly, though they had established it as an inviolable rule, that the king on no account, and under no pretence, should ever intermeddle in ecclesiastical matters, made no scruple of taking civil affairs under their cognizance, and of deciding, on this occasion, that the attempt of the conspirators was acceptable to all that feared God, or tendered the preservation of the king’s person, and prosperous state of the realm. They even enjoined all the clergy to recommend these sentiments from the pulpit; and they threatened with ecclesiastical censures every man who should oppose the authority of the confederated lords.[*] The convention, being composed chiefly of these lords themselves, added their sanction to these proceedings. Arran was confined a prisoner in his own house: Lenox, though he had power to resist, yet, rather than raise a civil war, or be the cause of bloodshed,[**] chose to retire into France, where he soon after died. He persevered to the last in the Protestant religion, to which James had converted him, but which the Scottish clergy could never be persuaded that he had sincerely embraced. The king sent for his family, restored his son to his paternal honors and estate, took care to establish the fortunes of all his other children, and to his last moments never forgot the early friendship which he had borne their father; a strong proof of the good dispositions of that prince.[***] * Spotswood, p. 322. ** Heylin’s Hist. Presbyter, p. 227. Spotswood. *** Spotswood, p. 328. No sooner was this revolution known in England, than the queen sent Sir Henry Gary and Sir Robert Bowes to James in order to congratulate him on his deliverance from the pernicious counsels of Lenox and Arran; to exhort him not to resent the seeming violence committed on him by the confederated lords; and to procure from him permission for the return of the earl of Angus, who ever since Morton’s fall had lived in England. They easily prevailed in procuring the recall of Angus; and as James suspected, that Elizabeth had not been entirely unacquainted with the project of his detention, he thought proper, before the English ambassadors, to dissemble his resentment against the authors of it.