A General Assembly at Dundee in May ratified these decisions, to the wrath of Andrew Melville, and the Catholic earls were more or less reconciled to the Kirk, which at this period had not one supporter among the nobility.

James had made large grants of Church lands among the noblesse, and they abstained from their wonted conspiracies for a while.

The king occupied himself much in encouraging the persecution of witches, but even that did not endear him to the preachers.
In the Assembly of March 1598 certain ministers were allowed to sit and vote in Parliament.

In 1598-1599 a privately printed book by James, the 'Basilicon Doron,' came to the knowledge of the clergy: it revealed his opinions on the right of kings to rule the Church, and on the tendency of the preachers to introduce a democracy "with themselves as Tribunes of the People," a very fair definition of their policy.

It was to stop them that he gradually introduced a bastard kind of bishops, police to keep the pulpiteers in order.