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with Bothwell and with the latter's fellow-plotter, John Colville—who nearly always addresses Locke as "beloved brother"—sufficiently explain his loss of employment after 1603, and his vain appeals to Cecil from Gatehouse and the Clink.
It is not perhaps too much to assume that the men whose lives have been outlined—at least Montgomerie, Fowler, and the Hudsons—were among the King's most intimate companions in his youth. He matured early, and was busy in statecraft and intrigue before most young noblemen of his age were free from their tutors and about the court. The nobility who surrounded him were not only older, but raw and reckless, involved in feuds among themselves and in "bands" against the crown. Scarcely one of them could be fully trusted. But the members of his household he had known from childhood, and while they were his servants and likely to treat him with deference, James was not one who let rank stand in the way of familiarity. Though The Essayes of a Prentise appeared without his name on the title-page, its authorship was obvious, and we should expect it to have been welcomed by a more impressive array of sonneteers, if James could have found noblemen willing to humor his literary bent or capable of penning a sonnet, and if he had not wished to give his fellow-experimenters an opportunity to see themselves in print.
Not much, to be sure, can be said for the characters of these literary friends. Most of them were capable of playing a double part and turning their friendship to profit. But they were men of culture and travel, who could bring the King in touch with England and the Continent. Several of them were envoys either of the King or of foreign powers, and the circumstance helps to explain the rapidity with which literary tendencies passed from one country to another in this period. It is clear, also, that scholarship was considered a key to royal favor. Foreign governments recognized this in their choice of representatives; such men as Du Bartas, Sir Edward and Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Robert Sidney, Constable, and Locke, all of whom visited Scotland,
