LETTERS
XXX
My Lord,
But that you do and say things in Scotland now (my lord) unfit for a good subject to hear, I should have hoped your lordship, by a true relation of the passages there, would have disabused your humble servant here. Distance and men's fears have so enlarged the truth, and so disproportioned everything about the town, that we have made the little troop of discontents a gallant army, and already measure no Scotchman but by his evening shadow.
We hear say you have taken livery and seisin of Northumberland, and there are that give in Cumberland for quietness sake, and are content to think it part of Scotland, because it is so barren. London scriveners begin to wish they had St. Michael-Mount's-men's security for the borderers they have standing bound in their shops; and the Witheringtons' and Howards' estates are already freely disposed to the needier rebels. Much of this part of the world is in agues, but not all, my lord; there are that have read the chronicles, and they find the English oftener marched into Edenburgh than the Scots into London.
Your old friend, Alderman (a learned bard, and a great in-seer into times), saith it is a boil broken out in the breech of the kingdom, and that when it is ripe, it will heal of itself. Others use a handsomer similitude, and compare Scotland to a hive of swarming bees which they say the king watches to reduce them for the better. There is a saucy kind of intelligence about the town, of ten thousand pounds that should be sent by my Lord M for redemption of affairs there; but this the wiser sort suspects, for, besides that his majesty buys his own again, they say none but the king would give so much for it.
Some are scandalized at the word of union, and protest they find no resemblance betwixt this new Covenant and our Saviour's. Others wonder why they would make use of religion rather than their poverty for the cause of their mutining, since the one is ever suspected, and the other none would have disputed.
