Five days later, the lords crowned Prince James in the parish church at Stirling. It was the worst-attended coronation in Scottish history. Morton swore the one-year-old child’s coronation oath for him, and Knox preached the sermon. Then the lords staged a spectacle. A thousand bonfires were lit in the towns and villages, and in Edinburgh the castle guns fired a salute. But the people were sullen. “It appeared,” Throckmorton noted wryly, “they rejoiced more at the inauguration of the new prince than they did sorrow at the deprivation of their queen.”
