ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Scottish ecclesiological background, and then considers the wider English and Scottish poetic response to the London events of 5 November 1605, in order to provide a context within which to read Melville's Coniuratio Pulverea and Monumentum Gratulatorium, texts and translations. Melville's leading role in presbyterian resistance to the king's policies, not least the imprisonment of the Aberdeen Assembly ministers, led to his being summoned to London in the summer of 1606, along with seven other obdurate presbyterian clerics. James VI's drastic reaction to the abortive Aberdeen General Assembly of 2 July 1605 lies at the heart of what Alan MacDonald has termed The regal union and the collapse of consensus' between 1603 and 1606. James VI and I's brand-new Great Britain had miraculously escaped a monstrous criminal act on a scale that would have dwarfed anything yet perpetrated by modern terrorists.
