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The Highlands had little contact with the administration at Edinburgh, let alone London. James had been brought up in the English Court; showing little sympathy for the Highland Clans; his policy became one of issuing Letters of Fire and Sward, authorizing one or more clans to deal with their neighbors in the manner they thought best. In this way, he could stay away and let the Scots settle their differences without any English expenditure of blood or money. Divide and conquer was the rule of the day; clan was set against clan.
The first to suffer was Clan Gregor when orders came from London for their complete extermination, including the destruction of the homes and the extinction of their name. Severe punishment was also meted out to the MacDonalds of Islay on the orders of the King. Patrick Stewart of the Orkneys was publicly hanged. Maclean of Duart and a number of other island chiefs were tricked into imprisonment before being released on the condition that they sign the Statutes of Iona in 1609. They were to dispense with the services of clan bards and send their sons to be educated in the Lowlands. Thus, a situation that had been taking place with mutual consent of the leading social classes in Wales was forcibly repeated in Scotland. The aim was total destruction of an ancient way of life; the days of the independent sovereigns of the Isles came to an abrupt end. The notorious Campbell Clan of Argyll now seized the opportunity to become agents of the central government and protectors of the Lowlands. It was not until the Civil Wars of Charles I that the Highland chiefs were able to stir their followers into battle again.
By the end of the seventh century, the four kingdoms of Alban were united in the Christian faith, but not much else. As in Wales, the clergy retained some of the traditions of the early Celtic Church, which put them out of touch with Rome. Thus, the ever-prejudiced English Churchman Bede condemned them. We may be sure that "The Celtic Church gave love; the Roman Church gave law" was not one of his favorite sayings. Even the constant raids of the Norsemen, beginning in the eighth century and culminating in the conquest of Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, Caithness and Sutherland, (where, in many areas, the non-Celtic Pictish tongue was replaced by the Scandinavian Norn), could not bring the four kingdoms together in a common cause.
Picts and Scots, with their own separate languages, were still enemies; and the Welsh-speaking Britons of Strathclyde were desperately trying to hold on to their culture in the face of ever-increasing hostility from the Angles of Lothian and Northumbria. They were only kept from further conquest by a defeat by the Picts at the Battle of Nectansmere in 685. Even before this battle, however, the incursions of the Northumbrians had separated the Celts of Strathclyde from their kinfolk in Wales.