When Charles II was crowned king of Scotland, England, France and Ireland at Scone in 1651 he was subjected to a well-known lesson on kingship by Robert Douglas, moderator of the general assembly. Douglas took the conventional line, reminding Charles of his duty to maintain true religion and the liberties of his people, exhorting him to cultivate the virtues of piety, fortitude, justice and prudence, and urging him to abide by the laws of the land as well as by God's law, and to accept the counsel of his traditional advisers. Like an earlier Scottish tutor in kingship, Douglas managed to inject a radical message into an otherwise conservative doctrine by teaching that ‘When a king is Crowned, and received by the people, there is a Covenant or mutuall Contract, between him and them, containing conditions, mutually to be observed’, and by warning Charles that ‘A King abusing his power, to the overthrow of Religion, Laws and Liberties, which are the very Fundamentals of this Contract and Covenant, may be controled and opposed’. As has often been remarked, Douglas's insistence that ‘a Kings power is a limited power, by this Covenant’, could have come straight from George Buchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos.