It was probably about this time that Craig contemplated hid great work on the feudal law. Such a work was in a manner new to the law literature of Scotland. 13ut Craig narrowed his powerful mind, its fancy and genius, and all its accumulated stores of learning and experience, to a temporary object; and to adopt the sentiment if not the language of one who had weighel his merits, instead of seizing the precious opportunity he enjoyed of prescntiug to his country a just system of her national jurisprudence, lie not only passed by the evidences of her common law which lay beside him, but endeavoured to sink them Into oblivion in favour of the civil and feudal law,. (Ross's ' Lectures,' vol ii. pp. 9, 10.) He had scarcely risen from his learned labours however when he found that Elizabeth was on the eve of her demise, and that various intrigues were carrying ou and cabala formed to secure her crown, with a view to the king's aucceasion, to which his treatise on 'Feuds' was composed. On the let of January 1603 therefore, he dedicated to the king a treatise on the ' Succession to the Throne of England,' which he had written in confutation of the jesuit Parsons' Conference on the Disputed Succession,' wherein the right of the people to choose their king was boldly reasoned, and the crown indirectly claimed for the Infauta of Spain. But in less than three months after, the queen repeated on her death-bed her former declared= that her cousin the king of Scots should bo her successor. James accordingly ascended the throne of England without dispute, and Craig's reply to Doleman was never printed.
On the king's departure for England with his family, Craig wrote a Pancneticen' of congratulation, and on the same occasion a ' Pro pempticon,' or farewell poem, to the young prince Henry. The same year he composed his iSteplianaphoria; in honour of the king's coronation ; of which ceremonial Craig seems to have been a wituess, having in all likelihood accompanied the royal party auto England ; and previous to his return home he addressed to the king a short poem, in which he took a solemn farewell of his majesty, and at the same time of the Muses.
Soon after hie return Craig was appointed one of the commissioners nominated by the parliament to meet with commissioners from England and treat of a union between the two kingdoms, and thereupon in the summer of 1605 he wrote his treatise on the union. About the same time he wrote his treatise on homage, to vindicate Scotland from the charge of feudal dependence on the crown of England, brought against it in the chronicles of Holliushed. Neither of these works was ever published. In the year 1606 Craig held the office of advocate for the Church of Scotland, and some time before his death, as he would not formally accept the honour of knighthood, the king commanded that he should be everywhere saluted by the style accorded to that honour. lie died on the 26th of February 1603, when he had been upwards of forty-five years at the bar, and probably therefore when he was nut much short of seventy-five years of age.