The loss of a royal court also meant there was no force to counter the kirk's dislike of theatre, which struggled to survive in Scotland. However, it was not entirely extinguished. The kirk used theatre for its own purposes in schools and was slow to suppress popular folk dramas. Surviving plays for the period include William Alexander's "Monarchicke Tragedies", written just before his departure with the king for England in 1603. They were closet dramas, designed to be read rather than performed, and already indicate Alexander's preference for southern English over the Scots language. There were some attempts to revive Scottish drama. In 1663 Edinburgh lawyer William Clerke wrote "Marciano or the Discovery", a play about the restoration of a legitimate dynasty in Florence after many years of civil war. It was performed at the Tennis-Court Theatre at Holyrood Palace before the parliamentary high commissioner John Leslie, Earl of Rothes. Thomas Sydsurf's "Tarugo's Wiles or the Coffee House", was first performed in London in 1667 and then in Edinburgh the year after and drew on Spanish comedy. A relative of Sydsurf, physician Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) wrote "The Assembly or Scotch Reformation" (1692), a ribald satire on the morals of the Presbyterian kirk, circulating in manuscript, but not published until 1722, helping to secure the association between Jacobitism and professional drama that discouraged the creation of professional theatre.