The Scottish Reformation

MARY, QUEEN OF ENGLAND, having died on 17 November 1558 the exiles who were dispersed over the Continent, trooped home; and in Geneva Knox had no longer a congregation to which to minister. Accordingly he left that city for good in the following January. But, for the reason already mentioned, he was not permitted to set foot in England, even for the purpose of passing through it to Scotland; and it was not till the month of May that he arrived in Edinburgh. On his voyage, however, he became privy to a secret, which he hoped, not without reason, might yet open his way to the favour of Queen Elizabeth, which for the time he had forfeited. In the vessel in which he sailed there was a great seal, graven with the arms of France, England and Scotland, and with a style for the French king and queen, naming them king and queen of these three countries. Of this jewel, as he

§3 calls it, Knox procured a sight, and he treasured this as a state secret of importance, to be divulged at some favourable opportunity. The king and queen who thus made pretentions to the throne of England, in rivalry to Elizabeth, were the Dauphin, afterwards Francis II. of France, and Mary Stuart, afterwards the Queen of Scots, who had been wedded in 1558.

Knox’s arrival in his native country took place at a critical moment; indeed, it proved to be so well-timed that devout students of history have recognised in this the special providence of God.

Three years had elapsed since his last visit; and in the interval the tide had been flowing strongly in favour of the Reformation. Mary of Lorraine, who had been Regent since 1554, had found it expedient in her own interest to encourage the Protestant nobles. These, in the year 1557, had formed an agreement among themselves, called the Band, in which they vowed to employ their whole power, substance and very lives to maintain, set forward and establish the blessed Word of God and of His congregation. From this time they were denominated the Lords of the Congregation, the Congregation being the name by which those who favoured the new religion were known. They were even so bold as to approach the Regent with a petition for the right of public and private prayer in the vulgar ‘| tongue, of explaining and expounding the Scriptures,! and of communion in both kinds; and they humbly required that means should be taken for the reform of the wicked, slanderous and detestable lives of prelates and the state ecclesiastical. In 1559 another Council met, which passed many resolutions for reform, the very terms of which are the best evidence of the charges made by Protestants against the old Church; these measures, however, proved, like others which had preceded them, to be only reforms on paper, the Church being too corrupt to reform itself Meanwhile the preachers of the Gospel were so multiplying in numbers and growing so bold that more than once the Regent summoned them to her presence, with the intention of silencing, them; but, when they appeared, they were accom panied by so many supporters that she was fain to dismiss them with nothing done.

At heart, however, she was a thorough l)aL2ist, her secret determination being to subject the country religiously to the see of Rome and politically to the power of France. She had filled the country with French soldiers, who devoured it unmercifully and perpetrated every insolence; and at length, after the crown matrimonial had been bestowed on her son-in-law, she considered that the hour had come for throwing off the mask. Accordingly the preachers were summoned to appear before her at Stirling on lo May 1559. They prepared to obey the summons; but the men of Montrose and Dundee, with others from the surrounding parts of Forfarshire and Fife, accompanied them in arms as far as Perth; and in the Dundee contingent John Knox made his appearance, having arrived in Edinburgh on the second of the month.

The Regent had, in fact, evoked civil war, which went on without intermission till her death. Its first centre was Perth, between which place and Stirling, where the Queen Regent lay, complex negotiations went on. Meantime Knox was preaching in the Fair City, his voice rising like a trumpet over the confusion of the times; and in connection with his preaching there broke out the spoliation of the holy places of the old religion, which has been so often made a serious charge against him. According to his own account, this began accidentally. After a sermon against idolatry, a priest commenced to say Mass; whereupon a boy used some abusive language; whereat the priest struck him a blow; then the lad threw a stone, which struck the altar at which the priest was ministering; whereupon confusion broke loose, and none could stop it. Thus were the houses of the Grey and the Black Friars and the Charterhouse Monks destroyed “by the hands,” says Knox, “not of the gentlemen, neither of them that were earnest professors, but of the rascal multitude.” He and others, a little later, attempted to stop similar proceedings at the Abbey and the Palace of Scone, refusing to speak to the rioters from Dundee who had done the violence. But similar acts of desecration accompanied his preaching soon afterwards at St. Andrews; and the destructive mania spread far and wide to other places. Knox would have preferred an orderly destruction of the symbols of idolatry by the action of lawful authority; but it would, it is to be feared, be too much to say that, in case of its not being done in this way, he would have preferred that it should not be done at all. The saying, often attributed to him, that the nests must be pulled down if the rooks are to be got rid of, cannot be traced to any document emanating from him; but it has internal verisimilitude. His aesthetic sense was imperfectly developed. He probably saw that the buildings and their ornaments were well adapted for the worship which it was his business to abolish; and, if buildings better adapted to Protestant worship and yet conforming to the laws of good taste were not substituted for these, this may be less his fault than that of the careless generations of Protestants that have succeeded him.

The war shifted from Perth to Fife, where the insurgents gained a decisive advantage at Cupar Muir; and, thereafter, they drove the Regent and her troops out of Stirling and Edinburgh to Haddington, where they rallied. Then the tide of fortune turned; and the Congregation were severely beaten at Leith and driven, in a sorely shattered condition, to Stirling.

It was a strange war; for the combatants were less the Scots themselves than the French on the one side and the English on the other; and the issue seemed to depend on the number of auxiliaries the one foreign power or the other could be induced to furnish. Knox had an extraordinary part to play in it; because he was not only the army chaplain, whose voice, as Randolph, the English ambassador, said, was able to put more life into men than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in their ears, but he was, besides, the secretary of the Congregation, issuing manifestoes and penning despatches; and he was negotiator and almost spy, going on a secret mission to England and haggling with the English Government about the sums of money they were to pay to the various Scottish nobles for their services. It was all necessary, he believed, in the sacred cause, and with his whole heart and mind he approved of the English alliance, while he was certainly politically right in seeking to deliver his country from the presence of the French, who were intolerable oppressors of the people; but we are almost glad that Knox did not shine in such negotiations. He was perfectly well known to the enemy at Berwick, when he thought he was going about incognito; once, when he suggested that the English soldiers who lent their swords to Scotland should make an equivocal explanation of their conduct, he was sharply rebuked by the English agent with whom he was dealing; and once, when he had secured a large sum of money from the English Government, it was surprised and seized by the enemy on its way North. He was himself weary of this business before he had had it long in charge; and it was well when it was taken out of his hands by young Lethington. But he endured incredible labours and sufferings in those eventful months. Often he was sick in body and sicker still in spirit. Yet he was the life and soul of the whole movement; and in moments of despair, which happened not rarely, he was able to pour energy into the veins of his comrades and inspire them with fresh faith in God and in their enterprise.

What might have been the issue of the struggle, had it been prolonged, it is impossible to say; but, while it still hung in the balance, Mary of Lorraine died on lo June i§6o; and, immediately thereafter, by the Treaty of Edinburgh, it was settled that Francis and Mary should give up using the arms of England; that the French troops should depart from Scotland and no office of importance be held any more by a Frenchman; and that a parliament should be forthwith assembled, the acts of which should be as valid as if it had been summoned by the King and Queen. Thus the Congregation triumphed all along the line; and the way was clear for realising all the hopes with which Knox had returned to his native country.

On I August 1560 began the sittings of the most important parliament that ever met in Scotland. It was numerously attended; the presence of many of the barons or lairds being especially noteworthy — an estate of the realm which had long had the right of sitting in parliament but had made little or no use of the privilege till now, when it was stirred with religious impulses and perceived how political power might be wielded as a weapon in the war of righteousness. “I never,” reported Randolph, the English ambassador, to his master.

“heard matters of so great import neither sooner dispatched nor with better will agreed to.” Religion had the first place; and a committee of ministers, of whom Knox was one, were called on to draw up a confession of faith, as a basis for all that was to follow. In four days the First Scottish Confession was put together; and it was adopted by parliament article by article; the opposite party having nothing to say for themselves beyond a feeble dissent from a very few. It was resolved that the spiritual estate, on account of false doctrine and dishonoured sacraments, should be henceforth excluded from voting in parliament. All doctrines and practices contrary to the new creed were condemned. The jurisdiction of the Pope within the realm was abolished. Finally, the celebration of the Mass was forbidden under penalty of confiscation for the first offence, banishment for the second, and death for the third.

Thus, at one swoop, was the structure, which it had taken hundreds of years to rear, brought to the ground; and, although to the end of his life Knox was kept in constant anxiety as to the possible raising up again of what he would have called the spiritual Babylon, the work was never undone. This was the end of the papacy in Scotland; and with it an era of darkness,

superstition and spiritual tyranny passed away. Whatever might be the shape which the New Scotland might assume, at all events the misshapen j fabric of Papal Scotland had perished of its own /corruption and gone down, unhonoured and unwept, into the abyss of oblivion. Never was there a system which was more utterly unable to offer for itself any rational defence. When the bishops, who were present in parliament, held their peace, the Earl Marischal uttered a word worthy of repetition. “It is long,” remarked he, “since I have had some favour unto the truth and since that I have had a suspicion of the papistical religion; but, I praise my God, this day has fully resolved me in the one and the other. For, seeing that my Lord Bishops, who for their learning can, and for the zeal that they bear to the verity would, as I suppose, gainsay anything that directly repugns to the verity of God; seeing, I say, that the Lord Bishops here present speak nothing to the contrary of the doctrine proponed, I cannot but hold it to be the very truth of God, and the contrary to be deceivable doctrine. And, therefore, as far as in me lieth, I approve the one and damn the other. And yet more, I must vote, by way of protestation, that, if any persons ecclesiastical shall after this oppose themselves to this our Confession, they have no place nor credit, considering that they, having had long advisement and full knowledge of this our Confession, none is now found, in lawful, free and quiet assembly, to oppose themselves to that which we profess.”

But much still required to be done to provide a substitute for the system which had been abolished and to supply to Scotland what Knox was fond of calling “the face of a Church.” Ministers of the right stamp were scarce; and much care had to be taken in distributing them to the best advantage over the country. Knox was appointed to Edinburgh, or rather reappointed; for he had been appointed the year before amidst the troubles of the civil war, and it was still felt that he was the man for this centre. Adam Heriot was sent to Aberdeen, William Christison to Dundee, John Row to Perth, Christopher Goodman to St. Andrews; and so on. Five ministers of distinguished ability were appointed Superintendents, to be over extensive 1 districts, in which they were “to plant and erect I churches, to set order and appoint ministers;” and these were John Spottiswood for Lothian, John Wynram for Fife, John Willock for Glasgow, Erskine of Dun for Angus and Mearns, John Carswxll for Argyll and the Isles. For the support History, ii. 122.

of these and their successors provision had to be made; but, for this and for the preparation of a comprehensive scheme for the government of the new Church, there was not time in the Parliament of 1560; and so to the same committee which had drawn up the Confession of Faith it was remitted to draw up a Book of Discipline, embodying all these things in preparation for a Parliament to be held the following year. Accordingly, at this task Knox and his comrades laboured with assiduity and soon had their report ready. But it met with unexpected opposition and was refused the sanction of Parliament, its outline being too ambitious for that generation, whose leaders characterized its proposals as “devout imaginations.” Its purpose was to employ the property of the old Church for the support of the new, and for the equipment of a national scheme of education and poor relief; but this was wrecked upon the compensation which it was supposed necessary to give to the actual holders of the property, many of whom were members of the nobility or related to the noble families of the land, on which their support would have fallen, had they been dispossessed.

But there was a motive behind of a still more serious kind. The example set in England of the spoliation of the monasteries had not been lost on Scotland; and there was a keen thirst, especially in the upper classes, for the property, which was acknowledged to be in excess of the needs of the preachers. The longer a settlement was delayed, the easier would it be for the landed proprietors to absorb into their own estates the possessions of the Church, as the incumbents, one by one, slipped away. By the avarice of the Scottish nobility the patriotic plans of Knox were to a large extent frustrated; land by the struggle with these landgrabbers, many of whom were professors of the Reformed religion, the rest of his life was embittered. The preachers were starved, some of them, it is alleged, actually dying of cold and hunger; young men were discouraged from entering the ministry; and the whole fabric of the new Church was stunted. It was well that an ecclesiastical body was called into existence as a counterpoise to Parliament, the first General Assembly being held in December 1560, and consisting of six ministers and forty-two elders. Many attempts were made to wreck this institution in its early years, one of these evoking from Knox the famous saying: “Take from us the freedom of Assemblies and take from us the Evangel “; but the General Assembly was destined to outlive the Scottish Parliament itself and nearly every other national institution then in existence.

Whilst, however, these sweeping changes were taking place, there was one power with which the revolutionists were not sufficiently reckoning. This was the sovereign of the country, ^jary Stuart, the only child of James V. and Mary of Guise, was born in sorrow, as her father was dropping

I into his grave a broken-hearted man. But she grew up gay and beautiful, with all the cleverness of the Stuart race in her brain and all its waywardness and passion in her blood. Scarcely had she come into the world when there was talk of marrying her; and about this there was far too much talk, for her comfort, all her days. First, she was to be the bride of the son of the King of England; and self-willed Harry the Eighth ravaged Scotland with fire and sword because this agreement was departed from, destroying, as he did so, not a few of those beautiful houses of religion on the Borders, the destruction of which is often credited to John Knox. Mary of Guise brought it about that her child was espoused to the Dauphin of her own native land; and in 1548, at the age of six, the little maid was accordingly carried to France, to be educated for her great destiny under the eye of her future

, mother-in-law, the renowned Catherine de’ Medici. It was an evil school; for the French court was unspeakably corrupt. “She was sold,” says Knox.

“to go to France, to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm and for her final destruction.”^ In 1558 she was married, at the age of sixteen, to a husband six weeks her junior, and she signed a secret deed, making over her country and crown, in the event of her death, to France, this compact to hold good notwithstanding any declaration to the contrary she might make in public, a fact which proves how exactly she had been taught in the same school of political morality as her mother, who declared at a critical moment in her own life that princes ought not to be bound by their promises any longer than was compatible with their own convenience. The Dauphin, Mary’s husband, succeeded to the French throne the year after their marriage; he was, however, but a sickly boy entirely under the thumb of his ambitious mother; and he died the following year, in November 1560. Thus was taken away one large portion of the glory apparently destined for Mary, who at one time seemed likely to be Queen at once of France, England and Scotland. It will be remembered that her mother had died the same year; and now, after the double bereavement, the time seemed ripe for her to return to her native country. History y i. 218.

On 19 August, 1 561 ,accompanied by her four Maries and a brilliant retinue, she landed at Leith; but it was one of those dismal days of rain, mist and darkness for which the Scottish climate is unrivalled; and prophets after the event. said that it was a presage of all the misery which was coming to the country and to her. The climate, political and religious, into which she had come, was scarcely less dismal for one born and bred as she had been; and, without treachery to the cause of Knox, it is surely possible to extend to the illfated princess a tribute of sympathy. Hardly had she set foot on the soil of her country when she became involved in the religious quarrel; for, the Sunday after her arrival, Mass was said in the chapel of Holyrood. This acted on the community like a spark on gunpowder, and the flames of religious excitement enveloped the land. Some stuck by the fact that she had broken the law and incurred its penalty. Others said that she could not avoid what had been done, having so many French visitors at the palace. A rumour spread that, if she were interfered with, she would take ship and sail back to the place whence she had come. Sanguine Protestants said that, if she were treated with generosity, she might be won to their side. Knox, from his pulpit in St. Giles’, declared that one Mass inspired him with more terror than would the landing in the country of ten thousand men.

Hearing of this sermon, Mary sent for the preacher to the palace, and interviewed him in the presence of the future Regent Moray. She reproached him with his book on female government; ^., o but he skilfully parried this attack by declaring that it had always been the privilege of the learned to emit theories of government differing widely from the customs of their own day, as Plato had done in his Republic; but yet they had lived quietly under the constitutions of their time and country. She then drew out of him his political views, the upshot of which appeared, she said, to be that her subjects were to obey him instead of her. But out of this conclusion also he extricated himself by the observa-!

tion that the whole end of his preaching was to j

I lead subjects and princes both to obey God. From

this she drifted into the true papist’s question, how

she was to know whether he or the teachers of her

youth had the divine authority; to which his reply

was that she was to trust neither the one nor the

other, but God speaking in his Word. He left her

with the benediction:” I pray God, Madam, that

you may be as blessed within the commonwealth of

Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever

Deborah was in the commonwealth of Israel.” What she thought of her visitor we have not been informed; but his opinion of her was, “If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth me.”

It is difficult to know what attraction there was in Knox which made Mary wish to see him any more; but she did send for him again and again; and it is evident from his accotints of these interviews that the attraction was not all on one side. I Mary appears to have hoped to subdue this son of ‘thunder. He, perhaps, did not hope enough to subdue her; for he seems early to have spoken strongly of the hopelessness of her conversion. But he enja^4jhe encounter of wits with so keen a mind. It was not an entirely unequal contest; for, while he had the advantage of age and experience, she had the advantage of being a woman and a queen.

The second occasion of his being summoned to the monarch’s presence was a sermon he had preached against an outbreak of persecution in France, where the Huguenots had been attacked by the Guises, in celebration of which the Queen was supposed to have held a ball at Holyrood. This time the preacher was in a humorous mood, and hinted to

Mary that the ordinary fate of people who do not go to Church had befallen her, in that she had heard ill of herself, and did not know whether or not it was true. If she would come to the sermon,, she would not be misinformed as she had been. Or, if she appointed time and place, he would come and preach his sermon over again to her. So he departed “with a reasonable merry countenance; whereat some papists offended, said: ‘He is not afraid.’ Which heard of him, he answered, * Why should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman make me afraid? I have looked in the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been afraid above measure.’”

It was Mary who was in a pleasant humour at their next interview, which took place at Lochleven, where she had invited him to attend her. The occasion was one of national interest. The Queen’s example, as a papist and hearer 01 Mass, was rapidly telling on the country. People of high degree came up from the provinces hot against the ceremony which the law of the land condemned, but the atmosphere of the court cooled them, and they went home thinking the Mass was not so dangerous after all. Wherever Mary made her progresses, of which she was fond, as they were 1 History, i. 335.

very popular, the Mass went with her; and the nobility with whom she had been staying were tempted to continue it after she had left. Knox’s best friends, like the future Regent Moray, had dissented from his views, maintaining that the Queen had the right to the exercise of her own religion; and Calvin had even been appealed to against his disciple. Many, of whom Lethington was one, had gone completely over to the Queen’s side, and were her uncompromising apologists. At length the priests nof the old Church beginning to bestir themselves, the Mass was celebrated here and there. But the gentlemen of the West, ever the most resolute and jealous Protestants in the country, taking the law into their own hands, suppressed the unlawful practice by force. Of this Knox approved, and Mary summoned him to answer for it. They had an angry interview in the evening; but next morning, as she went out to the hawking, she summoned him to her side and entered into the most confidential conversation on matters concerning both his and her welfare; no allusion being made to the subject of the preceding evening’s discussion, till, at the moment of parting, she whispered that all should be done as he had desired: to which he replied: “I am assured then that you shall please God and enjoy rest and tranquillity within your realm; which to your Majesty is more profitable than all the Pope’s power can be.”^

Very different was the next interview, which took place in June 1563, when it was rumoured that the Queen was about to marry the son of the King of Spain, of course a Catholic. On this report Knox had commented in the pulpit with such energy as to displease his own friends, and flatterers were not slow to carry his words to the court. On his arrival there he found the Queen in a towering passion, which lasted throughout the entire interview; every attempt of his to explain himself being met with the question: “But what have you to do with my marriage “? “I have borne with you,” she exclaimed through her tears, “in all your rigorous manner of speaking; yea, I have sought your favours by all possible means, and yet I cannot be quit of you. I vow to God, I shall be revenged.” He pleaded that he was not his own master in the; pulpit, but had to utter what was given him. But the same angry rejoinder burst from her; and she added the contemptuous question: “And what are you within this realm? “But it was now his turn to score; and he replied:” A subject born within the same; and, albeit I be neither earl, lord History i. 376.

nor baron, yet has God made me, how abject I ever be in your eyes, a profitable member thereof.” Erskine of Dun, who stood by, attempted to soothe the enraged princess, but her tears and sobs redoubled; and Knox was dismissed with an injunction to wait in the ante-chamber till the royal pleasure should be announced to him. There he was avoided by the courtiers, as if he had been a leper; but he turned him to the ladies of the court and said, not in the tones of a terrified man: “O fair ladies, how pleasant were this life of yours, if it should ever abide, and then in the end you might pass to heaven with all this gear. But fye upon that knave Death, that will come whether we will or not.” And so on he moralised, availing himself of the best company to be had in the circumstances, till the storm in the inner chamber was allayed and he was permitted to depart.^

From this time onwards, there can be no doubt that Knox was in deadly peril; and it was not long before Mary thought she had caught him in a corner from which escape was impossible. In her absence from the city. Mass was said at Holyrood in a peculiarly offensive manner during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the churches of the town; whereat Knox’s party sent certain 1 History, i. 389.

of their number to take note of the persons who attended the service in the chapel. Out of this sprang some disorder, which was greatly magnified; and two of the citizens of Edinburgh were arrested. When they were about to be brought to trial, Knox took it upon him to convene a number of friends from different parts of the country, to stand by the prisoners. His letter falling into the hands of Mary, who regarded it as treasonable, Knox was called to answer for this crime before the Privy Council in December 1563. His best friends counselled him to make his submission to the Queen beforehand, as they could perceive no way of escape. But Knox disdained to use any artifice, saying: “I praise my God, through Jesus Christ, I have learned not to cry conjuration and treason at everything that the godless multitude does condemn, neither yet to fear the things that they fear.” The Queen came in and occupied the chair with no little worldly pomp; “But,” adds Knox, “her pomp lacked one principal point, to wit, womanly gravity; for, when she saw John Knox standing at the other end of the table, bareheaded, she first smiled, and then burst into laughter, saying:” Know ye whereat I laugh? Yon man made me weep,^ and wept never a tear himself. “gart me greit.”

I will see whether I can make him cry.” The Queen entered into the argument, and Secretary Lethington did his very best to fasten the halter round the neck of the culprit. But never was Knox more cool and astute. They were assuming that to convene the Queen’s lieges without her permission was manifestly a crime; but Knox boldly denied it, arguing that he did so every Sabbath, when he invited people to Church; he proved that he had commission from the General Assembly to call the friends of the Church together whenever public necessity required it; and there were those in the Council who had answered such summonses from his pen in days gone by. A stupor of admiration seized the Council, like that which fell on the tribunal of the beasts when Reineke Fuchs made his defence, and they unanimously acquitted the prisoner. So incensed was Lethington that he recalled the Queen, who had left the chamber, and caused the vote to be taken over again in her presence. But Scottish nobles were not to be thus intimidated; and they gave the same votes lOver again with the emphasis of indignation.^ There is not in history a scene more creditable to the Scottish nobility; but it robbed John Knox of the martyr’s crown.

History i. 412.

Still he might well have felt like David, when he said: “I shall one day fall into the hands of Saul.” Mary’s blandishments were slowly undermining the virtue of the Protestant nobility; behind whom there was a considerable body of nobles still Catholic; and, by serious riots in Edinburgh, it was made manifest that the common man resented the yoke of discipline imposed by the new system. Maryland Knox stood out more and more clearly as rival champions; and an indifferent spectator of the struggle might have predicted with considerable confidence that the beautiful Queen would win in the long run. But by a sudden and overmastering impulse Mary flung her chances away, and the game was left in the hands of her grim antagonist.

There is nothing in the annals of romance more dramatic than the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, from her marriage to Darnley till her flight into England, from which she was never to return. The dates are eloquent, and ought to be carefully noted; because they reveal the headlong haste with which the various stages of this veritable Prodigal’s Progress were evolved.

After innumerable schemes for her second marriage had been discussed, Mary made a choice of her own, wedding her cousin, Henry Darnley, on 29 July

1565, she being then twenty-three and he nineteen years of age. This step cost her the loss of her best counsellors, such as the future Regent Moray and Maitland of Lethington, and made Queen Elizabeth and the statesmen of England her enemies. But her cousin had a handsome person and a fair face, and without regard for consequences she obeyed the impulse of her heart. Love, however, which swelled like the Solway, ebbed like its tide, Darnley was a fool, and she was soon disgusted with him, making no more secret of her dislike than she had previously done of her favour. On Riio, an Italian, who had come to Scotland in the train of the ambassador of Savoy and stayed as a secret agent of the Pope, she allowed her affections to decline, and she loaded him with promotions, which rendered him so obnoxious to the Scottish nobility that several of its members, in conjunction with the jealous Darnley, stabbed him to death in the Queen’s ante-chamber on 9 March, 1566. Such an act was not likely to bring back to her husband Mary’s wandering affections: and now she fell under the spell of another and still more dangerous lover, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whom Throgmorton, a keen observer, had, years before, described to Queen Elizabeth as “a glorious, rash and hazardous young man.” At the baptism of her son, the future James VI., in the June of this year, Bothwell was allowed to take a prominent part, while Darnley, the father of the child, was banished from the ceremony. In October Mary paid Bothwell a romantic visit at Hermitage Castle on the Border, riding so far and so fast for the purpose as to bring on a dangerous illness. On 9 February of the following year Darnley was foully murdered by an explosion of gunpowder at Kirk-o’-Field, a spot on which the University of Edinburgh now stands but then outside the city; and Bothwell was universally believed to be the leader of the conspirators, although he was acquitted at a mock trial. Three months afterwards, on 15 May 1567, Mary married him, after creating him Duke of Orkney; he having in the beginning of the month, through the shameful connivance of the head of the Roman Catholic Church, obtained a divorce from his wife. Mary was ready to launch forth on a new career, youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm; but she had miscalculated the temper of a Protestant population. By a common impulse the country rose up in an access of disgust and horror. The troops which she summoned to her assistance melted away on Carberry Hill. She was separated forever from her paramour and brought a prisoner to the capital, amidst the most humiliating outbreaks of popular execration. She had to sign her own demission of the crown; her infant son was crowned king; Moray was appointed regent of the kingdom; and she was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. Thence she managed to make her escape in May 1568; but, although three-fourths of the nobility flocked to her standard, she was so decisively beaten in a single battle at Langside that

/ she had to flee to England, where, for nearly twenty years, she remained in confinement, till in 1587, in Fotheringay Castle, she laid her head on the block and terminated her tragic career.

During all these proceedings Knox took the worst possible view of Mary, not scrupling to apply to her terms unfit for ears polite; and in his opinion

I a grave iniquity was committed when she was not tried and executed for murder and adultery, instead of being imprisoned in Lochleven Castle; for, in his eyes, birth or rank was no excuse for crime. But, as by the death of Mary of Lorraine his cause was saved from impending danger, so by the frailties of Mary Stuart it secured its second great deliverance and victory, at a juncture when it appeared to be in imminent peril. Knox preached at the coronation of the infant King at Stirling and again at the opening of Parliament at the close of the year. The Regent Moray, from whom he had long been alienated on account of their differing views as to the extent to which the Queen should be tolerated in the exercise of her own religion, was now his intimate friend again; and they laboured with one mind and heart for the best interests of the kingdom. As early as December 1567, the General Assembly could write to John Willock, whom it was recalling from England, that he might help in forwarding the good work in Scotland: “Our enemies, praised be God, are dashed; religion established; sufficient provision made for ministers; orders taken, and penalty appointed for all sort of transgressions and transgressors; and, above all, a godly magistrate, whom God, of His eternal and heavenly providence, hath reserved to this age, to put in execution whatever He by His law commandeth.”