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Lang Andrew
John Knox and the Reformation

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Knox was going about to destroy the scheme of les politiques, Randolph, Lethington, and the Lord James. They desired peace and amity with England, and the two Scots, at least, hoped to secure these as the Cardinal Guise did, by Mary’s renouncing all present claim to the English throne, in return for recognition as heir, if Elizabeth died without issue. Elizabeth, as we know her, would never have granted these terms, but Mary’s ministers, Lethington then in England, Lord James at home, tried to hope. ²²² Lord James had heard Mary’s outburst to Knox about defending her own insulted Church, but he was not nervously afraid that she would take to dipping her hands in the blood of the saints. Neither he nor Lethington could revert to the old faith; they had pecuniary reasons, as well as convictions, which made that impossible.

Lethington, returned to Edinburgh (October 25), spoke his mind to Cecil. “The Queen behaves herself.. as reasonably as we can require: if anything be amiss the fault is rather in ourselves. You know the vehemency of Mr. Knox’s spirit which cannot be bridled, and yet doth utter sometimes such sentences as cannot easily be digested by a weak stomach. I would wish he should deal with her more gently, being a young princess unpersuaded… Surely in her comporting with him she declares a wisdom far exceeding her age.” ²²³ Vituperation is not argument, and gentleness is not unchristian. St. Paul did not revile the gods of Felix and Festus.

But, prior to these utterances of October, the brethren had been baiting Mary. On her public entry (which Knox misdates by a month) her idolatry was rebuked by a pageant of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Huntly managed to stop a burning in effigy of a priest at the Mass. They never could cease from insulting the Queen in the tenderest point. The magistrates next coupled “mess-mongers” with notorious drunkards and adulterers, “and such filthy persons,” in a proclamation, so the Provost and Bailies were “warded” (Knox says) in the Tolbooth. Knox blamed Lethington and Lord James, in a letter to Cecil; ²²⁴ in his “History” he says, “God be merciful to some of our own.” ²²⁵

The Queen herself, as a Papist, was clearly insulted in the proclamation. Moray and Lethington, the latter touched by her “readiness to hear,” and her gentleness in the face of Protestant brutalities; the former, perhaps, lured by the hope of obtaining, as the price of his alliance, the earldom of Moray, were by the end of October still attempting to secure amity between her and Elizabeth, and to hope for the best, rather than drive the Queen wild by eternal taunts and menaces. The preachers denounced her rites at Hallowmass (All Saints), and a servant of her brother, Lord Robert, beat a priest; but men actually doubted whether subjects might interfere between the Queen and her religion. There was a discussion on this point between the preachers and the nobles, and the Church in Geneva (Calvin) was to be consulted. Knox offered to write, but Lethington said that he would write, as much stood on the “information”; that is, on the manner of stating the question. Lethington did not know, and Knox does not tell us in his “History” that he had himself, a week earlier, put the matter before Calvin in his own way. Even Lord James, he says to Calvin, though the Abdiel of godliness, “is afraid to overthrow that idol by violence” —idolum illud missalicum. ²²⁶

Knox’s letter to Calvin represents the Queen as alleging that he has already answered the question, declaring that Knox’s party has no right to interfere with the Royal mass. This rumour Knox disbelieves. He adds that Arran would have written, but was absent.

Apparently Arran did write to Calvin, anonymously, and dating from London, November 18, 1561. The letter, really from Scotland, is in French. The writer acknowledges the receipt, about August 20, of an encouraging epistle from Calvin. He repeats Knox’s statements, in the main, and presses for a speedy reply. He says that he goes seldom to Court, both on account of “that idol,” and because “sobriety and virtue” have been exiled. ²²⁷ As Arran himself “is known to have had company of a good handsome wench, a merchant’s daughter,” which led to a riot with Bothwell, described by Randolph (December 27, 1561), his own “virtue and sobriety” are not conspicuous. ²²⁸ He was in Edinburgh on November 15-19, and the London date of his anonymous letter is a blind. ²²⁹

It does not appear that Calvin replied to Knox, and to the anonymous correspondent, in whom I venture to detect Arran; or, if he answered, his letter was probably unfavourable to Knox, as we shall argue when the subject later presents itself.

Finally – “the votes of the Lords prevailed against the ministers”; the Queen was allowed her Mass, but Lethington, a minister of the Queen, did not consult a foreigner as to the rights of her subjects against her creed.

The lenity of Lord James was of sudden growth. At Stirling he and Argyll had gallantly caused the priests to leave the choir “with broken heads and bloody ears,” the Queen weeping. So Randolph reported to Cecil (September 24).

Why her brother, foremost to insult Mary and her faith, unless Randolph errs, in September, took her part in a few weeks, we do not know. At Perth, Mary was again offended, and suffered in health by reason of the pageants; “they did too plainly condemn the errors of the world… I hear she is troubled with such sudden passions after any great unkindness or grief of mind,” says Randolph. She was seldom free from such godly chastisements. At Perth, however, some one gave her a cross of five diamonds with pendant pearls.

Meanwhile the statesmen did not obey the Ministers as men ought to obey God: a claim not easily granted by carnal politicians.

CHAPTER XV: KNOX AND QUEEN MARY (continued), 1561-1564

Had Mary been a mere high-tempered and high-spirited girl, easily harmed in health by insults to herself and her creed, she might now have turned for support to Huntly, Cassilis, Montrose, and the other Earls who were Catholic or “unpersuaded.” Her great-grandson, Charles II., when as young as she now was, did make the “Start” – the schoolboy attempt to run away from the Presbyterians to the loyalists of the North. But Mary had more self-control.

The artful Randolph found himself as hardly put to it now, in diplomacy, as the Cardinal’s murderers had done, in war, when they met the scientific soldier, Strozzi. “The trade is now clean cut off from me,” wrote Randolph (October 27); “I have to traffic now with other merchants than before. They know the value of their wares, and in all places how the market goeth… Whatsoever policy is in all the chief and best practised heads of France; whatsoever craft, falsehood, or deceit is in all the subtle brains of Scotland,” said the unscrupulous agent, “is either fresh in this woman’s memory, or she can bring it out with a wet finger.” ²³⁰

Mary, in fact, was in the hands of Lethington (a pensioner of Elizabeth) and of Lord James: “subtle brains” enough. She was the “merchandise,” and Lethington and Lord James wished to make Elizabeth acknowledge the Scottish Queen as her successor, the alternative being to seek her price as a wife for an European prince. An “union of hearts” with England might conceivably mean Mary’s acceptance of the Anglican faith. It is not a kind thing to say about Mary, but I suspect that, if assured of the English succession, she might have gone over to the Prayer Book. In the first months of her English captivity (July 1568) Mary again dallied with the idea of conversion, for the sake of freedom. She told the Spanish Ambassador that “she would sooner be murdered,” but if she could have struck her bargain with Elizabeth, I doubt that she would have chosen the Prayer Book rather than the dagger or the bowl. ²³¹ Her conversion would have been bitterness as of wormwood to Knox. In his eyes Anglicanism was “a bastard religion,” “a mingle-mangle now commanded in your kirks.” “Peculiar services appointed for Saints’ days, diverse Collects as they falsely call them in remembrance of this or that Saint.. are in my conscience no small portion of papistical superstition.” ²³² “Crossing in Baptism is a diabolical invention; kneeling at the Lord’s table, mummelling,” (uttering the responses, apparently), “or singing of the Litany.” All these practices are “diabolical inventions,” in Knox’s candid opinion, “with Mr. Parson’s pattering of his constrained prayers, and with the mass-munging of Mr. Vicar, and of his wicked companions.” (A blank in the MS.) “Your Ministers, before for the most part, were none of Christ’s ministers, but mass-mumming priests.” He appears to speak of the Anglican Church as it was under Edward VI. (To Mrs. Locke, Dieppe, April 6, 1559.) ²³³ As Elizabeth brought in “cross and candle,” her Church must have been odious to our Reformer. Calvin had regarded the “silly things” in our Prayer Book as “endurable,” not so Knox. Before he came back to Scotland, the Reformers were content with the English Prayer Book. By rejecting it, Knox and his allies disunited Scotland and England.

Knox’s friend Arran was threatening to stir up the Congregation for the purpose of securing him in the revenues of three abbeys, including St. Andrews, of which Lord James was Prior. The extremists raised the question, “whether the Queen, being an idolater, may be obeyed in all civil and political actions.” ²³⁴

Knox later made Chatelherault promise this obedience; what his views were in November 1561 we know not. Lord James was already distrusted by his old godly friends; it was thought he would receive what he had long desired, the Earldom of Moray (November 11, 1561), and the precise professors meditated a fresh revolution. “It must yet come to a new day,” they said. ²³⁵ Those about Arran were discontented, and nobody was more in his confidence than Knox, but at this time Arran was absent from Edinburgh; was at St. Andrews.

Meanwhile, at Court, “the ladies are merry, dancing, lusty, and fair,” wrote Randolph, who flirted with Mary Beaton (November 18); and long afterwards, in 1578, when she was Lady Boyne, spoke of her as “a very dear friend.” Knox complains that the girls danced when they “got the house alone”; not a public offence! He had his intelligencers in the palace.

There was, on November 16, a panic in the unguarded palace: ²³⁶ “the poor damsels were left alone,” while men hid in fear of nobody knew what, except a rumour that Arran was coming, with his congregational friends, “to take away the Queen.” The story was perhaps a fable, but Arran had been uttering threats. Mary, however, expected to be secured by an alliance with Elizabeth. “The accord between the two Queens will quite overthrow them” (the Bishops), “and they say plainly that she cannot return a true Christian woman,” writes Randolph. ²³⁷

Lethington and Randolph both suspected that if Mary abandoned idolatry, it would be after conference with Elizabeth, and rather as being converted by that fair theologian than as compelled by her subjects. Unhappily Elizabeth never would meet Mary, who, for all that we know, might at this hour have adopted the Anglican via media, despite her protests to Knox and to the Pope of her fidelity to Rome. Like Henri IV., she may at this time have been capable of preferring a crown – that of England – to a dogma. Her Mass, Randolph wrote, “is rather for despite than devotion, for those that use it care not a straw for it, and jest sometimes against it.” ²³⁸

Randolph, at this juncture, reminded Mary that advisers of the Catholic party had prevented James V. from meeting Henry VIII. She answered, “Something is reserved for us that was not then,” possibly hinting at her conversion. Lord James shared the hopes of Lethington and Randolph. “The Papists storm, thinking the meeting of the queens will overthrow Mass and all.”

The Ministers of Mary, les politiques, indulged in dreams equally distasteful to the Catholics and to the more precise of the godly; dreams that came through the Ivory Gate; with pictures of the island united, and free from the despotism of Giant Pope and Giant Presbyter. ²³⁹ A schism between the brethren and their old leaders and advisers, Lord James and Lethington, was the result. At the General Assembly of December 1561, the split was manifest. The parties exchanged recriminations, and there was even question of the legality of such conventions as the General Assembly. Lethington asked whether the Queen “allowed” the gathering. Knox (apparently) replied, “Take from us the freedom of Assemblies, and take from us the Evangel.” He defended them as necessary for order among the preachers; but the objection, of course, was to their political interferences. The question was to be settled for Cromwell in his usual way, with a handful of hussars. It was now determined that the Queen might send Commissioners to the Assembly to represent her interests.

The plea of the godly that Mary should ratify the Book of Discipline was countered by the scoffs of Lethington. He and his brothers ever tormented Knox by persiflage. Still the preachers must be supported, and to that end, by a singular compromise, the Crown assumed dominion over the property of the old Church, a proceeding which Mary, if a good Catholic, could not have sanctioned. The higher clergy retained two-thirds of their benefices, and the other third was to be divided between the preachers and the Queen. Vested rights, those of the prelates, and the interests of the nobles to whom, in the troubles, they had feued parts of their property, were thus secured; while the preachers were put off with a humble portion. Among the abbeys, that of St. Andrews, held by the good Lord James, was one of the richest. He appears to have retained all the wealth, for, as Bishop Keith says, “the grand gulf that swallowed up the whole extent of the thirds were pensions given gratis by the Queen to those about the Court.. of which last the Earl of Moray was always sure to obtain the thirds of his priories of St. Andrews and Pittenweem.” In all, the whole reformed clergy received annually (but not in 1565-66) £24,231, 17s. 7d. Scots, while Knox and four superintendents got a few chalders of wheat and “bear.” In 1568, when Mary had fallen, a gift of £333, 6s. 8d. was made to Knox from the fund, about a seventh of the money revenue of the Abbey of St. Andrews. ²⁴⁰ Nobody can accuse Knox of enriching himself by the Revolution. “In the stool of Edinburgh,” he declared that two parts were being given to the devil, “and the third must be divided between God and the devil,” between the preachers and the Queen, and the Earl of Moray, among others. The eminently godly Laird of Pitarro had the office of paying the preachers, in which he was so niggardly that the proverb ran, “The good Laird of Pitarro was an earnest professor of Christ, but the great devil receive the Comptroller.”

It was argued that “many Lords have not so much to spend” as the preachers; and this was not denied (if the preachers were paid), but it was said the Lords had other industries whereby they might eke out their revenues. Many preachers, then or later, were driven also to other industries, such as keeping public-houses. ²⁴¹ Knox, at this period, gracefully writes of Mary, “we call her not a hoore.” When she scattered his party after Riccio’s murder, he went the full length of the expression, in his “History.”

“Simplicity,” says Thucydides, “is no small part of a noble nature,” and Knox was now to show simplicity in conduct, and in his narrative of a very curious adventure.

The Hamiltons had taken little but loss by joining the Congregation. Arran could not recover his claims, on whatever they were founded, over the wealth of St. Andrews and Dunfermline. Chatelherault feared that Mary would deprive him of his place of refuge, the castle of Dumbarton, to which he confessed that his right was “none,” beyond a verbal promise of a nineteen years “farm” (when given we know not), from Mary of Guise. ²⁴² Randolph began to believe that Arran really had contemplated a raid on Mary at Holyrood, where she had no guards. ²⁴³ “Why,” asked Arran, “was it not as easy to take her out of the Abbey, as once it had been intended to do with her mother?”

Here were elements of trouble, and Knox adds that, according to the servants of Chatelherault, Huntly and the Hamiltons devised to slay Lord James, who in January received the Earldom of Moray, but bore the title of Earl of Mar, which earldom he held for a brief space. ²⁴⁴ Huntly had claims on Moray, and hence hated Lord James. Arran was openly sending messengers to France; “his councils are too patent.” Randolph at the same time found Knox and the preachers “as wilfull as learned, which heartily I lament” (January 30). The rumour that Mary had been persuaded by the Cardinal to turn Anglican “makes them run almost wild” (February 12). ²⁴⁵ If the Queen were an Anglican the new Kirk would be in an ill way. Arran still sent retainers to France, and was reported to speak ill of Mary (February 21), but the Duke tried to win Randolph to a marriage between Arran and the Queen. The intended bridegroom lay abed for a week, “tormented by imaginations,” but was contented, not to be reconciled with Bothwell, but to pass his misdeeds in “oblivion,” ²⁴⁶ as he declared to the Privy Council (February 20).

In these threatening circumstances Bothwell made Knox’s friend, Barron, a rich burgess who “financed” the Earl, introduce him to our Reformer. The Earl explained that his feud with Arran was very expensive; he had for his safety to keep “a number of wicked and unprofitable men about him” – his “Lambs,” the Ormistouns, ²⁴⁷ young Hay of Tala, probably, and the rest. He therefore repented, and wished to be reconciled to Arran. Knox, pleased at being a reconciler where nobler men had failed, and moved, after long refusal, by the entreaties of the godly, as he tells Mrs. Locke, advised Bothwell first to be reconciled to God. So Bothwell presently was, going to sermon for that very purpose. Knox promised to approach Arran, and Bothwell, with his usual impudence, chose that moment to seize an old pupil of Knox’s, the young Laird of Ormiston (Cockburn). The young laird, to be sure, had fired a pistol at his enemy. However, Bothwell repented of this lapse, and at the Hamilton’s great house of Kirk-of-Field, Knox made him and Arran friends. Next day they went to sermon together; on the following day they visited Chatelherault at Kinneil, some twelve miles from Edinburgh. But on the ensuing day (March 26) came the wild end of the reconciliation.

Knox had delivered his daily sermon, and was engaged with his vast correspondence, when Arran was announced, with an advocate and the town clerk. Arran began a conference with tears, said that he was betrayed, and told his tale. Bothwell had informed him that he would seize the Queen, put her in Dumbarton, kill her misguiders, the “Earl of Moray” (Mar, Lord James), Lethington, and others, “and so shall he and I rule all.”

But Arran believed Bothwell really intended to accuse him of treason, or knowledge of treason, so he meant to write to Mary and Mar. Knox asked whether he had assented to the plot, and advised him to be silent. Probably he saw that Arran was distraught, and did not credit his story. But Arran said that Bothwell (as he had once done before, in 1559) would challenge him to a judicial combat – such challenges were still common, but never led to a fight. He then walked off with his legal advisers, and wrote to Mary at Falkland. ²⁴⁸ If Arran went mad, he went mad “with advice of counsel.” There had come the chance of “a new day,” which the extremists desired, but its dawn was inauspicious.

Arran rode to his father’s house of Kinneil, where, either because he was insane, or because there really was a Bothwell-Hamilton plot, he was locked up in a room high above the ground. He let himself down from the window, reached Halyards (a place of Kirkcaldy of Grange), and was thence taken by Mar (whom Knox appears to have warned) to the Queen at Falkland. Bothwell and Gawain Hamilton were also put in ward there. Randolph gives (March 31) a similar account, but believed that there really was a plot, which Arran denied even before he arrived at Falkland. Bothwell came to purge himself, but “was found guilty on his own confession on some points.” ²⁴⁹

The Queen now went to St. Andrews, where the suspects were placed in the Castle. Arran wavered, accusing Mar’s mother of witchcraft. Mary was “not a little offended with Bothwell to whom she has been so good.” Randolph (April 7) continued to think that Arran should be decapitated. He and Bothwell were kept in ward, and his father, the Duke, was advised to give up Dumbarton to the Crown, which he did. ²⁵⁰ This was about April 23. Knox makes a grievance of the surrender; the Castle, he says, was by treaty to be in the Duke’s hands till the Queen had lawful issue. ²⁵¹ Chatelherault himself, as we said, told Randolph that he had no right in the place, beyond a verbal and undated promise of the late Regent.

Knox now again illustrates his own historical methods. Mary, riding between Falkland and Lochleven, fell, was hurt, and when Randolph wrote from Edinburgh on May 11, was not expected there for two or three days. But Knox reports that, on her return from Fife to Edinburgh, she danced excessively till after midnight, because she had received letters “that persecution was begun again in France,” by the Guises. ²⁵² Now as, according to Knox elsewhere, “Satan stirreth his terrible tail,” so did one of Mary’s uncles, the Duc de Guise, “stir his tail” against one of the towns appointed to pay Mary’s jointure, namely Vassy, in Champagne. Here, on March 1, 1562, a massacre of Huguenots, by the Guise’s retainers, began the war of religion afresh. ²⁵³

Now, in the first place, this could not be joyful news to set Mary dancing; as it was apt to prevent what she had most at heart, her personal interview with Elizabeth. She understood this perfectly well, and, in conversation with Randolph, after her return to Edinburgh, lamented the deeds of her uncles, as calculated “to bring them in hate and disdain of many princes,” and also to chill Elizabeth’s amity for herself – on which her whole policy now depended (May 29). ²⁵⁴ She wept when Randolph said that, in the state of France, Elizabeth was not likely to move far from London for their interview. In this mood how could Mary give a dance to celebrate an event which threatened ruin to her hopes?

Moreover, if Knox, when he speaks of “persecution begun again,” refers to the slaughter of Huguenots by Guise’s retinue, at Vassy, that untoward event occurred on March 1, and Mary cannot have been celebrating it by a ball at Holyrood as late as May 14, at earliest. ²⁵⁵ Knox, however, preached against her dancing, if she danced “for pleasure at the displeasure of God’s people”; so he states the case. Her reward, in that case, would he “drink in hell.” In his “History” he declares that Mary did dance for the evil reason attributed to her, a reason which must have been mere matter of inference on his part, and that inference wrong, judging by dates, if the reference is to the affair of Vassy. In April both French parties were committing brutalities, but these were all contrary to Mary’s policy and hopes.

If Knox heard a rumour against any one, his business, according to the “Book of Discipline,” was not to go and preach against that person, even by way of insinuation. ²⁵⁶ Mary’s offence, if any existed, was not “public,” and was based on mere suspicion, or on tattle. Dr. M‘Crie, indeed, says that on hearing of the affair of Vassy, the Queen “immediately after gave a splendid ball to her foreign servants.” Ten weeks after the Vassy affair is not “immediately”; and Knox mentions neither foreign servants nor Vassy. ²⁵⁷

The Queen sent for Knox, and made “a long harangue,” of which he does not report one word. He gives his own oration. Mary then said that she could not expect him to like her uncles, as they differed in religion. But if he heard anything of herself that he disapproved of, “come to myself and tell me, and I shall hear you.” He answered that he was not bound to come “to every man in particular,” but she could come to his sermons! If she would name a day and hour, he would give her a doctrinal lecture. At this very moment he “was absent from his book”; his studies were interrupted.

“You will not always be at your book,” she said, and turned her back. To some papists in the antechamber he remarked, “Why should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman affray me? I have looked in the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been afraid above measure.”

He was later to flee before that pleasing face.

Mary can hardly be said to have had the worse, as far as manners and logic went, of this encounter, at which Morton, Mar, and Lethington were present, and seem to have been silent. ²⁵⁸

Meanwhile, Randolph dates this affair, the dancing, the sermon, the interview, not in May, but about December 13-15, 1562, ²⁵⁹ and connects the dancing with no event in France, ²⁶⁰ nor can I find any such event in late November which might make Mary glad at heart. Knox, Randolph writes, mistrusts all that the Queen does or says, “as if he were of God’s Privy Council, that knew how he had determined of her in the beginning, or that he knew the secrets of her heart so well that she neither did nor could have one good thought of God or of his true religion.” His doings could not increase her respect for his religion.

The affair of Arran had been a sensible sorrow to Knox. “God hath further humbled me since that day which men call Good Friday,” he wrote to Mrs. Locke (May 6), “than ever I have been in my life..” He had rejoiced in his task of peace-making, in which the Privy Council had practically failed, and had shown great naïveté in trusting Bothwell. The best he could say to Mrs. Locke was that he felt no certainty about the fact that Bothwell had tempted Arran to conspire. ²⁶¹

The probability is that the reckless and impoverished Bothwell did intend to bring in the desirable “new day,” and to make the Hamiltons his tools. Meanwhile he was kept out of mischief and behind stone walls for a season. Knox had another source of annoyance which was put down with a high hand.

The dominie of the school at Linlithgow, Ninian Winzet by name, had lost his place for being an idolater. In February he had brought to the notice of our Reformer and of the Queen the question, “Is John Knox a lawful minister?” If he was called by God, where were his miracles? If by men, by what manner of men? On March 3, Winzet asked Knox for “your answer in writing.” He kept launching letters at Knox in March; on March 24 he addressed the general public; and, on March 31, issued an appeal to the magistrates, who appear to have been molesting people who kept Easter. The practice was forbidden in a proclamation by the Queen on May 31. ²⁶² “The pain is death,” writes Randolph. ²⁶³ If Mary was ready to die for her faith, as she informed a nuncio who now secretly visited her, she seems to have been equally resolved that her subjects should not live in it.

Receiving no satisfactory written answer from Knox, Winzet began to print his tract, and then he got his reply from “soldiers and the magistrates,” for the book was seized, and he himself narrowly escaped to the Continent. ²⁶⁴ Knox was not to be brought to a written reply, save so far as he likened his calling to that of Amos and John the Baptist. In September he referred to his “Answer to Winzet’s Questions” as forthcoming, but it never appeared. ²⁶⁵ Winzet was Mary’s chaplain in her Sheffield prison in 1570-72; she had him made Abbot of Ratisbon, and he is said, by Lethington’s son, to have helped Lesley in writing his “History.”

On June 29 the General Assembly, through Knox probably, drew up the address to the Queen, threatening her and the country with the wrath of God on her Mass, which, she is assured, is peculiarly distasteful to the Deity. The brethren are deeply disappointed that she does not attend their sermons, and ventures to prefer “your ain preconceived vain opinion.” They insist that adulterers must be punished with death, and they return to their demands for the poor and the preachers. A new rising is threatened if wicked men trouble the ministers and disobey the Superintendents.

Lethington and Knox had one of their usual disputes over this manifesto; the Secretary drew up another. “Here be many fair words,” said the Queen on reading it; “I cannot tell what the hearts are.” ²⁶⁶ She later found out the nature of Lethington’s heart, a pretty black one. The excesses of the Guises in France were now the excuse or cause of the postponement of Elizabeth’s meeting with Mary. The Queen therefore now undertook a northern progress, which had been arranged for in January, about the time when Lord James was made Earl of Moray. ²⁶⁷

He could not “brook” the Earldom of Moray before the Earl of Huntly was put down, Huntly being a kind of petty king in the east and north. There is every reason to suppose that Mary understood and utterly distrusted Huntly, who, though the chief Catholic in the country, had been a traitor whenever occasion served for many a year. One of his sons, John, in July, wounded an Ogilvy in Edinburgh in a quarrel over property. This affair was so managed as to drive Huntly into open rebellion, neither Mary nor her brother being sorry to take the opportunity.

The business of the ruin of Huntly has seemed more of a mystery to historians than it was, though an attack by a Catholic princess on her most powerful Catholic subject does need explanation. But Randolph was with Mary during the whole expedition, and his despatches are better evidence than the fables of Buchanan and the surmises of Knox and Mr. Froude. Huntly had been out of favour ever since Lord James obtained the coveted Earldom of Moray in January, and he was thought to be opposed to Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. Since January, the Queen had been bent on a northern progress. Probably the Archbishop of St. Andrews, as reported by Knox, rightly guessed the motives. At table he said, “The Queen has gone into the north, belike to seek disobedience; she may perhaps find the thing that she seeks.” ²⁶⁸ She wanted a quarrel with Huntly, and a quarrel she found. Her northward expedition, says Randolph, “is rather devised by herself than greatly approved by her Council.” She would not visit Huntly at Strathbogie, contrary to the advice of her Council; his son, who wounded Ogilvy, had broken prison, and refused to enter himself at Stirling Castle. Huntly then supported his sons in rebellion, while Bothwell broke prison and fortified himself in Hermitage Castle. Lord James’s Earldom of Moray was now publicly announced (September 18), and Huntly was accused of a desire to murder him and Lethington, while his son John was to seize the Queen. ²⁶⁹ Mary was “utterly determined to bring him to utter confusion.” Huntly was put to the horn on October 18; his sons took up arms. Huntly, old and corpulent, died during a defeat at Corrichie without stroke of sword; his mischievous son John was taken and executed, Mary being pleased with her success, and declaring that Huntly thought “to have married her where he would,” ²⁷⁰ and to have slain her brother. John Gordon confessed to the murder plot. ²⁷¹ His eldest brother, Lord Gordon, who had tried to enlist Bothwell and the Hamiltons, lay long in prison (his sister married Bothwell just before Riccio’s murder). The Queen had punished the disobedience which she “went to seek,” and Moray was safe in his rich earldom, while a heavy blow was dealt at the Catholicism which Huntly had protected. ²⁷² Cardinal Guise reports her success to de Rennes, in Austria, with triumph, and refers to an autograph letter of hers, of which Lethington’s draft has lately perished by fire, unread by historians. As the Cardinal reports that she says she is trying to win her subjects back to the Church, “in which she wishes to live and die” (January 30, 1562-63), Lethington cannot be the author of that part of her lost letter. ²⁷³