the queen's almoner, and tried to enter the chapel. They were driven back, however, and the riot quelled.

A council was thereupon held, and the queen declared "that no change or alteration should be made in the present state of religion; only she would use her own service, apart with her family, and have a mass in private." This was assented to by her counsellors; but Knox and other ministers of the same stamp made a tremendous outcry in their pulpit harangues, and "did publicly condemn that toleration as unlawful." (Spottiswood, p. 179.) Mary admitted Knox to a private conference, hoping by gentleness and courtesy to check his turbu lence and disarm his opposition. But she little knew the man with whom she had to deal, and soon found that neither her sex nor station were any protection against his insolence. He had proclaimed in his "Monstrous regiment [or Rule] of women: "

"A woman promoted to sit in the seat of God, i. e., to teach, to judge, or to reign above the man, is a monster in nature, contumely to GOD, and a thing most repugnant to His will and ordinance." Speaking of Mary of England, he compares her to Jezebel and Athaliah, and says, "they ought to remove from honour and authority that monster in nature.

Her empire and reign is a wall without foundation. I mean the same of the authority of all women." It thus appears that it was her sex and not her cruelty that, in his opinion, unfitted her to govern; and we may not wonder that, according to his own account of this conference, he availed himself of the opportunity to grossly insult a lady, and that lady his sovereign. After a long harangue in defence of his treatise he concluded: "If the realm finds no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they approve I shall not farther disallow than within my own breast, but shall be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero." We take this account, however, with some suspicion, as it was written after the deposition of Mary; and find it not uncharitable to excuse his manners at the expense of his veracity, and to avow our belief that in fact he never addressed to her this brutal taunt.

Scarcely was she settled in her kingdom than Elizabeth,

oblivious of her own treachery, demanded the formal ratification of the articles of Leith, but this Mary steadily refused, unless she were declared the true and lawful next heir to the throne of England. The difficulty was at length compromised, but Elizabeth, jealous of the beauty, the reputation, and the position of the Queen of Scots, ill-disguised her hostility, and rested not till she had steeped her hands in the blood of her rival, in defiance of all law, both human and divine.

But for the present Mary won golden opinions. By her grace and condescension she gained the hearts of a large majority of the nation; and by her wise measures promoted its peace and prosperity. A dangerous insurrection of the Earl of Huntley, in September, 1562, was promptly quelled by her firmness and vigour; and had she been supported with honour and fidelity by the nobles in whom she trusted, and who by the laws of the realm were her official counsellors, she might now have been celebrated as one of the ablest and most fortunate, as well as the fairest of British sovereigns. But their intestine feuds, their love of English gold and ecclesiastical plunder, the truckling to the fanaticism of Knox on the part of "the Lords of the Congregation," and the fiery zeal of the Papist nobility, frustrated her wisest plans and best considered measures. And last but not least there was Knox with his colleagues continually beating the "drum ecclesiastic," and sounding the tocsin of sedition and tumult. To his jaundiced eye and gloomy spirit the amusements of the Court appeared sinful and soul-destroying. The preaching of the Gospel was, in his view, the utterance of coarse invective and licentious railing against whatever his taste condemned or his judgment disapproved; but then his scurrilous language is apologized for by his biographer and admirer, McCrie, under the convenient plea of "liberty of speech"! But we must in candour admit that he did not confine his rebukes to the queen and nobles. He was a pope in miniature. On him devolved the charge of all the Dioceses and superintendents. John Winram, Erskine of Dun, and every body else of note in the Kirk, were visited in turn, admonished and censured by their selfconstituted superior. Talk of episcopal tyranny, indeed! Where they used small cords he used scorpions.

1

In an assembly, at the close of 1562, it was questioned whether that body could meet and enact ecclesiastical laws to abridge the civil rights of the subject without the queen's license; and decided in the negative, as the zeal of " the earnest professors" among the nobility had somewhat slackened. Knox was much discomposed; and the more so, that the Council about the same time enacted, that of the revenues from the Church estates two-thirds should be paid to the papal incumbents, and one-third to the queen and Protestant ministers. The reason alleged was that the royal revenues were much impaired; but very little benefit accrued to her from this source, and it brought on her the ill-will of the Knoxians. He affirmed from the pulpit that "the Spirit of GOD was not the author of that order, by which two parts of the Church rents were given to the devil, and the other third part was to be divided between GOD and the devil." (Stephen's, I. 161.)

In May, 1563, Mary opened the Parliament with great splendour; and though she refused to ratify the treaty of Leith expressly, she consented to the passage of "an act of Oblivion," and the forfeitures of many notorious pensioners of England were remitted. Amid the general joy, however, was heard the shrill cry of the sinistra prædicens cornix. The report of the queen's approaching marriage to some one of her numerous foreign suitors called forth this eloquent tirade: "Dukes, brethren to emperors and kings, strive all for the best game; but this, my lords, will I say, note the day and bear witness, after whensoever the nobility of Scotland, professing the LORD JESUS, consents that an infidel—and all papists are infidels—shall be head to your sovereign, ye do so far as in ye lieth to banish JESUS CHRIST from this realm. Ye bring GOD'S vengeance upon the country, a plague upon yourselves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your sovereign." If this prophecy was fulfilled (and Knox did his best to fulfil it), we do not think his admirers should claim inspiration for him, as McCrie seems inclined to do; for the unhappy Darnley was not then thought of. The preacher was heard with disgust by both Papists and Protestants, and as usual he was summoned before the queen whom he so reviled, according to his own account, as to make her "howl" and shed tears "in greater

abundance than the matter required." But the account was written some four years after the event, when she was in prison and could not speak for herself with authority.

Towards the close of this year the queen's chapel was again mobbed, and two of the rioters were arrested. Knox wrote letters to his adherents in various parts of Scotland to be present at the trial. Randolph, the English ambassador, says, "that he intended by a mutinous assembly, made by his letter before, to have rescued two of their brethren, Cranstoun and Armstrong, from course of law, for using an outrage on a priest saying mass to the queen's household, in Holyrood House." Knox was summoned before the Council, but secure of the protection of his friends therein, he displayed great audacity and was acquitted. His narrative, penned years afterwards, as to the bearing and vivacity of the queen, is wholly inconsistent with contemporaneous evidence, which describes her as exhausted with a long and dangerous sickness, and hardly able to sit up. This is one of the many facts which demonstrate his history to be a partisan document, got up to subserve the purposes of her unscrupulous foes-an end which it effectually answered.

At the assembly in June, 1564, a warm debate arose upon the propriety of Knox's calling the Queen "a slave of Satan," and affirming that "God's vengeance hung over the realm on account of her impiety in continuing to practice the rites of her religion." The sensible and loyal part of the body declared that "such language could not profit." Knox alleged that he only prayed, "purge the Queen's heart from the venom of idolatry, and deliver her from the bondage of Satan, in which she hath been brought up and yet remains," &c.; and that he found authority for it in the petition, "Thy will be done!" He also complained that she never attended the public preachings. We think she showed her wisdom, judging from specimens on record, one of which we shall give presently. We are not from this to infer that Mary utterly refused to hear Knox. She had previously to this, after remonstrating with him on one of his coarse invectives, graciously added, "But if ye hear anything of myself that mislikes you, come to myself and tell me, and I shall hear you." What a golden opportunity was

here offered to win the heart of Mary by Christian gentleness, and the attractive development of Gospel truth. But the illmannered creature roughly answered, If she would appoint a day and hour to hear him explain the doctrine taught publicly in the churches, he would gladly wait upon her. "But to wait upon your chalmer door or elsewhere, and then have no farther liberty but to whisper my mind in your Grace's ear, or tell you what others think of you, neither will my conscience nor the vocation whereto God hath called me suffer it." It is not wonderful that, after such intolerable rudeness, she was willing to let him alone.

With all these drawbacks, Mary had reigned thus far with much of prosperity and honour, but a sad change was now to ensue. In the latter part of 1564 the forfeiture of the Earl of Lennox was rescinded, and he was allowed to return to Scotland. His son, Lord Henry Darnley, soon after followed, and reasons of State, as well as personal attractions, pointed him out to Mary as a suitable husband. He was the grandson of the Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry VII., of England, and widow of James IV., of Scotland, (and thus, also, the grandmother of Mary,) and the only rival she had to the succession of the English crown, should Elizabeth die before her without issue. He was tall, graceful, accomplished, and in outward appearance worthy to be her consort. But this fair exterior covered a soul weak and unmanly; a prey to the lowest vices and basest passions of human nature. Furious was the rage of Knox and his colleagues when the intended. marriage was made known; furious the rage of their confederates among the nobility. Plots were laid and even arms taken to prevent the accomplishment of the Queen's purpose, but they were all frustrated by her vigilance and promptitude. She was married privately, in April, and publicly with great pomp and splendour, in July, 1565. Great was the indignation of Elizabeth, who would neither marry herself nor allow any one else to do so with her good will. But the only victim she could reach at present was the venerable Countess of Lennox, mother of Darnley, and she was committed to the tower! The bridegroom was proclaimed, the next day, King of Scotland; which, however gratifying as