'of our constancy (as men may promise) till our lives end; yea, farther, we will divulgate and set abroad a charge and commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between you and us contracted and begun in Christ Jesus may by them be kept inviolated for ever.'
There was to be in the future a still more Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations, it too having for its object the deliverance (and, alas! also the uniformity) of religion in both kingdoms. But that public, and this private, league were alike disavowed by the Sovereign, and both became the badge of rebellion. The Queen Regent, indeed, had now fortified Leith, and was filling it with French soldiers. The Lords of the Congregation, founding on this as a breach of faith, resolved to suspend her from the regency, and did so by a proclamation, strangely signed: 'By us, the nobility and commons of the Protestants of the Church of Scotland.' The preachers approved, Knox, however, demanding that a door be still kept open for her restoration. War, of course, at once followed, and it turned out to be very much a fight between Edinburgh and Leith, then not unequally matched.[79] Soon the Protestants got the worst of it. On the last day of October the French, pouring up Leith Walk, drove them back into the Canongate, attacked Leith Wynd, and sent their horsemen in headlong flight through the Netherbow Port and up the High Street. Five days after, the forces of the Congregation having advanced to Restalrig, were enclosed by two advancing bodies of the enemy, and so jammed in near Holyrood, between the crags of the Calton on the one side and the crags of Arthur Seat on the other, as to be extricated only with most serious loss. Confusion and dismay seized upon all, and at midnight they marched out of Edinburgh, pursued by voices of reproach and execration from the overhanging roofs. Next night they gathered helplessly at Stirling. But on the following day Knox entered the pulpit there, and preached a memorable sermon. It recalled the despairing Congregation to a mood of resolute trust and hope. And yet his text was the Psalm which tells of the vine brought from Egypt to be planted in the land, but now wasted and broken down; and the preacher throughout refused even to suggest to the shrinking multitude any lower hope than the vouchsafed shining again of the Divine countenance. There remains only, he concluded,
'that we turn to the Eternal our God, who beats down to death, to the intent that he may raise up again, to leave the remembrance of his wondrous deliverance, to the praise of his own name ... yea, whatsoever shall become of us and of our mortal carcases, I doubt not but that this cause, in despite of Satan, shall prevail in the realm of Scotland.'
But his words were as life from the dead, and the sermon, which Buchanan also commemorates, was long after recalled by the preacher himself in St Giles, in another great crisis of the Evangel.
'From the beginning of God's mighty working within this realm, I have been with you in your most desperate tentations. Ask your own consciences, and let them answer you before God, if that I—not I, but God's Spirit by me—in your greatest extremity willed you not ever to depend upon your God, and in His name promised unto you victory and preservation from your enemies, so that ye would only depend upon his protection and prefer His glory to your own lives and worldly commodity. In your most extreme dangers I have been with you: St Johnstone, Cupar Muir, and the Crags of Edinburgh, are yet recent in my heart: yea, that dark and dolorous night wherein all ye, my Lords, with shame and fear left this town, is yet in my mind; and God forbid that ever I forget it!'
'The voice of one man,' it was afterwards said of Knox by the English ambassador in Edinburgh, 'is able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.' This day in Stirling was the very lowest point of the fortunes of the Congregation, and from this hour they began to rise. There were reverses still; but Scotland was sick of the French, and the end was to come with the coming year. In April 1560, the English forces surrounded Leith; the Queen Regent withdrew from it into the Castle of Edinburgh; and the Lords of the Congregation, stronger than they were originally by the accession of the Duke of Hamilton and the Earls of Morton and Huntly,[80] made one more 'Band' or Covenant. In it for the last time they fall back on liberty of conscience; for all they bind themselves to is,
'with our bodies, goods, friends, and all that we may do, to set forward the Reformation of Religion, according to God's word; and procure, by all means possible, that the truth of God's word may have free passage within this realm, with due administration of the Sacraments, and all things depending upon the said word.'[81]
A copy of this Band, by which each subscriber also bound himself not to make separate overtures to the Regent, was brought to her in the Castle. Knox, who by this time was become very hostile to Mary of Lorraine, and reports much doubtful gossip as to her rejoicing over the victories and cruelties of her soldiers, says that when she read the Band, she spoke in quite another and milder sense.
'The malediction of God I give unto them that counselled me to persecute the preachers, and to refuse the petitions of the best part of the true subjects of this realm.'