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.” [{221a}] 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. [{221b}] 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,” [{221c}] and to have slain her brother. John Gordon confessed to the murder plot. [{221d}] 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. [{222a}] 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. [{222b}]
Knox meanwhile, much puzzled by the news from the north, was in the western counties. He induced the lairds of Ayrshire to sign a Protestant band, and he had a controversy with the Abbot of Crosraguel. In misapplication of texts the abbot was even more eccentric than Knox, though he only followed St. Jerome. In his “History” Knox “cannot certainly say whether there was any secret paction and confederacy between the Queen herself and Huntly.” [{222c}] Knox decides that though Mary executed John Gordon and other rebels, yet “it was the destruction of others that she sought,” namely, of her brother, whom she hated “for his godliness and upright plainness.” [{222d}] His upright simplicity had won him an earldom and the destruction of his rival! He and Lethington may have exaggerated Huntly’s iniquities in council with Mary, but the rumours reported against her by Knox could only be inspired by the credulity of extreme ill-will. He flattered himself that he kept the Hamiltons quiet, and, at a supper with Randolph in November, made Chatelherault promise to be a good subject in civil matters, and a good Protestant in religion.
Knox says that preaching was done with even unusual vehemence in winter, when his sermon against the Queen’s dancing for joy over some unknown Protestant misfortune was actually delivered, and the good seed fell on ground not wholly barren. The Queen’s French and Scots musicians would not play or sing at the Queen’s Christmas-day Mass, whether pricked in heart by conscience, or afraid for their lives. “Her poor soul is so troubled for the preservation of her silly Mass that she knoweth not where to turn for defence of it,” says Randolph. [{223a}] These persecutions may have gone far to embitter the character of the victim.
Mr. Froude is certainly not an advocate of Mary Stuart, rather he is conspicuously the reverse. But he remarks that when she determined to marry Darnley, “divide Scotland,” and trust to her Catholic party, she did so because she was “weary of the mask which she had so long worn, and unable to endure any longer these wild insults to her creed and herself.” [{223b}] She had, in fact, given the policy of submission to “wild insults” rather more than a fair chance; she had, for a spirited girl, been almost incredibly long-suffering, when “barbarously baited,” as Charles I. described his own treatment by the preachers and the Covenanters.
CHAPTER XVI: KNOX AND QUEEN MARY (continued): 1563-1564
The new year, 1563, found Knox purging the Kirk from that fallen brother, Paul Methuen. This preacher had borne the burden and heat of the day in 1557-58, erecting, as we have seen, the first “reformed” Kirk, that of the Holy Virgin, in Dundee, and suffering some inconvenience, if no great danger, from the clergy of the religion whose sacred things he overthrew. He does not appear to have been one of the more furious of the new apostles. Contrasted with John Brabner, “a vehement man inculcating the law and pain thereof,” Paul is described as “a milder man, preaching the evangel of grace and remission of sins in the blood of Christ.” [{224a}]
Paul was at this time minister of Jedburgh. He had “an ancient matron” to wife, recommended, perhaps, by her property, and she left him for two months with a servant maid. Paul fell, but behaved not ill to the mother of his child, sending her “money and clothes at various times.” Knox tried the case at Jedburgh; Paul was excommunicated, and fled the realm, sinking so low, it seems, as to take orders in the Church of England. Later he returned—probably he was now penniless—“and prostrated himself before the whole brethren with weeping and howling.” He was put to such shameful and continued acts of public penance up and down the country that any spirit which he had left awoke in him, and the Kirk knew him no more. Thus “the world might see what difference there is between darkness and light.” [{225a}]
Knox presently had to record a scandal in a higher place, the capture and execution of the French minor poet, Chastelard, who, armed with sword and dagger, hid under the Queen’s bed in Holyrood; and invaded her room with great insolence at Burntisland as she was on her way to St. Andrews. There he was tried, condemned, and executed in the market-place. It seems fairly certain that Chastelard, who had joined the Queen with despatches during the expedition against Huntly, was a Huguenot. The Catholic version, and Lethington’s version, of his adventure was that some intriguing Huguenot lady had set him on to sully Queen Mary’s character; other tales ran that he was to assassinate her, as part of a great Protestant conspiracy. [{225b}]
Randolph, who knew as much as any one, thought the Queen far too familiar with the poet, but did not deem that her virtue was in fault. [{225c}] Knox dilates on Mary’s familiarities, kisses given in a vulgar dance, dear to the French society of the period, and concludes that the fatuous poet “lacked his head, that his tongue should not utter the secrets of our Queen.” [{225d}]