Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

On one point, and that the chief point of the quarrel, the leaders of the Congregation did not obtain their demand, which naturally was for the establishment of their religion. We may suppose that Cecil and his colleague were not very desirous of carrying this; for the Queen of England regarded the Scottish Reformers as fanatical and she especially abominated the character and doctrines of Knox. It was conceded, however, that Parliament should be summoned without delay, and that a deputation should lay this request before the king and queen.

By a second treaty between England and France, it was determined that the right to the crowns of England and Ireland lay in Elizabeth, and that Mary should no longer bear the arms or use the style of these two kingdoms. Another proposition, however, was refused in this treaty, and that was the surrender of Calais to England.

It remained now to obtain the consent of Francis and Mary to these decisions; and Sir James Sandilands, a knight of Malta, was despatched to Paris for this purpose. His reception was such as might be expected. Mary refused to sanction the proceedings of a Parliament which had been summoned without her authority, and which had acted in the very face of the treaty, by seeking to destroy the religion in which she had been educated. Thereupon the Estates established Protestantism on their own authority.

All speculations as to what the Guises would do were cut short by the death of Francis II., the husband of Mary, on the 5th of December, 1560. He had always been a sickly personage, and his reign had lasted only eighteen months. His successor, Charles IX., was only nine years of age, and had a mind and constitution not exhibiting more promise of health and vigour than those of his late brother. His mother, Catherine de Medici, became regent, and his uncles of Lorraine lost the direction of affairs. Catherine and Mary were no friends; the young Queen-Dowager of France, only nineteen, was now treated harshly and contemptuously by the Lady-Regent, and she retired to Rheims, where she spent the winter amongst her relatives of Lorraine.

Mary now prepared to make her way home by sea. Her false half-brother, the Lord James, instead of being to her, at this trying moment, a friend and staunch counsellor, was, and had long been, leagued with her most troublesome and rebellious subjects, and was expecting, by the aid of Elizabeth of England, to engross the chief power in the State, if not eventually to push his unsuspecting sister from the throne. The Roman Catholics of Scotland were quite alive to the dangers which attended their sovereign in such company, and deputed Leslie the Bishop of Ross, a man of high integrity—which, through a long series of troubles, he manifested towards his queen—to go over to France and return with her. Leslie was so much alarmed by the dangers which menaced her amongst her turbulent and zeal-excited subjects, that he advised her in private to extend her voyage to the Highlands, and put herself under the protection of the Earl of Huntly, who, at the head of a large army, would conduct her to her capital and place her in safety on her throne, at the same time that he enabled her to protect the ancient religion. But Mary would not listen to anything like a return by force. She determined to throw herself on the affections of her subjects, and to go amongst them peaceably.

Mary embarked at Calais on the 15th of August, 1561. She eluded the ships sent to prevent her, and on the 19th she landed on her native shore at Leith. She had come a fortnight earlier than she had fixed, to checkmate the schemes of her enemies; but the people flew to welcome her and crowded the beach with hearty acclamations: the lords, however, says a contemporary, had taken small pains to honour her reception and "cover the nakedness of the land." Instead of the gay palfreys of France to which she had been accustomed, in their rich accoutrements, she saw a wretched set of Highland shelties prepared to convey her and her retinue to Holyrood; and when she surveyed their tattered furniture and mounted into the bare wooden saddle, the past and the present came so mournfully over her, that her eyes filled with tears. The honest joy of her people, however, was an ample compensation, had she not known what ill-will lurked in the background against her amongst the nobles and clergy.

Mary was the finest woman of her time. Tall, beautiful, accomplished, in the freshness of her youth, not yet nineteen, distinguished by the most graceful manners and the most fascinating disposition, she was formed to captivate a people sensible to such charms. But she came into her country, in every past age turbulent and independent, at a crisis when the public spirit was divided and embittered by religious controversy, and she was exposed to the deepest suspicion of the Reforming party, by belonging to a family notorious for its bigoted attachment to the old religion. Yet the candour of her disposition and her easy condescension seemed to make a deep impression on the masses. They not only cheered her enthusiastically on the way to her ancestral palace of Holyrood, but about 200 of the citizens of Edinburgh, playing on three-stringed fiddles, kept up a deafening serenade under her windows all night; and such was her good-natured appreciation of the motive, that she thanked them in the morning for having really kept her awake after her fatiguing voyage. Not quite so agreeable, though, was the conduct of her liege subjects on the Sunday in her chapel, where, having ordered her chaplain to perform Mass, such a riot was raised, that had not her natural brother, the Lord James Stuart, interfered, the priest would have been killed at the altar.

This was a plain indication that, although the Reformers demanded liberty of conscience for themselves, they meant to allow none to others; and a month afterwards the same riot was renewed so violently in the royal chapel at Stirling, that Randolph, writing to Cecil, said that the Earl of Argyll and the Lord James himself this time "so disturbed the quire, that some, both priests and clerks, left their places with broken heads and bloody ears."

Mary bore this rude and disloyal conduct with an admirable patience. She had the advantage of the counsels of D'Oyselles, who had spent some years in the country, and had learned the character of the people. She placed the leaders of the Congregation in honour and power around her, making the Lord James her chief minister, and Maitland of Lethington her Secretary of State, both of whom, however, were in the pay and interests of the English queen. It was not in the nature of Knox to delay long appearing in her presence, and opening upon her the battery of his fierce zeal.

It is, perhaps, impossible to imagine a situation more appalling than that of this young and accomplished girl suddenly thrown into the midst of this effervescence of spiritual pride and boorish dogmatism, which was so insensible to the finer influences of social life, so unconscious of the rights of conscience in those of a different opinion. Mary showed a far more Christian spirit. She reminded Knox of his offensive and contemptuous book against women, gently admonished him to be more liberal to those who could not think as he did, and to use more meekness of speech in his sermons.