There was abundant reason for alarm. Mary was the Stuart Queen; she represented France, the old hereditary ally; she had been trained from childhood by a consummate politician and deadly enemy of the Reformation, her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine, to be his instrument to win back Scotland and England to the deadliest type of Romanism. She was a lovely creature, and was, besides, gifted with a power of personal fascination greater than her physical charms, and such as no other woman of her time possessed; she had a sweet caressing voice, beautiful hands; and not least, she had a gift of tears at command. She had been brought up at a Court where women were taught to use all such charms to win men for political ends. The Escadron volant de la Reine had not come into existence when Mary left France, but its recruits were ready, and some of them had been her companions. She had made it clearly understood that she meant to overthrow the Reformation in Scotland.[348] Her unscrupulous character was already known to Knox and the other Protestant leaders. Nine days before her marriage she had signed deeds guaranteeing the ancient liberties and independence of Scotland; six days after her marriage she and her husband had appended their signatures to the same deeds; but twenty days before her wedding she had secretly signed away these very liberties, and had made Scotland a mere appanage of France.[349] They suspected that the party in France whose figure-head she was, would stick at no crime to carry out their designs, and had shown what they were ready to do by poisoning four of the Scotch Commissioners sent to Paris for their young Queen’s wedding, because they refused to allow Francis to be immediately crowned King of Scotland.[350] They knew how apt a pupil she had already shown herself in their school, when she led her boy husband and her ladies for a walk round the Castle of Amboise, to see the bodies of dozens of Protestants hung from lintels and turrets, and to contemplate “the fair clusters of grapes which the grey stones had produced.”[351]
It was scarcely wonderful that Lord James, Morton, and Lethington, were it not for obedience’ sake, “cared not thoughe theie never saw her face,” and felt that there was no safety for them but in Elizabeth’s protection. As for Knox, we are told: “Mr. Knox is determined to abide the uttermost, and others will not leave him till God have taken his life and theirs together.”[352] What use might she not make of these fascinations of hers on the vain, turbulent nobles of Scotland? Is it too much to say that but for the passionate womanly impulse—so like a Stuart[353]—which made her fling herself first into the arms of Darnley and then of Bothwell, and but for Knox, she might have succeeded in re-establishing Popery in Scotland and in reducing Protestant England?
Cecil himself was not without his fears, and urged the Protestants in Scotland to stand firm. Randolph’s answer shows how much he trusted Knox’s tenacity, however much he might sometimes deprecate his violence:
“Where your honour exhortethe us to stowteness, I assure you the voyce of one man is hable in one hower to put more lyf in us than five hundred trompettes contynually blusteringe in our eares.”[354]
He was able to write after Mary’s arrival:
“She (Mary) was four days without Mass; the next Sunday after arrival she had it said in her chapel by a French priest. There were at it besides her uncles and her own Household, the Earle of Montrose, Lord Graham ... the rest were at Mr. Knox sermon, as great a number as ever was any day.”[355]
Mary’s advisers, her uncles, knew how dangerous the state of Scotland was for their designs, and counselled her to temporise and gradually win over the leading Reforming nobles to her side. The young Queen entered on her task with some zest. She insisted on having Mass for her own household; but she would maintain, she promised, the laws which had made the Mass illegal in Scotland; and it says a great deal for her powers of fascination and dissimulation that there was scarcely one of the Reforming nobles that she did not win over to believe in her sincerity at one time or another, and that even the sagacious Randolph seemed for a time to credit that she meant what she said.[356] Knox alone in Scotland read her character and paid unwilling tribute to her abilities from his first interview with her.[357]
He saw that she had been thoroughly trained by her uncles, and especially by the Cardinal of Lorraine, and that it was hopeless to expect anything like fair dealing from her:
“In verry dead hir hole proceadings do declayr that the Cardinalles lessons ar so deaplie prented in hir heart, that the substance and the qualitie ar liek to perische together. 1 wold be glaid to be deceaved, but I fear I shall not. In communication with her, I espyed such craft as I have not found in such aige.”[358]