Ch. 20: Mary in Scotland

On August 19, 1561, in a dense fog, and almost unexpected and unwelcomed, Mary landed in Leith. She had told the English ambassador to France that she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hoped to be unconstrained. Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure for a Robin Hood frolic: her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that they had acted "in despite of religion."

The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her Mass in her private chapel. Her priest was mobbed by the godly; on the following Sunday Knox denounced her Mass, and had his first interview with her later. In vain she spoke of her conscience; Knox said that it was unenlightened. Lethington wished that he would "deal more gently with a young princess unpersuaded." There were three or four later interviews, but Knox, strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, a Stewart, was proof against the queen's fascination. In spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary kept her temper, and, for long, cast in her lot with Lethington and her brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth.

The Court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with Bothwell, who, though a Protestant, had sided with Mary of Guise during the brawls of 1559. He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate, reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well educated.

In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided between the preachers and the queen, "between God and the devil," says Knox. Thenceforth there was a rift between the preachers and the politicians, Lethington and Lord James (now Earl of Mar), on whom Mary leaned. The new Earl of Mar was furtively created Earl of Murray and enjoyed the gift after the overthrow of Huntly.

In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth. Certainly Lethington hoped that Elizabeth "would be able to do much with Mary in religion," meaning that, if Mary's claims to succeed Elizabeth were granted, she might turn Anglican. The request for a meeting, dallied with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while, at home, Arran (March 31) accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary's person. Arran probably told truth, but he now went mad; Bothwell was imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562. Lethington, in June, was negotiating for Mary's interview with Elizabeth; Knox bitterly opposed it; the preachers feared that the queen would turn Anglican, and bishops might be let loose in Scotland. The masques for Mary's reception were actually being organised, when, in July, Elizabeth, on the pretext of persecutions by the Guises in France, broke off the negotiations.

The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of