and power around her, making the Lord James her chief minister, and Maitland of Lethington her Secretary of State, both of whom, however, we are already aware, 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.
"Mr. Knox," wrote Randolph to Cecil, "spoke on Tuesday unto the queen. He knocked so hastily upon her heart that he made her weep, as well you know there be of that sex that will do that, as well for anger as for grief." Mary's feelings, undoubtedly, were those of injury and indignation at the rude violence with which the religion of her youth, of her family, of her education, and of her inmost heart, was thus attacked. According to Knox, her parents had died in such error and idolatry that they went to the regions of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Randolph continued—"I commend better the success of Mr. Knox's doctrines and preachings than the manner of them, though I acknowledge his doctrine to be sound. His daily prayer for her is that God will turn her heart, now obstinate against God and his truth; and if his holy will be otherwise, that he will strengthen the hands and hearts of the chosen and the elect, stoutly to withstand the rage of tyrants."
But it was not merely the religion of Queen Mary which was exposed to this cynical and domineering spirit: the most innocent actions of her life, the most graceful and innocuous of her acquirements, were subjected to the iron shears of the Calvinistic philosophy. Mary had been accustomed to the enjoyment of music and the exhilaration of a social dance. All this was vile and scandalous in the eyes of Knox and his associates. She could not follow her hawks to the field, nor scarcely enjoy the pleasure of a ride amid her court, without being denounced as a vain and sinful Jezebel.
"It is difficult," says Knight's History, "to conceive a greater vulgarity of ideas or coarseness of language than that in which the Presbyterian clergy assailed these pastimes, which can be only sinful in excess—an excess not proved in the case of the queen. The preachers, one and all, were at least as bold in public as John Knox had been in his private conference. Every pulpit and hill-side was made to shake with awful denunciations of God's wrath and vengeance; and, following the example of their leader, they affirmed that, instead of dancing and singing, and hearing vile masses—the worst offence of all—the queen ought to go constantly to the kirk and hear them preach the only true doctrine. It was repeated daily that idolatry was worthy of death; that Papistry was rank idolatry; that the person who upheld or in any way defended the Roman Church was on the high-road to hell, however sincerely convinced of his religion being the true one. This sour spirit fermented wonderfully among the citizens of Edinburgh. The town-council, of their own authority, issued a proclamation, banishing from their town all the wicked rabble of antichrist, the Pope—such as priests, monks, and friars, together with all adulterers and fornicators. The Privy Council, indignant at this assumption of an authority which could only belong to the sovereign and the Parliament, suspended the magistrates; and then the magistrates, the preachers, and the people declared that the queen, by an unrighteous sympathy, made herself the protector of adulterers and fornicators. Before any circumstance had occurred calculated to throw suspicion on Mary's conduct, either as a queen or a woman, she was openly called Jezebel in the pulpit; and this became the appellation by which John Knox usually designated the sovereign. It was in vain that Mary tried to win the favour of the zealous reformer. She promised him ready access to her whenever he should desire it; and entreated him, if he found her conduct blameable, to reprehend her in private rather than vilify her in the kirk before the whole people. But Knox, whose notions of the rights of his clerical office were of the most towering kind, and who, upon other motives besides those connected with religion, had declared a female reign to be an abomination, was not willing to gratify the queen in any of her demands. He told her it was her duty to go to kirk to hear him, not his duty to wait upon her; and then came the usual addition, that if she gave up her mass-priest, and diligently attended upon the servants of the Lord, her soul might possibly be saved and her kingdom spared the judgments of an offended God. There was certainly a Calvinistic republicanism interwoven with this wonderful man's religious creed. Elizabeth blamed Mary that she had not sufficiently conformed to the advice of the Protestant teachers; but if Elizabeth herself had had to do with such a preacher as John Knox, she would, having the power, have sent him to the Marshalsea in one week, and to the pillory, or a worse place, in the next."
It is, perhaps, impossible to conceive a situation more appalling than that of this young and accomplished queen suddenly thrown into the midst of this effervescence of spiritual pride and boorish dogmatism, so totally insensible to the finer influences of social life, so utterly unconscious of the rights of conscience in those of a different opinion. Mary certainly 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 use more meekness of speech in his sermons.
But the Scottish clergy at that moment received a severe recompence for their contempt of the social amenities, in their aristocratic coadjutors treating them as men who had no need of temporal advantages. The nobles used them to overturn by their preaching the ancient church; and that done, they quietly but firmly appropriated the substance of it to themselves. The example of the English hierarchy had not been lost upon them. When the clergy put in their claim for a fair share of the booty, the nobles affected great surprise at such a worldly appetite in such holy men. The clergy proposed that the property of the Church should be divided into three portions: one-third for the pastors of the new church, one-third for the poor, and one-third for the endowment of schools and colleges. Maitland of Lethington asked Knox, "Where, then, was the portion of the nobles? Were they to become hod-bearers in this building of the kirk?" Knox replied that they might be worse employed. But he and his fellow ministers
