come a Frenchwoman; her French mother
governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church
was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the
other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
favour of the revolution.

And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
new dynasty.

I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60,