, and what he was able still to do, it is almost
certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the
eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the
reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds
of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,
and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet
would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.
Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave
names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from
France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was
theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than
their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to
keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her
assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind
herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have
been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,
broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still
thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten
thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the
Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of
religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the
Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through
farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost
chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,
he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the
artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village
preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned
morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the
nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders
of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of
defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was
everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children
tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled
day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from
Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never
speak; and, maddened with