een's partiality more than on the
favour of those proud nobles, and, about the time of which I am now
speaking, he carried his head at court as bravely as the boldest baron
amongst them. Still in this he had as yet done nothing greatly to
offend. The protestant Lords, however, independent of their aversion to
him on account his religion, felt, in common with all the nobility, a
vehement prejudice against an alien, one too of base blood, and they
openly manifested their displeasure at seeing him so gorgeous and
presuming even in the public presence of the Queen, but he regarded not
their anger.

In this fey man's service Winterton then was, and my grandfather never
doubted that it was for no good he came so often to the Earl of
Glencairn's, who, though not a man of the same weight in the realm as
the old Earl his father, was yet held in much esteem, as a sincere
protestant and true nobleman, by all the friends of the Gospel cause;
and, in the sequel, what my grandfather jealoused was soon very plainly
seen. For Rizzio learning, through Winterton's espionage and that of
other emissaries, how little the people of Scotland would relish a
foreign prince to be set over them, had a hand in dissuading the Queen
from accepting any of the matches then proposed for her; and the better
to make his own power the more sicker, he afterwards laid snares in the
water to bring about a marriage with that weak young prince, the Lord
Henry Darnley. But it falls not within the scope of my narrative to
enter into any more particulars here concerning that Italian, and the
tragical doom which, with the Queen's imprudence, he brought upon
himself; for, after spending some weeks in Edinburgh, and in visiting
their friends at Crail, my grandfather returned with his wife and Agnes
Kilspinnie to Quharist, where he continued to reside several years, but
not in tranquillity.

Hardly had they reached their home, when word came of quarrels among the
nobility; and though the same sprung out of secular debates, they had
much of the leaven of religious faction in their causes, the which
greatly exasperated the enmity wherewith they were carried on. But even
in the good Earl of Murray's raid, there was nothing which called on my
grandfather to bear a part. Nevertheless, those quarrels disquieted his
soul, and he heard the sough of discontents rising afar off, like the
roar of the bars of Ayr when they betoken a coming tempest.

After the departure of the