's Lieutenant.

Parliament declined to record the Protest, but the Queen Regent said in
her confidential way to the Lords, 'Me will remember what is protested;
and me shall put good order after this to all things.' Knox was
delighted, and in writing to Calvin commended her 'for excellent
knowledge in God's word, and good will towards the advancement of his
glory.' There is no reason to suppose that Mary of Lorraine had attained
to much more than a kindly appreciation of all parties around her, and
to that general sense of justice which is strong in rulers and other men
so long as they have no personal interest to the contrary. Yet under
this feminine 'regimen' Scotland was now within measurable distance of
being, alone among the commonwealths of Europe, the home of liberty of
worship and freedom of conscience. But that great time was not come; and
the small northern land was now caught up again into the whirl of
European politics. On the 17th November 1558 Mary of England, the
unhappy wife of Philip, died; and her Protestant sister Elizabeth, the
daughter of Anne Boleyn, succeeded. It became at once the chief point in
the policy of Catholic Europe that France and Scotland should be fast
bound together in religion and turned, along with Spain, as one force
for the restoration or re-conquest of England. For if the English queen
was an illegitimate heretic, then Mary Stuart, already Queen of Scotland
and Dauphiness of France, was now Queen of England too; and without
delay the French king quartered the arms of England with those of Mary's
own country and that of her adoption. The magnificent bribe of a third
crown for that fair 'daughter of debate' was too much for her mother in
Scotland, who in any case would have found a continued toleration there
irreconcileable with the traditions of their House of Guise. The Regent
now, in her mild way, joined the cruel Catholic crusade of the French
Court, and from the beginning of 1559 the conciliatory policy which had
distinguished the previous year in Scotland was at an end.

But its results were not ended. They had spread through all ranks, and
had gone down to the foundations of society. On New Year's Day of 1559
there was found affixed to the door of every religious house in Scotland
the following document--the most extraordinary imitation of a legal writ
that Scotland has seen. It is probably not written by Knox, but by some
other strong pen. It bears to be a notice or 'summon