what religion and manner thereof they please, to the said day;
_so that every man may have freedom to use his own conscience_
to the day foresaid.'[77]

The truce was to be for six months, to January 1560, and it was employed
by both parties in preparing for a renewed struggle, and, on the side of
the Congregation, in negotiations with Elizabeth and her ministers.
Politically, this last step was of the highest importance. For the first
time for centuries, it healed the breach with 'our auld enemies of
England,' as the Scots statutes had so often described them, and
founded an alliance between the two kingdoms, which has since that date
been only changed in order to become a union. And in this negotiation
the agent and secretary was Knox.[78] He corresponded with the Queen's
great minister Cecil (Elizabeth herself would not hear Knox's name). And
it says not a little for the self-command and honesty of the English
statesman, that he trusted so fully a man whose first letter, written
several years before--a letter, too, asking a favour--commenced by
Knox's 'discharging his conscience' in this way:--

'In time past, being overcome with common iniquity, you have
followed the world in the way of perdition: for ... to the
shedding of the blood of God's dear children have you, by
silence, consented and subscribed. Of necessity it is, that
carnal wisdom and worldly policy, (to both which, you are
bruited to be much inclined) give place to God's simple and
naked truth.'

Cecil had made no answer to this or to similar subsequent remarks, but
he now wrote asking the Congregation,

'if support should be sent hence, what manner of amity might
ensue betwixt these two realms, and how the same might be hoped
to be perpetual, and not to be so slender as heretofore hath
been, without other assurance of continuance than from time to
time hath pleased France.'

And the answer, in Knox's handwriting, is signed by the Protestant
lords, and assures England

'of our constancy (as men may promise) till our lives end; yea,
farther, we will divulgate and set abroad a charge and
commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between
you and us contracted and begun in Christ Jesus may by them be
kept inviolated for ever.'

There was to be in the future a still more Solemn League and Covenant
between the two nations, it too having for its object the delive