er the border. Threat and plot were too late to avert the
union, and at the close of July 1565, Darnley was married to Mary Stuart
and proclaimed king of Scotland. Murray at once called the Lords of the
Congregation to arms. But the most powerful and active stood aloof. As
heir of the line of Angus, Darnley was by blood the head of the house of
Douglas, and, Protestants as they were, the Douglases rallied to their
kinsman. Their actual chieftain, the Earl of Morton, stood next to
Murray himself in his power over the Congregation; he was chancellor of
the realm; and his strength as a great noble was backed by a dark and
unscrupulous ability. By waiving their claim to the earldom of Angus and
the lands which he held, the Lennoxes won Morton to his kinsman's cause,
and the Earl was followed in his course by two of the sternest and most
active among the Protestant Lords, Darnley's uncle, Lord Ruthven, and
Lord Lindesay, who had married a Douglas. Their desertion broke Murray's
strength; and his rising was hardly declared when Mary marched on his
little force with pistols in her belt, and drove its leaders over the
border.

[Sidenote: Mary and Catholicism.]

The work which Elizabeth had done in Scotland had been undone in an
hour. Murray was a fugitive. The Lords of the Congregation were broken
or dispersed. The English party was ruined. And while Scotland was lost
it seemed as if the triumph of Mary was a signal for the general revival
of Catholicism. The influence of the Guises had again become strong in
France, and though Catharine of Medicis held firmly to her policy of
toleration, an interview which she held with Alva at Bayonne led every
Protestant to believe in the conclusion of a league between France and
Spain for a common war on Protestantism. To this league the English
statesmen held that Mary Stuart had become a party, and her pressure
upon Elizabeth was backed by the suspicion that the two great monarchies
had pledged her their support. No such league existed, nor had such a
pledge been given, but the dread served Mary's purpose as well as the
reality could have done. Girt in, as she believed, with foes, Elizabeth
took refuge in the meanest dissimulation, while Mary Stuart imperiously
demanded a recognition of her succession as the price of peace. But her
aims went far beyond this demand. She found herself greeted at Rome as
the champion of the Faith. Pius the Fifth, who mounted the Papal throne
at the moment o