to show not a little countenance to the friends of the
Reformation and of the English alliance. We are not warranted to assert
that he meant to declare himself a Protestant; but he chose as his
chaplains preachers who showed themselves favourably inclined to the new
faith. He encouraged the chief men among the Protestants to frequent his
court, and he ventured to lay hands on the unscrupulous cardinal, who
had striven to exclude him from the regency. He consented to pass
through Parliament an Act expressly permitting the people to have and
to read the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments in the vulgar
tongue, and despatched messengers to all the chief towns to make public
proclamation of the Act. The little treatises of Alesius had thus done
their work, and he himself thought of returning and completing what he
had so well begun.

[Sidenote: Arran's Deceit.]

The friends of the Reformation imagined that the hour of their triumph
was at hand. They did not know on what a treacherous prop they were
leaning, or what sore trials were yet in store for them ere that triumph
should be gained. They knew the regent to be weak and timid; they did
not know him to be deceitful--so deceitful that, within six weeks after
the last of the messengers were despatched with the above-named
proclamation, immediately on the return from France of his brother, the
Abbot of Paisley, others were secretly sent off to inform the holy
father of his accession to the regency, to put himself and the kingdom
under his protection, and to ask permission to have under his control
the income of the benefices of the king's sons till they should come of
age.[49] The love of money was with him the root of this evil; as the
fear of man was of others which soon followed, and were fraught with
dire calamities to the nation. And so he went from bad to worse, till
in the dim light of the Franciscan chapel at Stirling,[50] "that weak
man, to whom people had been looking for the triumph of the Reformation
in Scotland, fondly fancying that he was performing a secret action,
knelt down before the altar, humbly confessed his errors, trampled under
foot the oaths which he had taken to his own country and to England,
renounced the evangelical profession of Jesus Christ, submitted to the
pope, and received absolution of the cardinal."[51]

Even in June he had entered in the books of the Privy Council an Act
against Sacramentaries holding opinions on the effect and es