Bartholomew: itself still in the womb of the future. "Mary
of Guise," says Knox's biographer, Professor Hume Brown, "had the
instincts of a good ruler--the love of order and justice, and the desire
to stand well with the people."

Knox, however, believed, or chose to say, that she wanted to cut all
Protestant throats, just as he believed that a Protestant king should cut
all Catholic throats. He attributed to her, quite erroneously and
uncharitably, his own unsparing fervour. As he held this view of her
character and purposes, it is not strange that a journey to Scotland was
"contrairious to his judgement."

He did not understand the situation. Ferocious as had been the English
invasion of Scotland in 1547, the English party in Scotland, many of them
paid traitors, did not resent these "rebukes of a friend," so much as
both the nobles and the people now began to detest their French allies,
and were jealous of the Queen Mother's promotion of Frenchmen.

There were not, to be sure, many Scots whom she, or any one, could trust.
Some were honestly Protestant: some held pensions from England: others
would sacrifice national interests to their personal revenges and clan
feuds. The Rev. the Lord James Stewart, Mary's bastard brother, Prior of
St. Andrews and of Pittenweem, was still very young. He had no interest
in his clerical profession beyond drawing his revenues as prior of two
abbeys; and his nearness to the Crown caused him to be suspected of
ambition: moreover, he tended towards the new ideas in religion. He had
met Knox in London, apparently in 1552. Morton was a mere wavering
youth; Argyll was very old: Chatelherault was a rival of the Regent, a
competitor for the Crown and quite incompetent. The Regent, in short,
could scarcely have discovered a Scottish adviser worthy of employment,
and when she did trust one, he was the brilliant "chamaeleon," young
Maitland of Lethington, who would rather betray his master cleverly than
run a straight course, and did betray the Regent. Thus Mary, a
Frenchwoman and a Catholic, governing Scotland for her Catholic daughter,
the Dauphiness, with the aid of a few French troops who had just saved
the independence of the country, naturally employed French advisers. This
made her unpopular; her attempts to bring justice into Scottish courts
were odious, and she would not increase the odium by persecuting the
Protestants. The Duke's bastard brother, again, the Archbishop, sh