e local brethren showed a want of
enthusiasm. The Congregation nevertheless summoned the Regent to depart
from Leith, and on October 21 met at the Tolbooth to discuss her formal
deposition from office. Willock moved that this might lawfully be done.
Knox added, with more reserve than usual, that their hearts must not be
withdrawn from their King and Queen, Mary and Francis. The Regent, too,
ought to be restored when she openly repented and submitted. Willock
dragged Jehu into his sermon, but Knox does not appear to have remarked
that Francis and Mary were Ahab and Jezebel, idolaters. He was now in a
position of less freedom and more responsibility than while he was a
wandering prophet at large.

On October 24 the Congregation summoned Leith, having deposed the Regent
_in the name of the King and Queen, Francis and Mary_, and of themselves
as Privy Council! They did more. They caused one James Cocky, a gold
worker, to forge the great seal of Francis and Mary, "wherewith they
sealed their pretended laws and ordinances, tending to constrain the
subjects of the kingdom to rebel and favour their usurpations." Their
proclamations with the forged seal they issued at St. Andrews, Glasgow,
Linlithgow, Perth, and elsewhere; using this seal in their letters to
noblemen, who were ordered to obey Arran. The gold worker, whose name is
variously spelled in the French record, says that the device for the
coins which the Congregation meant to issue and ordered him to execute
was on one side a cross with a crown of thorns, on the other the words
VERBUM DEI. The artist, Cocky, was dilatory, and when the brethren were
driven out of Edinburgh he gave the dies, unfinished, to John Achison,
the chief official of the Mint, who often executed coins of Queen Mary.
{158a} As Professor Hume Brown says of the audacious statement of the
brethren, that they acted in the name of their King and Queen, their use
of the forged Royal seal, "as covering their action with an appearance of
law, served its purpose in their appeals to the people." Cocky and
Kirkcaldy were hanged by Morton in 1573.

The idea of forging the great seal may have arisen in the fertile brain
of Lethington, who about October 25 had at last deserted the Regent, and
now took Knox's place as secretary of the Congregation. Henceforth their
manifestoes say little about religion, and a great deal about the French
design to conquer Scotland. {158b}

To the wit of Lethington w