f which he does not
report one word. He gives his own oration. Mary then said that she
could not expect him to like her uncles, as they differed in religion.
But if he heard anything of herself that he disapproved of, "come to
myself and tell me, and I shall hear you." He answered that he was not
bound to come "to every man in particular," but she _could_ come to his
sermons! If she would name a day and hour, he would give her a doctrinal
lecture. At this very moment he "was absent from his book"; his studies
were interrupted.

"You will not always be at your book," she said, and turned her back. To
some papists in the antechamber he remarked, "Why should the pleasing
face of a gentlewoman affray me? I have looked in the faces of many
angry men, and yet have not been afraid above measure."

He was later to flee before that pleasing face.

Mary can hardly be said to have had the worse, as far as manners and
logic went, of this encounter, at which Morton, Mar, and Lethington were
present, and seem to have been silent. {217a}

Meanwhile, Randolph dates this affair, the dancing, the sermon, the
interview, not in May, but about December 13-15, 1562, {217b} and
connects the dancing with no event in France, {217c} nor can I find any
such event in late November which might make Mary glad at heart. Knox,
Randolph writes, mistrusts all that the Queen does or says, "as if he
were of God's Privy Council, that knew how he had determined of her in
the beginning, or that he knew the secrets of her heart so well that she
neither did nor could have one good thought of God or of his true
religion." His doings could not increase her respect for his religion.

The affair of Arran had been a sensible sorrow to Knox. "God hath
further humbled me since that day which men call Good Friday," he wrote
to Mrs. Locke (May 6), "than ever I have been in my life. . . ." He had
rejoiced in his task of peace-making, in which the Privy Council had
practically failed, and had shown great naivete in trusting Bothwell. The
best he could say to Mrs. Locke was that he felt no certainty about the
fact that Bothwell had tempted Arran to conspire. {218}

The probability is that the reckless and impoverished Bothwell did intend
to bring in the desirable "new day," and to make the Hamiltons his tools.
Meanwhile he was kept out of mischief and behind stone walls for a
season. Knox had another source of annoyance which was put down with a
high ha