rong guard.

According to Knox, Mary laughed a horse laugh when he entered, saying,
"Yon man gart me greit, and grat never tear himself. I will see gif I
can gar him greit." Her Scots, textually reported, was certainly
idiomatic.

Knox acknowledged his letter to the Congregation, and Lethington
suggested that he might apologise. Ruthven said that Knox made
convocation of people daily to hear him preach; what harm was there in
his letter merely calling people to convocation. This was characteristic
pettifogging. Knox said that he convened the people to meet on the day
of trial according to the order "that the brethren has appointed . . . at
the commandment of the general Kirk of the Realm."

Mary seems, strangely enough, to have thought that this was a valid
reply. Perhaps it was, and the Kirk's action in that sense, directed
against the State, finally enabled Cromwell to conquer the Kirk-ridden
country. Mary appears to have admitted the Kirk's imperium in imperio,
for she diverted the discussion from the momentous point really at
issue--the right of the Kirk to call up an armed multitude to thwart
justice. She now fell on Knox's employment of the word "cruelty." He
instantly started on a harangue about "pestilent Papists," when the Queen
once more introduced a personal question; he had caused her to weep, and
he recounted all their interview after he attacked her marriage from the
pulpit.

He was allowed to go home--it might not have been safe to arrest him, and
the Lords, unanimously, voted that he had done no offence. They repeated
their votes in the Queen's presence, and thus a precedent for "mutinous
convocation" by Kirkmen was established, till James VI. took order in
1596. We have no full narrative of this affair except that of Knox. It
is to be guessed that the nobles wished to maintain the old habit of
mutinous convocation which, probably, saved the life of Lethington, and
helped to secure Bothwell's acquittal from the guilt of Darnley's murder.
Perhaps, too, the brethren who filled the whole inner Court and
overflowed up the stairs of the palace, may have had their influence.

This was a notable triumph of our Reformer, and of the Kirk; to which, on
his showing, the Queen contributed, by feebly wandering from the real
point at issue. She was no dialectician. Knox's conduct was, of course,
approved of and sanctioned by the General Assembly. {235} He had, in his
circular, averred that Cranstou