ater Bishop of Ross), who represented the
Catholic party, and asked Mary to land in Aberdeen, and march south at
the head of the Gordons and certain northern clans. The proposal came
from noblemen of Perthshire, Angus, and the north, whose forces could not
have faced a Lowland army. Mary, who had learned from her mother that
Huntly was treacherous, preferred to take her chance with her brother,
who, returning by way of England, moved Elizabeth to recognise the
Scottish queen as her heir. But Elizabeth would never settle the
succession, and, as Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh,
forbade her to travel home through England.

CHAPTER XX. MARY IN SCOTLAND.

On August 19, 1561, in a dense fog, and almost unexpected and unwelcomed,
Mary landed in Leith. She had told the English ambassador to France that
she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hoped to be
unconstrained. Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure
for a Robin Hood frolic: her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that
they had acted "in despite of religion."

The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her Mass in her private
chapel. Her priest was mobbed by the godly; on the following Sunday Knox
denounced her Mass, and had his first interview with her later. In vain
she spoke of her conscience; Knox said that it was unenlightened.
Lethington wished that he would "deal more gently with a young princess
unpersuaded." There were three or four later interviews, but Knox,
strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord
Ochiltree, a Stewart, was proof against the queen's fascination. In
spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary
kept her temper, and, for long, cast in her lot with Lethington and her
brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth.

The Court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with
Bothwell, who, though a Protestant, had sided with Mary of Guise during
the brawls of 1559. He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate,
reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well
educated.

In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics
should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided
between the preachers and the queen, "between God and the devil," says
Knox. Thenceforth there was a rift between the preachers and the
politicians, Lethington and L