Mary landed at Leith in a thick fog on August 19, 1561.  She was now in a country where she lay under sentence of death as an idolater.  Her continued existence was illegal.  With her came Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingstone, and Mary Fleming, the comrades of her childhood; and her uncles, the Duc d’Aumale, Francis de Lorraine, and the noisy Marquis d’Elboeuf.  She was not very welcome.  As late as August 9, Randolph reports that her brother, Lord James, Lethington, and Morton “wish, as you do, she might be stayed yet for a space, and if it were not for their obedience sake, some of them care not though they never see her face.” {193b} None the less, on June 8 Lord James tells Mary that he had given orders for her palace to be prepared by the end of July.  He informs her that “many” hope that she will never come home.  Nothing is “so necessary . . . as your Majesty’s own presence”; and he hopes she will arrive punctually.  If she cannot come she should send her commission to some of her Protestant advisers, by no means including the Archbishop of St. Andrews (Hamilton), with whom he will never work.  It is not easy to see why Lord James should have wished that Mary “might be stayed,” unless he merely dreaded her arrival while Elizabeth was in a bad temper.  His letter to Elizabeth of August 6 is incompatible with treachery on his part.  “Mr. Knox is determined to abide the uttermost, and others will not leave him till God have taken his life and theirs together.”  Of what were these heroes afraid?  A “familiar,” a witch, of Lady Huntly’s predicted that the Queen would never arrive.  “If false, I would she were burned for a witch,” adds honest Randolph.  Lethington deemed his “own danger not least.”  Two galleys full of ladies are not so alarming; did these men, practically hinting that English ships should stop their Queen, think that the Catholics in Scotland were too strong for them?

Not a noble was present to meet Mary when in the fog and filth of Leith she touched Scottish soil, except her natural brother, Lord Robert. {194} The rest soon gathered with faces of welcome.  She met some Robin Hood rioters who lay under the law, and pardoned these roisterers (with their excommunication could she interfere?), because, says Knox, she was instructed that they had acted “in despite of the religion.”  Their festival had been forbidden under the older religion, as it happens, in 1555, and was again forbidden later by Mary herself.

All was mirth till Sunday, when the Queen’s French priest celebrated Mass in her own chapel before herself, her three uncles, and Montrose.  The godly called for the priest’s blood, but Lord James kept the door, and his brothers protected the priest.  Disappointed of blood, “the godly departed with great grief of heart,” collecting in crowds round Holyrood in the afternoon.  Next day the Council proclaimed that, till the Estates assembled and deliberated, no innovation should be