Knox later made Chatelherault promise this obedience; what his views were in November 1561 we know not.  Lord James was already distrusted by his old godly friends; it was thought he would receive what he had long desired, the Earldom of Moray (November 11, 1561), and the precise professors meditated a fresh revolution.  “It must yet come to a new day,” they said. {207c} Those about Arran were discontented, and nobody was more in his confidence than Knox, but at this time Arran was absent from Edinburgh; was at St. Andrews.

Meanwhile, at Court, “the ladies are merry, dancing, lusty, and fair,” wrote Randolph, who flirted with Mary Beaton (November 18); and long afterwards, in 1578, when she was Lady Boyne, spoke of her as “a very dear friend.”  Knox complains that the girls danced when they “got the house alone”; not a public offence!  He had his intelligencers in the palace.

There was, on November 16, a panic in the unguarded palace:  {208a} “the poor damsels were left alone,” while men hid in fear of nobody knew what, except a rumour that Arran was coming, with his congregational friends, “to take away the Queen.”  The story was perhaps a fable, but Arran had been uttering threats.  Mary, however, expected to be secured by an alliance with Elizabeth.  “The accord between the two Queens will quite overthrow them” (the Bishops), “and they say plainly that she cannot return a true Christian woman,” writes Randolph. {208b}

Lethington and Randolph both suspected that if Mary abandoned idolatry, it would be after conference with Elizabeth, and rather as being converted by that fair theologian than as compelled by her subjects.  Unhappily Elizabeth never would meet Mary, who, for all that we know, might at this hour have adopted the Anglican via media, despite her protests to Knox and to the Pope of her fidelity to Rome.  Like Henri IV., she may at this time have been capable of preferring a crown—­that of England—­to a dogma.  Her Mass, Randolph wrote, “is rather for despite than devotion, for those that use it care not a straw for it, and jest sometimes against it.” {208c}

Randolph, at this juncture, reminded Mary that advisers of the Catholic party had prevented James V. from meeting Henry VIII.  She answered, “Something is reserved for us that was not then,” possibly hinting at her conversion.  Lord James shared the hopes of Lethington and Randolph.  “The Papists storm, thinking the meeting of the queens will overthrow Mass and all.”

The Ministers of Mary, les politiques, indulged in dreams equally distasteful to the Catholics and to the more precise of the godly; dreams that came through the Ivory Gate; with pictures of the island united, and free from the despotism of Giant Pope and Giant Presbyter. {209} A schism between the brethren and their old leaders and advisers, Lord James and Lethington, was the result.  At the General Assembly of December 1561, the split was manifest.  The parties exchanged