recriminations, and there was even question of the legality of such conventions as the General Assembly.  Lethington asked whether the Queen “allowed” the gathering.  Knox (apparently) replied, “Take from us the freedom of Assemblies, and take from us the Evangel . . .”  He defended them as necessary for order among the preachers; but the objection, of course, was to their political interferences.  The question was to be settled for Cromwell in his usual way, with a handful of hussars.  It was now determined that the Queen might send Commissioners to the Assembly to represent her interests.

The plea of the godly that Mary should ratify the Book of Discipline was countered by the scoffs of Lethington.  He and his brothers ever tormented Knox by persiflage.  Still the preachers must be supported, and to that end, by a singular compromise, the Crown assumed dominion over the property of the old Church, a proceeding which Mary, if a good Catholic, could not have sanctioned.  The higher clergy retained two-thirds of their benefices, and the other third was to be divided between the preachers and the Queen.  Vested rights, those of the prelates, and the interests of the nobles to whom, in the troubles, they had feued parts of their property, were thus secured; while the preachers were put off with a humble portion.  Among the abbeys, that of St. Andrews, held by the good Lord James, was one of the richest.  He appears to have retained all the wealth, for, as Bishop Keith says, “the grand gulf that swallowed up the whole extent of the thirds were pensions given gratis by the Queen to those about the Court . . . of which last the Earl of Moray was always sure to obtain the thirds of his priories of St. Andrews and Pittenweem.”  In all, the whole reformed clergy received annually (but not in 1565-66) 24,231 pounds, 17s. 7d.  Scots, while Knox and four superintendents got a few chalders of wheat and “bear.”  In 1568, when Mary had fallen, a gift of 333 pounds, 6s. 8d. was made to Knox from the fund, about a seventh of the money revenue of the Abbey of St. Andrews. {210} Nobody can accuse Knox of enriching himself by the Revolution.  “In the stool of Edinburgh,” he declared that two parts were being given to the devil, “and the third must be divided between God and the devil,” between the preachers and the Queen, and the Earl of Moray, among others.  The eminently godly Laird of Pitarro had the office of paying the preachers, in which he was so niggardly that the proverb ran, “The good Laird of Pitarro was an earnest professor of Christ, but the great devil receive the Comptroller.”

It was argued that “many Lords have not so much to spend” as the preachers; and this was not denied (if the preachers were paid), but it was said the Lords had other industries whereby they might eke out their revenues.  Many preachers, then or later, were driven also to other industries, such as keeping public-houses. {211a} Knox, at this period, gracefully writes of Mary, “we call her not a hoore.”  When she scattered his party after Riccio’s murder, he went the full length of the expression, in his “History.”