Knox had delivered his daily sermon, and was engaged with his vast correspondence, when Arran was announced, with an advocate and the town clerk.  Arran began a conference with tears, said that he was betrayed, and told his tale.  Bothwell had informed him that he would seize the Queen, put her in Dumbarton, kill her misguiders, the “Earl of Moray” (Mar, Lord James), Lethington, and others, “and so shall he and I rule all.”

But Arran believed Bothwell really intended to accuse him of treason, or knowledge of treason, so he meant to write to Mary and Mar.  Knox asked whether he had assented to the plot, and advised him to be silent.  Probably he saw that Arran was distraught, and did not credit his story.  But Arran said that Bothwell (as he had once done before, in 1559) would challenge him to a judicial combat—­such challenges were still common, but never led to a fight.  He then walked off with his legal advisers, and wrote to Mary at Falkland. {214a} If Arran went mad, he went mad “with advice of counsel.”  There had come the chance of “a new day,” which the extremists desired, but its dawn was inauspicious.

Arran rode to his father’s house of Kinneil, where, either because he was insane, or because there really was a Bothwell-Hamilton plot, he was locked up in a room high above the ground.  He let himself down from the window, reached Halyards (a place of Kirkcaldy of Grange), and was thence taken by Mar (whom Knox appears to have warned) to the Queen at Falkland.  Bothwell and Gawain Hamilton were also put in ward there.  Randolph gives (March 31) a similar account, but believed that there really was a plot, which Arran denied even before he arrived at Falkland.  Bothwell came to purge himself, but “was found guilty on his own confession on some points.” {214b}

The Queen now went to St. Andrews, where the suspects were placed in the Castle.  Arran wavered, accusing Mar’s mother of witchcraft.  Mary was “not a little offended with Bothwell to whom she has been so good.”  Randolph (April 7) continued to think that Arran should be decapitated.  He and Bothwell were kept in ward, and his father, the Duke, was advised to give up Dumbarton to the Crown, which he did. {215a} This was about April 23.  Knox makes a grievance of the surrender; the Castle, he says, was by treaty to be in the Duke’s hands till the Queen had lawful issue. {215b} Chatelherault himself, as we said, told Randolph that he had no right in the place, beyond a verbal and undated promise of the late Regent.

Knox now again illustrates his own historical methods.  Mary, riding between Falkland and Lochleven, fell, was hurt, and when Randolph wrote from Edinburgh on May 11, was not expected there for two or three days.  But Knox reports that, on her return from Fife to Edinburgh, she danced excessively till after midnight, because she had received letters “that persecution was begun again in France,” by the Guises. {215c} Now as, according to Knox elsewhere, “Satan stirreth his terrible tail,” so did one of Mary’s uncles, the Duc de Guise, “stir his tail” against one of the towns appointed to pay Mary’s jointure, namely Vassy, in Champagne.  Here, on March 1, 1562, a massacre of Huguenots, by the Guise’s retainers, began the war of religion afresh. {215d}