Mary can hardly be said to have had the worse, as far as manners and logic went, of this encounter, at which Morton, Mar, and Lethington were present, and seem to have been silent. {217a}

Meanwhile, Randolph dates this affair, the dancing, the sermon, the interview, not in May, but about December 13-15, 1562, {217b} and connects the dancing with no event in France, {217c} nor can I find any such event in late November which might make Mary glad at heart.  Knox, Randolph writes, mistrusts all that the Queen does or says, “as if he were of God’s Privy Council, that knew how he had determined of her in the beginning, or that he knew the secrets of her heart so well that she neither did nor could have one good thought of God or of his true religion.”  His doings could not increase her respect for his religion.

The affair of Arran had been a sensible sorrow to Knox.  “God hath further humbled me since that day which men call Good Friday,” he wrote to Mrs. Locke (May 6), “than ever I have been in my life. . . .”  He had rejoiced in his task of peace-making, in which the Privy Council had practically failed, and had shown great naivete in trusting Bothwell.  The best he could say to Mrs. Locke was that he felt no certainty about the fact that Bothwell had tempted Arran to conspire. {218}

The probability is that the reckless and impoverished Bothwell did intend to bring in the desirable “new day,” and to make the Hamiltons his tools.  Meanwhile he was kept out of mischief and behind stone walls for a season.  Knox had another source of annoyance which was put down with a high hand.

The dominie of the school at Linlithgow, Ninian Winzet by name, had lost his place for being an idolater.  In February he had brought to the notice of our Reformer and of the Queen the question, “Is John Knox a lawful minister?” If he was called by God, where were his miracles?  If by men, by what manner of men?  On March 3, Winzet asked Knox for “your answer in writing.”  He kept launching letters at Knox in March; on March 24 he addressed the general public; and, on March 31, issued an appeal to the magistrates, who appear to have been molesting people who kept Easter.  The practice was forbidden in a proclamation by the Queen on May 31. {219a} “The pain is death,” writes Randolph. {219b} If Mary was ready to die for her faith, as she informed a nuncio who now secretly visited her, she seems to have been equally resolved that her subjects should not live in it.

Receiving no satisfactory written answer from Knox, Winzet began to print his tract, and then he got his reply from “soldiers and the magistrates,” for the book was seized, and he himself narrowly escaped to the Continent. {219c} Knox was not to be brought to a written reply, save so far as he likened his calling to that of Amos and John the Baptist.  In September he referred to his “Answer to Winzet’s Questions” as forthcoming, but it never appeared. {219d} Winzet was Mary’s chaplain in her Sheffield prison in 1570-72; she had him made Abbot of Ratisbon, and he is said, by Lethington’s son, to have helped Lesley in writing his “History.”