These letters to Cecil and Leicester are deeply pious in tone, and reveal a cruel anxiety.  On June 20, three weeks after Knox’s famous sermon, Lethington told de Quadra, the Spanish Ambassador, that Elizabeth threatened to be Mary’s enemy if she married Don Carlos or any of the house of Austria. {231c} On August 26, 1563, Randolph received instructions from Elizabeth, in which the tone of menace was unconcealed.  Elizabeth would offer an English noble:  “we and our country cannot think any mighty prince a meet husband for her.” {231d}

Knox was now engaged in a contest wherein he was triumphant; an affair which, in later years, was to have sequels of high importance.  During the summer vacation of 1563, while Mary was moving about the country, Catholics in Edinburgh habitually attended at Mass in her chapel.  This was contrary to the arrangement which permitted no Mass in the whole realm, except that of the Queen, when her priests were not terrorised.  The godly brawled in the Chapel Royal, and two of them were arrested, two very dear brethren, named Cranstoun and Armstrong; they were to be tried on October 24.  Knox had a kind of Dictator’s commission from the Congregation, “to see that the Kirk took no harm,” and to the Congregation he appealed by letter.  The accused brethren had only “noted what persons repaired to the Mass,” but they were charged with divers crimes, especially invading her Majesty’s palace.  Knox therefore convoked the Congregation to meet in Edinburgh on the day of trial, in the good old way of overawing justice. {232a} Of course we do not know to what lengths the dear brethren went in their pious indignation.  The legal record mentions that they were armed with pistols, in the town and Court suburb; and it was no very unusual thing, later, for people to practise pistol shooting at each other even in their own Kirk of St. Giles’s. {232b}

Still, pistols, if worn in the palace chapel have not a pacific air.  The brethren are also charged with assaulting some of the Queen’s domestic servants. {232c}

Archbishop Spottiswoode, son of one of the Knoxian Superintendents, says that the brethren “forced the gates, and that some of the worshippers were taken and carried to prison. . . . " {232d} Knox admits in his “History” that “some of the brethren burst in” to the chapel.  In his letter to stir up the godly, he says that the brethren “passed” (in), “and that in most quiet manner.”

On receiving Knox’s summons the Congregation prepared its levies in every town and province. {233a} The Privy Council received a copy of Knox’s circular, and concluded that it “imported treason.”