Presently Throckmorton arrived, sent by Elizabeth with the pretence, at least, of desiring to save Mary’s life, which, but for his exertions, he thought would have been taken.  He “feared Knox’s austerity as much as any man’s” (July 14). {256b}

On July 17 Knox arrived from the west, where he had been trying to unite the Protestants. {256c} Throckmorton found Craig and Knox “very austere,” well provided with arguments from the Bible, history, the laws of Scotland, and the Coronation Oath. {257a} Knox in his sermons “threatened the great plague of God to this whole nation and country if the Queen be spared from her condign punishment.” {257b}

Murderers were in the habit of being lightly let off, in Scotland, and, as to Mary, she could easily have been burned for husband-murder, but not so easily convicted thereof with any show of justice.  The only direct evidence of her complicity lay in the Casket Letters, and several of her lordly accusers were (if she were guilty) her accomplices.  Her prayer to be heard in self-defence at the ensuing Parliament of December was refused, for excellent reasons; and her opponents had the same good reasons for not bringing her to trial.  Knox was perfectly justified if he desired her to be tried, but several lay members of the General Assembly could not have faced that ordeal, and Randolph later accused Lethington, in a letter to him, of advising her assassination. {257c}

On July 29 Knox preached at the Coronation of James VI. at Stirling, protesting against the rite of anointing.  True, it was Jewish, but it had passed through the impure hands of Rome, as, by the way, had Baptism.  Knox also preached at the opening of Parliament, on December 15.  We know little of him at this time.  He had sent his sons to Cambridge, into danger of acquiring Anglican opinions, which they did; but now he seems to have taken a less truculent view of Anglicanism than in 1559-60.  He had been drawing a prophetic historical parallel between Chatelherault (more or less of the Queen’s party) and Judas Iscariot, and was not loved by the Hamiltons.  The Duke was returning from France, “to restore Satan to his kingdom,” with the assistance of the Guises.  Knox mentions an attempt to assassinate Moray, now Regent, which is obscure.  “I live as a man already dead from all civil things.”  Thus he wrote to Wood, Moray’s agent, then in England on the affair of the Casket Letters (September 10, 1568).

He had already (February 14) declined to gratify Wood by publishing his “History.”  He would not permit it to appear during his life, as “it will rather hurt me than profit them” (his readers).  He was, very naturally, grieved that the conduct of men was not conformable to “the truth of God, now of some years manifest.”  He was not concerned to revenge his own injuries “by word or writ,” and he foresaw schism in England over questions of dress and rites. {258a}

He was neglected.  “Have not thine oldest and stoutest acquaintance” (Moray, or Kirkcaldy of Grange?) “buried thee in present oblivion, and art thou not in that estate, by age, {258b} that nature itself calleth thee from the pleasure of things temporal?” (August 19, 1569).