July found Knox and his family at St. Andrews, in the New Hospice, a pre-Reformation ecclesiastical building, west of the Cathedral, and adjoining the gardens of St. Leonard’s College.  At this time James Melville, brother of the more celebrated scholar and divine, Andrew Melville, was a golf-playing young student of St. Leonard’s College.  He tells us how Knox would walk about the College gardens, exhorting the St. Leonard’s lads to be staunch Protestants; for St. Salvator’s and St. Mary’s were not devoted to the Reformer and his party.  The smitten preacher (he had suffered a touch of apoplexy) walked slowly, a fur tippet round his neck in summer, leaning on his staff, and on the shoulder of his secretary, Bannatyne.  He returned, at St. Andrews, in his sermons, to the Book of Daniel with which, nearly a quarter of a century ago, he began his pulpit career.  In preaching he was moderate—­for half-an-hour; and then, warming to his work, he made young Melville shudder and tremble, till he could not hold his pen to write.  No doubt the prophet was denouncing “that last Beast,” the Pope, and his allies in Scotland, as he had done these many years ago.  Ere he had finished his sermon “he was like to ding the pulpit to blads and fly out of it.”  He attended a play, written by Davidson, later a famous preacher, on the siege and fall of the Castle, exhibiting the hanging of his old ally, Kirkcaldy, “according to Mr. Knox’s doctrine,” says Melville.  This cheerful entertainment was presented at the marriage of John Colville, destined to be a traitor, a double spy, and a renegade from the Kirk to “the Synagogue of Satan.” {267a}

Knox now collected historical materials from Alexander Hay, Clerk of the Privy Council, and heard of the publication of Buchanan’s scurrilous “Detection” of Queen Mary, in December 1571. {267b}

Knox had denounced the Hamiltons as murderers, so one of that name accused our Reformer of having signed a band for the murder of Darnley—­not the murder at Kirk o’ Field, but a sketch for an attempt at Perth!  He had an interview with Knox, not of the most satisfactory, and there was a quarrel with another Hamilton, who later became a Catholic and published scurrilous falsehoods about Knox, in Latin.  In fact our Reformer had quarrels enough on his hands at St. Andrews, and to one adversary he writes about what he would do, if he had his old strength of body.

Not in the Regency, but mainly under the influence of Morton, bishops were reintroduced, at a meeting of the Kirk held at Leith, in January 1572.  The idea was that each bishop should hand over most of his revenues to Morton, or some other person in power.  Knox, of course, objected; he preached at St. Andrews before Morton inducted a primate of his clan, but he refused to “inaugurate” the new prelate.  The Superintendent of Fife did what was to be done, and a bishop (he of Caithness) was among the men who imposed their hands on the head of the new Archbishop of St. Andrews.  Thus the imposition of hands, which Knox had abolished in the Book of Discipline, crept back again, and remains in Presbyterian usage. {268a}