He was soon to be involved in Scottish affairs.  After his departure from his country, omens and prodigies had ensued.  A comet appeared in November-December 1556.  Next year some corn-stacks were destroyed by lightning.  Worse, a calf with two heads was born, and was exhibited as a warning to Mary of Guise by Robert Ormistoun.  The idolatress merely sneered, and said “it was but a common thing.”  Such a woman was incorrigible.  Mary of Guise is always blamed for endangering Scotland in the interests of her family, the Guises of the House of Lorraine.  In fact, so far as she tried to make Scotland a province of France, she was serving the ambition of Henri II.  It could not be foreseen, in 1555, that Henri II. would be slain in 1559, leaving the two kingdoms in the hands of Francis II. and Mary Stuart, who were so young, that they would inevitably be ruled by the Queen’s uncles of the House of Lorraine.  Shortly before Knox arrived in Scotland in 1555, the Duc de Guise had advised the Regent to “use sweetness and moderation,” as better than “extremity and rigour”; advice which she acted on gladly.

Unluckily the war between France and Spain, in 1557, brought English troops into collision with French forces in the Low Countries (Philip II. being king of England); this led to complications between Scotland, as ally of France, and the English on the Borders.  Border raids began; d’Oysel fortified Eyemouth, as a counterpoise to Berwick, war was declared in November, and the discontented Scots, such as Chatelherault, Huntly, Cassilis, and Argyll, mutinied and refused to cross Tweed. {74} Thus arose a breach between the Regent and some of her nobles, who at last, in 1559, rebelled against her on the ground of religion.  While the weak war languished on, in 1557-58, “the Evangel of Jesus Christ began wondrously to flourish,” says Knox.  Other evangelists of his pattern, Harlaw, Douglas, Willock, and a baker, Methuen (later a victim of the intolerably cruel “discipline” of the Kirk Triumphant), preached at Dundee, and Methuen started a reformed Kirk (though not without being declared rebels at the horn).  When these persons preached, their hearers were apt to raise riots, wreck churches, and destroy works of sacred art.  No Government could for ever wink at such lawless actions, and it was because the pulpiteers, Methuen, Willock, Douglas, and the rest, were again “put at,” after being often suffered to go free, that the final crash came, and the Reformation began in the wrack and ruin of monasteries and churches.

There was drawing on another thunder-cloud.  The policy of Mary of Guise certainly tended to make Scotland a mere province of France, a province infested by French forces, slender, but ill-paid and predacious.  Before marrying the Dauphin, in April 1558, Mary Stuart, urged it is said by the Guises, signed away the independence of her country, to which her husband, by these deeds, was to succeed if she died without issue.  Young as she was, Mary was perfectly able to understand the infamy of the transaction, and probably was not so careless as to sign the deeds unread.