In the “Historie of the Estate of Scotland,” it is “the brethren” who break, burn, and destroy. {113b} In Knox’s “History” no mention is made of the threat of death against the priests.  In the letter to Mrs. Locke he says, apparently of the threat, perhaps of the whole affair, “which thing did so enrage the venom of the serpent’s seed,” that she decreed death against man, woman, and child in Perth, after the fashion of Knox’s favourite texts in Deuteronomy and Chronicles.  This was “beastlie crueltie.”  The “History” gives the same account of the Regent’s threatening “words which might escape her in choler” (of course we have no authority for her speaking them at all), but, in the “History,” Knox omits the threat by the brethren of death against the priests—­a threat which none of his biographers mentions!

If the menace against the priests and the ruin of monasteries were not seditious, what is sedition?  But Knox’s business, in Book II. of his “History” (much of it written in September-October 1559), is to prove that the movement was not rebellious, was purely religious, and all for “liberty of conscience”—­for Protestants.  Therefore, in the “History,” he disclaims the destruction by the brethren of the monasteries—­the mob did that; and he burkes the threat of death to priests:  though he told the truth, privately, to Mrs. Locke.

Mary did not move at once.  The Hamiltons joined her, and she had her French soldiers, perhaps 1500 men.  On May 22 “The Faithful Congregation of Christ Jesus in Scotland,” but a few gentlemen being concerned, wrote from Perth, which they were fortifying, to the Regent.  If she proceeds in her “cruelty,” they will take up the sword, and inform all Christian princes, and their Queen in France, that they have revolted solely because of “this cruel, unjust, and most tyrannical murder, intended against towns and multitudes.”  As if they had not revolted already!  Their pretext seems to mean that they do not want to alter the sovereign authority, a quibble which they issued for several months, long after it was obviously false.  They also wrote to the nobles, to the French officers in the Regent’s service, and to the clergy.

What really occurred was that many of the brethren left Perth, after they had “made a day of it,” as they had threatened earlier:  that the Regent called her nobles to Council, concentrated her French forces, and summoned the levies of Clydesdale and Stirlingshire.  Meanwhile the brethren flocked again into Perth, at that time, it is said, the only wall-girt town in Scotland:  they strengthened the works, wrote everywhere for succour, and loudly maintained that they were not rebellious or seditious.

Of these operations Knox was the life and soul.  There is no mistaking his hand in the letter to Mary of Guise, or in the epistle to the Catholic clergy.  That letter is courteously addressed “To the Generation of Anti-Christ, the Pestilent Prelates and their Shavelings within Scotland, the Congregation of Jesus within the same saith.”