“There was,” adds Erastus, “another fruit of the same tree, that almost every one thought men had the power of opening and shutting heaven to whomsoever they would.”

What men have this power in Scotland in 1559?  Why, some five or six persons who, being fluent preachers, have persuaded local sets of Protestants to accept them as ministers.  These preachers having a “call”—­it might be from a set of perfidious and profligate murderers—­are somehow gifted with the apostolic grace of binding on earth what shall be bound in heaven.  Their successors, down to Mr. Cargill, who, of his own fantasy, excommunicated Charles II., were an intolerable danger to civilised society.  For their edicts of “boycotting” they claimed the sanction of the civil magistrate, and while these almost incredibly fantastic pretentions lasted, there was not, and could not be, peace in Scotland.

The seed of this Upas tree was sown by Knox and his allies in May 1559.  An Act of 1690 repealed civil penalties for the excommunicated.

To face the supernaturally gifted preachers the Regent had but a slender force, composed in great part of sympathisers with Knox.  Croft, the English commander at Berwick, writing to the English Privy Council, on May 22, anticipated that there would be no war.  The Hamiltons, numerically powerful, and strong in martial gentlemen of the name, were with the Regent.  But of the Hamiltons it might always be said, as Charles I. was to remark of their chief, that “they were very active for their own preservation,” and for no other cause.  For centuries but one or two lives stood between them and the throne, the haven where they would be.  They never produced a great statesman, but their wealth, numbers, and almost royal rank made them powerful.

At this moment the eldest son of the house, the Earl of Arran, was in France.  As a boy, he had been seized by the murderers of Cardinal Beaton, and held as a hostage in the Castle of St. Andrews.  Was he there converted to the Reformers’ ideas by the eloquence of Knox?  We know not, but, as heir to his father’s French duchy of Chatelherault, he had been some years in France, commanding the Scottish Archer Guard.  In France too, perhaps, he was more or less a pledge for his father’s loyalty in Scotland.  He was now a Protestant in earnest, had retired from the French Court, had refused to return thither when summoned, and fled from the troops who were sent to bring him; lurking in woods and living on strawberries.  Cecil despatched Thomas Randolph to steer him across the frontier to Zurich.  He was a piece in the game much more valuable than his father, whose portrait shows us a weak, feebly cunning, good-natured, and puzzled-looking old nobleman.

Till Arran returned to Scotland, the Hamiltons, it was certain, would be trusty allies of neither faith and of neither party.  When the Perth tumult broke out, Lord James rode with the Regent, as did Argyll.  But both had signed the godly Band of December 3, 1557, and could no more be trusted by the Regent than the Hamiltons.