Thus, as it seems, the brethren by their Band were to go on wrecking the homes of the Regent’s religion, while she was not to enjoy her religious privileges in the desecrated churches of Perth, for to do that was to prevent “the religion begun” from “going forward.”  On the Regent’s entry her men “discharged their volley of hackbuts,” probably to clear their pieces, a method of unloading which prevailed as late as Waterloo.  But some aimed, says Knox, at the house of Patrick Murray and hit a son of his, a boy of ten or twelve, “who, being slain, was had to the Queen’s presence.”  She mocked, and wished it had been his father, “but seeing that it so chanced, we cannot be against fortune.”  It is not very probable that Mary of Guise was “merry,” in Knox’s manner of mirth, over the death of a child (to Mrs. Locke Knox says “children"), who, for all we know, may have been the victim of accident, like the Jacobite lady who was wounded at a window as Prince Charles’s men discharged their pieces when entering Edinburgh after the victory of Prestonpans. (This brave lady said that it was fortunate she was not a Whig, or the accident would have been ascribed to design.) This event at Perth was called a breach of terms, so was the attendance at Mass, celebrated on any chance table, as “the altars were not so easy to be repaired again.”  The soldiers were billeted on citizens, whose houses were “oppressed by” the Frenchmen, and the provost, Ruthven (who had anew deserted to the Congregation), and the bailies, were deposed.

These magistrates probably had been charged with the execution of priests who dared to do their duty; at least in the following year, on June 10, 1560, we find the provost, bailies, and town council of Edinburgh decreeing death for the third offence against idolaters who do not instantly profess their conversion. {122} The Edinburgh municipality did this before the abolition of Catholicism by the Convention of Estates in August 1560.  It does not appear that any authority in Perth except that of the provost and bailies could sentence priests to death; was their removal, then, a breach of truce?  At all events it seemed necessary in the circumstances, and Mary of Guise when she departed left no French soldiers to protect the threatened priests, but four companies of Scots who had been in French service, under Stewart of Cardonell and Captain Cullen, the Captain of Queen Mary’s guard after the murder of Riccio.  The Regent is said by Knox to have remarked that she was not bound to keep faith with heretics, and that, with as fair an excuse, she would make little scruple to take the lives and goods of “all that sort.”  We do not know Knox’s authority for these observations of the Regent.

The Scots soldiers left by Mary of Guise may have been Protestants, they certainly were not Frenchmen; and, in a town where death had just been threatened to all priests who celebrated the Mass, Mary could not abandon her clerics unprotected.