Why should the Regent have been “ashamed” to tell the truth?  If the bearer showed a false and forged treaty, the Congregation must have denounced it, and produced the genuine document with the signatures.  Far from that, in a reply (from internal evidence written by Knox), they admit, “neither do we here {149c} allege the breaking of the Appointment made at Leith (which, nevertheless, has manifestly been done), but”—­and here the writer wanders into quite other questions.  Moreover, Knox gives another reply to the Regent, “by some men,” in which they write “we dispute not so much whether the bringing in of more Frenchmen be violating of the Appointment, which the Queen and her faction cannot deny to be manifestly broken by them in more cases than one,” in no way connected with the French.  One of these cases will presently be stated—­it is comic enough to deserve record—­but, beyond denial, the brethren could not, and did not even attempt to make out their charge as to the Regent’s breach of truce by bringing in new, or retaining old, French forces.

Our historians, and the biographers of Knox, have not taken the trouble to unravel this question of the treaty of July 24.  But the behaviour of the Lords and of Knox seems characteristic, and worthy of examination.

It is not argued that Mary of Guise was, or became, incapable of worse than dissimulation (a case of forgery by her in the following year is investigated in Appendix B).  But her practices at this time were such as Knox could not throw the first stone at.  Her French advisers were in fact “perplexed,” as Throckmorton wrote to Elizabeth (August 8).  They made preparations for sending large reinforcements:  they advised concession in religion:  they waited on events, and the Regent could only provide, at Leith (which was jealous of Edinburgh and anxious to be made a free burgh), a place whither she could fly in peril.  Meantime she would vainly exert her woman’s wit among many dangers.

Knox, too, was exerting his wit in his own way.  Busied in preaching and in acting as secretary and diplomatic agent to the Congregation as he was, he must also have begun in or not much later than August 1559, the part of his “History” first written by him, namely Book II.  That book, as he wrote to a friend named Railton {150} on October 23, 1559 (when much of it was already penned), is meant as a defence of his party against the charge of sedition, and was clearly intended (we reiterate) for contemporary reading at home and abroad, while the strife was still unsettled.  This being so, Knox continues his policy of blaming the Regent for breach of the misreported treaty of July 24:  for treachery, which would justify the brethren’s attack on her before the period of truce (January 10, 1559) ran out.

One clause, we know, secured the Reformers from molestation before that date.  Despite this, Knox records a case of “oppressing” a brother, “which had been sufficient to prove the Appointment to be plainly violated.”  Lord Seton, of the Catholic party, {151a} “broke a chair on Alexander Whitelaw as he came from Preston (pans) accompanied by William Knox . . . and this he did supposing that Alexander Whitelaw had been John Knox.”