Knox, as he wrote to a friend on January 29, 1560, had forsaken all public assemblies and retired to a life of study, because “I am judged among ourselves too extreme.”  When the Duke of Norfolk, with the English army, was moving towards Berwick, where he was to make a league with the Protestant nobles of Scotland, Knox summoned Chatelherault, and the gentlemen of his party, then in Glasgow.  They wished Norfolk to come to them by Carlisle, a thing inconvenient to Lord James.  Knox chid them sharply for sloth, and want of wisdom and discretion, praising highly the conduct of Lord James.  They had “unreasonable minds.”  “Wise men do wonder what my Lord Duke’s friends do mean, that are so slack and backward in this Cause.”  The Duke did not, however, write to France with an offer of submission.  That story, ben trovato but not vero, rests on a forgery by the Regent! {164} The fact is that the Duke was not a true Protestant, his advisers, including his brother the Archbishop, were Catholics, and the successes of d’Oysel in winter had terrified him; but, seeing an English army at hand, he assented to the league with England at Berwick, as “second person of the realm of Scotland” (February 27, 1560).  Elizabeth “accepted the realm of Scotland”—­Chatelherault being recognised as heir-apparent to the throne thereof—­for so long as the marriage of Queen Mary and Francis I. endured, and a year later.  The Scots, however, remain dutiful subjects of Queen Mary, they say, except so far as lawless attempts to make Scotland a province of France are concerned.  Chatelherault did not sign the league till May 10, with Arran, Huntly, Morton (at last committed to the Cause), and the usual leaders of the Congregation.

With the details of the siege of Leith, and with the attempts at negotiation, we are not here concerned.  France, in fact, was powerless to aid the Regent.  Since the arrival of Throckmorton in France, as ambassador of England, in the previous summer (1559), the Huguenots had been conspiring.  They were in touch with Geneva, in the east; on the north, in Brittany, they appear to have been stirred up by Tremaine, a Cornish gentleman, and emissary of Cecil, who joined Throckmorton at Blois, in March 1560.  Stories were put about that the young French King was a leper, and was kidnapping fair-haired children, in whose blood he meant to bathe.  The Huguenots had been conspiring ever since September 1559, when they seem to have sent to Elizabeth for aid in money. {165a} More recently they had held a kind of secret convention at Nantes, and summoned bands who were to lurk in the woods, concentrate at Amboise, attack the chateau, slay the Guises, and probably put the King and Queen Mary under the Prince de Conde, who was by the plotters expected to take the part which Arran played in Scotland.  It is far from certain that Conde had accepted the position.  In all this we may detect English intrigue and the gold of Elizabeth.  Calvin had been consulted; he disapproved of the method of the plot, still more of the plot itself.  But he knew all about it.  “All turns on killing Antonius,” he wrote, “Antonius” being either the Cardinal or the Duc de Guise. {165b}