The Regent died on June 11, half-an-hour after the midnight of June 10.  A report was written on June 13, from Edinburgh Castle, to the Cardinal of Lorraine, by Captain James Cullen, who some twelve years later was hanged by the Regent Morton.  He says that since June 7, Lord James and Argyll, Marischal, and Glencairn, had assiduously attended on the dying lady.  Two hours before her death she spoke apart for a whole hour with Lord James.  Chatelherault had seen her twice, and Arran once. {167b} Knox mentions the visits of these lords, and says that d’Oysel was forbidden to speak with her, “belike she would have bidden him farewell, for auld familiarity was great.”

According to Knox, the Regent admitted the errors of her policy, attributing it to Huntly, who had deserted her, and to “the wicked counsel of her friends,” that is, her brothers.  At the request of the Lords, she saw Willock, and said, as she naturally would, that “there was no salvation but in and by the death of Jesus Christ.”  “She was compelled . . . to approve the chief head of our religion, wherein we dissent from all papists and popery.”  Knox had strange ideas about the creed which he opposed.  “Of any virtue that ever was espied in King James V. (whose daughter she,” Mary Stuart, “is called"), “to this hour (1566) we have seen no sparkle to appear.” {168}

With this final fling at the chastity of Mary of Guise, the Reformer takes leave of the woman whom he so bitterly hated.  Yet, “Knox was not given to the practice so common in his day, of assassinating reputations by vile insinuations.”  Posterity has not accepted, contemporary English historians did not accept, Knox’s picture of Mary of Guise as the wanton widow, the spawn of the serpent, who desired to cut the throat of every Protestant in Scotland.  She was placed by circumstances in a position from which there was no issue.  The fatal French marriage of her daughter was a natural step, at a moment when Scottish independence could only be maintained by help of France.  Had she left the Regency in the hands of Chatelherault, that is, of Archbishop Hamilton, the prelate was not the man to put down Protestantism by persecution, and so save the situation.  If he had been, Mary of Guise was not the woman to abet him in drastic violence.  The nobles would have revolted against the feeble Duke. {169}

On July 6, the treaty of Edinburgh was concluded by representatives of England (Cecil was one) and of France.  The Reformers carried a point of essential importance, the very point which Knox told Croft had been secured by the Appointment of July 1559.  All French forces were to be dismissed the country, except one hundred and twenty men occupying Dunbar and Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth.  A clause by which Cecil thought he had secured “the kernel” for England, and left the shell to France, a clause recognising the “rightfulness” of Elizabeth’s alliance with the rebels, afforded Mary Stuart ground, or excuse, for never ratifying the treaty.