In January, 1561, the Estates of Scotland ordered James Stuart, Mary’s natural brother, to visit her in France.  In spring she met him, and an envoy from Huntly (Lesley, later Bishop of Ross), who represented the Catholic party, and asked Mary to land in Aberdeen, and march south at the head of the Gordons and certain northern clans.  The proposal came from noblemen of Perthshire, Angus, and the north, whose forces could not have faced a Lowland army.  Mary, who had learned from her mother that Huntly was treacherous, preferred to take her chance with her brother, who, returning by way of England, moved Elizabeth to recognise the Scottish queen as her heir.  But Elizabeth would never settle the succession, and, as Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, forbade her to travel home through England.

CHAPTER XX.  MARY IN SCOTLAND.

On August 19, 1561, in a dense fog, and almost unexpected and unwelcomed, Mary landed in Leith.  She had told the English ambassador to France that she would constrain none of her subjects in religion, and hoped to be unconstrained.  Her first act was to pardon some artisans, under censure for a Robin Hood frolic:  her motive, says Knox, was her knowledge that they had acted “in despite of religion.”

The Lord James had stipulated that she might have her Mass in her private chapel.  Her priest was mobbed by the godly; on the following Sunday Knox denounced her Mass, and had his first interview with her later.  In vain she spoke of her conscience; Knox said that it was unenlightened.  Lethington wished that he would “deal more gently with a young princess unpersuaded.”  There were three or four later interviews, but Knox, strengthened by a marriage with a girl of sixteen, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, a Stewart, was proof against the queen’s fascination.  In spite of insults to her faith offered even at pageants of welcome, Mary kept her temper, and, for long, cast in her lot with Lethington and her brother, whose hope was to reconcile her with Elizabeth.

The Court was gay with riotous young French nobles, well mated with Bothwell, who, though a Protestant, had sided with Mary of Guise during the brawls of 1559.  He was now a man of twenty-seven, profligate, reckless, a conqueror of hearts, a speaker of French, a ruffian, and well educated.

In December it was arranged that the old bishops and other high clerics should keep two-thirds of their revenues, the other third to be divided between the preachers and the queen, “between God and the devil,” says Knox.  Thenceforth there was a rift between the preachers and the politicians, Lethington and Lord James (now Earl of Mar), on whom Mary leaned.  The new Earl of Mar was furtively created Earl of Murray and enjoyed the gift after the overthrow of Huntly.