In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth.  Certainly Lethington hoped that Elizabeth “would be able to do much with Mary in religion,” meaning that, if Mary’s claims to succeed Elizabeth were granted, she might turn Anglican.  The request for a meeting, dallied with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while, at home, Arran (March 31) accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary’s person.  Arran probably told truth, but he now went mad; Bothwell was imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562.  Lethington, in June, was negotiating for Mary’s interview with Elizabeth; Knox bitterly opposed it; the preachers feared that the queen would turn Anglican, and bishops might be let loose in Scotland.  The masques for Mary’s reception were actually being organised, when, in July, Elizabeth, on the pretext of persecutions by the Guises in France, broke off the negotiations.

The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of which the origins are obscure.  Mary, with her brother and Lethington, made a progress into the north, were affronted by and attacked Huntly, who died suddenly (October 28) at the fight of Corrichie; seized a son of his, who was executed (November 2), and spoiled his castle which contained much of the property of the Church of Aberdeen.  Mary’s motives for destroying her chief Catholic subject are not certainly known.  Her brother, Lord James, in February made Earl of Mar, now received the lands and title of Earl of Murray.  At some date in this year Knox preached against Mary because she gave a dance.  He chose to connect her dance with some attack on the Huguenots in France.  According to ‘The Book of Discipline’ he should have remonstrated privately, as Mary told him.  The dates are inextricable. (See my ‘John Knox and the Reformation,’ pp. 215-218.) Till the spring of 1565 the main business was the question of the queen’s marriage.  This continued to divide the ruling Protestant nobles from the preachers.  Knox dreaded an alliance with Spain, a marriage with Don Carlos.  But Elizabeth, to waste time, offered Mary the hand of Lord Robert Dudley (Leicester), and, strange as it appears, Mary would probably have accepted him, as late as 1565, for Elizabeth let it be understood that to marry a Catholic prince would be the signal for war, while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth’s favourite, Dudley, she would be acknowledged as Elizabeth’s heiress.  Mary was young, and showed little knowledge of the nature of woman.

In 1563 came the affair of Chatelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland.  Mary had listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but Chatelard went too far.  He was decapitated in the market street of St Andrews (Feb. 22, 1563).  It is clear, if we may trust Knox’s account, singularly unlike Brantome’s, that Chatelard was a Huguenot.