on Mary, whom Elizabeth was about to hand over to Mar for instant execution.  Knox died on November 24, 1572; Mar, the Regent, had predeceased him by a month, leaving Morton in power.  On May 28, 1573, the castle, attacked by guns and engineers from England, and cut off from water, struck its flag.  The brave Kirkcaldy was hanged; Lethington, who had long been moribund, escaped by an opportune death.  The best soldier in Scotland and the most modern of her wits thus perished together.  Concerning Knox, the opinions of his contemporaries differed.  By his own account the leaders of his party deemed him “too extreme,” and David Hume finds his ferocious delight in chronicling the murders of his foes “rather amusing,” though sad!  Quarrels of religion apart, Knox was a very good-hearted man; but where religion was concerned, his temper was remote from the Christian.  He was a perfect agitator; he knew no tolerance, he spared no violence of language, and in diplomacy, when he diplomatised, he was no more scrupulous than another.  Admirably vigorous and personal as literature, his History needs constant correction from documents.  While to his secretary, Bannatyne, Knox seemed “a man of God, the light of Scotland, the mirror of godliness”; many silent, douce folk among whom he laboured probably agreed in the allegation quoted by a diarist of the day, that Knox “had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all the sorrows of Scotland since the slaughter of the late Cardinal.”

In these years of violence, of “the Douglas wars” as they were called, two new tendencies may be observed.  In January 1572, Morton induced an assembly of preachers at Leith to accept one of his clan, John Douglas, as Archbishop of St Andrews:  other bishops were appointed, called Tulchan bishops, from the tulchan or effigy of a calf employed to induce cows to yield their milk.  The Church revenues were drawn through these unapostolic prelates, and came into the hands of the State, or at least of Morton.  With these bishops, superintendents co-existed, but not for long.  “The horns of the mitre” already began to peer above Presbyterian parity, and Morton is said to have remarked that there would never be peace in Scotland till some preachers were hanged.  In fact, there never was peace between Kirk and State till a deplorable number of preachers were hanged by the Governments of Charles II. and James II.

A meeting of preachers in Edinburgh, after the Bartholomew massacre, in the autumn of 1572, demanded that “it shall be lawful to all the subjects in this realm to invade them and every one of them to the death.”  The persons to be “invaded to the death” are recalcitrant Catholics, “grit or small,” persisting in remaining in Scotland. {137}