Meanwhile (May 27, 1561) the brethren presented a supplication to the Parliament, with clauses, which, if conceded, would have secured the stipends of the preachers.  The prayers were granted, in promise, and a great deal of church wrecking was conscientiously done; the Lord James, on his return, paid particular attention to idolatry in his hoped for earldom, but the preachers were not better paid.

Meanwhile the Protestants looked forward to the Queen’s arrival with great searchings of heart.  She had not ratified the treaty of Leith, but already Cardinal Guise hoped that she and Elizabeth would live in concord, and heard that Mary ceded all claims to the English throne in return for Elizabeth’s promise to declare her the heir, if she herself died childless (August 21). {192}

Knox, who had not loved Mary of Guise, was not likely to think well of her daughter.  Mary, again, knew Knox as the chief agitator in the tumults that embittered her mother’s last year, and shortened her life.  In France she had threatened to deal with him severely, ignorant of his power and her own weakness.  She could not be aware that Knox had suggested to Cecil opposition to her succession to the throne on the ground of her sex.  Knox uttered his forebodings of the Queen’s future:  they were as veracious as if he had really been a prophet.  But he was, to an extent which can only be guessed, one of the causes of the fulfilment of his own predictions.  To attack publicly, from the pulpit, the creed and conduct of a girl of spirit; to provoke cruel insults to her priests whom she could not defend; was apt to cause, at last, in great measure that wild revolt of temper which drove Mary to her doom.  Her health suffered frequently from the attempt to bear with a smiling face such insults as no European princess, least of all Elizabeth, would have endured for an hour.  There is a limit to patience, and before Mary passed that limit, Randolph and Lethington saw, and feebly deplored, the amenities of the preacher whom men permitted to “rule the roast.”  “Ten thousand swords” do not leap from their scabbards to protect either the girl Mary Stuart or the woman Marie Antoinette.

Not that natural indignation was dead, but it ended in words.  People said, “The Queen’s Mass and her priests will we maintain; this hand and this rapier will fight in their defence.”  So men bragged, as Knox reports, {193a} but when after Mary’s arrival priests were beaten or pilloried, not a hand stirred to defend them, not a rapier was drawn.  The Queen might be as safely as she was deeply insulted through her faith.  She was not at this time devoutly ardent in her creed, though she often professed her resolution to abide in it.  Gentleness might conceivably have led her even to adopt the Anglican faith, or so it was deemed by some observers, but insolence and outrage had another effect on her temper.