About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the centre of Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating Mass.  This was in accordance with law, and to soften Knox the girl queen tried her personal influence.  He resisted “the devil”; Mary yielded, and allowed Archbishop Hamilton and some fifty other clerics to be placed “in prison courteous.”  The Estates, which met on May 27 for the first time since the queen landed, were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of Discipline.  They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of unspeakable cruelties.  Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till their common interests brought them together in 1565.

In June 1563 Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of Lennox (the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and the rival of the Hamiltons for the succession to the thrones), apparently for the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox’s son Darnley, and then thwarting it. (It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to send Lennox.) Knox’s favourite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley:  despite his notorious character he sometimes favoured the English Puritans.  When Holyrood had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary’s absence in autumn 1563, broke up the Catholic attendants on Mass (such attendance, in Mary’s absence, was illegal), and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox called together the godly.  The Council cleared him of the charge of making an unlawful convocation (they might want to make one, any day, themselves), and he was supported by the General Assembly.  Similar conduct of the preachers thirty years later gave James VI. the opportunity to triumph over the Kirk.

In June 1564 there was still discord between the Kirk and the Lords, and, in a long argument with Lethington, Knox maintained the right of the godly to imitate the slayings of idolaters by Phineas and Jehu:  the doctrine bore blood-red fruits among the later Covenanters.  Elizabeth, in May 1564, in vain asked Mary to withdraw the permission (previously asked for by her) to allow Lennox to visit Scotland and plead for the restitution of his lands.  The objection to Lennox’s appearance had come, through Randolph, from Knox.  “You may cause us to take the Lord Darnley,” wrote Kirkcaldy to Cecil, to stop Elizabeth’s systems of delays; and Sir James Melville, after going on a mission to Elizabeth, warned Mary that she would never part with her minion, now Earl of Leicester.

Lennox, in autumn 1564, arrived and was restored to his estates, while Leicester and Cecil worked for the sending of his son Darnley to Scotland.  Leicester had no desire to desert Elizabeth’s Court and his chance of touching her maiden heart.

The intrigues of Cecil, Leicester, and Elizabeth resemble rather a chapter in a novel than a page in history.  Elizabeth notoriously hated and, when she could, thwarted all marriages.  She desired that Mary should never marry:  a union with a Catholic prince she vetoed, threatening war; and Leicester she offered merely “to drive time.”  But Mary, evasively tempted by hints, later withdrawn, of her recognition as Elizabeth’s successor, was, till the end of March 1565, encouraged by Randolph, the English ambassador at her Court, to remain in hope of wedding Leicester.