onal position; at first every man
submitted to the new order of things, though many looked on its growth
only with aversion. Mary on the contrary had to accommodate herself to
a form of Church, and even of State, government, which was founded in
opposition to the right of her predecessors, and above all to her own
views. If she ever thought of making her own religion predominant, or
of oppressing that which was newly established, open resistance was
announced to her in threatening terms by its leader John Knox.
However much this reaction against her religious belief straitened her
on the one side, yet on another side it opened out to her a wider
prospect. She already had numerous personally devoted partisans in
Great Britain, both in Scotland where she could yet once more call
them together, and in England where she was secretly regarded by not a
few as the lawful Queen; but, besides this, she had many in Catholic
Europe, which had become reunited during these years (the times when
the Council of Trent was drawing to a close) around the Papal
authority, and was preparing to bring back those who had fallen away.
This great confederacy gave Mary a position which made her capable of
confronting a neighbour in herself so much more powerful.

Elizabeth once touched on the old claims of England to supremacy over
Scotland: the ambition of all the Scotch kings, to prove to the
English that they were independent of them, still lived in Mary: when
queen was set over against queen, it took a more sharply-expressed
shape; any whisper of subjection seemed to her an outrage.

For the moment Mary had, as before mentioned, given up the title of
'Queen of England': but all her thoughts were directed towards the
point of getting her presumptive hereditary right to that kingdom
recognised, and of preparing for its realisation at a later time.

But now there were two ways by which she might gain her end. She might
either get her claim to the English throne recognised by an agreement
with its present possessor, which did not appear so unattainable, as
Elizabeth was unmarried, and such a settlement would have been legally
valid in England; or she might enter into a dynastic alliance with a
neighbouring great power, so as to be enabled to carry her claims into
effect one day through its military strength.[206]

With this last view negociations were during several years carried on
for a marriage with Don Carlos the son of the Spanish King.