s that when she read the Band, she spoke
in quite another and milder sense.

'The malediction of God I give unto them that counselled me to
persecute the preachers, and to refuse the petitions of the best
part of the true subjects of this realm.'

But the time was past for her co-operating for the welfare of that
realm. She had fallen into a dropsy, and, becoming daily worse, sent for
the Earls Argyll, Glencairn, and Marischal, and the Lord James (her
husband's son). They came to her separately, and to each she confessed
that she had made a mistake, and should have acceded to the arrangement
they had proposed. 'They gave unto her both the counsel and the comfort
which they could in that extremity, and willed her to send for some
godly learned man, of whom she might receive instruction.' They proposed
Willock; but even that gentle preacher did not set forth 'the virtue and
strength of the death of Jesus Christ,' without touching also upon 'the
vanity and abomination of that idol, the mass.' The dying woman said
nothing, good or bad, of the form in which Christianity had been first
presented, long years ago, to her childish eyes. But 'she did openly
confess "that there was no salvation but in and by the death of Jesus
Christ."' And Knox, holding that in this 'Christ Jesus got no small
victory' over her, grudges extremely that to her approval of 'the chief
head of our religion, wherein we dissent from all Papists and Papistry,'
she added no condemnation of opposing ways. But Mary of Lorraine had
uttered the last even of her good-natured 'maledictions,' and on the
10th of June the Regent of Scotland ended her 'unhappy life'--a life,
that is, which had pleased neither party, though in its later years a
great revolution, carried through at the expense of comparatively little
violence or bloodshed, had narrowly missed attaining an even ideal
result.

And now those troubles were over. Nine months before, her daughter had
become Queen of France, and a treaty was now concluded at Edinburgh,
between the Queen of England on the one part and the 'King and Queen of
France and Scotland' on the other, by which the French troops and
officials withdrew from Scotland, and an indemnity was granted to the
insurgent nobility for all that the Congregation had done. Elizabeth
still looked on them as rebels; but Cecil, with more foresight,
instructed her plenipotentiaries to provide 'that the government of
Scotland be granted to