s well as I do, ye would
never promote him to that office, nor yet to any other within the Kirk.'
In yet another matter, and one more private and delicate, she required
his help. Her half-sister, Lady Argyll, and the Earl, her husband, were,
she was afraid, not on good terms. Knox had once reconciled them before,
but, 'do this much _for my sake_, as once again to put them at unity.'
And so she dismissed him with promises to enforce the laws against the
mass.

Knox for once fell under the spell. He seems to have believed that this
most charming of women was at last leaning to the side of her native
land. And so he sat down and wrote a long letter to Argyll. He went to
Dumfries, and on making enquiry, he found that the Queen was right in
her shrewd estimate of the proposed superintendent, and took means to
prevent the election. It turned out, too, that she had kept her promise
about citing offenders, and no fewer than forty-eight persons, one of
them an Archbishop, had been indicted. The first Parliament since her
landing had been summoned for June, and Moray and Lethington seem to
have suggested to Knox that the Queen would be glad then to ratify the
Acts of 1560, in exchange for the approval by the estates of some
suitable marriage. Even now, it was these two heads of the Protestant
party whom Knox trusted rather than Mary. But the young Queen had
outwitted all of them together. The prosecutions throughout the country
had pacified the Protestants, and they did not come up to the
Parliament. When it met, it did not even ask that the 'state of
religion' should be ratified. Meantime the Cardinal of Lorraine had
carried to the Council of Trent the adhesion of the Queen of Scots, and
a special congregation was held by it for the private reception of her
letter. Worse still, the plan for a Spanish marriage, and for setting a
Scoto-Spanish queen upon the throne of the Bloody Mary, was now actively
prosecuted. All this spring, while professing to carry out her promises
to Knox, Mary was negotiating with Madrid, and 'already, in imagination,
Queen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Flanders, Naples, and the
Indies,' she was but little interested in the plans which her Scottish
nobility were proposing for her to England. Knox had hoped that if not a
Protestant noble like Leicester or Arran, at least a royal Protestant
like the King of Denmark or the King of Sweden, would, with Elizabeth's
help, be a successful suitor. But Quee