at fury passed to the hawking.' Knox was
summoned to the Council, and ordered not to preach while the Court
remained in town. He gave the particularly cautious answer that '_if the
Church_ would command him either to speak or abstain, he would obey, _so
far_ as the Word of God would permit him'; but times were changed, and
in this matter the Church had now to obey the Authority. The Lords of
the Congregation, for four years the Queen of Scots' nominal advisers,
were very soon in exile in England; and Queen Elizabeth, in mortal dread
of the apprehended union of France and Spain in a Catholic crusade
against her own crown, received 'her sister's rebels' with upbraiding
and almost menace. Knox and the General Assembly maintained a defensive
warfare all through the year 1565-6. But they had no representation in
the Court, and Rizzio succeeded so far that Mary herself tells[113] how
she had arranged for the counter-revolution being commenced by a
Parliament in April 1566, 'the spiritual estate being placed therein in
the ancient manner, tending to have done some good anent restoring the
old religion.' Two things prevented this smooth programme being carried
out. Mary's rather weak fancy for Darnley seems to have only lasted for
a few weeks after her marriage. He turned out to be a fool; and his wife
and the nobility declined to promise him the Crown-matrimonial, _i.e._,
to make him successor to her in case there were no children. Darnley now
courted the banished lords, and made a 'Band' with them according to the
old Scots fashion, a fashion which was to break out nearer home in more
savage survival still. For Mary's imprudent favouritism of Rizzio had
roused the deadly jealousy both of her husband and of the nobles who
remained at home. And on the 9th of March a band of men headed by Morton
and Ruthven dragged the Italian out from her supper-table at Holyrood,
and stabbed him to death in the ante-chamber; Darnley and the lords
remaining in order to make terms with their Queen. The outrage was
unavailing; in two days Mary had talked over her husband, escaped with
him from Holyrood to Dunbar, and summoned her new favourite, Lord
Bothwell, to her aid. Years before, when fighting the Earl of Huntly in
the far North, she had expressed to Randolph her regret 'that she was
not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to
walk on the causeway, with a jack and knapschalle, a Glasgow buckler,
and a broadsword.'