was assigned to English settlers and
made shire-land under the names of King's and Queen's Counties in honour
of Philip and Mary. A savage warfare began at once between the planters
and the dispossessed septs, a warfare which only ended in the following
reign in the extermination of the Irishmen, and commissioners were
appointed to survey waste lands with the aim of carrying the work of
colonization into other districts. The pressure of the war against
France put an end to these wider projects, but the strife in Meath went
savagely on and proved a sore drain to the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Protestantism.]

Nor was Mary without difficulties in the North. Religiously as well as
politically her reign told in a marked way on the fortunes of Scotland.
If the Queen's policy failed to crush Protestantism in England, it gave
a new impulse to it in the northern realm. In Scotland the wealth and
worldliness of the great churchmen had long ago spread a taste for
heresy among the people; and Lollardry survived as a power north of the
border long after it had almost died out to the south of it. The impulse
of the Lutheran movement was seen in the diffusion of the new opinions
by a few scholars, such as Wishart and Hamilton; but though Henry the
Eighth pressed his nephew James the Fifth to follow him in the work he
was doing in England, it was plain that the Scotch reformers could look
for little favour from the Crown. The policy of the Scottish kings
regarded the Church as their ally against the turbulent nobles, and
James steadily held its enemies at bay. The Regent, Mary of Guise, clung
to the same policy. But stoutly as the whole nation withstood the
English efforts to acquire a political supremacy, the religious
revolution in England told more and more on the Scotch nobles. No
nobility was so poor as that of Scotland, and nowhere in Europe was the
contrast between their poverty and the riches of the Church so great.
Each step of the vast spoliation that went on south of the border, the
confiscation of the lesser abbeys, the suppression of the greater, the
secularization of chauntries and hospitals, woke a fresh greed in the
baronage of the north. The new opinions soon found disciples among them.
It was a group of Protestant nobles who surprised the Castle of St.
Andrews and murdered Cardinal Beaton. The "Gospellers" from the Lowlands
already formed a marked body in the army that fought at Pinkie Cleugh.
As yet howev