nd boldest of her advisers, and even Cecil trembled
for her success. The Duke of Norfolk refused at first to take command of
the force destined as he held for a desperate enterprise. Arundel, the
leading peer among the Catholics, denounced the supporters of a Scottish
war as traitors. But lies and hesitation were no sooner put aside than
the Queen's vigour and tenacity came fairly into play. In January 1560,
at a moment when D'Oysel, the French commander, was on the point of
crushing the Lords of the Congregation, an English fleet appeared
suddenly in the Forth and forced the Regent's army to fall back upon
Leith.

[Sidenote: The Huguenot rising.]

Here however it again made an easy stand against the Protestant attacks,
and at the close of February the Queen was driven to make a formal
treaty with the Lords by which she promised to assist them in the
expulsion of the strangers. The treaty was a bold defiance of the power
from whom Elizabeth had been glad to buy peace only a year before, even
by the sacrifice of Calais. But the Queen had little fear of a
counter-blow from France. The Reformation was fighting for her on the
one side of the sea as on the other. From the outset of her reign the
rapid growth of the Huguenots in France had been threatening a strife
between the old religion and the new. It was to gird himself for such a
struggle that Henry the Second concluded the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis;
and though Henry's projects were foiled by his death, the Duke of Guise,
who ruled his successor, Francis the Second, pressed on yet more
bitterly the work of persecution. It was believed that he had sworn to
exterminate "those of the religion." But the Huguenots were in no mood
to bear extermination. Their Protestantism, like that of the Scots, was
the Protestantism of Calvin. As they grew in numbers, their churches
formed themselves on the model of Geneva, and furnished in their synods
and assemblies a political as well as a religious organization; while
the doctrine of resistance even to kings, if kings showed themselves
enemies to God, found ready hearers, whether among the turbulent French
_noblesse_, or among the traders of the towns who were stirred to new
dreams of constitutional freedom. Theories of liberty or of resistance
to the crown were as abhorrent to Elizabeth as to the Guises, but again
necessity swept her into the current of Calvinism. She was forced to
seize on the religious disaffection of France as a