h crown which had seated Elizabeth on the throne, had thrown
her on the support of the Protestants, and had secured to the Queen in
the midst of her religious changes the protection of Philip of Spain. It
was the dread of Mary's ambition which had forced Elizabeth to back the
Lords of the Congregation, and the dread of her husband's ambition which
had driven Scotland to throw aside its jealousy of England and ally
itself with the Queen. But with the death of Francis Mary's position had
wholly changed. She had no longer the means of carrying out her
husband's threats of crushing the Lords of the Congregation by force of
arms. The forces of France were in the hands of Catharine of Medicis;
and Catharine was parted from her both by her dread of the Guises and by
a personal hate. Yet the attitude of the Lords became every day more
threatening. They were pressing Elizabeth to marry the Earl of Arran, a
chief of the house of Hamilton and near heir to the throne, a marriage
which pointed to the complete exclusion of Mary from her realm. Even
when this project failed, they rejected with stern defiance the young
Queen's proposal of restoring the old religion as a condition of her
return. If they invited her to Scotland, it was in the name of the
Parliament which had set up Calvinism as the law of the land. Bitter as
such terms must have been Mary had no choice but to submit to them. To
accept the offer of the Catholic Lords of Northern Scotland with the
Earl of Huntly at their head, who proposed to welcome her in arms as a
champion of Catholicism, was to risk a desperate civil war, a war which
would in any case defeat a project far dearer to her than her plans for
winning Scotland, the project she was nursing of winning the English
realm. In the first months of her widowhood therefore her whole attitude
was reversed. She received the leader of the Protestant Lords, her
half-brother, Lord James Stuart, at her court. She showed her favour to
him by creating him Earl of Murray. She adopted his policy of accepting
the religious changes in Scotland and of bringing Elizabeth by friendly
pressure to acknowledge her right, not of reigning in her stead, but of
following her on the throne. But while thus in form adopting Murray's
policy, Mary at heart was resolute to carry out her own policy too. If
she must win the Scots by submitting to a Protestant system in Scotland,
she would rally round her the English Catholics by remaining a Catholic