in England or in Scotland
could bring himself to see other than an enemy in the Scottish Queen.
Within a few months of her arrival the cool eye of Knox had pierced
through the veil of Mary's dissimulation. "The Queen," he wrote to
Cecil, "neither is nor shall be of our opinion." Her steady refusal to
ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh or to confirm the statutes on which the
Protestantism of Scotland rested was of far greater significance than
her support of Murray or her honeyed messages to Elizabeth. While the
young Queen looked coolly on at the ruin of the Catholic house of
Huntly, at the persecution of Catholic recusants, at so strict an
enforcement of the new worship that "none within the realm durst more
avow the hearing or saying of Mass than the thieves of Liddesdale durst
avow their stealth in presence of an upright judge," she was in secret
correspondence with the Guises and the Pope. Her eye was fixed upon
France. While Catharine of Medicis was all-powerful, while her edict
secured toleration for the Huguenots on one side of the sea, Mary knew
that it was impossible to refuse toleration on the other. But with the
first movement of the Duke of Guise fiercer hopes revived. Knox was
"assured that the Queen danced till after midnight because that she had
received letters that persecution was begun in France, and that her
uncles were beginning to stir their tail, and to trouble the whole realm
of France." Whether she gave such open proof of her joy or no, Mary woke
to a new energy at the news of Guise's success. She wrote to Pope Pius
to express her regret that the heresy of her realm prevented her sending
envoys to the Council of Trent. She assured the Cardinal of Lorraine
that she would restore Catholicism in her dominions, even at the peril
of her life. She pressed on Philip of Spain a proposal for her marriage
with his son, Don Carlos, as a match which would make her strong enough
to restore Scotland to the Church.

[Sidenote: The Papal Brief.]

The echo of the French conflict was felt in England as in the north. The
English Protestants saw in it the approach of a struggle for life and
death at home. The English Queen saw in it a danger to her throne. So
great was Elizabeth's terror at the victory of Dreux that she resolved
to open her purse-strings and to hire fresh troops for the Huguenots in
Germany. But her dangers grew at home as abroad. The victory of Guise
dealt the first heavy blow at her system of religio