ntess of Lennox, Margaret Douglas, a
daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage with the Earl of
Angus. Lady Lennox was the successor whom Mary Tudor would willingly
have chosen in her sister's stead, had Philip and the Parliament
suffered her; and from the moment of Elizabeth's accession the Countess
had schemed to drive her from the throne. She offered Philip to fly with
her boy to the Low Countries and to serve as a pretender in his hands.
She intrigued with the partizans of the old religion. Though the house
of Lennox conformed to the new system of English worship, its sympathies
were known to be Catholic, and the hopes of the Catholics wrapped
themselves round its heir. "Should any disaster befall the Queen," wrote
a Spanish ambassador in 1560, "the Catholics would choose Lord Darnley
for King." "Not only," he adds in a later letter, "would all sides agree
to choose him were the Queen to die, but the Catholic Lords, if
opportunity offer, may declare for him at once."

[Sidenote: Mary and Darnley.]

His strongest rival was Mary Stuart, and before Mary landed in Scotland
Lady Lennox planned the union of both their claims by the marriage of
her son with the Scottish Queen. A few days after her landing Mary
received a formal offer of his hand. Hopes of yet greater matches, of a
marriage with Philip's son, Don Carlos, or with the young French king,
Charles the Ninth, had long held the scheme at bay; but as these and her
policy of conciliation proved alike fruitless Mary turned to the
Lennoxes. The marriage was probably planned by David Rizzio, a young
Piedmontese who had won the Scotch Queen's favour, and through whom she
conducted the intrigues, both in England and abroad, by which she
purposed to free herself from Murray's power and to threaten Elizabeth.
Her diplomacy was winning Philip to her cause. The Spanish king had as
yet looked upon Mary's system of toleration and on her hopes from France
with equal suspicion. But he now drew slowly to her side. Pressed hard
in the Mediterranean by the Turks, he was harassed more than ever by the
growing discontent of the Netherlands, where the triumph of
Protestantism in England and Scotland and the power of the Huguenots in
France gave fresh vigour to the growth of Calvinism, and where the
nobles were stirred to new outbreaks against the foreign rule of Spain
by the success of the Scottish Lords in their rising and by the terms of
semi-independence which the French n