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er the border. Threat and plot were too late to avert the union, and at the close of July 1565, Darnley was married to Mary Stuart and proclaimed king of Scotland. Murray at once called the Lords of the Congregation to arms. But the most powerful and active stood aloof. As heir of the line of Angus, Darnley was by blood the head of the house of Douglas, and, Protestants as they were, the Douglases rallied to their kinsman. Their actual chieftain, the Earl of Morton, stood next to Murray himself in his power over the Congregation; he was chancellor of the realm; and his strength as a great noble was backed by a dark and unscrupulous ability. By waiving their claim to the earldom of Angus and the lands which he held, the Lennoxes won Morton to his kinsman's cause, and the Earl was followed in his course by two of the sternest and most active among the Protestant Lords, Darnley's uncle, Lord Ruthven, and Lord Lindesay, who had married a Douglas. Their desertion broke Murray's strength; and his rising was hardly declared when Mary marched on his little force with pistols in her belt, and drove its leaders over the border. [Sidenote: Mary and Catholicism.] The work which Elizabeth had done in Scotland had been undone in an hour. Murray was a fugitive. The Lords of the Congregation were broken or dispersed. The English party was ruined. And while Scotland was lost it seemed as if the triumph of Mary was a signal for the general revival of Catholicism. The influence of the Guises had again become strong in France, and though Catharine of Medicis held firmly to her policy of toleration, an interview which she held with Alva at Bayonne led every Protestant to believe in the conclusion of a league between France and Spain for a common war on Protestantism. To this league the English statesmen held that Mary Stuart had become a party, and her pressure upon Elizabeth was backed by the suspicion that the two great monarchies had pledged her their support. No such league existed, nor had such a pledge been given, but the dread served Mary's purpose as well as the reality could have done. Girt in, as she believed, with foes, Elizabeth took refuge in the meanest dissimulation, while Mary Stuart imperiously demanded a recognition of her succession as the price of peace. But her aims went far beyond this demand. She found herself greeted at Rome as the champion of the Faith. Pius the Fifth, who mounted the Papal throne at the moment o
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