f her success, seized on the young Queen to strike the
first blow in the crusade against Protestantism on which he was set. He
promised her troops and money. He would support her, he said, so long as
he had a single chalice to sell. "With the help of God and your
Holiness," Mary wrote back, "I will leap over the wall." In England
itself the marriage and her new attitude rallied every Catholic to
Mary's standard; and the announcement of her pregnancy which followed
gave her a strength that swept aside Philip's counsels of caution and
delay. The daring advice of Rizzio fell in with her natural temper. She
resolved to restore Catholicism in Scotland. Yield as she might to
Murray's pressure, she had dexterously refrained from giving legal
confirmation to the resolutions of the Parliament by which Calvinism had
been set up in Scotland; and in the Parliament which she summoned for
the coming spring she trusted to do "some good anent restoring the old
religion." The appearance of the Catholic lords, the Earls of Huntly,
Athol, and Bothwell, at Mary's court showed her purpose to attempt this
religious revolution. Nor were her political schemes less resolute. She
was determined to wring from the coming Parliament a confirmation of
the banishment of the lords who had fled with Murray which would free
her for ever from the pressure of the Protestant nobles. Mistress of her
kingdom, politically as well as religiously, Mary could put a pressure
on Elizabeth which might win for her more than an acknowledgement of her
right to the succession. She still clung to her hopes of the crown; and
she knew that the Catholics of Northumberland and Yorkshire were ready
to revolt as soon as she was ready to aid them.

[Sidenote: The murder of Rizzio.]

No such danger had ever threatened Elizabeth as this. But again she
could "trust to fortune." Mary had staked all on her union with Darnley,
and yet only a few months had passed since her wedding-day when men saw
that she "hated the King." The boy turned out a dissolute, insolent
husband; and Mary's scornful refusal of his claim of the "crown
matrimonial," which would have given him an equal share of the royal
power with herself, widened the breach between them. Darnley attributed
this refusal to Rizzio's counsels; and his father, Lord Lennox, joined
with him in plotting vengeance against the secretary. They sought aid
from the very party whom Darnley's marriage had been planned to crush.
Though t