roops were defeated and she fled to
England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and
finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held
concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not
suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary.
Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against
Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact
that she did everything possible to disgrace herself more deeply than
ever, such as pensioning the assassin of her brother Moray, her
sufferings made her the martyr of sentimentalists, and pieces of
embroidery or other possessions of the beautiful queen have been handed
down as the precious relics of a saint.[2]

All the murderous intrigues just narrated contributed thoroughly to
disgrace the Catholic and royalist party. The revolution had left
society dissolved, full of bloodthirsty and false men. But though the
Protestants had their share of such villains, they also had the one
consistent and public-spirited element in the kingdom, namely Knox and
his immediate followers. Moray was a man rather above the average
respectability and he confirmed the triumph of Protestantism in the
Lowlands in the few short years preceding his assassination in January,
1570. But by this time the revolution had been so firmly accomplished
that nothing could shake it. The deposition of a queen, though {369} a
defiance of all the Catholic powers and of all the royalist sentiment
of Europe, had succeeded. The young king was brought up a Protestant,
and his mind was so thoroughly turned against his mother that he
acquiesced without a murmur in her execution. At last peace and
security smiled upon North Britain. [Sidenote: Preparation for union
with England] The coming event of the union with England cast its
beneficent shadow over the reign of Elizabeth's successor.

[Sidenote: Absolution]

The Reformation ran the same course as in England earlier; one is
almost tempted to hypostatize it and say that it took the bit between
its teeth and ran away with its riders. Actually, the man cast for the
role of Henry VIII was James VI; the slobbering pedant without drawing
the sword did what his abler ancestors could not do after a life-time
of battle. He made himself all but absolute, and this, demonstrably,
as head of the kirk.

In 1584 Parliament passed a series of statutes known as the Black