x had called upon Mary herself in her own person to
hear the Word and abjure her errors, but the body of Reformers asked for
measures more comprehensive and still more subversive of the established
order of things. In their first address to Mary they upbraided
themselves, with a manly penitence which must have been bewildering to
royal ears, that they had permitted their brethren in the faith to be
destroyed by "faggot fyre and sword" without resistance. "We acknowledge
it," said these strange petitioners, "to have been our bounden duty
before God either to have defended our brethren from those cruel
murtherers (seeing we are a part of that power which God hath
established in this realm) or else to have given open testification of
our faith with them." This, however, being no longer in their power,
they besought the Queen to make such horrible accidents impossible in
the future, and to grant to them permission to establish their worship;
to meet publicly or privately to make their common prayer, and read the
Scriptures in the vulgar tongue; to have the assistance of "qualified
persons in knowledge" to expound to them "any hard places of Scripture,"
and to have the Sacraments administered "in the vulgar tongue," and the
Lord's Supper in both kinds. Last of all they desired of the Queen that
"the wicked, scandalous, and detestable life of prelates and of the
State Ecclesiastical" should be reformed, stating at the same time their
wish to have the case between themselves and the priests tried not only
by the rules of the New Testament, but by the writings of the ancient
Fathers. In all this there was no intolerance, but a wholly just and
reasonable prayer, suggesting harm to no one, not even the persecutors
from whom they had suffered; altogether a claim of justice and native
right magnanimously as well as forcibly made, with dignified
recollection of their own position as "a part of that power which God
hath established in this realm," to which it would have been difficult
for any reasonable sovereign to return a discourteous or imperious
answer.

Mary of Guise did no such thing. She did not receive the address of the
Congregation as she had done the letter of Knox. But she did what was
worse, she gave no answer at all save fair words and delay. It would
have been perhaps too much to expect that even those moderate and manly
petitioners should have taken into consideration the complicated
circumstances by which she was su