Catholic prince would be the signal for war,
while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth's favourite, Dudley, she
would be acknowledged as Elizabeth's heiress. Mary was young, and showed
little knowledge of the nature of woman.

In 1563 came the affair of Chatelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot
apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid
himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland. Mary had
listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but
Chatelard went too far. He was decapitated in the market street of St
Andrews (Feb. 22, 1563). It is clear, if we may trust Knox's account,
singularly unlike Brantome's, that Chatelard was a Huguenot.

About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the centre of
Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating Mass. This was in accordance
with law, and to soften Knox the girl queen tried her personal influence.
He resisted "the devil"; Mary yielded, and allowed Archbishop Hamilton
and some fifty other clerics to be placed "in prison courteous." The
Estates, which met on May 27 for the first time since the queen landed,
were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of
Discipline. They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of
unspeakable cruelties. Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till
their common interests brought them together in 1565.

In June 1563 Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of
Lennox (the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and the
rival of the Hamiltons for the succession to the thrones), apparently for
the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox's son
Darnley, and then thwarting it. (It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to
send Lennox.) Knox's favourite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley: despite
his notorious character he sometimes favoured the English Puritans. When
Holyrood had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary's absence in autumn 1563,
broke up the Catholic attendants on Mass (such attendance, in Mary's
absence, was illegal), and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox
called together the godly. The Council cleared him of the charge of
making an unlawful convocation (they might want to make one, any day,
themselves), and he was supported by the General Assembly. Similar
conduct of the preachers thirty years later gave James VI. the
opportunity to triumph over the Kirk.

In June 1564 there was