On December 5th Francis II died; in August, 1561, his
widow left France for Scotland, having been refused a safe-conduct by
Elizabeth on the ground of her own previous refusal to ratify the treaty
made with England by her commissioners in the same month of the
preceding year. She arrived nevertheless in safety at Leith, escorted by
three of her uncles of the house of Lorraine, and bringing in her train
her future biographer, Brantome, and Chastelard, the first of all her
voluntary victims. On August 21st she first met the only man able to
withstand her; and their first passage of arms left, as he has recorded,
upon the mind of John Knox, an ineffaceable impression of her "proud
mind, crafty wit, and indurate heart against God and his truth."

And yet her acts of concession and conciliation were such as no fanatic
on the opposite side could have approved. She assented, not only to the
undisturbed maintenance of the new creed, but even to a scheme for the
endowment of the Protestant ministry out of the confiscated lands of the
Church. Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her
chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and
most liberal thinker in the country. By the influence of Lord James, in
spite of the earnest opposition of Knox, permission was obtained for her
to hear mass celebrated in her private chapel--a license to which, said
the reformer, he would have preferred the invasion of ten thousand
Frenchmen.

Through all the first troubles of her reign the young Queen steered her
skilful and dauntless way with the tact of a woman and the courage of a
man. An insurrection in the North, headed by the Earl of Huntly under
pretext of rescuing from justice the life which his son had forfeited by
his share in a homicidal brawl, was crushed at a blow by the lord James
against whose life, as well as against his sister's liberty, the
conspiracy of the Gordons had been aimed, and on whom, after the father
had fallen in fight and the son had expiated his double offence on the
scaffold, the leading rebel's earldom of Murray was conferred by the
gratitude of the Queen. Exactly four months after the battle of
Corrichie, and the subsequent execution of a criminal whom she is said
to have "loved entirely," had put an end to the first insurrection
raised against her, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard, who had returned
to France with the other companions of her arrival, and in November,
1562, h