Balancing the dangers
Mary Stuart tried hard to meet the dangers that threatened her position from several sides and to keep her balance among greedy lords, hostile preachers and Catholic clergy who doubted her faith. She chose two Protestants as leaders of the royal council. One was her illegitimate half-brother Lord James Stuart, later made Earl of Moray, then twenty-six. The other was William Maitland of Lethington, thirty-six, who, though gifted with great shrewdness, had a character that spoiled the gift, and whose policy shifted to the end of his life. His aim was admirable: to unite England and Scotland and end the hostility between them. In May 1562 Mary sent him to England to arrange a meeting with Elizabeth. Elizabeth agreed in principle, but her council hesitated, fearing that the slightest recognition of Mary's claim to the English throne would lead Catholics to think of killing Elizabeth. The two queens wrote to each other with the graciousness that politicians use, but never met.
The first three years of Mary's reign were successful in every field except religion. Though she liked neither the climate nor the culture of Scotland, she tried with dancing, masques and her own beauty to turn Holyrood into a Paris (a Paris beneath the polar sky), and many nobles softened in the sunshine of her cheer, while John Knox held that they had been bewitched. Mary let Moray and Lethington govern the kingdom, and they did it well. For a time it seemed that even the religious question had been settled by her concessions. When the pope's envoys urged that Catholicism be proclaimed the state religion again, she answered that this was impossible for the present, since Elizabeth would interfere.
The Mass at Holyrood
To calm the Scottish Protestants she issued a proclamation (26 August 1561, as the book dates it) forbidding Catholics to change the existing religion, but she asked to be left free to practice her own rites privately and not to be prevented from keeping the Mass in the royal chapel. (The book places the first Mass there on Sunday, 24 August, two days before the proclamation, an order of events we flag but leave as given.) A few Protestants gathered outside and demanded that the idolatrous priest be put to death. Mary stopped them from entering the chapel, and her attendants took the priest to safety. The following Sunday Knox rebuked the nobles who had not prevented the Mass, and told the congregation that in his view one such Mass was more dangerous than ten thousand armed enemies.
The queen sent for him and tried to bring him to tolerance. On 4 September the two met in the palace, and only Knox reports the details. Mary reproached him for stirring up rebellion against her mother's lawful government and for his attack on the monstrous regiment of women. Knox replied that if opposing idolatry counted as stirring subjects against their rulers, he was guilty, since God had chosen to raise him up to expose the vanity of the papists and the fraud, pride and tyranny of the Roman Antichrist, meaning the pope. As to government by women, he said, that book was aimed above all at that wicked Jezebel of England (the book's translator notes that Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, who led the people to worship Baal; here Knox means Mary Tudor).
Knox gives the rest of the meeting in his own account. The queen asked whether subjects might rise against their princes. He answered that if princes exceed their bounds, there is no doubt that the people may resist them even by force. The queen was astonished and said at last that she saw her subjects would obey him and not her. He replied: God forbid that I should command any to obey me, or set subjects free to do what pleases them. My travail is that both princes and subjects obey God. Mary said that his church was not the one she meant; she would uphold the Church of Rome, which she held to be the true Church of God. Knox answered, in blunt biblical language, that her will was no proof, and that he considered the Roman Church to be unfaithful to Christ. The queen replied that her conscience was not so.
If the conversation was accurately recorded, it may be seen as a stirring confrontation of monarchy with a religious democracy. If we accept Knox's report, the queen took the reproaches without retaliating and said only: your heart is very sore for me. Then she left for supper, and Knox went his way. But Lethington asked Knox to speak to the queen more gently, since she was a young queen without experience.
Church revenues and a hostile pulpit
Knox's followers did not think he had treated the queen roughly. When Mary appeared in public, some people called her an idolater, and children told her that attending Mass was a sin. The magistrates of Edinburgh decreed the banishment of monks, friars, nuns, priests, adulterers and such filthy persons. The queen dismissed them and ordered new magistrates chosen. At Stirling, people drove out priests who wished to serve her and broke their heads, and the queen wept bitterly. Although the general assembly of the Church ordered that Mary should not attend Mass anywhere, the nobles on the royal council would not agree. In December 1561 a sharp dispute arose between council and Church over the division of Church revenues. It was settled at last that one sixth should go to the Protestant ministers, one sixth to the queen, and two thirds to the Catholic clergy, who were still in the majority (the proportions as the book gives them). Knox summed it up by saying that two parts were given to the devil and the third was divided between the devil and God. The ministers received on average about a hundred marks a year (the book's figure).
Through the next year the ministers of the new Church kept criticizing the queen, angry at the masques, dancing, singing, courting and merrymaking of the court. Out of respect for the ministers the queen cut back a little on her pleasures, but they felt that by attending Mass she had gone too far. A contemporary of Knox wrote that he cried out from the pulpit so loudly that I fear he will one day ruin everything; he commands and all are afraid of him. Here again the Reformation entered battle with the Renaissance.
On 15 December 1562 Mary summoned Knox and, in front of Moray, Lethington and others, accused him of stirring her subjects against her. Knox answered that princes are more eager to fiddle and frisk than to hear God's holy word, and that fiddlers and flatterers are more honored in their eyes than grave and wise men who could, with good counsel, lessen some of the vanity and pride found in all human nature but rooted in princes by bad upbringing. According to Knox, the queen replied with unusual humility: if you hear anything amiss of me, come and tell me, and I shall hear you. But Knox said that God had given him a public duty in the Church to rebuke the sins and faults of all, and that he was not commissioned to go to each person separately, which would be endless; if her Grace would come to his public sermons, she would learn what he approved and what he blamed.
The queen did not trouble him further, but the war of the two religions went on. At Easter 1563 several Catholic priests who had broken the law by saying Mass were arrested by local officers, and there was fear that they would be put to death on the charge of idolatry. Some were imprisoned, and others fled and hid in the woods. Mary again summoned Knox and asked him to intercede for the imprisoned priests. Knox replied that if the queen would enforce the law, he too would call Protestants to obey her; otherwise, in his view, the papists must learn a lesson. The queen said: I promise to act as you wish; and for a short time they were friends. By the queen's order the archbishop of St. Andrews and forty-seven priests were tried for saying Mass and imprisoned. The Protestant ministers rejoiced. But a week later (26 May 1563), when Mary and her ladies appeared in parliament in splendid dress, some of the people cried out their blessing on that fair face (the book breaks off here; the blessing is our reading of a cut sentence). The preachers condemned the tassels on the ladies' skirts, and Knox wrote that such stinking pride of women had never before been seen in Scotland.