the town of Edinburgh, of which he was the patron. Under thé eyes of the Regent the priests were rabbled and the idol was smashed in pieces. It was plain that the next year would be stormy; and at this crisis the face of England was once more changed.
A few weeks later Henry Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, was talking with the Duke of Châtelherault. God, said the Englishman, has sent you a true and Christian religion. We are on the point of receiving the same boon. Why should you and we be enemies- we who are hardly out of our servitude to Spain; you who are being brought into servitude by France? The liberties m Scotland are in jeopardy and the rights of the Hamiltons. Might we not unite in the maintenance of God's Word and national independence? This is the ideal which springs to light in the last months of 1558:—deliverance from the toils of foreign potentates; amity between two sister nations; union in a pure religion. The Duke himself was a waverer; his duchy lay in France; he is the Antoine de Bourbon of Scottish history; but his son the Earl of Arran had lately installed a Protestant preacher at Châtelherault and was in correspondence with Calvin. Percy reported this interview to an English lady who had once been offered to the Duke as a bride for Arran and had just become Queen Elizabeth.
Mary, Queen of England and Spain, died on the 17th of November, 1558. The young woman at Hatfield, who knew that her sister's days were numbered, had made the great choice. Ever since May it had been clear that she would soon be Queen. The Catholics doubted and feared, but had no other candidate; King Philip was hopeful. So Elizabeth was prepared. William Cecil was to be her secretary, and England was to be Protestant. Her choice may surprise us. When a few months later she is told by the Bishop of Aquila that she has been imprudent, he seems for once to be telling the truth.
Had there been no religious dissension, her title to the throne would hardly have been contested among Englishmen. To say nothing of her father's will, she had an unrepealed statute in her favour. Divines and lawyers might indeed have found it difficult to maintain her legitimate birth. Parliament had lately declared that her father was lawfully married to Catharine of Aragon, and with this good Catholics would agree. But there was another scandal, of which good Protestants might take account. Elizabeth's godfather, the Henrican Archbishop and Protestant martyr, had adjudged that Henry was never married to Anne Boleyn. His reasons died with him; but something bad, something nameless, might be guessed. It is sometimes said that Elizabeth's birth condemned her to be Protestant or bastard. But it would be truer to say that, had she cared much about legitimacy, she would have made her peace with Rome. Hints came to her thence, that the plenitude of power can set these little matters straight for the benefit of well
