[3] In truth, however, each of the powers
which might have assailed Elizabeth, had religious difficulties of its
own to encounter.
[3] See _Reign of Elizabeth_, page 8.
In Scotland there was civil war. The Protestant faith had been slow of
introduction there, but under the leadership of John Knox it had become
at length supreme.[4] The Regent, mother of the young queen, Mary
Stuart, had French troops to aid her against the reformers, but had been
compelled to yield to their demands. When Queen Mary herself returned to
rule Scotland after the death of her French husband, King Francis, she
found her path anything but easy. A sovereign of one faith and a nation
of another had not yet learned to endure each other, and there were
queer doings in Scotland, wild nobles running off with the Queen, wilder
fanatics lecturing at her in her own court, her French favorite
assassinated, a new husband, a Scotch one, sent the same dark road, more
civil war, imprisonments, romantic escapes. It ended in Mary's secret
flight to England. She who had so nearly marched into the land a
conqueror, entered it a fugitive supplicating Elizabeth's protection.
The remainder of her life she passed in an English prison, and eighteen
years later was executed on an only half-proven charge of conspiring
against the rival who had kept her in such dreary durance.
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