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, had revisited Scotland, expiated with his head the offence of the
misfortune of a second detection at night in her bedchamber.
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