fantasy, excommunicated Charles II., were an intolerable danger to
civilised society. For their edicts of "boycotting" they claimed the
sanction of the civil magistrate, and while these almost incredibly
fantastic pretentions lasted, there was not, and could not be, peace in
Scotland.

The seed of this Upas tree was sown by Knox and his allies in May 1559.
An Act of 1690 repealed civil penalties for the excommunicated.

To face the supernaturally gifted preachers the Regent had but a slender
force, composed in great part of sympathisers with Knox. Croft, the
English commander at Berwick, writing to the English Privy Council, on
May 22, anticipated that there would be no war. The Hamiltons,
numerically powerful, and strong in martial gentlemen of the name, were
with the Regent. But of the Hamiltons it might always be said, as
Charles I. was to remark of their chief, that "they were very active for
their own preservation," and for no other cause. For centuries but one
or two lives stood between them and the throne, the haven where they
would be. They never produced a great statesman, but their wealth,
numbers, and almost royal rank made them powerful.

At this moment the eldest son of the house, the Earl of Arran, was in
France. As a boy, he had been seized by the murderers of Cardinal
Beaton, and held as a hostage in the Castle of St. Andrews. Was he there
converted to the Reformers' ideas by the eloquence of Knox? We know not,
but, as heir to his father's French duchy of Chatelherault, he had been
some years in France, commanding the Scottish Archer Guard. In France
too, perhaps, he was more or less a pledge for his father's loyalty in
Scotland. He was now a Protestant in earnest, had retired from the
French Court, had refused to return thither when summoned, and fled from