Chatelherault's promise was less vigorous than it had been reported!

Knox, who now acted as secretary for the Congregation, was not Sir Henry
Wotton's ideal ambassador, "an honest man sent to lie abroad for his
country." When he stooped to statements which seem scarcely candid, to
put it mildly, he did violence to his nature. He forced himself to
proclaim the loyalty of his party from the pulpit, when he could not do
so without some economy of truth. {154b} He inserted things in his
"History," and spoke things to Croft, which he should have known to be
false. But he carried his point. He did advance the "union of hearts"
with England, if in a blundering fashion, and we owe him eternal
gratitude for his interest in the match, though "we like not the manner
of the wooing." The reluctant hand of Elizabeth was now inextricably
caught in the gear of that great machine which broke the ancient league
of France and Scotland, and saved Scotland from some of the sorrows of
France.

The papers of Sadleir, Elizabeth's secret agent with the Scots, show the
godly pursuing their old plan of campaign. To make treaty with the
Regent; to predict from the pulpit that she would break it; to make false
statements about the terms of the treaty; to accuse her of their
infringement; to profess loyalty; to aim at setting up a new sovereign
power; to tell the populace that Mary of Guise's scanty French
reinforcements--some 1500 men--came by virtue of a broken treaty; to tell
Sadleir that they were very glad that the French _had_ come, as they
would excite popular hatred; to make out that the fortification of Leith
was breach of treaty;--such, in brief, were the methods of the Reformers.
{155}

They now took a new method of proving the Regent's breach of treaty, that