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Scotland, where he succeeded in detaching his father, the Duke of
Châtelherault, and several other nobles from the side of the regent.
Relying on the protection of England, from which a plentiful supply of
money was dispatched to the rebels, and on the new accessions to their
ranks, the lords of the Congregation announced the suspension of the
regent from her office (Oct. 1559) though they hesitated to take the
further step of proclaiming the Earl of Arran or Lord James Stuart
sovereign of Scotland. The regent replied to this act of rebellion by
marching on Edinburgh, forcing the rebels to retreat to Stirling
(Nov.), while the Earl of Bothwell seized large sums of money that
were being forwarded to the rebel camp from England. The English
advisers began to realise that money and secret assistance were not
enough to secure the triumph of the Congregation in Scotland, and that
the time had come when more decisive measures must be taken.

In December 1559 and January 1560, an armed force was dispatched to
the north, and Admiral Winter was commanded to blockade the Forth
against a French fleet. A little later a formal agreement was
concluded between the Duke of Norfolk representing Elizabeth, and Lord
James Stuart the commissioner for the Congregation. At first it was
proposed to act in common for "the maintenance of the Christian
religion," but as these words might have given rise to serious
complications on the Continent, it was decided that an alliance should
be concluded for the defence of the ancient rights and liberties of
Scotland. An English army of eight thousand men marched into Scotland,
and the English fleet blockaded the fortress of Leith which was the
key to the capital. Owing to the Huguenot risings in France the
assistance that had been promised could not be sent, but nevertheless
the invaders were thrown back in their first assault. In June 1560,
however, Mary of Guise, worn out by the anxieties and cares of her
difficult office, passed away, and three weeks later the garrison was
obliged to surrender. English and French plenipotentiaries met to
arrange the terms of peace. It was agreed that the French soldiers,
with the exception of about one hundred and twenty men, should be
drafted from Scotland, that no foreigners should be promoted to any
office in the kingdom, that until the arrival of the king and queen
the country should be governed by a council of twelve, seven of whom
were to be selected by Mary and Francis and five by the Parliament,
that the entire question of religion should be submitted to a Scottish
Parliament convoked to meet on the 1st August (1560), and that, in the
meantime, a kind of religious truce should be observed by both sides.
It was agreed, furthermore, that the spiritual peers should hold their
seats in Parliament as before, and that they should not be disturbed
in their ecclesiastical possessions.

The successful invasion of Scotland by the English troops had turned
the scales in favour of the lords of the Congregation. They were now
masters in Scotland, but, had the bishops and clergy been zealous men
worthy of their sacred office, the cause of the old Church in Scotland
would not have been even then hopeless. While Knox and his friends
were straining every nerve to consolidate their work by the
appointment of preachers and superintendents for the rising
congregation, many of the Catholic bishops and abbots, several of whom
were allied by blood and friendship with the lay lords, either
contented themselves with doing nothing, or went over to the enemies
of the Church for the sake of securing for themselves and their
descendants the ecclesiastical property that they administered. The
Archbishop of St. Andrew's and Primate of Scotland was the brother of
the Earl of Arran. Though a convinced Catholic himself, he was not the
man either to make a struggle or to inspire confidence at such a
crisis. Archbishop Beaton of Glasgow had fled already from the
kingdom; the Bishop of Argyll, another illegitimate scion of the house
of Hamilton, was a Protestant or was soon to become one; Adam
Bothwell,[19] whom the Pope had appointed the previous year to the See
of Orkney on the petition of the king and queen of Scotland, could not
be trusted, as his subsequent conduct showed; Alexander Gordon, who
claimed to be Bishop of Galloway, though he was never consecrated, had
gone over openly to the enemies of the Church, as had also the
provincial of the Dominicans, the sub-prior of the chapter of St.
Andrew's, and John Rowe a former agent of the Scottish bishops at the
Roman Court. With men such as these to guard the interests of
Catholicism in Scotland there could be little doubt about the result.