The British Isles still remained a dark and almost inaccessible territory on the Jesuit map, but Englishmen, flying from the penal laws of Elizabeth, began to enter the Society on the continent, and one or two secret missions were sent out. Thomas King was sent from Louvain to England, but he died in the following year (1565), and is merely stated to have made a few converts. Another refugee in Belgium, an Irishman named David Woulfe, had been sent in 1560 to his native land with the position of Nuncio. He was so effectively disguised that in France he was arrested as a Lutheran. His early reports represent him as an austere spectator of the general corruption of the Irish clergy, monks, and people. He speaks of giving absolution, in one year, to a thousand penitents who had contracted "incestuous marriages," and describes the people coming to his retreat in their shirts and bare feet. Father Woulfe seems to have caught the taint, however, as he was some years later ignominiously expelled from the Society. William Good, a Somersetshire man, and "Edmund the Irishman," joined him in 1564, distributing to the peasantry the dispensations and indulgences which England proscribed, to the grave inconvenience of the papal treasury. The mission to Scotland was not less adventurous. It was the year 1562, when Mary Queen of Scots had returned from France, full of sad foreboding, to the land of John Knox. Nicholas Gouda was sent from Louvain, in the secret character of Nuncio, to console and assist her, and two Scottish students, Hay and Crichton, accompanied him. They were dressed as gentlemen of quality, who would see the world. Unfortunately, Crichton betrayed the secret to an acquaintance at Leith, and the fiery cross passed from pulpit to pulpit in the city of Edinburgh. Gouda sent Crichton back to Louvain and went on himself to Edinburgh. After many fruitless attempts to see Mary, he was at last admitted one night, by a postern gate, to the presence of the beautiful and distracted young queen, but there was nothing to be done. He asked that the bishops might be assembled somewhere to meet him, and it appeared that there was only one bishop, on one of the islands, who would venture to receive him, if he were well disguised. It seems that the least remarkable dress to don on visiting his lordship was that of a money-lender, and Father Nicholas, so habited, traversed wild and stern Caledonia. The rumour of his presence got about, and the Covenanters kept watch at Edinburgh for his return. A French merchant coming in from Aberdeen was sorely beaten by them before he could prove his identity. But two of the faithful met Gouda outside Edinburgh, and they sailed, with a small band of Scottish aspirants, for Belgium.