It was not many hours before Queen Mary was to learn to how different a Scotland she had come from the Catholic Scotland her father and grandfathers had known. After she had supped, and whilst the bonfires still burnt on Arthur’s Seat, and the crowds were dispersing home through the foggy streets, the weary Queen wished to rest. Suddenly a noise;--a crowd of about five hundred people had gathered below the palace windows, and were serenading the Catholic Queen by singing her Protestant psalms to the accompaniment of fiddles. “Vile fiddles and rebecks,” Brantôme designates them; and adds that the crowds sang “so ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Yes, Sieur de Brantôme! And what a different picture from that of James IV. kneeling bareheaded before little Margaret Tudor whilst she played to him on the virginal! So, with a “grand brouillard,” with a serenade of psalms ill sung to fiddles, and with a riot in her chapel during Mass, Queen Mary’s life and troubles at Holyrood began. Although the first stress of the religious revolution had greatly changed the daily life and the characters of the people, it had as yet not spoilt Holyrood Abbey, and Queen Mary saw it as the royal Jameses had seen it, in all its grandeur of size and its grace of early Norman architecture, as it had been built by David I. The armies of Henry VIII., it is true, had recently plundered and burnt it; but English fire never made much impression on Scottish stone.