Through the later part of the sixteenth century Scotland lay between Scylla and Charybdis--between France and England; and politics, at home and abroad, were strenuous. Henry VIII. “scourged Scotland as no English king had scourged her since Edward I.,” and his soldiers left Edinburgh burnt to the ground, and laid waste a circuit of five miles round it. France offered help with one hand, and with the other attempted to grasp the Scottish crown for the coronation of the Dauphin on his marriage to Mary Stuart. Meanwhile Protestantism, already established in England, was gaining a gradual and independent hold in Scotland; and against this, and against the English alliance it threatened, Mary of Lorraine and Cardinal Beaton struggled desperately and in vain. In 1534 and 1540 Cardinal Beaton burnt heretics; in 1546 Cardinal Beaton was murdered. Mary of Lorraine had been made Regent in succession to Arran--to the intense disapproval of Buchanan and Knox; “als semlye a sight (yf men had eis) as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrewly kow,” is Knox’s rough comment. She filled Edinburgh with her countrymen, and heaped honours on them, and riots in the streets of Edinburgh ensued between the French soldiers and the native citizens, and hatred of the French and of their faith grew bitter and strong. In 1556 the most precious of the Church valuables were stolen, and the life-sized statue of the patron saint was ducked in the Nor’ Loch by the rabble and then burnt. The Archbishop of St. Andrews “caused his curate Tod to curse them as black as cole,” and the Church authorities borrowed an image from Greyfriars for the St. Giles’s Day procession, in which the Queen Regent herself walked to do them honour; but when she left it a riot ensued, and the borrowed image was rudely handled and defaced. After this the Church valuables were boarded out for safety among the faithful; but the army of the Congregation entered the town on 29th June 1559, and that same day the stones of St. Giles’s echoed back the stern thundering eloquence of John Knox, the great Presbyterian reformer. John Knox was the first minister of the city under the new form of religion, and he preached in the central part of the church, opening from the south, which division was called “the Old Kirk.”[26]