The Scots Queen had in the meantime ostensibly given her support to Murray and Maitland, accompanying her half-brother on an expedition to crush Huntly, the head of the Catholic nobility. Murray and Maitland did their best during the early months of 1563 to force the recognition of their Queen as Elizabeth's heir by the menace of her marriage with the Prince of Spain; Elizabeth in turn did her own best to induce Mary to marry Dudley, whom she later on raised to the rank of Earl of Leicester. This union however was one which neither Mary herself nor any of her counsellors would accept; and when the year closed, Knox and the extreme Calvinists were grimly assimilating the to them portentous probability that she would end by marrying either Don Carlos or the young King of France--either event threatening the restoration of the Old Church in Scotland. [Sidenote: 1564 Darnley and others] The civil war in France ended, as we saw, in the triumph of the Politiques. The corollary was the treaty of Troyes with England in the spring of 1564. The French court was now disposed to be friendly towards Elizabeth; the Guises had lost weight by the death of the Duke; Philip of Spain saw nothing to gain by further embroilments; so the chances of Mary's marriage either with his son or with Charles IX. were small. The Scots Queen began to give Darnley a leading place in her own mind, feeling that a marriage with him would give a double claim to the English succession, and one in favour of which the whole of the English Catholics would be united. So far Elizabeth had only urged her to marry an English nobleman, with an implication that Leicester [Footnote: Dudley was not in fact raised to the Earldom till the year was well advanced.] was intended. Mary tried to extract approval for Darnley, but with the result only that Leicester was definitely and explicitly nominated. Yet even on behalf of her favourite, the English Queen would not commit herself on the subject of the succession. On the other hand, with the exception of Maitland of Lethington who was not actually opposed to the Darnley marriage on condition of Elizabeth's public approval, the Scottish Protestants were very unfavourable to that solution. So the year passed in perpetual diplomatic fencing, Mary trying to draw Darnley to Scotland, while Elizabeth kept him at her own court, to which he with both his parents had been attached for many years past. It is not a little curious to find all this intriguing crossed by a proposal from Katharine de Medici that King Charles should marry not Mary but Elizabeth, who was eighteen years his senior: while Elizabeth herself was trying to revive the idea of her own marriage with the Archduke Charles, whose brother Maximilian had just succeeded Ferdinand as Emperor. In February 1565, Elizabeth found it no longer possible to prevent Darnley's return to Scotland, and in April it was tentatively announced that he was to be Mary's husband.