[Sidenote: Mary and Catholicism.] The work which Elizabeth had done in Scotland had been undone in an hour. Murray was a fugitive. The Lords of the Congregation were broken or dispersed. The English party was ruined. And while Scotland was lost it seemed as if the triumph of Mary was a signal for the general revival of Catholicism. The influence of the Guises had again become strong in France, and though Catharine of Medicis held firmly to her policy of toleration, an interview which she held with Alva at Bayonne led every Protestant to believe in the conclusion of a league between France and Spain for a common war on Protestantism. To this league the English statesmen held that Mary Stuart had become a party, and her pressure upon Elizabeth was backed by the suspicion that the two great monarchies had pledged her their support. No such league existed, nor had such a pledge been given, but the dread served Mary's purpose as well as the reality could have done. Girt in, as she believed, with foes, Elizabeth took refuge in the meanest dissimulation, while Mary Stuart imperiously demanded a recognition of her succession as the price of peace. But her aims went far beyond this demand. She found herself greeted at Rome as the champion of the Faith. Pius the Fifth, who mounted the Papal throne at the moment of her success, seized on the young Queen to strike the first blow in the crusade against Protestantism on which he was set. He promised her troops and money. He would support her, he said, so long as he had a single chalice to sell. "With the help of God and your Holiness," Mary wrote back, "I will leap over the wall." In England itself the marriage and her new attitude rallied every Catholic to Mary's standard; and the announcement of her pregnancy which followed gave her a strength that swept aside Philip's counsels of caution and delay. The daring advice of Rizzio fell in with her natural temper. She resolved to restore Catholicism in Scotland. Yield as she might to Murray's pressure, she had dexterously refrained from giving legal confirmation to the resolutions of the Parliament by which Calvinism had been set up in Scotland; and in the Parliament which she summoned for the coming spring she trusted to do "some good anent restoring the old religion." The appearance of the Catholic lords, the Earls of Huntly, Athol, and Bothwell, at Mary's court showed her purpose to attempt this religious revolution. Nor were her political schemes less resolute. She was determined to wring from the coming Parliament a confirmation of the banishment of the lords who had fled with Murray which would free her for ever from the pressure of the Protestant nobles. Mistress of her kingdom, politically as well as religiously, Mary could put a pressure on Elizabeth which might win for her more than an acknowledgement of her right to the succession. She still clung to her hopes of the crown; and she knew that the Catholics of Northumberland and Yorkshire were ready