The two queens were at Linlithgow palace, in which the young Mary was born. The regent and the cardinal each gave out that the queens were on his side, but all the sympathies of the queen-mother were with the cardinal. The latter, accompanied by the earls of Argyle, Huntley, and Bothwell, and by many bishops, went to Linlithgow. Supposing that the princesses were not safe there, he persuaded them to go with him to Stirling, which they did. These lords talked without reserve among themselves, and with the queen, of deposing the regent, on the ground of disobedience to their holy mother the Church. This greatly alarmed Arran, who at that same time was persecuted by the abbot of Paisley, his natural brother. ‘Consider,’ said the latter, ‘the danger to which you expose yourself by allowing the authority of the pope to be impaired. It is the authority on which your own rests.’ As Arran was in dread of the anger of Henry VIII., the abbot exalted to the utmost the power of the King of France, and the great advantages of an alliance with him. But above everything else he insisted on the obligation of making peace with the Church, ‘out of whose pale,’ he repeated, ‘there is no salvation.’ The poor regent, weak, inconstant, and not at all grounded in the faith of the Gospel, halted between the wish to follow the advice of his brother and the shame involved in abandoning his party and giving the precedence to the cardinal. He wavered between the pope and the Gospel, between France and England. His irresolution was torture to him; he endured bitter pangs. The abbot never wearied of repeating the question, ‘What will ye do? will you then destroy yourself and your house for ever?’[304] He hesitated no longer. Beaten on all sides by contending waves; conscious that his forces were inferior to those of his adversaries; hemmed in by the snares of the cardinal, who chose rather to gain him by terror than to subdue him by arms; abandoned by many of the nobles; no longer in favor with the people, who were offended by his weakness; lowered in the esteem of his own friends, and disgraced in the eyes of the English, the unhappy man at last took the fatal leap. Nine days after the ratification of the alliance with England, and only six days after he had published a proclamation against the cardinal, Arran secretly stole away from Holyrood palace, betook himself to Stirling on September 3, and threw himself into the arms of his cousin Beatoun.