The discontent of the people with the clergy went on increasing, and at a provincial council which met at Edinburgh in March, 1536, Sir James Hamilton, in the king’s name, demanded various reforms. The men of the kirk were indignant. ‘Never had they been so ill content,’ said Angus.[195] The monks, in alarm, began to attack the Reformation from their pulpits. Bishop Barlow, the English envoy, thought the moment a favorable one for reform in Scotland. ‘If I may obtain the king’s license,’ he wrote to Cromwell, then first secretary of state to Henry VIII., ‘otherwise shall I not be suffered to preach, I will not spare for no bodily peril, boldly to publish the truth of God’s Word among them. Whereat though the clergy shall repine, yet many of the lay people will gladly give hearing. And until the Word of God be planted among them, I suppose their feigned promises shall be finally found frustrate without any faithful effect.’[196] It seemed as if the hopes of the Anglican bishop were beginning to be realized. It was rumored that the King of Scotland, offended at the reception which his demands had met in the council, was going to have a conference with his uncle. The prelates thought that if that project were carried out they were undone. ‘Pray do not allow,’ they said to the king, ‘a single word to be spoken by the King of England to induce you to adopt his new constitutions of the Scripture.’[197] James was willing and unwilling: but he yielded, and the interview with the terrible Tudor was given up. But the bishops were not yet freed from their alarm; they dreaded the influence of the English ambassadors, and that of the queen-mother, and they feared that they might not be strong enough another time. In order to confirm the prince in his resolution, they conceived the plan of getting him to request a brief from the pope to _forbid_ his holding intercourse with Henry VIII. Thompson, the apostolic prothonotary, was secretly charged with this strange mission, and the priests thought it a capital stroke to ask the King of England to grant this agent a passport, taking good care to conceal from him the object of the mission. Henry, not at all suspicious, agreed to their request, and these cunning clerks could laugh together at their paltry trick. But the queen-mother, when she became acquainted with all these intrigues, sharply rebuked her son. Sensitive and violent, as weak men frequently are, James forgot all respect, and accused his mother of accepting gifts from the king her brother to betray the king her son. Margaret indignantly declared that she would return to London,[198] and the two English envoys hastened their departure from Scotland. The Scottish clergy had been very much alarmed at the project formed by Henry VIII. of giving his daughter Mary to his nephew; but the daughter of Catherine of Aragon would not have been wanting in submissiveness to the pope. The clerical party, having succeeded in