intromission or care with his affairs.' In this stately letter Knox recalled all their past career in common, and added that, seeing his hopes had been disappointed, 'I commit you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those who better please you. I praise my God, I this day leave you victor of your enemies, promoted to great honours, and in credit and authority with your sovereign. If so ye long continue, none within the realm shall be more glad than I shall be; but if that after this ye shall decay (as I fear that ye shall) then call to mind by what means God exalted you.' But the pulpit remained to him, and the pulpit in those days had sometimes to combine the functions of free Parliament and free press. Knox went into St Giles', and in a great sermon before the assembled Lords, from whose retrospective eloquence we have already quoted,[111] he drove right at the heart of the situation. 'And now, my Lords, to put end to all, I hear of the Queen's marriage; dukes, brethren to emperors, and kings, all strive for the best game. But this, my Lords, will I say--note the day, and bear witness after--whensoever the nobility of Scotland, professing the Lord Jesus, consent that an infidel (and all Papists are infidels) shall be head to your Sovereign, ye do as far as in you lieth to banish Christ Jesus from this realm; ye bring God's vengeance upon the country, a plague upon yourselves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your Sovereign.' That sovereign could scarcely be expected to take the same view, and for the last time the Queen sent for Knox. No one knew so well as she that he had laid his finger on the true hinge of the political question, and that her opponent would have a far stronger case now than at any of their previous interviews. She burst into tears the moment he entered. 'I have borne with you,' she said most truly, 'in all your rigorous manner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means.' 'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had at least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her own so well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do with my marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herself invited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in the pulpit, where he had to speak to the nobility and to think of the good of the whole commonwealth. 'What have you to do,' she persisted, 'with my marriage? or what are you within this commonwealth?'