One man was left in Scotland, and he now had at least the people of Edinburgh with him. Darnley, though a Catholic, thought it prudent to come to Knox's preaching on a Sunday very soon after the marriage, but was so unfortunate as to hear a sermon on the text--'Other lords than Thou have had dominion over us.' The preacher explained that in very bad cases of ingratitude of the people, God permitted such lords to be 'boys and women,' and the weakness of Ahab was specially dwelt upon in not restraining his strong-minded wife. Worse than all, the service was an hour longer than he had expected; and the king, characteristically, 'would not dine, and with great fury passed to the hawking.' Knox was summoned to the Council, and ordered not to preach while the Court remained in town. He gave the particularly cautious answer that '_if the Church_ would command him either to speak or abstain, he would obey, _so far_ as the Word of God would permit him'; but times were changed, and in this matter the Church had now to obey the Authority. The Lords of the Congregation, for four years the Queen of Scots' nominal advisers, were very soon in exile in England; and Queen Elizabeth, in mortal dread of the apprehended union of France and Spain in a Catholic crusade against her own crown, received 'her sister's rebels' with upbraiding and almost menace. Knox and the General Assembly maintained a defensive warfare all through the year 1565-6. But they had no representation in the Court, and Rizzio succeeded so far that Mary herself tells[113] how she had arranged for the counter-revolution being commenced by a Parliament in April 1566, 'the spiritual estate being placed therein in the ancient manner, tending to have done some good anent restoring the old religion.' Two things prevented this smooth programme being carried out. Mary's rather weak fancy for Darnley seems to have only lasted for a few weeks after her marriage. He turned out to be a fool; and his wife and the nobility declined to promise him the Crown-matrimonial, _i.e._, to make him successor to her in case there were no children. Darnley now courted the banished lords, and made a 'Band' with them according to the old Scots fashion, a fashion which was to break out nearer home in more savage survival still. For Mary's imprudent favouritism of Rizzio had roused the deadly jealousy both of her husband and of the nobles who remained at home. And on the 9th of March a band of men headed by Morton and Ruthven dragged the Italian out from her supper-table at Holyrood, and stabbed him to death in the ante-chamber; Darnley and the lords remaining in order to make terms with their Queen. The outrage was unavailing; in two days Mary had talked over her husband, escaped with him from Holyrood to Dunbar, and summoned her new favourite, Lord Bothwell, to her aid. Years before, when fighting the Earl of Huntly in the far North, she had expressed to Randolph her regret 'that she was