mortally wounded in an assault made upon the adherents of the king at Stirling, by a force led by Huntly in the interests of Mary, and Erskine of Mar was chosen as his successor. This was in September, 1571. Meanwhile Kirkaldy, of Grange, who had been appointed governor of the Castle of Edinburgh by Murray, had turned his back upon the professions and promise of his life, by avowing himself a partisan of the Queen. He held that fortress for her {187} behoof, and gave its protection to Secretary Maitland, who was working earnestly in her cause. By Maitland's influence Kirkaldy was encouraged in a course which was exceedingly painful to Knox. The Laird of Grange and he had been fellow-sufferers in the French galleys, and to the last the heart of the Reformer yearned after him. Yet he could not permit his conduct as governor of the Castle to go unreproved. On two occasions, in particular, he was constrained to take public notice of his doings. The first was briefly this. There had been a scuffle in Dunfermline between a cousin of Kirkaldy and his relatives, and some of the Duries, a family with whom the Kirkaldys had a feud; and one of the latter having been seen shortly afterwards in the streets of Edinburgh, was by Kirkaldy's orders followed to Leith by some of his tools, that they might chastise him with a cudgel. But they took the sword instead and left him dead. In the attempt to escape, one of the assailants was arrested and committed to the Tolbooth, but Grange and his men attacked the building, violently forced it open, and marched off with their liberated comrade to the Castle, the guns of which they fired, either in token of triumph or for the purpose of striking terror into the citizens. In his sermon on the following Sunday Knox protested against this interference with the course of justice, using language which seems to us both temperate and kindly: "Had it been done," he said, "by the authority of a bloodthirsty man, or one who had no fear of God, he would not have been so much {188} moved; but he was affected to think that one, of whom all good men had formed so great expectations, should have fallen so low as to act such a part, one too who, when formerly in prison, had refused to purchase his own liberty by the shedding of blood." An utter misrepresentation of this statement was carried to Kirkaldy, who complained to John Craig, the Reformer's colleague, by whom he was referred to the elders of the Church of which Kirkaldy still professed to be a member. Knox himself, as soon as he had the matter brought before him, denied that he had used the words imputed to him, and took the first opportunity of correcting the false report, by repeating and vindicating what he had really said.