of its images and to pull down the monasteries. The report of all this taken to the Queen Regent in the palace of Falkland by the archbishop, led to the affair of Cupar Muir, which Carlyle has thus described after his own manner: "Not itself a fight, but the prologue or foreshadow of all the fighting that followed. The Queen Regent and her Frenchmen had marched in triumphant humour out of Falkland, with their artillery ahead, soon after midnight, trusting to find at St. Andrews {125} the two chief lords of the congregation, the Earl of Argyle and Lord James Stuart (afterwards Regent Murray), with scarcely a hundred men about them,--found suddenly that the hundred men, by good industry over-night, had risen to an army; and that the congregation itself, under these two lords, was here, as if by _tryst_, at mid-distance, skilfully posted, and ready for battle either in the way of cannon or of spear. Sudden halt of the triumphant Falklanders in consequence; and after that a multifarious manoeuvring, circling, and wheeling, now in clear light, now hidden in clouds of mist; Scots standing steadfast on their ground, and answering message-trumpets in an inflexible manner, till, after many hours, the thing had to end in an 'appointment,' truce, or offer of peace, and a retreat to Falkland of the Queen Regent and her Frenchmen, as from an enterprise unexpectedly impossible."[2] From this place Knox accompanied the forces of the congregation to Perth, and thence to Edinburgh, where on the 7th of July the Protestants of the city chose him to be their minister, and then for the first time his voice sounded through the cathedral of St. Giles in ringing notes of trumpet power. But soon after the lords of the congregation, having been compelled to conclude a treaty with the Regent, by the terms of which they agreed to quit Edinburgh and deliver it up to her, judged it unsafe that he, being so obnoxious to her, {126} should remain there without their protection, and so, putting the less objectionable John Willock for the time into his place, they set him free for a preaching excursion through different parts of the kingdom.