A serious task for Knox was to draw up, with others, a "Book of the Policy and Discipline of the Kirk," a task entrusted to them in April 1560. In politics, till January 1561, the Lords hoped that they might induce Elizabeth (then entangled with Leicester, as Knox knew) to marry Arran, but whether "Glycerium" (as Bishop Jewel calls her) had already detected in "the saucy youth" "a half crazy fool," as Mr. Froude says, or not, she firmly refused. She much preferred Lord Robert Dudley, whose wife had just then broken her neck. The unfortunate Arran had fought resolutely, Knox tells us, by the side of Lord James, in the winter of 1559, but he already, in 1560, showed strange moods, and later fell into sheer lunacy. In December died "the young King of France, husband to our Jezebel--unhappy Francis . . . he suddenly perished of a rotten ear . . . in that deaf ear that never would hear the truth of God" (December 5, 1560). We have little of Knox's poetry, but he probably composed a translation, in verse, of a Latin poem indited by one of "the godly in France," whence he borrowed his phrase "a rotten ear" (aure putrefacta corruit). "Last Francis, that unhappy child, His father's footsteps following plain, To Christ's crying deaf ears did yield, A rotten ear was then his bane." The version is wonderfully close to the original Latin. Meanwhile, Francis was hardly cold before Arran wooed his idolatrous widow, Queen Mary, "with a gay gold ring." She did not respond favourably, and "the Earl bare it heavily in his heart, and more heavily than many would have wissed," says Knox, with whom Arran was on very confidential terms. Knox does not rebuke his passion for Jezebel. He himself "was in no small heaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bedfellow, Marjorie Bowes," of whom we know very little, except that she worked hard to lighten the labours of Knox's vast correspondence. He had, as he says, "great intelligence both with the churches and some of the Court of France," and was the first to receive news of the perilous illness of the young King. He carried the tidings to the Duke and Lord James, at the Hamilton house near Kirk o' Field, but would not name his informant. Then came the news of the King's death from Lord Grey de Wilton, at Berwick, and a Convention of the Nobles was proclaimed for January 15, 1561, to "peruse newly over again" the Book of Discipline. CHAPTER XIII: KNOX AND THE BOOK OF DISCIPLINE