As for armed conflict, at this moment Mary of Guise could only reckon surely on the small French garrison of Scotland, perhaps 1500 or 2000 men. She could place no confidence in the feudal levies that gathered when the royal standard was raised. The Hamiltons merely looked to their own advancement; Lord James Stewart was bound to the Congregation; Huntly was a double dealer and was remote; the minor noblesse and the armed burghers, with Glencairn representing the south-west, Lollard from of old, were attached to Knox's doctrines, while the mob would flock in to destroy and plunder. [Bridal medal of Mary Stuart and the Dauphin, 1558: knox3.jpg] Meanwhile Mary of Guise was at Stirling, and a multitude of Protestants were at Perth, where the Reformation had just made its entry, and had secured a walled city, a thing unique in Scotland. The gentry of Angus and the people of Dundee, at Perth, were now anxious to make a "demonstration" (unarmed, says Knox) at Stirling, if the preachers obeyed the summons to go thither, on May 10. Their strategy was excellent, whether carefully premeditated or not. The Regent, according to Knox, amused Erskine of Dun with promises of "taking some better order" till the day of May 10 arrived, when, the preachers and their backers having been deluded into remaining at Perth instead of "demonstrating" at Stirling, she outlawed the preachers and fined their sureties ("assisters"). She did not outlaw the sureties. Her treachery (alleged only by Knox and others who follow him) is examined in Appendix A. Meanwhile it is certain that the preachers were put to the horn in absence, and that the brethren, believing themselves (according to Knox) to have been disgracefully betrayed, proceeded to revolutionary extremes, such as Calvin energetically denounced. If we ask who executed the task of wrecking the monasteries at Perth, Knox provides two different answers. In the "History" Knox says that after the news came of the Regent's perfidy, and after a sermon "vehement against idolatry," a priest began to celebrate, and "opened a glorious tabernacle" on the high altar. "Certain godly men and a young boy" were standing near; they all, or the boy alone (the sentence may be read either way), cried that this was intolerable. The priest struck the boy, who "took up a stone" and hit the tabernacle, and "the whole multitude" wrecked the monuments of idolatry. Neither the exhortation of the preacher nor the command of the magistrate could stay them in their work of destruction. {111} Presently "the rascal multitude" convened, _without_ the gentry and "earnest professors," and broke into the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries. They wrecked as usual, and the "common people" robbed, but the godly allowed Forman, Prior of the Charter House, to bear away about as much gold and silver as he was able to carry. We learn from Mary of Guise and Lesley's "History" that the very orchards were cut down.