devotion towards the Queen’s Majesty, as well for benefits received of her father and brother, by me and my friends, as for Religion’s sake, and her honourable dealings with this realm, in the beginning of her Majesty’s reign, so I will wish her Highness shall procure the union of this nobility, and I doubt not she may bring it to pass, if it please her. And if your Lordship will take that course in hand, I trust assuredly it shall be easy for your Lordship to begin and for her Majesty to end whereby the whole nobility of Scotland may remain at her Majesty’s devotion; and I, for my part, most earnestly desire it. And so, leaving to trouble your Lordship further, for the present, I commit your Lordship to the protection of God. At Edinburgh Castle, the 29th of April, 1570. WM. KIRKCALDY.’ Grange’s letters were not agreeable to the English agents. To accept his explanation would have been to admit that, as he very clearly hinted, the defection was not on his side, but on that of the English Government, which, now that it had Mary in its power, was working as persistently and as unscrupulously as ever the Guises had done, to reduce Scotland to political dependence and subjection, and was consequently losing the confidence and alienating the sympathy of many of those who had been staunch supporters of the English alliance so long as they recognised in it a guarantee of their own liberty. Randolph’s reply, written on the first of May, ignored the important point, and confined itself to the secondary matters mentioned by Grange. The writer expressed his satisfaction at learning the Governor’s determination to maintain the King’s authority, but professed his inability to understand the meaning of the proviso ‘until the same be taken away by order of law.’ He justified the severe treatment of Maxwell on the ground that he had received and maintained the Queen of England’s rebels; and, as to the liberation of the Castle prisoners, he oracularly pronounced that Kirkcaldy would some day repent it. He avoided expressing either belief or incredulity in respect of the bestowal and acceptance of the Priory of St Andrews, which the Laird had directly and emphatically denied, by bantering his ‘brother William’ about his unfitness to figure as an ecclesiastic. ‘It was indeed most wonderful unto me,’ he said, ‘when I heard that you should become a Prior. That vocation agreeth not with anything that ever I knew in you, saving for your religious life, led under the Cardinal’s hat, when we were both students in Paris.’ He concluded with a sarcastic allusion to Kirkcaldy’s letter to the Lord-Lieutenant. ‘The Earl of Sussex has made me privy to a very eloquent, fine-written letter of yours, which passes my wit to understand. Either you have lately altered your hand, your style, your manner, and your meaning, or used the pen of some fine secretary.’