He left Edinburgh on the 5th of May, 1571, and crossing the Frith at Leith, travelled by short stages to St Andrews, which he had chosen as the place of his retreat.[238] His pulpit was filled by Alexander Gordon, bishop of Galloway, who preached and prayed in a manner more acceptable to the queen’s party than his predecessor, but little to the satisfaction of the people, who despised him on account of his weakness, and disliked him for supplanting their favourite pastor.[239] A number of the most respectable inhabitants {190} were driven from the capital by violence, while others were induced to quit it, and retire to Leith, that they might not be understood as even practically submitting to the queen’s authority. The church of Edinburgh was for a time dissolved. The celebration of the Lord’s supper was suspended. And, whereas formerly scarce a day passed without some public exercise of religion, there was now, during a whole week, “neither preaching nor prayer; neither was there any sound of bell heard in all the town, except the ringing of the cannon.”[240] The kingdom was now subjected to all the miseries of civil war and intestine faction. In almost every part of the country there were adherents to the king and to the queen, who exasperated each other by reciprocal reproaches and injuries. The regent fortified Leith, while the queen’s party kept possession of the castle and town of Edinburgh. As the two armies lay at a small distance from one another, and neither of them was sufficiently strong for undertaking to dispossess the other, they were daily engaged in petty skirmishes; and several acts of disgraceful retaliation, which rarely happen in the open field, were committed on both sides. The evidence which the queen’s friends gave of their personal antipathy to the Reformer, clearly showed that his life {191} would have been in imminent danger, if he had remained among them. An inhabitant of Leith was assaulted and his body mutilated, because he was of the same name with him. A servant of John Craig, being met one day by a reconnoitring party, and asked who was his master, answered, in his trepidation, Mr Knox; upon which he was seized, and, although he immediately corrected his mistake, they desired him to “hold at his first master,” and dragged him to prison. Having fortified St Giles’s steeple to overawe the inhabitants, the soldiers baptized one of the cannons by the name of Knox, which they were so fond of firing, that it burst, killed two of the party, and wounded others.[241] They circulated the most ridiculous tales respecting his conduct at St Andrews. John Law, the letter‑carrier of that city, being in the castle of Edinburgh, “the ladie Home and utheris wald neidis thraip in his face, that” John Knox “was banist the said toune, becaus that in the yarde he had reasit sum sanctis, amongis whome thair came up the devill with hornis, which when his servant Richart sawe, [he] ran woode, and so died.”[242]