Besides his fears for the common cause, Knox had at this time grounds of apprehension as to his personal safety. The queen was peculiarly incensed against him on account of the active part which he had taken in the late revolution; the popish clergy who left the kingdom had represented him as the ringleader of her factious subjects; and she had publicly declared, before she left France, that she was determined he should be punished. His book against female government was most probably the ostensible charge on which he was to be prosecuted; and, accordingly, we find him making application, through the English resident at Edinburgh, to secure the favour of Elizabeth; reasonably suspecting that she might be induced to abet the proceedings against him on this ground.[44] But whatever perils he apprehended, {31} from the personal presence of the queen, either to the public or to himself, he used not the smallest influence to prevent her being invited home. On the contrary, he concurred with his brethren in this measure, and also in using means to defeat a scheme which the duke of Chastelherault, under the direction of the archbishop of St Andrew, had formed to exclude her from the government.[45] But when the prior of St Andrews was sent to France with the invitation, he urged that her desisting from the celebration of mass should be one of the conditions of her return; and when he found him and the rest of the council disposed to grant her this liberty within her own chapel, he predicted that “her liberty would be their thraldom.”[46] In the beginning of September,[47] only a few days after her arrival in Scotland, the queen sent for Knox to the palace, and held a long conversation with him, in the presence of her brother, the prior of St Andrews. Whether she did this of her own accord, or at the suggestion of some of her counsellors, is uncertain; but she seems to have expected to awe him into submission by her authority, if not to confound him by her arguments. The bold freedom with which he replied to all her charges, and vindicated his own conduct, convinced her that the one expectation was not more vain than the other; and the impression {32} which she wished to make on him was left on her own mind. She accused him of raising her subjects against her mother and herself; of writing a book against her just authority, which, she said, she would cause the most learned in Europe to refute; of being the cause of sedition and bloodshed, when he was in England; and of accomplishing his purposes by magical arts.