The interview between the queen and the Reformer excited great speculation, and different conjectures were formed as to its probable consequences. The catholics, whose hopes now depended solely on the queen, were alarmed, lest Knox’s rhetoric should have shaken her constancy. The protestants cherished the expectation that she would be induced to attend the protestant sermons, and that her religious prejudices would gradually abate.[49] Knox indulged no such flattering expectations. He had made it his study, during the late conference, to discover the real character of the queen; and when some of his confidential {40} friends asked his opinion of her, he told them that he was very much mistaken if she was not proud, crafty, obstinately wedded to the popish church, and averse to all means of instruction.[50] Writing to Cecil, he says, “The queen neyther is, neyther shal be of our opinion; and, in very dead, her whole proceedings do declair that the cardinalle’s lessons ar so deaplie printed in her heart, that the substance and the qualitie are like to perishe together. I wold be glad to be deceaved, but I fear I shal not. In communication with her, I espyed such craft as I have not found in such aige. Since, hath the court been dead to me and I to it.”[51] He resolved, therefore, vigilantly to watch her proceedings, and to give timely warning of any danger which might result from them to the reformed interest; and the more that he perceived the zeal of the protestant nobles to cool, and their jealousy to be laid asleep by the winning arts of the queen, the more frequently and loudly did he sound the alarm. Vehement and harsh as his expressions often were――violent, seditious, and insufferable, as his sermons and prayers have been pronounced to be, I have no hesitation in saying, that, as the public peace was never disturbed by them, so they were useful to the public safety, and a principal means of warding off for a time those confusions in which the country was afterwards involved, and which brought on the ultimate ruin {41} of the infatuated queen. His uncourtly and rough manner was not, indeed, calculated to gain upon her mind, (nor is there any reason to think that an opposite manner would have had this effect,) and his admonitions often irritated her; but they obliged her to act with greater reserve and moderation; and they operated, to an indescribable degree, in arousing and keeping awake the zeal and the fears of the nation, which, at that period, were the two great safeguards of the protestant religion in Scotland. We may form an idea of the effect produced by his pulpit‑orations, from the account of the English ambassador, who was one of his constant hearers. “Where your honour,” says he, in a letter to Cecil, “exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us, than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.”[52]