This was the first parliament which had been held since the queen’s arrival in Scotland; and it was natural to expect that their first business would be to ratify the treaty of peace made in July 1560, and the establishment of the protestant religion. If the acts of the former parliament were invalid, as the queen had repeatedly declared, the protestants had no law on their side; they held their religion at the mercy of their sovereign, and might be required, at her pleasure, to submit to popery, as the religion which still possessed the legal establishment. But so well had she laid her plans, such was the effect of her insinuating address, and, above all, so powerful was the temptation of self‑interest on the minds of the protestant leaders, that, by general consent, they passed from this demand, and lost the only favourable {84} opportunity which presented itself, during the reign of Mary, for giving a legal security to the reformed religion, and thereby removing one principal source of national fears and jealousies. An act of oblivion, securing indemnity to those who had been engaged in the late civil war, was indeed passed; but the mode of its enactment virtually implied the invalidity of the treaty in which it had been originally embodied; and the protestants, on their bended knees,[106] supplicated, as a boon from their sovereign, what they had formerly won with their swords, and repeatedly demanded as their right. The other acts made to please the more zealous reformers were expressed with such studied and glaring ambiguity, as to offer an insult to their understandings.[107] Our Reformer was thunderstruck when first informed of the measures which were in agitation, and could scarcely believe that it was seriously intended to carry them into execution. He immediately procured an interview with some of the leading members of parliament, to whom he represented the danger of allowing that meeting to dissolve without obtaining the ratification of the acts of the preceding parliament, or at least those acts which established the Reformation. They alleged that the queen would never have agreed to call them together, if they had persisted in these demands; but that there was a {85} prospect of her being soon married, and on that occasion they would obtain all their wishes. In vain he reminded them that poets and painters had represented _Occasion_ with a bald hind‑head; in vain he urged, that the event to which they looked forward would be accompanied with difficulties of its own, which would require all their skill and circumspection. Their determination was fixed. He now perceived the full extent of the queen’s dissimulation; and the selfishness and servility of the protestant leaders affected him deeply.