For the next four years--save for a short time at Dunkeld during Hertford’s expedition--the little Queen was carefully guarded in Stirling: a fortress further than Edinburgh from the greedy hand of Henry VIII. The English monarch had set his heart on wedding his son to Mary of Scotland, but he alienated the people of the northern kingdom by trying to coerce them into submission to his will. During these years the Queen-Mother at the castle kept in touch with the politics of the day. Here she received the joyful news of the Scottish victory of Ancrum Moor in 1545. Later she welcomed Lorges de Montgomery, who came with money and soldiers from France. In September, 1547, Arran rode in haste to the castle bearing the depressing tidings of the defeat and slaughter at Pinkie Cleuch. After this disaster even Stirling Castle was considered hardly a safe enough abode for the youthful sovereign of Scotland, so without delay she was conveyed to Inchmahome, an island priory in the Lake of Menteith. When the immediate danger was past the precious royal child was carried back to Stirling, before being removed to the fortress of Dumbarton, whence a few months later she set sail for the friendly realm of France. After her daughter’s departure from Scotland Mary of Guise was often at Stirling, but she did not survive to welcome the young Queen home when she returned a girl widow in 1561. The battery at the south-east corner of the castle, overlooking Ballengeich, is known as the Spur or French Battery, the latter name recalling foreign workmen of Mary of Guise, who caused this fortification to be made at the time of the French occupation of Stirling during the religious dissension called the Wars of the Congregation. After her return to the land of her fathers Queen Mary made Holyrood her principal seat. She sometimes, however, removed to the castle that had been the home of her early youth, finding it a useful halting-place on her journeys to and from the north. In September, 1561, she narrowly escaped being burnt in the Palace. One night as she slept the candle which had been left alight set fire to the curtains of her bed, and although the Queen was rescued from the flames, she was almost overpowered by the smoke. An old prophecy that a queen should be burnt at Stirling came near to being fulfilled.[33] Mary’s short stay in the castle at this time was marked by another disturbance. On her chaplains’ attempting to sing High Mass, her half-brother, Lord James, and the Earl of Argyll, in their zeal for the Protestant cause, attacked the priests and singers with such fury that blood was actually shed in the Chapel Royal. Some of those who witnessed the scuffle regarded it as an amusing entertainment; others, however, took it more to heart, and gave way to tears instead of laughter.[34]