Morton’s day of triumph, however, was beginning to draw to a close. There arrived in Scotland a man from France, who quickly won the favour of King James, and who set himself to restore Queen Mary to the throne, to overthrow the Protestant religion in Scotland and to ruin the Earl of Morton. He was successful in only the last of these three enterprises. This remarkable person was Esmé Stewart, Lord of Aubigny in France, and nephew of the Regent Lennox. “He was a man of comely proportion, civil behaviour, red-bearded, honest in conversation.”[56] Recommended to James by the Guises, whose special agent he was, he arrived at Stirling in September, 1579, and was presented to the King in the hall of the castle. The artful schemer was not long in winning James’s favour. Soon he received the wealthy Abbey of Arbroath, which had been in the possession of the Hamilton family, and about the same time he was made a privy-councillor and was given the Earldom of Lennox. Esmé Stewart had not been many months at Court before a rumour was reported to the Earl of Mar to the effect that the half-foreign favourite and his partisans intended to remove the King to Dumbarton, and afterwards to convey him secretly to France. The night of the 10th of April, 1580, was believed to be the time arranged by the conspirators for carrying out their plan. The rumour, whether well-founded or not, gave rise to intense excitement in the castle. When the dreaded evening came round, Mar placed soldiers both within and without the King’s apartment, and ordered them on no account to allow anyone to enter the room. Lennox, armed and supported by a guard of friends, prepared to defend himself in his own chamber, for he heard the threatening shouts in the courtyard and knew that his life was in danger. The night passed away, however, without an attack being made upon Stirling, although in the morning the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Sutherland--friends of Esmé Stewart, Lord Lennox--endeavoured without success to gain admittance to the castle.[57]