In 1556 he addressed a letter to her, by desire of the Congregation, exhorting her to renounce the errors of Rome; she handed this to Beaton, Bishop of Glasgow. “Please you, my Lord, to read a pasquil.” Knox, a humorist himself, was peculiarly sensitive to scornful irony, and of that two of his contemporaries had a peculiar gift, the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, and the Secretary, Maitland of Lethington. He never forgot nor forgave these thrusts, and he cordially hated both. This does not justify his vicious and one-sided account of the death-bed of this Royal lady in 1560: “God, for his greit mercyis saik, red us frome the rest of the Guysiane blude. Amen. Amen.” Such were the folk of the time. In 1560 the Congregation made an attack on Leith, which was held by the French. They failed: the French, Knox tells us, stripped the slain and laid them along the wall. When the Regent looked across the valley at this strange decoration she could not contain herself for joy, and said, “Yonder are the fairest tapestrie that ever I saw. I wald that the haill feyldis that is betwix this place and yon war strowit with the same stuffe.” I am quite ready to believe this story. On both sides death did not extinguish hatred, not even then was the enemy safe from insult. Does not Knox himself tell us with entire approval how his party refused the dead Regent the rights of her church, and how the body was “lappit in a cope of lead and keipit in the Castell” for long weary months till it could be sent to France, where the poor ashes were at length laid to rest in due form?