Her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, succeeded to the throne, and England with a cry of relief threw off the hated Spanish alliance. She was free again. Free, but in infinite danger. The Catholic Pope and Catholic Philip, remembering that the divorce under which Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn had never been admitted by the Church, declared Elizabeth illegitimate, and pointed to her cousin Mary Stuart of Scotland as the lawful ruler of England. Mary had been married to the French prince Francis II, who at this moment succeeded his father Henry II as king of France. Here was a chance indeed for Spain and France and Scotland all three to unite against Elizabeth and place a second Catholic Mary on England's throne. Many Englishmen themselves were still Catholic, and might easily have been persuaded to approve the change. That Elizabeth, by her cool and cunning diplomacy, managed to evade the threatened danger, has ever been held as little short of providential by the Protestants of the world.[3] In truth, however, each of the powers which might have assailed Elizabeth, had religious difficulties of its own to encounter. [3] See _Reign of Elizabeth_, page 8. In Scotland there was civil war. The Protestant faith had been slow of introduction there, but under the leadership of John Knox it had become at length supreme.[4] The Regent, mother of the young queen, Mary Stuart, had French troops to aid her against the reformers, but had been compelled to yield to their demands. When Queen Mary herself returned to rule Scotland after the death of her French husband, King Francis, she found her path anything but easy. A sovereign of one faith and a nation of another had not yet learned to endure each other, and there were queer doings in Scotland, wild nobles running off with the Queen, wilder fanatics lecturing at her in her own court, her French favorite assassinated, a new husband, a Scotch one, sent the same dark road, more civil war, imprisonments, romantic escapes. It ended in Mary's secret flight to England. She who had so nearly marched into the land a conqueror, entered it a fugitive supplicating Elizabeth's protection. The remainder of her life she passed in an English prison, and eighteen years later was executed on an only half-proven charge of conspiring against the rival who had kept her in such dreary durance.[5] [4] See _John Knox Heads the Scottish Reformers_, page 21. [5] See _Mary Stuart: Her Reign and Execution_, page 51.