But though she was deeply infatuated with “the young fool,” Mary would not marry him until she had received a reply to her advances to Philip. The match with Darnley was to give her, she hoped, the English Crown, but it could only be done with the aid of Spain. So, tired almost of waiting, she seized upon a hollow pretext to send James Hay, of Balmerino, to London to see Guzman, and learn if he had any news for her. On the very day that Hay first saw the Spanish ambassador Philip’s important letter had arrived in London. The Scot had just been violently snubbed by Elizabeth, and all his requests refused contumeliously, as no doubt he had foreseen they would be; his real reason for coming south at all, indeed, being to obtain the sanction not of the Queen of England but the King of Spain to Mary’s marriage with Darnley. The reply from Philip that Guzman gave to Balmerino was indeed a welcome one. “He appeared delighted with it, and said that his Queen desired nothing so much as that she should follow your Majesty’s orders in all things, without swerving a hair’s breadth, and that you should take her under your protection. I urged him to try to get his Queen to manage her affairs prudently, and not to strike until a good opportunity presented itself.” Hay only stayed in London one day longer, for he knew that the great wish of Mary’s heart was now to be granted; and though to the English partisans and the Protestants in Scotland he deplored “the evil success of his long journey,” it must have been with a merry heart beneath his doublet that he carried his welcome message to Holyrood on the 7th July, 1565. Two days afterwards Mary was secretly married to Darnley, though the public wedding was deferred until the 29th; and the great conspiracy against Elizabeth and Protestantism was then complete. Mary was so infatuated with Darnley at the time that she would probably have married him in any case, but her caprice for him and her determination to supplant Elizabeth had thus led her to promise the submission of herself and her realms to the dictation of a foreign monarch, the traditional foe of France that she pretended to love so well; a monarch whose first object was to gain command of the policy and resources of Scotland and England by exterminating the religion of a large proportion of the people. It was a triumph for her that her marriage with the man for whom she was temporarily crazy should be instrumental in gaining what she had striven so hard for since she left France, namely, the support of Spain; but indoctrinated though she was by the cynical teaching of her uncle, Cardinal Lorraine, she can hardly have realised the turpitude of the act of treachery she was committing. She had been cherished and beloved even by her Protestant subjects, and yet the step she was taking would lead, if she were successful in her object, to the employment of the hideous methods of Spanish religious coercion to crush their religious liberty,