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Updated: May 20, 2025
The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course, and to fatal results, does Knox's analogy between the foreign worships of Israel and the Mass. "She thinks not that idolatry, but good religion," said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Mary's Mass. "So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch," retorted the reformer.
Idolaters must be converted or exterminated; they were no better than Amalekites. This was the central rock of Knox's position: tolerance was impossible. He remained in Scotland, preaching and administering the Sacrament in the Genevan way, till June 1556. William Maitland of Lethington, "the flower of the wits of Scotland," was to Knox a less congenial acquaintance.
Elizabeth made various proposals to Mary, all involving her resignation as queen, or at least the suspension of her rights. Mary refused to listen; her party in Scotland, led by Chatelherault, Herries, Huntly, and Argyll, did not venture to meet Murray and his party in war, and was counselled by Lethington, who still, in semblance, was of Murray's faction.
She assented, not only to the undisturbed maintenance of the new creed, but even to a scheme for the endowment of the Protestant ministry out of the confiscated lands of the Church. Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and most liberal thinker in the country.
It was to Lethington that Bothwell addressed himself. "Her Grace is in a mood to hear how the Gordian knot of her marriage might be unravelled," said he, grimly ironic. Lethington raised his eyebrows, licked his thin lips, and rubbed his bony hands one in the other. "Unravelled?" he echoed with wondering stress. "Unravelled? Ha!" His dark eyes flashed round at them.
The speaker referred to, of this, as of most of the other caustic sayings of the time, is said to have been Lethington. The first thing done by the Parliament was the distribution of the handful of ministers then existing among the districts which most needed them; the second, the verification and establishment of the Confession of Faith.
Under an uncouth exterior, with a clumsy frame and a gross countenance, further disfigured by a tongue too big for his mouth, Lauderdale concealed a power of crafty insinuation in which he repeated some of the dexterity of his kinsman of a former generation, Maitland of Lethington, known in the Courts of Elizabeth and James VI. as "the Chameleon."
When his sister married Darnley, he took up arms against her: he did so again when she married Bothwell: and on both occasions he was probably obeying an elastic conscience. While he was endeavouring to fix the odium of the Darnley murder on Mary, he must have been quite aware that both Lethington and Morton, his allies, were steeped in the guilt of it.
The Queen was brought again and placed in her chair, and they commanded to vote over again, which thing highly offended the haill nobilitie so that they began to speak in open audience 'What! shall the Laird of Lethington have power to control us? or shall the presence of ane woman cause us to offend God and to dampen ane innocent, against our conscience for pleasure of any creature? And so the haill nobilitie absolved John Knox again."
Moray was at Lochleven with the Queen, and Moray believed, or pretended to believe, in Ruthven's "sossery," as Randolph spells "sorcery." She, rather putting herself at our Reformer's mercy, complained that Lethington alone placed Ruthven in the Privy Council. "That man is absent," said Knox, "and therefore I will speak nothing on that behalf."
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