Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/422

408 Cockburn, and carried off the money. This was a severe blow to the Congregation, and was speedily followed by another. Haliburton, provost of Dundee, had led a party of Reformers to attack Leith. He had planted his heavy artillery on an eminence near Holyrood; but whilst the majority of the leaders were attending a sermon, the French attacked the battery, and drove the Reformers back into the city with great slaughter. The queen-regent, sitting on the ramparts of Leith, hailed the victorious soldiers returning from the massacre of her subjects, and thus gave mortal offence.

Great Seal of Queen Elizabeth

On the 5th of November the French sailed from Leith to intercept a convoy of provisions for the relief of Edinburgh. They were attacked by the Lord James and Arran, who, getting into difficult ground, were defeated in the morasses of Restalrig with great slaughter. Haliburton of Dundee was killed; Arran and the Lord James escaped into the city, where Knox summoned them to hear the "promises of God;" but though the royalists had returned to Leith, the eloquence of Knox failed to inspire confidence, a sudden panic spread through the city, and the Reformers, abandoning Knox in his pulpit, fled. The road to Linlithgow was crowded before midnight with fugitives, and the darkness adding to their terror, in the belief that the French were pursuing them, they never stopped till they reached Stirling, thirty miles off.

When the Scottish fugitives arrived at Stirling, and the emptiness of their terrors became fully known, they were, both leaders and people, covered with confusion. Knox, however, undertook to restore them to their usual confidence by finishing there the sermon which they had broken off so suddenly at Edinburgh. He asked why had the army of God fled before the uncircumcised Philistines; and he answered his own question by asserting that they had been suffered to fall through the avarice of one leader, the lewdness of another, and the vain-glory and presumption of a third. He bade them repent and return sincerely to the Lord, and the tribes of Israel should yet triumph over the recreant sons of Benjamin. Thus he raised the spirits of the Protestants by his fiery eloquence, in the very act of soundly castigating them.

Meantime, the queen-regent entered Edinburgh in triumph; fortunately, however, the failure of the Reformers did not cool the zeal of their English friends. The struggle was considered not so much with the Scotch Government as with France; and Sadler urged on Cecil to supply the insurgents with more money, for so long, he observed, as they kept the French engaged there, they would have less leisure to turn their designs on England. The Lords of the Congregation, thus reanimated by the sermons of Knox and the promises of Cecil, mustered fresh forces at Stirling; but again they were defeated, and Stirling taken by a detachment from the queen-regent's army at Leith. The royalist forces then invaded Fifeshire, burning and laying waste the lands of the Covenanters. Kinghorn, Kirkaldy, and Dysart were sacked, and the troops of Arran and the Lord James were compelled to retire before the superior forces of the enemy. With the intensest anxiety did they expect the promised succours from England: the royalists were now in full march for St. Andrews, over which inevitable destruction seemed to hover, when, on rounding the promontory of Kingcraig, the little army of Arran following at a distance, watching their motions, a fleet was descried in the offing. Each army gazed in terror and expectation, the royalists hoping it might be the French fleet bringing the troops of D'Elbœuf, the Reformers that it might be the English succours. It proved to be the latter. Three small vessels of the queen-regent were soon captured, and the fleet directed its guns against her army. It was obliged to make instant retreat.

This was a direct and open infraction of the peace betwixt England, Scotland, and France. Noailles made a formal complaint at the English court of this violation of the treaty; but it was pretended that Winter, the English admiral, had only acted in self-defence; that he had been sent to convoy a fleet of victuallers to Berwick, but had been driven by stress of weather into the Frith of Forth; that there the batteries of