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Knox should be suppressed, the churches planted with true ministers, and ‘some certain provision made for them according to equity and conscience.’ The discussion ended with the concession that the churchmen (i.e. the lay or ecclesiastical impropriators) should have two-thirds of these benefices, and the remaining third should be in the hands of a committee for such uses as should be afterwards settled. The third was afterwards reduced to a fourth, with the proviso that if a fourth was not found enough for the support of the ministers and the queen, a third or more might be taken. A return which was ordered of all ecclesiastical revenues was apparently never made. Knox inveighed against this compromise. ‘I see twa partis,’ he said, ‘freely given to the devil, and the third may be divided betwixt God and the devil. It will not be long before the devil shall have three parts of the third, and judge you then what God's portion shall be.’

The ministers' stipends were at last fixed at a hundred merks for the ordinary, and three hundred for the chief charges. The superintendents got double. Knox himself had two hundred and a free house. On 8 Feb. 1562 Lord James, who had been created Earl of Murray, was married at St. Giles to the daughter of the Earl Marshal. Knox officiated, and in the nuptial address warned Murray that if he became less favourable to the reformers it would be said his wife had changed his nature. He was much offended at the vanity of the dresses and banquets, and the divergence between his views and those of the future regent now began to show itself. Early in 1562 Knox made vain endeavours to reconcile James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell [q. v.], and James Hamilton, third earl of Arran [q. v.]

On a Sunday towards the end of the same year (1562) Knox preached another violent sermon against the queen and her court, in which he denounced dancing and other vanities. He was sent for by Mary. Murray, Morton, Lethington, and some of the guard were present. According to Knox's account, he said that he did not utterly condemn dancing provided those who practised it did not neglect their principal vocation, and did not dance for the pleasure they took in the displeasure of God's people. Mary dismissed him, saying stronger words had been reported, and Knox grumbled at being called away from his book. He left her with ‘a reasonably merry countenance.’ Some of the bystanders wondering that he was not afraid, he remarked, ‘Why should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman frighten one who had looked on the faces of many angry men without fear?’ The assembly presented a supplication to the queen, in which the hand of Knox is visible, demanding reformation of the mass, punishment of vice, provision for the poor, the restoration of the glebes to the ministers, obedience to the superintendents, and, lastly, support of the ministers out of the thirds. Knox was appointed to visit Kyle and Galloway, and met the barons and gentlemen of these districts at Ayr on 4 Sept., when they subscribed a declaration promising to assist the whole body of protestants. He then passed by Nithsdale to Galloway, where he induced the Master of Maxwell to write to Bothwell to be on his good behaviour, and wrote to Chatelherault warning him against his bastard brother, the new archbishop of St. Andrews. While in Ayrshire Knox was challenged to a disputation by Quintin Kennedy [q. v.], abbot of Crosraguel, on the doctrine of the mass. It was held at Maybole in Ayrshire in September, and the substance of it was printed by Lekprevik at Edinburgh next year. Both sides claimed the victory, but it was a drawn battle. With another Roman apologist, Ninian Winzet [q. v.], schoolmaster of Linlithgow, who sent Knox a paper with questions in February 1562, the reformer had an epistolary but incomplete correspondence. In the beginning of 1563 he acted as one of the commissioners appointed by the assembly of 1562 for the trial of Paul Methven, minister of Jedburgh, for immorality, and takes credit for the condemnation of Methven as a contrast to the license the Roman church conceded to its ecclesiastics.

In the middle of April the queen sent for him to Lochleven, and in an audience of two hours before supper urged him to stay the persecution of the Romanists for saying mass, especially in the western shires. Knox, in return, exhorted her to administer the laws, and reminded her that the sword of justice belonged to God and not to any temporal sovereign. Next morning, before daybreak, she again summoned him to meet her when hawking near Kinross. Without going back on their former conference she started fresh topics—the offer of a ring to her by Ruthven, the appointment of Gordon, bishop of Athens, afterwards of Galloway, as a superintendent, and the quarrel between the Earl of Argyll and his wife, her bastard sister, in which she asked Knox to mediate. She concluded by promising to put the law in force as he had requested. Knox reports this conversation, to ‘let the world see,’ he says, ‘how deeply Mary Queen of Scotland could dissemble.’ While at Glasgow on 2 May, on his way to Dumfries, where he was sent to assist in the election of a super-