Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/386

 $fr REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 66. haste, but Huntley had the start of them. St Andrew's was swarming with Gordons, the King was in the midsi of his mother's friends, and they were ohliged to retire as they came. A second messenger went off to Paris with the news, and with a promise that the work so well begun would soon be finished, that Gowrie, who had been made a tool of, would be shaken off, and that the Catholics would have Scotland at their feet. It was the rebound of the stone of Sisyphus. After years of anxiety and miracles of diplomatic adroitness, the neg- lect which had destroyed Morton had been repaired. The cards had been once more in Elizabeth's hands, she had flung them in the face of her friends, and they, as usual, were left to perish, and her ministers to begin their ever recurring and ever hopeless toil. Utterly discomfited, Mar, Angus, and Lindsay could but sit still. They knew not what to do, or in which direction to turn. Only the ministers saw their way clearly. A deputation from the Presbytery at Edin- burgh came over to St Andrew's, demanded an inter- view with the King, and warned him against ' new courses.' James, whatever his shifts of politics, had never wavered in his hatred of the Kirk. He turned fiercely on them. 'Never king in Europe/ he said, David Fergusson, one of the party, coolly answered that he had been well brought up, and they did not wish him to be like other kings. If they saw occasion to speak to him they intended to speak, whether he liked it or not. ' There was not the face on flesh that they would
 * would have borne at their hands what he had borne.'