Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/385

1540.] and to feel the real temper of the people they summoned the Estates to meet at Edinburgh on the 15th of November.

Henry was profoundly angry. The behaviour of the queen-mother, he said, 'sounded openly to her extreme reproach an the blemishing of the royal house and blood whereof she descended. He accounted her rather like an unnatural and transformed person than like a noble princess or a woman of wisdom or honour.' For the present, however, he was forced to leave events to their own course, and to wait for the effect of the restoration of the Douglases. The French faction only among the nobility answered to the call of the camarilla; those exclusively who shared their schemes and sympathies. The remainder, either acting under Angus's advice or because they disdained to pay even outward obedience to the authority which had summoned them, held a separate convention by themselves, and prepared to assert their influence in a more effective manner. The Parliament had sat for eleven days. On the 26th of November, Angus, Lennox, the Laird of Buccleugh, and several hundred followers, scaled the walls of Edinburgh at four in the morning. They took possession of the gates, and when the day broke, the citizens, looking out into the twilight, saw the dark mass of horsemen drawn up in arms at the cross before St Giles's Church. The two Earls were come (so ran their manifesto) to claim their rights, their