Mary Stuart was now Queen Consort of France. Her clever, ambitious uncles, Guise and the Cardinal, were practically rulers of France, and she herself, as Throgmorton says, “took everything upon her,” and according to Cecil’s diary (16th July), “the ushers going before the Queen of Scotts (now French Queen) to Chappell cry, ‘Place pour la Reine d’Angleterre.’” As soon as the pretensions of Mary were known, Cecil’s counter move was to send help to the reform party in Scotland, and to revive the talk of a marriage between Elizabeth and the Earl of Arran, the heir-apparent to the Scottish crown. Arran was in France; and on the first suspicion against him of intriguing with the English, the King had ordered his capture, dead or alive. Randolph and Killigrew were successively sent by Cecil to Throgmorton with orders to aid the Earl, and, at any risk, smuggle him to England.[110] In disguise he was conveyed by Randolph to Zurich, and thence to England, and subsequently into Scotland,[111] to head the Protestant party against the French, from his father’s castles of Hamilton and Dumbarton. Whilst Arran was in hiding in England, Cecil was apparently the only minister who saw him, and when he left, it was with full instructions and pecuniary help from the Secretary. Cecil was a man of peace; but the main point of his policy was the keeping of the French out of Flanders and Scotland. Now that Guise ambition openly struck at England through the northern kingdom active measures were needed, and they were taken.
As usual, Cecil’s report on the whole question[112] to the Queen judiciously summed up all the possibilities. The document sets forth the desirability of an enduring peace between Scotland and England, and the impossibility of it whilst the former country is governed by a foreign nation like the French in the absence of its native sovereign; that the land should be “freed from idolatry like as England”; and that the nobility should be banded together with the next heir to the crown (Arran) to remedy all abuses. “If the Queen (Mary) shall be unwilling to this, as is likely, … then it is apparent that Almighty God is pleased to transfer from her the rule of the kingdom for the weale of it. And in this time great circumspection is to be used to avoid the deceits and trumperies of the French.” Sir William’s decision, after infinite discussion, is that the cheapest and only possible way will be at once to send strong reinforcements to the Scottish reformers, and at the same time that Sadler and Crofts on the Border should be sleepless, as they were, in their efforts in favour of the Protestant Scots.