He forced himself to proclaim the loyalty of his party from the pulpit, when he could not do so without some economy of truth.

{154b} He inserted things in his "History," and spoke things to Croft, which he should have known to be false.

But he carried his point.

He did advance the "union of hearts" with England, if in a blundering fashion, and we owe him eternal gratitude for his interest in the match, though "we like not the manner of the wooing." The reluctant hand of Elizabeth was now inextricably caught in the gear of that great machine which broke the ancient league of France and Scotland, and saved Scotland from some of the sorrows of France.
The papers of Sadleir, Elizabeth's secret agent with the Scots, show the godly pursuing their old plan of campaign.

To make treaty with the Regent; to predict from the pulpit that she would break it; to make false statements about the terms of the treaty; to accuse her of their infringement; to profess loyalty; to aim at setting up a new sovereign power; to tell the populace that Mary of Guise's scanty French reinforcements--some 1500 men--came by virtue of a broken treaty; to tell Sadleir that they were very glad that the French _had_ come, as they would excite popular hatred; to make out that the fortification of Leith was breach of treaty;--such, in brief, were the methods of the Reformers.
{155} They now took a new method of proving the Regent's breach of treaty, that she had "set up the Mass in Holyrood, which they had before suppressed." _They_ were allowed to have their sermons in St.Giles's, but _she_ was not to have her rites in her own abbey.