In Byways of Scottish History. Louis Auguste Barbé

without foundation, he was ignominiously ordered to leave the country.124 Anxious as he had been to be relieved from duties which had become as dangerous as they were difficult, Randolph nevertheless refused to obey. He appealed from Mary and her Lords to Elizabeth, to the sovereign to whom he owed his allegiance, and was answerable for his conduct, by whose favour he had been appointed to a position of confidence and honour, and at whose command alone he would consent to surrender his trust. On hearing the slight which had been put upon her accredited representative, the Queen of England took up his cause with characteristic promptitude and energy. She at once dispatched a letter to the Queen of Scots complaining "of her strange and uncourteous treatment of Mr. Randolph",125 and informing her that his departure from Edinburgh would be the signal for the dismissal of the Scottish agent from the English Court. In spite of Elizabeth's remonstrances, and in the face of a threat which was so far from being idly meant that it was peremptorily carried out less than a fortnight later,126 Randolph's expulsion was insisted upon. After having twice again received orders from the Lords,127 he at length yielded to necessity and retired across the Border to Berwick.

      That Randolph, smarting under such treatment, should have made use of his enforced leisure and of the knowledge which he had had special opportunities for acquiring to write a book by which he hoped to injure her cause and tarnish her reputation, doubtless seemed to Mary to be so natural that she deemed it unnecessary to institute further enquiries into the truth of the charge brought against him. His guilt was assumed as soon as the accusation was made, and, by a singular coincidence, if, indeed, it was not of set purpose, the same Minister whose dismissal had followed his own disgrace was sent back to Elizabeth to demand his punishment.