kinds of offensive rumours. With this object they--for the
instigation came from them--joined in a union with the Protestant
nobles. These regarded Riccio as their most thoroughgoing opponent:
they too wished him to be got rid of; but his death alone could not
content them. A Parliament was to meet at once, from which they
expected nothing but a complete condemnation of their former friends,
and absolutely ruinous resolutions against themselves. They made the
overthrow of this system a condition of their taking a share in
getting rid of Riccio. The King consented that Murray should be again
placed at the head of the government, in return for which the
matrimonial crown was promised him.

On the 7th March the Queen went to the old council-house of Edinburgh
to make the necessary arrangements for the Parliament. The insignia of
the realm, sword crown and sceptre, were borne before her by the
Catholic lords, Huntley, Athol, and Crawford, the heads of those
houses which had once already, in France, offered her their alliance.
The King had refused to take part in the ceremony. She named the Lords
of Articles, who from of old exercised a decisive influence in the
Scotch Parliaments, and restored the bishops to their place among
them. As the Queen declares, her object was to promote the restoration
of the old religion and to have the rebels sentenced by the assembled
Estates. In Holyrood, besides Huntley and Athol, Bothwell, Fleming,
Levingstoun, and James Balfour had also found favour, all men who had
taken an active part for the restoration of Catholicism or for the
re-establishment of the power of the crown: how much it must have
surprised men to find that the Queen granted Huntley and Bothwell, who
had been declared traitors, admittance into the Privy Council. If the
Parliament adopted resolutions in accordance with these preliminaries,
it was to be expected that the work of political and religious
reaction would begin at once, with the active participation not only
of the Pope from whom some money had already come, but also of other
Catholic powers with whom Riccio kept the Queen in communication.

A serious danger assuredly for the lords and for Protestantism; there
was not a moment to lose if they wished to avert it; but the attempt
to do so assumed, through the wild habits of the time and the country,
that character of violence which has made it the romance of centuries.
The event had such far-reaching results that w