"I will think upon revenge." But even revenge
was not suffered to interfere with her political schemes. Keen as was
Mary's thirst for vengeance on him, Darnley was needful to the triumph
of her aims, and her first effort was to win him back. He was already
grudging at the supremacy of the nobles and his virtual exclusion from
power, when Mary masking her hatred beneath a show of affection
succeeded in severing the wretched boy from his fellow-conspirators, and
in gaining his help in an escape to Dunbar. Once free, a force of eight
thousand men under the Earl of Bothwell quickly gathered round her, and
with these troops she marched in triumph on Edinburgh. An offer of
pardon to all save those concerned in Rizzio's murder broke up the force
of the Lords; Glencairn and Argyle joined the Queen, while Morton,
Ruthven, and Lindesay fled in terror over the border. But Mary had
learned by a terrible lesson the need of dissimulation. She made no show
of renewing her Catholic policy. On the contrary, she affected to resume
the system which she had pursued from the opening of her reign, and
suffered Murray to remain at the court. Rizzio's death, had in fact
strengthened her position. With him passed away the dread of a Catholic
reaction. Mary's toleration, her pledges of extending an equal
indulgence to Protestantism in England, should she mount its throne, her
marriage to one who was looked upon as an English noble, above all the
hope of realizing through her succession the dream of a union of the
realms, again told on the wavering body of more Conservative statesmen,
like Norfolk, and even drew to her side some of the steadier Protestants
who despaired of a Protestant succession. Even Elizabeth at last seemed
wavering towards a recognition of her as her successor. But Mary aimed
at more than the succession. Her intrigues with the English Catholics
were never interrupted. Her seeming reconciliation with the young king
preserved that union of the whole Catholic body which her marriage had
brought about and which the strife over Rizzio threatened with ruin.
Her court was full of refugees from the northern counties. "Your
actions," Elizabeth wrote in a sudden break of fierce candour, "are as
full of venom as your words are of honey." Fierce words however did
nothing to break the clouds that gathered thicker and thicker round
England: and in June the birth of a boy, the future James the Sixth of
Scotland and First of England, doubled M