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"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
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