he answered, "and by the sword will I
keep them." But defiance broke idly against the skill and vigour of Sir
Henry Sidney, who succeeded Sussex as Lord Deputy. The rival septs of
the north were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English
army advanced from the Pale; and in 1567 Shane, defeated by the
O'Donnells, took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn to pieces in a drunken
squabble by his Scottish entertainers.

[Sidenote: Bothwell.]

The victory of Sidney marked the turn of the tide which had run so long
against Elizabeth. The danger which England dreaded from Mary Stuart,
the terror of a Catholic sovereign and a Catholic reaction, reached its
height only to pass irretrievably away. At the moment when the Irish
revolt was being trampled under foot a terrible event suddenly struck
light through the gathering clouds in the north. Mary had used Darnley
as a tool to bring about the ruin of his confederates and to further her
policy; but from the moment that she discovered his actual complicity in
the plot for Rizzio's murder she had loathed and avoided him. Ominous
words dropped from her lips. "Unless she were free of him some way,"
Mary was heard to mutter, "she had no pleasure to live." The lords whom
he had drawn into his plot only to desert and betray them hated him with
as terrible a hatred, and in their longing for vengeance a new
adventurer saw the road to power. Of all the border nobles James
Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, was the boldest and the most
unscrupulous. But, Protestant as he was, he had never swerved from the
side of the Crown; he had supported the Regent, and crossed the seas to
pledge as firm a support to Mary; and his loyalty and daring alike
appealed to the young Queen's heart. Little as he was touched by Mary's
passion, it stirred in the Earl dreams of a union with the Queen; and
great as were the obstacles to such a union which presented themselves
in Mary's marriage and his own, Bothwell was of too desperate a temper
to recoil before obstacles such as these. Divorce would free him from
his own wife. To free himself from Darnley he seized on the hatred
which the lords whom Darnley had deserted and betrayed bore to the king.
Bothwell joined Murray and the English ambassador in praying for the
recall of Morton and the exiles. The pardon was granted; the nobles
returned to court, and the bulk of them joined readily in a conspiracy
to strike down one whom they still looked on as their bitte