rton, Ruthven, Lindsay of the
Byres, George Douglas, and some sixty others were denounced as rebels
with forfeiture of life and goods, while one Thomas Scott, who had been
in command of the guards that had kept Her Majesty prisoner at Holyrood,
was hanged, drawn, and quartered at the Market Cross.

News of this reached the fugitives to increase their desperate rage.
But what drove the iron into the soul of the arch-murderer Ruthven
was Darnley's solemn public declaration denying all knowledge of or
complicity in Rizzio's assassination; nor did it soothe his fury to know
that all Scotland rang with contemptuous laughter at that impudent and
cowardly perjury. From his sick-bed at Newcastle, whereon some six weeks
later he was to breathe his last, the forsaken wretch replied to it by
sending the Queen the bond to which he had demanded Darnley's signature
before embarking upon the business.

It was a damning document. There above the plain signature and seal of
the King was the admission, not merely of complicity, but that the thing
was done by his express will and command, that the responsibility
was his own, and that he would hold the doers scatheless from all
consequences.

Mary could scarcely have hoped to be able to confront her worthless
husband with so complete a proof of his duplicity and baseness. She sent
for him, confounded him with the sight of that appalling bond, made an
end to the amity which for her own ends she had pretended, and drove him
out of her presence with a fury before which he dared not linger.

You see him, then, crushed under his load of mortification, realizing at
last how he had been duped on every hand, first by the lords for their
own purpose, and then by the Queen for hers. Her contempt of him was now
so manifest that it spread to all who served him--for she made it plain
that who showed him friendship earned her deep displeasure--so that
he was forced to withdraw from a Court where his life was become
impossible. For a while he wandered up and down a land where every door
was shut in his face, where every man of whatsoever party, traitor or
true, despised him alike. In the end, he took himself off to his father,
Lennox, and at Glasgow he sought what amusement he could with his dogs
and his hawks, and such odd vulgar rustic love-affairs as came his way.

It was in allowing him thus to go his ways, in leaving her
vengeance--indeed, her justice--but half accomplished, that lay the
greate