ng in any way Darnley's power. Darnley
was very much incensed against him, and earnestly desired to find
some way to effect his destruction. He communicated these feelings to
a certain fierce and fearless nobleman named Ruthven, and asked his
assistance to contrive some way to take vengeance upon Rizzio.

Ruthven was very much pleased to hear this. He belonged to a party of
the lords of the court who also hated Rizzio, though they had hated
Darnley besides so much that they had not communicated to him their
hostility to the other. Ruthven and his friends had not joined Murray
and the other rebels in opposing the marriage of Darnley. They had
chosen to acquiesce in it, hoping to maintain an ascendency over
Darnley, regarding him, as they did, as a mere boy, and thus retain
their power. When they found, however, that he was so headstrong and
unmanageable, and that they could do nothing with him, they exerted
all their influence to have Murray and the other exiled lords
pardoned and allowed to return, hoping to combine with them after
their return, and then together to make their power superior to that
of Darnley and Rizzio. They considered Darnley and Rizzio both as
their rivals and enemies. When they found, therefore, that Darnley
was plotting Rizzio's destruction, they felt a very strong as well as
a very unexpected pleasure.

Thus, among all the jealousies, and rivalries, and bitter animosities
of which the court was at this time the scene, the only true and
honest attachment of one heart to another seems to have been that of
Mary to Rizzio. The secretary was faithful and devoted to the queen,
and the queen was grateful and kind to the secretary. There has been
some question whether this attachment was an innocent or a guilty
one. A painting, still hanging in the private rooms which belonged to
Mary in the palace at Holyrood, represents Rizzio as young and very
handsome; on the other hand, some of the historians of the day, to
disprove the possibility of any guilty attachment, say that he was
rather old and ugly. We may ourselves, perhaps, safely infer, that
unless there were something specially repulsive in his appearance and
manner, such a heart as Mary's, repelled so roughly from the one whom
it was her duty to love, could not well have resisted the temptation
to seek a retreat and a refuge in the kind devotedness of such a
friend as Rizzio proved himself to be to her.

However this may be, Ruthven made such sugg