through the bed-chamber, _B_, and through the ante-room, _R_, to the
door, _o_, where he fell down, and was stabbed by the murderers again
and again, till he ceased to breathe.

After this scene was over, Darnley and Ruthven came coolly back into
Mary's chamber, and, as soon as Mary recovered her senses, began to
talk of and to justify their act of violence, without, however,
telling her that Rizzio had been killed. Mary was filled with
emotions of resentment and grief. She bitterly reproached Darnley for
such an act of cruelty as breaking into her apartment with armed men,
and seizing and carrying off her friend. She told him that she had
raised him from his comparatively humble position to make him her
husband, and now this was his return. Darnley replied that Rizzio had
supplanted him in her confidence, and thwarted all his plans, and
that Mary had shown herself utterly regardless of his wishes, under
the influence of Rizzio. He said that, since Mary had made herself
his wife, she ought to have obeyed him, and not put herself in such a
way under the direction of another. Mary learned Rizzio's fate the
next day.

The violence of the conspirators did not stop with the destruction of
Rizzio. Some of Mary's high officers of government, who were in the
palace at the time, were obliged to make their escape from the
windows to avoid being seized by Morton and his soldiers in the
court. Among them was the Earl Bothwell, who tried at first to drive
Morton out, but in the end was obliged himself to flee. Some of these
men let themselves down by ropes from the outer windows. When the
uproar and confusion caused by this struggle was over, they found
that Mary, overcome with agitation and terror, was showing symptoms
of fainting again, and they concluded to leave her. They informed her
that she must consider herself a prisoner, and, setting a guard at
the door of her apartment, they went away, leaving her to spend the
night in an agony of resentment, anxiety, and fear.

Lord Darnley took the government at once entirely into his own hands.
He prorogued Parliament, which was then just commencing a session, in
his own name alone. He organized an administration, Mary's officers
having fled. In saying that _he_ did these things, we mean, of
course, that the conspirators did them in his name. He was still but
a boy, scarcely out of his teens, and incapable of any other action
in such an emergency but a blind compliance with the wis