n fact, as soon as Huntly, Athol, and Bothwell had recognised the
musician-minister, they sheathed their swords, and, having saluted the
king, went away.

Mary had gone away with a single thought in her heart, vengeance. But she
understood that she could not revenge herself at one and the same time on
her husband and his companions: she set to work, then, with all the
charms of her wit and beauty to detach the kind from his accomplices. It
was not a difficult task: when that brutal rage which often carried
Darnley beyond all bounds was spent, he was frightened himself at the
crime he had committed, and while the assassins, assembled by Murray,
were resolving that he should have that greatly desired crown
matrimonial, Darnley, as fickle as he was violent, and as cowardly as he
was cruel, in Mary's very room, before the scarcely dried blood, made
another compact, in which he engaged to deliver up his accomplices.
Indeed, three days after the event that we have just related, the
murderers learned a strange piece of news--that Darnley and Mary,
accompanied by Lord Seyton, had escaped together from Holyrood Palace.
Three days later still, a proclamation appeared, signed by Mary and dated
from Dunbar, which summoned round the queen, in her own name and the
king's, all the Scottish lords and barons, including those who had been
compromised in the affair of the "run in every sense," to whom she not
only granted full and complete pardon, but also restored her entire
confidence. In this way she separated Murray's cause from that of Morton
and the other assassins, who, in their turn, seeing that there was no
longer any safety for them in Scotland, fled to England, where all the
queen's enemies were always certain to find a warm welcome, in spite of
the good relations which reigned in appearance between Mary and
Elizabeth. As to Bothwell, who had wanted to oppose the assassination,
he was appointed Warden of all the Marches of the Kingdom.

Unfortunately for her honour, Mary, always more the woman than the queen,
while, on the contrary, Elizabeth was always more the queen than the
woman, had no sooner regained her power than her first royal act was to
exhume Rizzio, who had been quietly buried on the threshold of the chapel
nearest Holyrood Palace, and to have him removed to the burial-place of
the Scottish kings, compromising herself still more by the honours she
paid him dead than by the favour she had granted him living.

S