Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/446

432 hung around many of her courtiers, they were almost all at deadly feud with each other. There was nothing for it, however, but to make the beat of her materials. She reconciled Bothwell to Murray, and Argyll to Atholl, and she appeared ready to pardon Morton, Maitland, and others of the conspirators. In Mary's kindly and forgiving nature lay her danger. Had she punished with the relentless severity of Elizabeth her throne might have stood. But her pardons were wasted on wretches who, at the first opportunity, would turn and rend her. The nobles of her Court were but demi-savages, rude, insolent, treacherous, and implacable.



Darnley, conscious of having committed himself irrecoverably with these brutal men, was now loud in their denunciation. His safety lay only in their destruction, and there was not one that he did not betray except Murray, who was at hand and dangerous. The fugitive nobles, enraged at Darnley's betrayal of them, sent the "bonds," or covenants which had passed between them, or copies of them, to the queen. She was thunderstruck there to behold, in the list of sworn traitors and assassins, her own husband and her brother Murray. She seemed crushed to the soul by the terrible discovery. She saw herself actually seated in a nest of vipers, and the vilest of those reptiles were those nearest to her in affection and consangiunity. She could no longer put faith in her husband, she turned from him in sickness of heart; and so completely was she dispirited with the scene around her, that she contemplated