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 strange things were happening nearer home. On 2 Jan. 1567 parliament was dissolved. Next month the country was horrified by the news that Darnley, titular king of the Scots, had been barbarously and deliberately murdered, and that the Earl of Both well was believed to have been the instigator of the crime. Two months later it was known that Bothwell and Mary Stuart were living together at Dunbar; then that he had divorced his wife; then that the two had been married on 15 May; and then followed the news of the day at Carberry Hill, and on 17 June the imprisonment of 'the mother of debate' in the castle of Lochleven. Meanwhile across the Channel the civil war in France was raging, the catholics were carrying all before them, and in the Netherlands Alva was expected to supersede the regent Margaret. In August 1567 he entered Brussels, and some bloody work began. When the year 1568 opened there were clouds upon the horizon; before it closed Mary Stuart was a captive in England, war with Spain seemed imminent, the English ambassador had been expelled from Spain, the Spanish treasure-ships had been seized, and Elizabeth had declared that she meant to keep the treasure in safe custody; what she would do with it time would show. On 20 Jan. 1569 Mary Stuart was removed from Lord Scrope's castle at Bolton to the care of Lord Shrewsbury at Tutbury (Hatfield MSS. i. 395). The Queen of Scots, though under vigilant supervision, had a household of ten ladies and fifty other persons, with ten horses. Liberal as this treatment may seem at first sight, it still remains a question at whose charge this household was kept up. Lord Shrewsbury, it is certain, was full of complaints at the great expense he was put to. Elizabeth, if she ever repaid him, did not do so without much reluctance and many reminders. Mary's husband was still living in Denmark; but he, too, was in safe custody. The marriage between him and the queen was treated as invalid, though there were rumours that a divorce might be necessary, and could be easily obtained. But what was to be done with her? To send her back to Scotland would be some said, to send her back to certain destruction; some said it would be to make the northern land more French than ever. Certainly it would be to plunge it deeper than ever into sanguinary civil war. On the other hand, to keep her in England, which she had voluntarily fled to as an asylum, was to assure her personal safety at the cost of a thousand risks and dangers which were obvious to any one who could form an estimate of the political outlook of the times wherever one turned.

It was not long (1569) before the first of these dangers showed itself. The Duke of Norfolk was unmarried. If he was not an avowed catholic, at any rate he was regarded as the head of the catholic party, and he was a personage round whom the catholic party would rally; they were still a powerful faction; in the north they were very powerful. Both weirs name was hardly mentioned. The suspicion which the Casket letters had cast upon Mary's complicity in Darnley's murder might make Norfolk's pillow uncomfortable for him; but as to her having another husband alive at Copenhagen scribbling letters to her day after day (Cal. State Papers, Scotland, 1509-89, p. 310, No. 5), that seems hardly to have occurred to him as a matter to concern himself about. So the duke, in a vacillating, half-hearted, languid way, consented to be named as a suitor to the Queen of Scots. Of course Elizabeth heard of it, taxed him with it, threw him into the Tower, found that there was no evidence to convict him of anything more than a matrimonial plot, released him in August 1570, but continued to keep him under supervision. The great northern rebellion — the story of which has been so splendidly told by Mr. Froude — broke out in November. If the catholic party had had competent leaders, the issue might easily have proved calamitous for the country; as it was, the leadership and the energy were all on the other side. Even so there was room for anxiety and much need for promptness of decision, rapidity of action, and entire readiness to co-operate in any course that might be resolved on. But during all the crisis Elizabeth kept up a continual whimpering at the great charges she was being put to. She felt not the smallest anxiety about herself; she was sure that the result would be the discomfiture of the rebels; it was deplorable and vexatious that the cost of scourging them should be so heavy. She would have preferred that her nobles should rush upon these troublesome rioters with their riding-whips, as the Scythians served their mutinous slaves in old times; that would have been cheaper. Her nobles succeeded in quelling the dangerous outbreak in spite of their royal mistress, and when the time of punishment came they were encouraged to recoup themselves at the cost of those who might be implicated in the rising. Nothing in Elizabeth's life is more dreadful than the pilous savagery which she permitted, and more than permitted, in the slaughter and pillage that followed the northern rebellion. She heard of it all, and did as her father would have done in the fury of his wrath.

Then there rose a cry that if the pope had