Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/18

 2 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 63. believe that his object was to restore the French party in the Scottish councils. The Queen of Scots herself was not admitted to a secret of which her knowledge would be useless till the conspiracy was further ad- vanced, and the Pope, the Duke of Guise, the Arch- bishop of Glasgow, and the English at Rheims, were the only persons in Europe who were acquainted with the real purpose. The opportunity was singularly favourable. The Earl of Morton had fallen. He had recovered power again, but he knew that without Elizabeth's assistance he would be unable to maintain himself. He had asked her to give the rents to the King of estates which were really his own, and to distribute a few trifling pensions among the Scotch Peers. She had met his request with a violent, passionate, and insult- ing refusal. The party which had dethroned Mary Stuart were the only friends that she possessed in Scot- land; yet it suited her to plead to the world that she had no connection with them. To grant the King the rents of his grandmother's estates would prejudge, she was pleased to maintain, the question. of the succession. Thus the Abbot of Dunfermline was sent back empty- handed, and the patience of the Scots was worn out. They would have preferred the most insignificant assist- ance from Elizabeth to the profuse offers which were pressed on them from abroad. But when, in return for their service, they found nothing but hard words, and when the King's claims in England were implicitly denied which they were enthusiastically bent on main-