Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/553

1542.] intimate with Beton. To kill a herald was, by the law of arms, sacrilege, and fresh disgrace had been brought upon a cause of which his better judgment saw too clearly the injustice. The Cardinal came back from the Border to. concert measures to repair the disaster of the Solway; but his presence was unendurable. James, as well as Knox, saw in the overwhelming calamity which had prostrated him the immediate judgment of the Upper Powers, and in a dreamy, half-conscious melancholy, he left Holyrood, and wandered into Fife to the discarded minister whose advice he had so fatally neglected, the old Lord Treasurer. Kirkaldy himself was absent from home. His wife received the King with loyal affection; but he had no definite purpose in going thither, and he would not remain. The hand of death was upon him, and he knew it, and he waited its last grasp with passive indifference. 'My portion in this world is short,' he said to her; 'I shall not be with you fifteen days.' His servants asked him where he would spend his Christmas. 'I cannot tell,' he said; 'but this I can tell on yule day ye will be masterless, and the realm without a king.'

Two boys whom Mary of Guise had borne to him had died in the year preceding. The Queen was at Linlithgow, expecting every day her third confinement. But James was weary of earth and earthly interests. He showed no desire to see her. He went languidly to Falkland; and there, on the 8th of December, came tidings that there was again an heir to the crown; that a princess, known afterwards as Mary Stuart, had been