Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/507

 1567.] THE MURDER OF DARNLEY. 487 and to the probable issue of that conflict conjecture fails to penetrate. But the era of toleration was yet centuries distant ; and the day of the Roman persecutors was gone never more to reappear. Six weeks later a powder barrel ex- ploded in a house in Edinburgh, and when the smoke cleared away the prospects of the Catholics in England were scattered to all the winds. The murder of Henry Stuart Lord Darnley is one of those incidents which will remain till the end of time conspicuous on the page of history. In itself the death of a single boy, prince or king though he might be, had little in it to startle the hard world of the sixteenth century. Even before the folly and falsehood by which Mary Stuart's husband had earned the hatred of the Scotch nobility, it had been foreseen that such a frail and giddy summer pleasure-boat would be soon wrecked in those stormy waters. Had Darnley been stabbed in a scuffle or helped to death by a dose of arsenic in his bed, the fair fame of the Queen of Scots would have suffered little, and the tongues that dared to mutter would have been easily silenced. But conspiracies in Scotland were"! never managed with the skilful villany of the Continent ; and when some conspicuous person was to be removed I out of the way, the instruments of the deed were either / fanatic religionists who looked on themselves as the serv- ants of God, or else they had been wrought up to the murder point by some personal passion which was not contented with the death of its victim, and required a fuller satisfaction in the picturesqueness of dramatic re-