Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/268

 254 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 54. adequately answered. He had married one of the ' Queen's Maries/ Lord Fleming's daughter, to whom he was passionately attached, and through whom he had been brought in connection with the great Ca- tholic families. But a wife's influence, however tender, would not have weakened the brain of such a man as Maitland ; and the explanation must be looked for in the constitution of his character. Through all his changes he was always pursuing one object the union of the Crowns under a Scottish sovereign : whether that sovereign was Arran, Mary, James, or again Mary, mattered little. After the Both well marriage he had believed Mary to be ruined. He had expected that Eli- zabeth, for her own safety's sake, would have acknow- ledged the little Prince. When he found himself mistaken, when he found the English Queen weak, hesi- tating, uncertain, and the English nobility ready, on the other hand, to overlook Mary's misdemeanours and accept her, notwithstanding, as heir-presumptive, he believed evidently that Elizabeth's star was setting, that in her vacillation she was going the road to per- dition. The exceptional confidence with which Eliza- beth treated him led him to suppose that he saw deeper into her tortuous ways than other men. He assured himself that, sooner or later, she would yield to pressure and let Mary Stuart go. In yielding he knew that she would be destroyed ; and he set his hand therefore to assist his mistress towards the passionately- coveted ob- ject of his and her ambition. And perhaps another influence was not without its