rest foe.

[Sidenote: Darnley's murder.]

Morton alone stood aloof. He demanded an assurance of the Queen's
sanction to the deed; and no such assurance was given him. On the
contrary Mary's mood seemed suddenly to change. Her hatred to Darnley
passed all at once into demonstration of the old affection. He had
fallen sick with vice and misery, and she visited him on his sick-bed,
and persuaded him to follow her to Edinburgh. She visited him again in a
ruinous and lonely house near the palace in which he was lodged by her
order, on the ground that its purer air would further his recovery,
kissed him as she bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a
wedding-dance at Holyrood. If Mary's passion had drawn her to share
Bothwell's guilt, these acts were but awful preludes to her husband's
doom. If on the other hand her reconciliation was a real one, it only
drove Bothwell to hurry on his deed of blood without waiting for the aid
of the nobles who had sworn the king's death. The terrible secret is
still hid in a cloud of doubt and mystery which will probably never be
wholly dispelled. But Mary had hardly returned to her palace when, two
hours after midnight on the ninth of February 1567, an awful explosion
shook the city. The burghers rushed out from the gates to find the house
of Kirk o' Field destroyed and Darnley's body dead beside the ruins.

[Sidenote: Mary's fall.]

The murder was undoubtedly the deed of Bothwell. It was soon known that
his servant had stored the powder beneath the king's bedchamber and that
the Earl had watched without the walls till the deed was done. But, in
spite of gathering suspicion and of a charge of murder made formally
against Bothwell by Lord Lennox, no serious steps were taken to
investigate the crime; and a rumour that Mary purposed to marry the
murderer drove her friends to despair. Her agent in England wrote to her
that "if she married that man she would lose the favour of God, her own
reputation, and the hearts of all England, Ireland, and Scotland." But
whatever may have been the ties of passion or guilt which united them,
Mary was now powerless in Bothwell's hands. While Murray withdrew to
France on pretext of travel, the young Earl used the plot against
Darnley into which he had drawn the lords to force from them a
declaration that he was guiltless of the murder and their consent to his
marriage with the Queen. He boasted that he would marry Mary, whether
she would or no. Every str