detained by Murray in Scotland: Westmorland made his way to Spain. Sussex received and carried out orders to punish with a heavy hand those who had taken part in the rebellion; and so without any great difficulty the one serious revolt of the reign was stamped out. [Sidenote: 1570 Murder of Murray] The year 1570 had hardly opened when Elizabeth lost one of her most valuable allies by the murder of the Regent Murray, assassinated by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Murray's figure in history is a sombre one, and the sombreness is thrown into the greater relief by the picturesque brilliancy of his hapless sister. It was his fate to fight on the gloomy side; to stand at the head of a nobility conspicuously sordid and unprincipled, half of whom, when not occupied in plotting against the life of a hereditary foe or a political rival, were posing as representatives of the "godly"--an attitude held to be entirely compatible with a total disregard for the decalogue. Perhaps there is no prominent statesman of his times who came through the heavy ordeal of public life with cleaner hands. There is no fair ground for associating him directly and actively with any of the great crimes in one or another of which almost every one of the Scots lords had a share. When his sister married Darnley, he took up arms against her: he did so again when she married Bothwell: and on both occasions he was probably obeying an elastic conscience. While he was endeavouring to fix the odium of the Darnley murder on Mary, he must have been quite aware that both Lethington and Morton, his allies, were steeped in the guilt of it. But he could neither stand aside from the turmoil, nor pick and choose his associates. The political support or countenance of Elizabeth seemed absolutely necessary to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland. A man of a more generous spirit would more than once have felt that the price was too high, that he was accepting a too ignominious position; he stooped to a course which if not exactly dishonourable was perilously near it. But the part he was forced to play was the hardest and the most thankless imaginable; and he played it with a constant effort to be tolerant, to be as just as circumstances permitted, to be true to himself. He was the one man in Scotland who had striven resolutely amid the kaleidoscopic chaos of factions to maintain some sort of order, some sort of liberty, some sort of standard of public spirit. With his fall, anarchy became more rampant than ever. Elizabeth lamented, not without reason, that she had lost her best friend; but while he lived she had not made his task the easier. [Sidenote: March The Bull of Deposition]