reach Ulster the activity of Shane had quelled the disaffection of his rivals, the O'Donnells of Donegal, and won over the Scots of Antrim. "Never before," wrote Sussex, "durst Scot or Irishman look Englishman in the face in plain or wood since I came here"; but Shane fired his men with a new courage, and charging the Deputy's army with a force hardly half its number drove it back in rout on Armagh. A promise of pardon induced the Irish chieftain to visit London, and make an illusory submission, but he was no sooner safe home again than its terms were set aside; and after a wearisome struggle, in which Shane foiled the efforts of the Lord Deputy to entrap or to poison him, he remained virtually master of the north. His success stirred larger dreams of ambition. He invaded Connaught, and pressed Clanrickard hard; while he replied to the remonstrances of the Council at Dublin with a bold defiance. "By the sword I have won these lands," he answered, "and by the sword will I keep them." But defiance broke idly against the skill and vigour of Sir Henry Sidney, who succeeded Sussex as Lord Deputy. The rival septs of the north were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English army advanced from the Pale; and in 1567 Shane, defeated by the O'Donnells, took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn to pieces in a drunken squabble by his Scottish entertainers. [Sidenote: Bothwell.] The victory of Sidney marked the turn of the tide which had run so long against Elizabeth. The danger which England dreaded from Mary Stuart, the terror of a Catholic sovereign and a Catholic reaction, reached its height only to pass irretrievably away. At the moment when the Irish revolt was being trampled under foot a terrible event suddenly struck light through the gathering clouds in the north. Mary had used Darnley as a tool to bring about the ruin of his confederates and to further her policy; but from the moment that she discovered his actual complicity in the plot for Rizzio's murder she had loathed and avoided him. Ominous words dropped from her lips. "Unless she were free of him some way," Mary was heard to mutter, "she had no pleasure to live." The lords whom he had drawn into his plot only to desert and betray them hated him with as terrible a hatred, and in their longing for vengeance a new adventurer saw the road to power. Of all the border nobles James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, was the boldest and the most unscrupulous. But, Protestant as he was, he had never swerved from the side of the Crown; he had supported the Regent, and crossed the seas to pledge as firm a support to Mary; and his loyalty and daring alike appealed to the young Queen's heart. Little as he was touched by Mary's passion, it stirred in the Earl dreams of a union with the Queen; and great as were the obstacles to such a union which presented themselves in Mary's marriage and his own, Bothwell was of too desperate a temper to recoil before obstacles such as these.