The whole face of affairs was now altered; and Mary, who for some days had suffered so much, was once more Queen of Scotland. "And such a change you should have seen," says Archbishop Spottiswood, "that they who, the night preceding, did vaunt of the fact (Rizzio's murder) as a godly and memorable act, affirming, some truly, some falsely, that they were present thereat,--did, on the morrow, forswear all that before they had affirmed." But it was not in Mary's nature to be cruel, and her resentments were never of long continuance. Two persons only were put to death for their share in Rizzio's slaughter, and these were men of little note. Before the end of the year, most of the principal delinquents, as will be seen in the sequel, were allowed to return to Court. Lord Ruthven, however, died at Newcastle of his old disease, a month or two after his flight thither. His death occasioned little regret, and his name lives in history only as that of a titled murderer.[138] CHAPTER XVII. THE BIRTH OF JAMES VI. Mary's vigorous conduct had again put her in possession of that rightful authority of which so lawless an attempt had been made to deprive her; but though restored to power, she was far from being likewise restored to happiness. The painful conviction was now at length forced upon her, that she had not in all the world one real friend. She felt that the necessities of her situation forced her to associate in her councils men, who were the slaves of ambition, and whose heartless courtesies were offered to her, only until a prospect of higher advantages held out a temptation to transfer them to another. She had not been long in her own kingdom, before Bothwell and others contemplated seizing her person, and assassinating her prime minister, the Earl of Murray;--she had hardly succeeded in frustrating these designs, when Murray himself directed his strength against her; and now, still more recently, the husband, for whose sake she had raised armies to chase her brother from the country, had aimed at making himself independent, and, to ingratiate himself with traitors, had scrupled not to engage in a deed of wanton cruelty, personally insulting to his wife and sovereign.