Great as were the bodily and mental sufferings which close confinement, disappointed hopes and the ingratitude of men produced, they would have been greatly aggravated, had Mary only known by what a slender thread her life sometimes hung. Elizabeth entered into negotiations with successive Regents, from Moray to Morton, for the delivery of Mary into their hands. The remonstrations of the French and Spanish Ambassadors, who represented that such an action would be equivalent to condemning her to instant death, arrested the progress of the first negotiations till the death of Moray brought them to an abrupt ending. During the regency of Mar, the project was revived and almost realized, the necessary condition that Mary should be quickly put to death having been agreed to by the Regent and Morton. But here the death of another Regent intervened to save the doomed Queen from assassination or judicial murder. On the death of Mar, Morton, who had hitherto been the real, though not the nominal Regent, assumed the reins of government. He had no scruples about executing the will of Elizabeth, but he demanded a higher price for his services than she cared to pay. Morton and Elizabeth were well matched; they both knew the value of money, and were unwilling to close a bargain that would not promise to be a safe business transaction. Morton was, no doubt, confident that he would not be hampered by competition in the work he was undertaking, and that he could exact what wages he pleased for his expert labour. Killegrew, the agent of Elizabeth, understood this, and was anxious that the bargain should be clinched before Morton took it into his mind to demand a greater reward. "I pray God," he wrote; "we prove not herein like those who refused the three volumes of Sibylla’s prophecies, with the price that they were afterwards pleased to give for one; for sure I left the market here better cheap than now I find it." But Elizabeth would not be outwitted--and Mary lived on.