All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant. The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request, from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the Reformation history.