In a flash the queen perceives a plot, and turning to her wretched husband demands if he knows anything of this enterprise. The ready lie comes to his lips, and he says that he knows nothing of it. “Go,” cries the queen to Ruthven, and points to the door. But he moves not, and bids the accomplice who has disowned him, “Take the queen, your wife and sovereign, to you.” But the royal dastard stands dazed, and wists not what to do; while the Italian, with his drawn dagger in his trembling hand, clings to the queen’s gown, crying, “Save me! save me!” Now one of the guests strives to seize Ruthven, who draws his sword and cries fiercely, “Lay no hands on me, for I will not be handled!” Then the chamber is filled with armed men, the table and chairs are overthrown, the lights are extinguished save one, and a wild rush is made for the victim. Ruthven flings the queen into the arms of her husband, and the shrieking Italian is dragged from the room with curses and threats and blows. You hear his screams grow fainter and fainter, as his foes plunge their daggers into him. Now all is silent, and the queen’s favourite lies dead with fifty-six wounds in his body. Her husband’s dagger is sticking in the breast of the corpse in testimony of his consent to the deed! The ghastly scene which you have just witnessed serves to introduce the moving tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots. She was born in the hour of calamity, and conflict, contention, sorrow, and disaster dogged her footsteps from the cradle to the grave. Her heart-broken father, James the Fifth, had turned his face to the wall when her birth was announced. Ere she was christened he was dead, and Scotland was torn with the strife of contending factions. Scotland’s weakness was England’s opportunity, and Henry the Eighth lost no time in proposing his delicate little son, afterwards Edward the Fifth, for the hand of the five-year-old queen. The Scots refused the match, and an English army marched north and sacked Leith and Edinburgh. The invasion was “too much for a wooing and too little for a conquest.” Four years later an English army again made an attempt to compel the Scots to marry their queen to young Edward. At Pinkie there was a great slaughter, but it was all in vain. The little queen was hurried to France, where she grew up with her four Maries at the gay court of King Henry the Second, and became far more French than Scottish. As she advanced in years, her grace and beauty, her _esprit_ and her accomplishments, were the talk of France, and at sixteen she wedded the Dauphin, a sickly weakling, who only survived his marriage a little more than a year. At the age of nineteen Mary was a widow, about to set sail for her northern kingdom.