Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/215

I570-] THE RISING OF THE NORTH. 201 made his few arrangements. He commended the King to Sempell and Mar, and ' without speaking a reproach- ful word of any man/ died a little before midnight. Many a political atrocity has disgraced the history of the British nation. It is a question whether among them all there can be found any which was more use- less to its projectors or more mischievous in its immedi- ate consequences. It did not bring back Mary Stuart. It did not open a road to the throne to the Hamiltons, or turn back the tide of the Reformation. It flung only a deeper tint of ignominy on his sister and her friends, and it gave over Scotland to three years of misery. With a perversity scarcely less than the folly which destroyed his life, his memory has been sacrificed to sentimentalism ; and those who can see only in the Protestant religion an uprising of Antichrist, and in the Queen of Scots the beautiful victim of sectarian iniquity, have exhausted upon Murray the resources of eloquent vituperation, and have described him as a per- fidious brother building up his own fortunes on the wrongs of his injured Sovereign. In the eyes of theo- logians, or in the eyes of historians who take their in- spiration from theological systems, the saint changes into the devil and the devil into the saint, as the point of view is shifted from one creed to another. But facts prevail at last, however passionate the predilection ; and when the verdict of plain human sense can get itself pronounced, the ' good Regent ' will take his place among the best and greatest men who have ever lived.