The three commissioners named by Elizabeth to sit as judges in the great cause between Mary and her subjects, of which she had been named the umpire, were the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Sussex, and sir Ralph Sadler, a very able negotiator and man of business. On the part of the Scottish nation, the regent Murray, fearing to trust the cause in other hands, appeared in person, attended by several men of talent and consequence. The situation of Mary herself was not more critical or more unprecedented, and scarcely more humiliating, than that in which Murray was placed by her appeal to Elizabeth. Acting on behalf of the infant king his nephew, he saw himself called upon to submit to the tribunal of a foreign sovereign such proofs of the atrocious guilt of the queen his sister, as should justify in the eyes of this sovereign, and in those of Europe, the degradation of Mary from the exalted station which she was born to fill, her imprisonment, her violent expulsion from the kingdom, and her future banishment or captivity for life:—an attempt in which, though successful, there was both disgrace to himself and detriment to the honor and independence of his country; and from which, if unsuccessful, he could contemplate nothing but certain ruin. Struck with all the evils of this dilemma; with the danger of provoking beyond forgiveness his own queen, whose restoration he still regarded as no improbable event, and with the imprudence of relying implicitly on the dubious protection of Elizabeth, Murray long hesitated to bring forward the only charge dreaded by the illustrious prisoner,—that of having conspired with Bothwell the murder of her husband.