as fairly to drive Elizabeth from all her artifices and excuses, and to the plain avowal that she would not grant that which Mary most wanted-the recognition by Elizabeth of Mary's right to the succession. Convinced by this, as by many other instances, of Elizabeth's subtlety and insincerity, and of her settled purpose to disallow, if possible, her claim to the English throne on its next vacancy, Mary took her own measures and married, in spite of all opposition from her subjects and from others, her cousin Lord Henry Darnley

"This marriage (says Mr. Mignet) put an end to the cordial union of the two queens, which for four years had been based upon reciprocal hopes which, in both cases, had been deceived. Elizabeth had urged the ratification of the treaty of Edinburgh, but had failed to induce Mary to comply with her wish; and Mary had claimed the recognition of her right to the succession of England, but had not been able to obtain it from Elizabeth. With the animosity which thus arose between the two queens, hostilities between the two kingdoms could not fail to recommence."

The faults, we must confess, were not on Mary's side: they must all be attributed to Elizabeth. This crafty, proud, mistrustful, and imperious princess endeavoured to guide Mary without satisfying her requirements, and to isolate her from every one else without binding her strongly to herself. She was desirous that the Queen should not marry either a continental prince, who would have rendered her too powerful; or an English subject, who would have gained for her the succession to the throne of England; or a member of the royal houses of Tudor and Stuart, who would have prepared the way for the union of the two crowns: so she opposed Don Carlos, rejected the Archduke Charles, refused Leicester, and would have denied Darnley. She might have married her to any one she pleased if she had consented to appoint her her heir: by not doing so, she condemned herself to a policy of vigilance, intrigue, rivalry, treachery, and conflict. To be incessantly framing plots in Scotland and frequently foiling them in England-to foment civil war in the kingdom of her neighbour and repress or prevent it in her own dominions-such was the course which she was forced to pursue from 1565 to 1587—a period of more than twenty years.

On the other hand, Mary Stuart beheld the course of her mournful destiny-which had been temporarily suspendedrenewed by this reasonable but fatal marriage. She was compelled to break with her brother, the ambitious Earl of Murray, who had been her prudent counsellor ever since her return from France and had secured for her the internal tranquillity of her

kingdom, peace with England, the obedience of her turbulent nobility, and the confidence, or at least, the submission, of the Presbyterian party. She was about to return to her old inclinations to resume her connection with her uncles of the house of Guise-to come to an understanding with the King of Spain and the Sovereign Pontiff-to favour the Catholics, to alarm the Protestants, to alienate the English-and finally, be wrecked upon the quicksands of her authority and reputation.

A civil war between Mary and her brother Murray was the immediate consequence of this marriage; but Mary was quite at home at the head of an army, and with the ten or twelve thousand feudatory troops she collected she very soon cleared the kingdom of her opponents. All in the realm, indeed, bowed before her: out of twenty-one earls and twenty-eight barons, there were only five earls and three barons hostile to her, and they were now fugitives. Considering herself sure, therefore, of Scotland-feeling that she was supported by a powerful party in England-and believing that she had the countenance of the Catholic powers of the continent-she hoped to make Elizabeth herself repent that she had not recognized her as her heir and that she had encouraged her subjects to revolt. She even allowed her intentions to creep out in her conversation. Some noblemen of her retinue having represented to her that she would fatigue herself by so much riding, and by following her army during the inclement weather, she replied "That she would never cease to continue in such fatigues until she had led them to London." She now assumed a haughty tone in her communications with Elizabeth, and no longer hesitated to make known her predilections and her projects. Under the guidance of David Riccio, she began to prepare for the restoration of the ancient faith. She summoned the Catholics around her, placed them in offices of trust, solicited assistance from the Pope and the chief Roman Catholic powers, and avowed to them her intention to spare neither life nor estate to restore and maintain the Romish faith in the land. Confidently believing that her power was consolidated, and that she might gratify her vengeance by crushing utterly her late domestic adversaries, she determined, by an Act of Parliament, to procure the condemnation of Murray, Argyle, and the other lords, as traitors; and Riccio, who was in the pay of the Pope and was the principal agent of the Catholic party, strongly advised the Queen to act implacably towards the exiles and to plunge into the perilous path of a religious restoration. "This Riccio managed Mary's affairs (says the Tuscan Ambassador) with so much prudence as her private secretary, and brought them to so satisfactory a

conclusion, that he was greatly beloved by her Majesty." It was he who had advised and effected her marriage with Darnley: it was he whose views, in conformity with Mary's opinions, tended to draw closer the connection between the Queen of Scotland, the Pope, and the King of Spain; and thus to separate her from England and to effect a rupture with the Protestant party; but the state he assumed, the extreme favour with which he was treated, the relation in which he stood to the Queen, and the ascendancy which he had acquired over her, were very injurious to Mary's reputation. Darnley, after having for some time displayed considerable friendship for Riccio, at length quarrelled mortally with him, and very speedily a powerful conspiracy of the chief nobles of the land was organized under Darnley's authority to murder Riccio and to imprison the Queen. Darnley himself, within six months after his marriage, was thoroughly loathed by the Queen: he had perfectly disgusted her by his habit of drinking, his surly and imperious temper, his heartlessness, his vanity, and selfishness; and she avoided to the utmost his company and conversation. He attributed the utter loss of her affections to the influence which Riccio exercised over her; and jealousy and hatred and mortified pride alike urged him to murder the man who had deprived him, as he thought, of the Queen's affections. As his own marriage, however, had plunged Scotland into an exterminating civil war, so the assassination of Riccio filled it with conspiracies and murders; and the history of Scotland, for several subsequent years, presents a sad and unvarying scene of treason, violence, and intrigue. All persons took their part in these proceedings. Darnley, the Queen, the three Regents, were all mixed up with them at different periods and to a greater or less extent; and assassination, imprisonment, or the scaffold, was the lot of all.

The murder of Riccio, accompanied as it was with the greatest insults and indignities to herself, Mary determined to avenge upon all concerned in it; and she laid her plans with such patient artifice, and with such fierce and well-dissembled hatred, that very soon she was in a condition to gratify her resentment to the utmost. All the principal conspirators fled from before her anger and her vengence, and those of lesser note whom she could secure she put to death; and, when she was fully aware of the part that Darnley had taken in these plots and outrages, she regarded him with undissembled disgusthated and despised him-accounting him an ungrateful husband, a perfidious conspirator, and a cowardly liar; and, condemning him to a life of isolation in the midst of her court, he went up

and down all alone (says Melvil), few daring to bear him company.

But there were other causes than his own ill conduct which contributed to confirm and increase Mary's repugnance to her husband. She had become passionately attached to one of the most daring, ambitious, dangerous, and unprincipled men in all Scotland-one also of the wealthiest, and who, by his marriage, had united one of the most powerful families of the south of Scotland with the most influential family of the north. This was Earl Bothwell, who had become, by Mary's rapidly increasing passion for him, the sole director of his Sovereign's will, and who arranged everything according to his own pleasure in her court.

That Darnley should be offended at all this was natural; nor, well-known as was Bothwell's character for reckless daring, was it to be wondered at that he should consider even his life in danger and should take measures for retiring at once to the continent. He was, however, in himself, from his vacillation and his weakness, incapable of any such decision in action as would have placed him beyond the power of his formidable rival; and he, therefore, loitered about while a plot was formed against him of as atrocious a character as any that history, ancient or modern, has ever made known to us.

Some of the members of Mary's privy council seeing but too clearly her loathing of her husband, and her partiality to Bothwell, submitted to her a plan for separating her from Darnley by a divorce; or by making her Majesty, as they said, quit of him without prejudice to the son she had lately borne to him; and they swore among themselves, by a bond written and signed, that they would cut off the King as a young fool and tyrant, and would defend the deed as a measure of State. About a month after this, that infant son was baptized with much pomp, according to the Romish ritual, by the Archbishop of St. Andrew's in Stirling Castle, where Darnley was then residing; but the father was not allowed by Bothwell to be present at the baptism of his own son, and Darnley, being alike irritated and alarmed, fled from the court to his father's residence at Glasgow. There he presently fell ill with the small-pox: at the same time, Mary's animosity increasing against him, she accused him of conspiring against her life, and, on the 20th of January, wrote a letter still extant to the Archbishop of Glasgow, accusing him of bad practices and of conspiracy. Nevertheless, on the very next day she set out for Glasgow, and lavished upon him every mark of the strongest affection, and persuaded him, through her blandishments and professions of attachment, to

travel with her in a litter to the too celebrated Kirk of Field. There, as is well known, he was very shortly afterwards most blunderingly and barbarously murdered. Much of Mary's almost daily correspondence with Bothwell at that period is preserved, and it leaves not a doubt of Mary's full complicity in that horrid business and her entire assent to it. Her numerous letters, which are given in these volumes, we can only allude to; but they are decisive as to her guilty knowledge of the whole transaction, and of her own consciousness of the perfidious part she was playing at Bothwell's instigation :—

"You constrain me (she says in one of her letters to Bothwell) so to dissimulate that I am horrified, seeing that you do not merely force me to play the part of a traitress. I pray you remember that, if desire to please you did not force me, I would rather die than commit these things; for my heart bleeds to do them. But to obey you, my dear love, I spare neither honour, conscience, hazard, nor greatness whatsoever: therefore, give no credit to anything you hear against the most faithful lover you ever had or ever shall have, and see not her (his wife, Lady Jane Gordon) whose feigned tears should not be so much praised nor esteemed as the true and faithful travails which I sustain for to merit her place, for the obtaining of the which against my natural disposition I betray them that may hinder me."

No wonder that with these thoughts and feelings she could conclude her letter with the almost despairing exclamation— "God forgive me!"

Notwithstanding all Mary's affectionate behaviour to Darnley he had his misgivings "I have fears enough (he said), but may God judge between us! I have only her promise to trust to, but I have put myself in her hand and shall go with her, though she should murder me." As all the details of the murder are given in these pages from the subsequent confession of the guilty subordinates, we need not refer to them to prove by whose hands and by whose connivance it was accomplished: it was avenged, fully and summarily at last, upon all concerned in itupon Mary herself as upon her reckless paramour and all his associates.

Mary, indeed, showed the most perfect indifference to Darnley's murder, and refused to make any real enquiry after the authors of it. Every man and woman in Edinburgh could have told her that Earl Bothwell was charged with it, and was in their opinion guilty of it, and that she was, moreover, an accomplice in it; and so agitated was the city that she removed from it to Seton Castle, accompanied by Bothwell and his accomplices, and there occupied herself in gay amusements. Darnley's father, the Earl of Lennox, was not, however, disposed to be so quiescent in the business; and he so strongly and perseveringly applied