CAMEO I.

Birth of James. 1566.

Scotland to a regency, consisting of Moray, Mar, Bothwell, Huntly, and Athol. She also wrote to the Pope, to see if it were possible to obtain a divorce.

She, however, as a Christian about to be in peril of death, made a reconciliation with her husband, though she did not trust him and would not let him know the contents of her will. She was in friendly correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, who just at this time had a severe attack of small-pox. In one of her letters Mary regrets that she did not know the recipe by which a French physician had preserved her complexion uninjured when she had suffered from the malady. According to a French poet, the illness had been sent by Venus out of dread lest the Queen should surpass her in beauty.

On the 19th of June, 1566, Mary gave birth in Edinburgh Castle to her son, a healthy child, apparently uninjured by all that his mother had undergone before his birth, though it proved afterwards that irreparable injury had befallen his nerves, and the effects followed him through life. Over the infant, on the afternoon after his birth, a few ominous sentences passed between his parents.

"This is the prince," said Mary, "who I hope shall first unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland."

"Why, Madam," said one of her attendants, "shall he succeed before your Majesty and his father?"

"Alas!" said Mary, "his father has broken with me."

"Sweet Madam, is this the promise you made to forgive and forget all?" said Henry.

66 I may forgive, I cannot forget," said Mary. "What if Faudonside's pistol had shot?"

"Madam, all these things are past," said Darnley.

"Then let them go," said the Queen.

Eliza

Sir James Melville carried the tidings to the English Court. beth, now quite recovered from her small-pox, was at Greenwich, and was dancing after supper when Cecil whispered the tidings. She sat down, resting her head on her hand, and when presently her ladies came round her, asking what ailed her, she murmured that "here was the Queen of Scots with a fair son, while she was but a barren stock."

She did not like to think of the Scottish boy as her heir, though she well knew that so he was, and she consented to be his godmother, sending a silver font for his christening.

Mary's bitter feelings against her husband had only been laid aside as a preparation for possible death. She had Giuseppe Rizzio, the brother of David, as her secretary, and through him kept up her secret communications with the Pope, France, and Spain; but for her Scottish affairs of government she trusted her brother Moray more than any man, though her innate spirit of intrigue made her also keep up secret communications with Bothwell, who showed her the gallantry of a devoted lover, so far as his rough, ferocious Border-nature would permit.

Darnley was neglected and distrusted by all. He was very miserable, and wanted to go to France, but was not permitted, as none could guess what stories he might tell. Meantime the Queen set out on a progress to the Borders, which were, as usual, in a state of disturbance.

Bothwell was one of the Border Wardens, and had gone into Liddesdale to set matters to rights. He began with the Armstrongs, and seizing their chief lairds threw them into the dungeons of Hermitage Castle. He then attacked the Elliots, but in a single combat with John Elliot of the Park, was badly wounded. Elliot got away from him, but died before he had ridden far, and Bothwell was left on the ground, bleeding from three wounds. It was reported in England that he was dead, but he was carried safely to Hermitage Castle. Mary was then at Jedburgh, holding a court of justice, in company with Moray and the rest of her council, but as soon as the business was over, she rode off for Hermitage Castle to visit her wounded Warden, over twenty miles of very rough country, in the month of October. It is not clear whether she went with her brother and her council, or whether, as her enemies alleged, she galloped off on the impulse of a woman hearing of the dangerous illness of a man she loves over well.

It was a perilous feat in every way, for the Borderers would have gladly captured such a prize. She had to ride fast over the rugged moors and mosses, and only stayed two hours at the castle, where she found Bothwell recovering. She was really overcome by this forty miles' ride, and had a fever, which lasted ten days and placed her life in danger. Her husband never came near her during her illness, but when she was recovering he arrived and stayed only one night, when there seems to have been more recrimination. Mary moved to Craigmillar. She was no doubt longing to be free from the vicious, ill-mannered, headstrong boy, and Moray was willing to help her to break the knot which he had disapproved from the first. Divorce was thought of, but this might interfere with the rights of the prince, and the grim Scottish lords began to consider of another of their bonds "for the killing of the King." The baptism of the young prince did not take place till the 7th of December, when it was performed with great splendour by the Archbishop of St. Andrew's with two Bishops to support him. It was the last public State ceremony performed by the prelates of the Scottish Church, and the child received the names of James Charles. The Countess of Argyle was proxy for Queen Elizabeth, for which Popish compliance she was made to perform public penance by the ministers.

The father was not present. He had taken some fresh offence, and though actually in Holyrood would not appear, and it was known that he was corresponding privately with Rome and with English Roman Catholics, also to have some wild scheme of carrying off his son and setting up a hostile party.

CAMEO I.

Visit to

Hermitage. 1566.

CAMEO I.

Plot against Darnley. 1566.

After the christening, Moray prevailed with the Queen to pardon and recall Morton. Bothwell had recovered, and came to the court at Craigmillar Castle, and there, under a great yew-tree which is still standing, these three, with Maitland of Lethington, first agreed that Darnley must die. On the tidings of Morton's return, the young man had been so much alarmed as to repair to Glasgow, where his father, the Earl of Lennox, was living. Immediately after his arrival he fell ill of the small-pox, and his enemies hoped that nature would spare them the actual commission of the crime; but he began to recover, and the confederates resolved on his murder.

The mystery.

WE have reached one of the great mysteries of the past, and a subject CAMEO II. of controversy as hotly contested after the lapse of three hundred years as when Mary of Scotland still lived to be Queen of Hearts, and while the French interpreted the anagram of Marie Stuart only too appropriately-Tu te marieras, or, Tu es martire.

One party views her as a Guise, a Papist, and the pupil of Catherine de' Medici, a licentious, faithless woman, who treacherously assisted in destroying her husband to make way for his coarse and brutal rival.

Others resolutely maintain that she was an innocent and faithful woman, hated and maligned for her faith; and, because her subjects feared her good government, slandered beyond all measure, and the victim of the most savage and most complicated plots for murdering her Roman Catholic husband, forcing on her his chief murderer, a Protestant, then throwing the whole blame on her, and thus destroy. ing her.

If these defenders are entirely in the right, the scheme of the traitors was the most extraordinary, long-sighted, and elaborate that ever was successful; and no innocent woman was ever so completely abandoned by Providence. Yet they have refuted so much of the evidence brought against Mary by her enemies that there is much to say in favour of her acquittal of the details of the charge.

While as to the Scottish lords, it is hard to believe that they laid the entire plot from beginning to end, and did not rather drift on step by step with the exigencies of the moment, sometimes working with the Queen, sometimes against her.

CAMEO II.

Question as to Mary's guilt.

As to Mary's being of the Guise blood, there was nothing in that to account for treachery and murder. The Guise family who had bred her up were among the most high-minded and honourable persons in France. The ferocity which stains the name began in the younger generation, provoked by the murder of Duke François, after Mary had left France. Moreover, she was no pupil of Catherine de' Medici, but rather her enemy. Still the Court of France, ever since the death of Anne of Britanny, had become increasingly immoral, and indulged in what was called romantic gallantry, but was really gilded voluptuousness.

The same licentiousness prevailed in Scotland, utterly unvarnished except here and there by pious language in some of the Calvinist nobles. It does not seem possible to clear Mary of a certain amount of gallantry towards Bothwell, who was, at any rate, no deceiver and made no hypocritical pretensions. Of his guilt there is no doubt, nor that he was the tool of longer-headed ruffians, who flattered him on the Queen's preference, and then threw him over.

Leicester had been suspected of sweeping his own wife out of his way to a crown; Bothwell thought it equally possible to clear his path of the impracticable lad who made the Queen's life wretched. All the actors in the tragedy belonged to a nation where scarcely any change of ministry took place without assassination.

Mary's Scottish ancestors had far more murders to answer for than her French ones, and she had every reason to hate and loathe Darnley. Indeed it is quite possible that, as a sovereign, she would have thought she had a right to sanction for the public good a deed which could not be carried out openly.

The Scottish lords had never brooked a governing hand. They viewed their monarch as their slave, and always resented, generally prevented, any effort to keep them within the slightest bounds of order. Moreover, they had all gorged themselves with Church plunder, and they abhorred the notion of restitution. Their preachers avowedly thought the murder of the enemies of their faith justifiable and praiseworthy, so that not even a religious scruple was likely to trouble them in compassing, as they most certainly did, the death of Darnley. Bothwell was the executioner, and the question is-Did the Queen know what was to be done, either in general or minutely?

The conspirators certainly continued to direct the whole force of public indignation upon her, when they found that the deed was not going to be regarded as lightly as such matters had hitherto been treated in Scotland. And thus they went on to blacken her character and fabricate evidence against her in self-defence, until they so entirely overshot the mark as to leave her apparently innocent in the eyes of her ardent supporters.

We can only go on with the story as it can best be unravelled; but as nobody spoke truth, all the evidence was tampered with,