positive that nothing of the kind took place; for if such a fact could have been established by his evidence, no matter how extorted, it would have corroborated the assertion of the conspirators, that she acted under the influence of a guilty passion for the murderer of her husband. But as the confession of Ormistoun is silent upon that point, having been written down in the presence of the honest minister, Brand, who, though ranked with her foes, was too honourable a man to permit interpolations to be made for the purpose of dishonouring his hapless sovereign, the charge of her complicity with Bothwell rests solely on the unverified assertions of the usurpers of her regal power, the credibility of the eight letters produced by Morton, and the so-called second confession of Nicholas Hubert, alias, French Paris, who is made to confess delivering a letter to Bothwell a day before it could, according to its own showing, have been written; the 24th being plainly indicated by the allusion to the journey from Stirling, yesterday.' [April 23.] It will be necessary to quote this letter.

"My Lord,-Since my letter written, your brother-in-law, [Huntley, that was,] came to me very sad, and has asked me my counsel what he should do to-morrow, because there be many folks here, and among others the Earl of Sutherland, who would rather die, considering the good they have so lately received from me, than suffer me to be carried away, they conducting me; and that he feared there should some trouble happen of it of the other side, and that it should be said that he were unthankful to have betrayed me. I told him he should have resolved with you upon all, and that he should avoid, if he could, them that were most instructed. has resolved to write to you by my advice.'

He

"And here the usual discrepancy of falsehood confutes its own fictions, for the forger goes on to say,

"We had yesterday three hundred horse of his and Livingstone's. For the honour of God be accompanied rather with more than less, for that is my principal care. I go to write my despatch, and pray God to send us a happy interview shortly. I write in haste, to the end you may be advertised in time.'

"Thus we see a letter purporting to be written the day after the Queen had started from Stirling to Linlithgow,-consequently on the 24th of April, the day of her abduction-expresses the greatest uncertainty as to what Bothwell's intentions were, which is incompatible with the assertion in Paris' confession, that Bothwell very early on that morning made him the bearer both of a letter and a message to the Queen, telling her he would meet her the same day on the bridge.' So the letter confutes the confession, and the confession the letter, affording a striking illustration of the old proverb, that 'falsifiers require to have good memories.'

"Instead of being guarded by an escort of three hundred horsemen, as artfully insinuated in the seventh of the supposititious letters, Mary was so slenderly attended on her journey from Lin

lithgow to Edinburgh on the fatal 24th of April, that her train did not exceed twelve persons. Bothwell, who had meantime armed and mounted a thousand of his followers, rode boldly out of the west port of Edinburgh at the head of his company, apparently for the performance of his duty as high sheriff, which required him to meet her majesty at the verge of the county, to receive her with the customary honours due to the sovereign, and conduct her to her palace of Holyrood. His real object was to overpower and capture her in some lonely part of the road. He had, if Sir William Drury's information on the subject be correct, conferred very early that morning with his brother-in-law, Huntley, 'with whom he did directly break of his determination of having the Queen to Dunbar, which in no respect Huntley would yield unto.' It is possible, therefore, that it was in consequence of being warned by Huntley that she was in danger of being ambushed on the road, Mary either started earlier than was anticipated, or pushed forward with such unwonted speed to get into Edinburgh, that Bothwell, instead of surprising her, as he had calculated, in a lonely part of the old Linlithgow road, which then ran in almost a straight line near the sea coast, encountered her and her little train in the suburban hamlet, anciently called Foulbriggs, between Coultbridge and the West Port. If he had been ten minutes later she would have escaped him altogether, for she was within three quarters of a mile of the castle, and almost under the walls of Edinburgh, but near as she was to a place of refuge it was impossible for her to reach it. A thousand horsemen, mailed and equipped with weapons of war, were treasonably interposed between her and the West Port. Resistance to such a force was out of the question. Her attendants were disarmed and overpowered in a moment, and Bothwell dashing forward, seized her bridle-rein, and turning her horse's head, hurried her away with him to Dunbar as his prisoner. It is proper to verify this statement of the real place and manner of Mary Stuart's capture, not merely by a marginal reference to an authority inaccessible to the great body of my readers, but by a quotation of the very words of the act of parliament for the forfeiture of Bothwell and sixty-four of his accomplices, 1 James, VI., which, after reciting the murder of the late King Henry,' proceeds in these words 'And also for their treasonable interception of the most noble person of our most illustrious mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, on her way from Linlithgow to the town of Edinburgh, near the bridges vulgarly called Foulbriggs, besetting her with a thousand men equipped in the manner of war, in the month of April last. The fullest, the most satisfactory, and explicit testimony of the forcible nature of the royal victim's abduction follows in these words: She, suspecting no evil from any of her subjects, and least of all from the Earl Bothwell, to whom she had shown as great offices of liberality and benevolence as prince could show to good subject, he, by force and violence, treasonably seized her

most noble person, put violent hands upon her, not permitting her to enter her own town of Edinburgh in peace, but carried her away that same night to the Castle of Dunbar, against her will, and there detained her as a prisoner for twelve days.'

*

*

"A vast amount of falsehood is overthrown by the parliamentary record defining the when, where, and how Mary's capture was effected by Bothwell. The act was framed within seven months after the offence was perpetrated, and it behoved to be correct, because several persons assisted in that parliament, as Huntley, Lethington, Sir James Melville, and others, who were not only present when the abduction was effected, but were carried away with their royal mistress as prisoners to Dunbar. The statute for Bothwell's forfeiture, reciting the overt treasons he had committed, was, moreover, proclaimed to the people of Edinburgh by the heralds, first from the windows of the Talbooth, where the parliament then sat, then from the Market Cross, and other public places, in the ears of hundreds, who might actually have been eye-witnesses of the facts alleged.

"The credibility of the charges against Mary Stuart, charges no less opposed to probability than inconsistent with the whole tenor of her life, and holy calmness of her death, is grounded by her adversaries on her supposed collusion with Bothwell, when he made public seizure on her person, and carried her off to Dunbar, she having, as they pretend, secretly encouraged and excited him to that measure. But the united voices of the three estates of Scotland assembled in parliament under an influence so hostile to her, as to have robbed her of her crown and personal liberty, acquit her of all foreknowledge or suspicion of the designs of Bothwell. She suspected,' declares the act of his forfeiture, no evil from any of her subjects, and least of all from him.' He was her Prime Minister, her Lord Admiral, Lieutenant of all the borders, and High Sheriff of Edinburgh and the Lothians, whose bounden duty it was to meet and convey her, and defend her in case of danger, with his posse comitatus.' She, therefore, suspected no evil,' and even if she had, resistance was impossible. It seems withal that he was provided with a plausible tale in reply to any remonstrance she might have offered, when he took her by the bridle-rein and turned her horse in a contrary direction to that in which she was proceeding, deceitfully assuring her that she was in imminent danger, and beseeching her to allow him to provide for her personal safety by allowing him to conduct her to one of his castles."

"Without the slightest consideration for the fatigue of his royal victim, who had been suffering so recently from a severe and alarming attack of illness the preceding day, on her journey from Stirling to Linlithgow, Bothwell hurried the captive Queen the same night to Dunbar, a weary distance of twenty miles, she having already ridden from Linlithgow nearly to the gates of Edinburgh. -Vol. v. pp. 269, 276.

It is impossible to disprove much more completely the charge of concert between Mary and Bothwell in her abduction. Every circumstance in the matter shows that although Bothwell's enemies favoured that imputation in the first instance, so as to secure him from interruption in the accomplishment of an enterprise which they knew would work his ruin, along with that of Mary; it was not put forward as a public charge upon the rolls of parliament, where it ought naturally to find its place, but that the very reverse was affirmed, even before it became the duty of James the Sixth, in regard to his mother's memory, to place on record her entire freedom from participation in that outrage. The fact of her marriage following so suddenly, is far indeed, from being decisive of her connivance in the abduction which led to it. Her total seclusion, and that other circumstance which it is enough to notice even thus darkly, which at the very least is incapable of being disproved, and which is reiterated in public documents; go far in explanation, though hardly in excuse, of this worst weakness in her life. What gives the matter a double aspect, rendering it doubtful whether the connection with Bothwell was on that account more criminal or less so, is the fact, very fairly suggested by Miss Strickland, that Mary, knowing the rules of the Church as well as she must have done, did not consider the marriage binding, and that she submitted to the vain ceremony in the hope of disarming the suspicions of Bothwell, and escaping at the earliest opportunity. We regret we are not at liberty to enter into the discussion of her attempted escape from Dunbar, and her recapture by Bothwell, as ill-starred as her original abduction. Few have made allowance for the effect of illness, abandonment, perplexity, and every element of irresolution by which she was encompassed; in producing a state of mind such as to disqualify her for resistance to the threats, violence, and importunity of Bothwell. On the other hand, it was not in Mary's character to shrink from danger, or from submitting her fortunes to the arbitrament of war, as she had shown on more than one occasion; and therefore we are entitled to infer that her final abandonment of Bothwell was not from pure aversion to the shedding of blood, though her nature always recoiled from judicial executions, and to pardon was always more grateful to her than to condemn. These, and many other

arguments, fairly and ingeniously put, we have been obliged to notice thus cursorily, and to omit the greater number altogether. The proper course for the reader will be to consult Miss Strickland's volumes himself. There are some few things to which we might take exception, but they have no regard to the gist of the work. Notwithstanding that Miss Strickland is so generally wellinformed, she falls into droll mistakes with regard to Catholic doctrine and practice, which show that a Protestant, however well-inclined or well-informed-and without wishing to be ungallant we may be permitted to say, a lady in particular-ought not to approach questions of the kind without satisfying herself as to the accuracy of her descriptions. In one instance she speaks of the Roman Communion as "the most corrupt form of the Latin Church," a figure of speech which, though it has no designation proper in Aristotle or elsewhere, is not altogether unlike the similarity between " Cæsar and Pompey, especially Cæsar." Again, she speaks of the dirge, as held by Catholics, essential to salvation; and in another place says the same thing quite as undoubtingly of the last sacraments. Perhaps if she prosecute her enquiries a little further, she will unlearn many of her existing ideas, but as far as we are ourselves concerned we can afford to forgive mistakes of this kind, when the spirit of the work in which they are found is so perfect. We take leave of the book, so far as it has gone, with a very sincere wish that what remains to be accomplished may be not less successful in its execution, and that its popularity may be equal to its deserts. It is not one of the essential properties of truth to be agreeable, and feeling that in proportion as the circumference of Miss Strickland's popularity enlarges itself, some ray of truth will reach a quarter yet unvisited, and some darksome recesses be illuminated, we cannot but wish her increase of strength, courage, and reputation.

VOL. XXXVIII.-NO. LXXV.