former office of Secretary of State. To avoid, however, the danger of a personal collision between him and her irascible consort, she ventured not to receive him at Stirling Castle, where she and Darnley were at that time holding their court as King and Queen of Scotland, but resorted to the foolish step of granting him a clandestine interview in the house of a person of inferior degree-with what privacy the English Warden's letter to Cecil has shown; and if the news reached Berwick so soon, it would not, of course, be very long in travelling from Willie Bell's house in the High Street of Stirling to Darnley's apartments in the Castle. That no scandals of the Queen were connected with the report sent to Cecil, must be attributed to the fact that Lethington was the confederate of Moray, and a secretservice man of England. It is certain that no incident of so suspicious a nature has ever been recorded in support of her alleged intimacy with Bothwell, who possessed neither the elegance of person nor the insinuating manners of the accomplished Secretary. But Darnley's jealousy was political, not personal; his anger was excited at the little regard the Queen paid to his marital authority in affairs of State, and by his being utterly excluded from any share in the government, while Moray, who had sinned far more deeply against her than he had ever done, had the whole guiding of her councils, and carried every measure in his despite. The dear-bought experience Darnley had acquired of Moray and his faction, during the fatal league he had made with them against his wife and Sovereign, was unavailing to preserve her from falling into the snares they were weaving round her. She could not be induced to believe his warnings; he had not deserved to be believed, and she imputed all he said to petulance, prejudice, and the evil promptings of his father, whose influence had proved fatal to her connubial peace.

"The Secretary," continues our authority,2" is appointed to be at Edinburgh the 11th of this instant with the Queen.

1 Letter from Sir John Forster to Sir W. Cecil, dated Berwick, 8th September 1566. Inedited State Paper MS., Border Correspondence.

2 Ibid.

There shall shortly be a Convention, to appoint them which shall have the government of the Prince. The Queen's coming to Edinburgh at this time is to sit in her Exchequer to understand her whole revenues, and to appoint what shall be for the keeping of her house and the young Prince's house. After the Convention it is thought the Secretary shall come to the Court, if the Parliament hold. The Queen hath her husband in small estimation, and the Earl of Lennox came not in her sight since the death of Davy."1

The faults of the inexperienced Darnley, a petulant youth in his teens, were excusable in comparison with the guilt of his cold-hearted, plotting father, from whom, as Mary pathetically observed, "he ought to have had far different counsel." She had forgiven Lennox for his treason against herself and her realm in her orphaned infancy, restored him to his estates, and loaded him with benefits; and he had in return, because she refused to violate her duty to God and her people by an illegal demission of her regal power to hands unmeet to exercise it, poisoned her consort's mind against her, and persuaded him to league with traitors within her realm, and outlawed rebels without, in the most atrocious of conspiracies against her person and authority, for the purpose of usurping her throne. He had imperilled her life, and that of her unborn babe, his grandson, by urging that the murder of David Riccio should be perpetrated in her presence, and allowed his son to commit himself irrevocably by basely introducing the band of assassins into her bedchamber, to agitate, menace, insult, and capture her. Nor should it be forgotten that he, her father-in-law and uncle, had assisted at a council where her death or life-long imprisonment had been decreed. Who, then, can wonder that she suffered him not to enter her presence again? The only marvel is, that, thus intolerably aggrieved, both as Sovereign and woman, by her own subject, she did not bring him to the block his offences had so richly merited. That Mary allowed Lennox to pass

1 Letter from Sir John Forster to Sir W. Cecil, dated Berwick, 8th September 1566. Inedited State Paper MS., Border Correspondence.

unscathed, and employed no means, either direct or indirect, for vengeance, ought to be regarded as an instance of magnanimity and Christian forbearance rare indeed among princes of the sixteenth century, and perfectly incompatible with the vindictive temper imputed to her by her defamers. "Her whole reign," observes a biographer, who has based his statement on documentary evidence, "was a series of plots and pardons."1 There was not, in fact, one member of the confederacy by which her fall was accomplished, who had not been a recipient of her grace for some previous act of treason. Unfortunately for herself, those whom Mary Stuart pardoned, she was, with too confiding generosity, apt to trust. The most successful of her regal predecessors had found it expedient, in their dealings with the overweening oligarchs who oppressed the people and controlled the Crown, to act on the worldly-wise maxim, "divide and rule;" but Mary, a peace-maker by nature, and a peace Sovereign by principle, desired to govern a realm in which all ranks should be united in love to each other for love of her. At the juncture which claims our present attention, she had taken some pains to effect a pacification between the rival claimants of the rich ecclesiastical domains of Haddington, Bothwell and Lethington, who had been threatening each other's lives for the last four months.2 "The Queen," writes Forster to Cecil," hath made the agreement between the Earl of Bothwell and the Secretary."3 Eager as Lethington was to retain the whole of the abbey lands adjoining his father's estate, he saw the policy of submitting with a good grace to the Queen's arbitration. By resigning a portion of his prey, he removed a previously insuperable obstacle to acting as Bothwell's colleague in the new ministry which Mary was labouring to form, and was reinstated in his former office of Secretary of State. As for his reconciliation with Bothwell, that was conducted, according to the Asmodean principle, with outward pledges of amity and deadlier purposes of

1 Chalmers.

2 Inedited letter from Drury to Cecil, June 20. Border Correspondence -State Paper Office. 2 Inedited, Sept. 19, 1566.

malice. He played his game so finely withal, as to succeed in beguiling Bothwell into becoming the instrument of his vengeance on Darnley, and thus, effecting Bothwell's ruin, remained the undisputed possessor of the abbey lands. The events of the few brief months that intervened between the conception of Lethington's daring plot for ridding himself of his two great adversaries, Darnley and Bothwell, and its consummation, resemble the progressive scenes of a startling tragedy—a tragedy in which the part assigned to the royal heroine was about as voluntary as that of the puppet queen on the mechanist's chess-board, whose springs are directed by the unseen hands of the deep-seeing planner of the game. The only move in which Mary exercised free will was the fatal one of associating the parties who were denounced by her husband as deeply implicated in the late conspiracy against her person and government, with Bothwell, in whose hands was the whole military power of the realm, and who, acting independently of the English faction, had up to that moment proved an effectual bulwark against the ambitious designs of Moray and his confederates. Well might Darnley take alarm when he observed symptoms of a coalition so ominous to the royal house of Stuart. His first impulse had been to provide for his personal safety by securing the means of leaving Scotland; but his father having objected to his doing so, he had made a desperate effort to induce Mary to dismiss from her cabinet, not Bothwell, to whom he never expressed the slightest ill-will, but Moray and his guilty confederates, Lethington, Sir John Bellenden, and Makgill. Unfortunately, his bad temper, venting itself in a sullen disobliging demeanour to Mary, defeated his own purpose, offended her, and irrevocably committed him with those whose presence in her Court he had refused to tolerate. Bitter cause

had Mary to lament her infatuation, when too late, in allowing herself to be deluded by the insidious counsels of her Premier, instead of listening to the warning voice of her husband, who knew their practices and principles too well.

1 Letter of Sir Robert Melville-printed in Keith.

The day after Darnley's angry departure from Holyrood, a general reconciliation took place between Moray, Huntley, Bothwell, and Argyll; and they not only agreed to act officially together as ministerial colleagues, but entered into a secret band of alliance to fortify and support each other in all their undertakings against all opponents.1 The arrangements for the Coalition Cabinet being thus completed, Moray continued to exercise the office of Prime Minister; and, as he had done ever since the Queen "took her chamber" in Edinburgh Castle, before the birth of the Prince, engrossed the principal direction of the civil power of the realm. Bothwell, as the Queen's Lieutenant and hereditary Lord Admiral of Scotland, had the military and naval force, such as it was, under his control. The Earl of Huntley was Lord Chancellor—a dignity previously held and still claimed by the outlawed traitor, Morton, because it was in Scotland a life-long appointment. Moray's brother-in-law, Argyll, was Justice-General; Lethington, Secretary of State; Sir John Bellenden, Justice Clerk; Mr James Makgill, ClerkRegister; and Richardson, another creature of Moray's, the Lord Treasurer. Associated with this junta, as members of the Privy Council, were Darnley's nearest kinsman, the Roman Catholic Earl of Atholl; the profligate Adam Bothwell, Protestant Bishop of Orkney; Alexander Gordon, Protestant Bishop of Galloway; John Leslie the historian, Roman Catholic Bishop of Ross; the Earl of Rothes; Sir John Maxwell of Terregles, lord of Herries ; and one or two others.

As an interlude between the diplomatic toils of settling the claims and contentions of persons heretofore diametrically opposed in creed and party, and inducing them to act with, instead of against, each other, Mary recreated herself with the more feminine amusement of "perusing and sorting over her jewels,"2 and issuing directions for the costume that was to be worn by the noble assistants at the approaching royal solemnity of her baby's christening,

1 Moray's Answer to the Protestation of the Earls of Huntley and Argyll, printed in Keith.

2 Forster to Cecil, Sept. 19-Border Correspondence. State Paper MS.