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 this company,1 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 secretly break of his determination of the having the Queen to Dunbar, which in no respect Huntley would yield unto.”2 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,3 between Coltbridge and the West Port. If he had been ten minutes later she would have escaped him altogether, for she was actually 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 overpowered and disarmed 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

1 Walter Goodall.

2 Letter from Sir William Drury to Cecil-Border Correspondence. Inedited MS., State Paper Office.

Acta Parliamentorum, vol. iii. pp. 5–10.

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 his 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 Foul Briggis, besetting her with a thousand armed men, equipped in manner of war, in the month of April last." 1 The fullest, the most satisfactory and explicit testimony of the forcible nature of the royal victim's abduction follows in these emphatic words: "She suspecting no evil from any of her subjects, and least of all from the Earl of Bothwell, towards 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 his prisoner, for about twelve days." 2

The suburb of Foulbriggs, specified by James Makgill, Clerk-Register to the Regent Moray's first Parliament, as the place where Bothwell perpetrated the treasonable misdemeanour of besetting and barring the passage of his Sovereign Lady Queen Mary into her own metropolis, and capturing her person, being now materially altered by the canal passing through it, and the erection of factories, warehouses, and streets, where all was at that time a desolate open waste, without the walls of Edinburgh, it becomes necessary to explain that the old name of Foulbriggs is now superseded by that of Fountainbridge, so called from the famous old well of pure water, which was destroyed only a few years ago. The name of Foulbriggs was derived from the Foulburn, a fetid stream formed from the off1 Act of Parliament for Bothwell's forfeiture, Dec. 20, 1567, framed by James Makgill, Clerk-Register. First Parl. James VI., in the first year of Moray's regency. 2 Ibid.

scourings of the streets and kennels of Edinburgh, which, descending into the low grounds, rendered them almost impassable after a succession of heavy rains.1 The channel it formed near Dalry was arched over in two or three places for the convenience of passengers on the old Glasgow and Linlithgow road, which Queen Mary was traversing on her way to the West Port, when her evil genius, in the shape of Bothwell, met and prevailed against her. The spot where this encounter, so fatal to her, took place, must have been opposite to the premises now occupied by Mr Johnstone the builder, the site of the old bridge under which the Foulburn, which is now dammed up in a trough to work his saw-mill, formerly flowed into the park of Dalry, which it now enters by a covered channel.

In Rennie's plan for the canal between Glasgow and Edinburgh, dated 1797, the suburb now called Fountainbridge is thus mapped by its original and then familiar name of Foulbriggs

1 This oral evidence of the old inhabitants of Edinburgh is confirmed by

a deed (called in Scotland an instrument of sasine) dated 1711, in which a

VOL. V.

S

A vast amount of falsehood is overthrown by the evidence of 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 window of the Tolbooth, where the Parliament then sat, then from the Mercat Cross and other public places, in the ears of hundreds who might actually have been eyewitnesses of the facts alleged.1

part of the lands of Dalry, or Brandsfield, is described as "bounded by the Queen's highway to Foulbridge and Saughtonhall on the south, by the highroad to Coltbridge on the north, and by the arable lands of Sir Alexander Brand of Brandsfield, on the west." The same deed, enumerating the privileges and pertinents attached to the lands, mentions "the liberty and privilege of the Foulbridge well." This description is repeated in subsequent deeds down to 1734.

1 In the MS. Parliamentary Record, Dec. 20, 1567, opposite to the place where Bothwell is charged with seizing the Queen's person at Foulbriggs, is this note: "So it was neither at Almon Bridge, as Buchanan and his followers tell us, nor at Linlithgow Bridge, as others, but about half a mile from the gates of her own capital only." Cramond Bridge, Linlithgow Bridge, and the bridge over the Almond at Kirkliston, have each been named by historians as the scene of Mary's capture; but the Act of Parliament is the highest possible authority, and supersedes all others.

The following extract from the reply of Joseph Robertson, Esq., Searcher for Literary Purposes in Her Majesty's General Register Office, Edinburgh, to my queries as to the existence of any bridge on the Almond called Foulbriggs, clinches the matter: "We have searched our legal records for any place of the name of Foulbriggs in the county of Linlithgowshire, but find none. No place of that name exists, or ever existed, in that county. Foulbriggs must, therefore, be identified with the district of Edinburgh now called Fountainbridge.'

I must here return my sincere acknowledgments to Her Majesty's Solicitor-General, James Craufurd, Esq., W. Patrick, Esq., W.S., and Joseph Robertson, Esq., for the valuable assistance they have rendered me in verifying this important point, by the communication of excerpts from various old deeds and conveyances descriptive of the situation and connected with property at Foulbriggs, alias Fountainbridge; and last, not least, my thanks must be offered to the Rev. Adam Duncan Tait, the learned minister of Kirkliston parish, for the friendly zeal in the cause of truth which induced him to take the trouble of ascertaining, by personal in

The credibility of the charges against Mary Stuartcharges no less opposed to probability than inconsistent with the whole tenor of her life, and the holy calmness of her death—is grounded by her adversaries on her supposed collusion with Bothwell, when he made public seizure of her person and carried her off to Dunbar, she having, as they pretend, secretly encouraged and incited 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 fully of either foreknowledge or suspicion of the designs of Bothwell.1 "She suspected," declares the Act for his forfeiture, "no evil from any of her subjects, and least of all from him."2 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 convoy her, and to 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

quiries, both from the landed proprietors and peasantry in Linlithgowshire, that no traces, either documentary, historical, or traditionary, existed of there having been any bridge or bridges on the Almond which could be identified with the Foulbriggs specified by the Acta Parliamentorum as the place where Bothwell treasonably beset Queen Mary, laid violent hands on her most noble person, and ied her as his captive to Dunbar. 1 Acta Parliamentorum, Dec. 19-20, 1567.

2 The facts chronicled in the Parliamentary record, which are officially attested by the signature of James Makgill of Rankeillour, the Clerk-Register, demonstrate at once the falsehood of his patron the Earl of Moray's journal, of Buchanan's "Detection" and history of Mary's reign, of the absurd paper published by Moray under the name of French Paris's Second Confession," and the supposititious letters produced by Morton for the defamation of the Queen. These are all refuted by the Act of Parliament, which asserts the treasonable constraint that was put on the Queen's will; and that Act, be it remembered, was framed, and, more than that, proclaimed by the heralds in the ears of the people, six months after the date assigned by Morton to the discovery of the letters which he produced as evidences of a guilty collusion and correspondence between the Queen and Bothwell. The Act of Parliament may be consulted in the Register House, Edinburgh, in the original Latin.