outlawed exile in France. He had been accused in 1562 of a
plot to seize the queen and put her into the keeping of the earl of
Arran, whose pretensions to her hand ended only when his
insanity could no longer be concealed. Another new adherent
was the son of the late earl of Huntly, to whom the forfeited
honours of his house were restored a few months before the
marriage of his sister to Bothwell. The queen now appealed to
France for aid; but Castelnau, the French ambassador, replied
to her passionate pleading by sober and earnest advice to make
peace with the malcontents. This counsel was rejected, and in
October 1565 the queen marched an army of 18,000 men against
them from Edinburgh; their forces dispersed in face of superior
numbers, and Murray, on seeking shelter in England, was
received with contumely by Elizabeth, whose half-hearted help
had failed to support his enterprise, and whose intercession for
his return found at first no favour with the queen of Scots. But
the conduct of the besotted boy on whom at their marriage she
had bestowed the title of king began at once to justify the enterprise
and to play into the hands of all his enemies alike. His
father set him on to demand the crown matrimonial, which
would at least have assured to him the rank and station of independent
royalty for life. Rizzio, hitherto his friend and advocate,
induced the queen to reply by a reasonable refusal to this
hazardous and audacious request. Darnley at once threw himself
into the arms of the party opposed to the policy of the queen
and her secretary—a policy which at that moment was doubly
and trebly calculated to exasperate the fears of the religious and
the pride of the patriotic. Mary was invited if not induced by
the king of Spain to join his league for the suppression of Protestantism;
while the actual or prospective endowment of Rizzio
with Morton’s office of chancellor, and the projected attainder of
Murray and his allies, combined to inflame at once the anger and
the apprehension of the Protestant nobles. According to one
account, Darnley privately assured his uncle George Douglas of
his wife’s infidelity; he had himself, if he might be believed,
discovered the secretary in the queen’s apartment at midnight,
under circumstances yet more unequivocally compromising than
those which had brought Chastelard to the scaffold. Another
version of the pitiful history represents Douglas as infusing
suspicion of Rizzio into the empty mind of his nephew, and thus
winning his consent to a deed already designed by others. A
bond was drawn in which Darnley pledged himself to support
the confederates who undertook to punish “certain privy
persons” offensive to the state, “especially a strange Italian,
called Davie”; another was subscribed by Darnley and the
banished lords, then biding their time in Newcastle, which
engaged him to procure their pardon and restoration, while
pledging them to insure to him the enjoyment of the title he
coveted, with the consequent security of an undisputed succession
to the crown, despite the counter claims of the house of
Hamilton, in case his wife should die without issue—a result
which, intentionally or not, he and his fellow-conspirators did
all that brutality could have suggested to accelerate and secure.
On the 9th of March the palace of Holyrood was invested by a
troop under the command of Morton, while Rizzio was dragged
by force out of the queen’s presence and slain without trial in
the heat of the moment. The parliament was discharged by
proclamation issued in the name of Darnley as king; and in the
evening of the next day the banished lords, whom it was to have
condemned to outlawry, returned to Edinburgh. On the day
following they were graciously received by the queen, who undertook
to sign a bond for their security, but delayed the subscription
till next morning under plea of sickness. During the night
she escaped with Darnley, whom she had already seduced from
the party of his accomplices, and arrived at Dunbar on the third
morning after the slaughter of her favourite. From thence they
returned to Edinburgh on the 28th of March, guarded by two
thousand horsemen under the command of Bothwell, who had
escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder, to raise a
force on the queen’s behalf with his usual soldierly promptitude.
The slayers of Rizzio fled to England, and were outlawed;
Darnley was permitted to protest his innocence and denounce
his accomplices; after which he became the scorn of all parties
alike, and few men dared or cared to be seen in his company.
On the 19th of June a son was born to his wife, and in the
face of his previous protestations he was induced to acknowledge
himself the father. But, as Murray and his partisans
returned to favour and influence no longer incompatible with
that of Bothwell and Huntly, he grew desperate enough with
terror to dream of escape to France. This design was at once
frustrated by the queen’s resolution. She summoned him to
declare his reasons for it in presence of the French ambassador
and an assembly of the nobles; she besought him for God’s sake
to speak out, and not spare her; and at last he left her presence
with an avowal that he had nothing to allege. The favour
shown to Bothwell had not yet given occasion for scandal,
though his character as an adventurous libertine was as notable
as his reputation for military hardihood; but as the summer
advanced his insolence increased with his influence at court and
the general aversion of his rivals. He was richly endowed by
Mary from the greater and lesser spoils of the Church; and the
three wardenships of the border, united for the first time in his
person, gave the lord high admiral of Scotland a position of
unequalled power. In the gallant discharge of its duties he
was dangerously wounded by a leading outlaw, whom he slew
in single combat; and while yet confined to Hermitage Castle
he received a visit of two hours from the queen, who rode thither
from Jedburgh and back through 20 miles of the wild borderland
where her person was in perpetual danger from the freebooters
whom her father’s policy had striven and had failed to extirpate.
The result of this daring ride was a ten days’ fever, after which
she removed by short stages to Craigmillar, where a proposal
for her divorce from Darnley was laid before her by Bothwell,
Murray, Huntly, Argyle and Lethington, who was chosen spokesman
for the rest. She assented on condition that the divorce
could be lawfully effected without impeachment of her son’s
legitimacy; whereupon Lethington undertook in the name of all
present that she should be rid of her husband without any prejudice
to the child—at whose baptism a few days afterwards
Bothwell took the place of the putative father, though Darnley
was actually residing under the same roof, and it was not till
after the ceremony that he was suddenly struck down by a
sickness so violent as to excite suspicions of poison. He was
removed to Glasgow, and left for the time in charge of his father;
but on the news of his progress towards recovery a bond was
drawn up for execution of the sentence of death which had
secretly been pronounced against the twice-turned traitor who
had earned his doom at all hands alike. On the 22nd of the next
month (Jan. 1567) the queen visited her husband at Glasgow and
proposed to remove him to Craigmillar Castle, where he would
have the benefit of medicinal baths; but instead of this resort
he was conveyed on the last day of the month to the lonely and
squalid shelter of the residence which was soon to be made
memorable by his murder. Between the ruins of two sacred
buildings, with the town-wall to the south and a suburban
hamlet known to ill fame as the Thieves’ Row to the north of it,
a lodging was prepared for the titular king of Scotland, and fitted
up with tapestries taken from the Gordons after the battle of
Corrichie. On the evening of Sunday, the 9th of February, Mary
took her last leave of the miserable boy who had so often and so
mortally outraged her as consort and as queen. That night the
whole city was shaken out of sleep by an explosion of gunpowder
which shattered to fragments the building in which he should
have slept and perished; and the next morning the bodies of Darnley
and a page were found strangled in a garden adjoining it, whither
they had apparently escaped over a wall, to be despatched by the
hands of Bothwell s attendant confederates.
Upon a view which may be taken of Mary’s conduct during the next three months depends the whole debateable question of her character. According to the professed champions of that character, this conduct was a tissue of such dastardly imbecility, such heartless irresolution and such brainless inconsistency as for ever to dispose of her time-honoured claim to the credit of intelligence and courage. It is certain that just three months
