In due time after the coronation, the various embassadors and delegates returned to their respective courts, carrying back glowing accounts of the ceremonies and festivities attendant upon the christening, and of the grace, and beauty, and loveliness of the queen.
Bothwell and Murray.
Mary's visit to Bothwell.
Its probable motive.
In the mean time, Bothwell and Murray were competitors for the confidence and regard of the queen, and it began to seem probable that Bothwell would win the day. Mary, in one of her excursions, was traveling in the southern part of the country, when she heard that he had been wounded in an encounter with a party of desperadoes near the border. Moved partly, perhaps, by compassion, and partly by gratitude for his services, Mary made an expedition across the country to pay him a visit. Some say that she was animated by a more powerful motive than either of these. In fact this, as well as almost all the other acts of Mary's life, are presented in very different lights by her friends and her enemies. The former say that this visit to her lieutenant in his confinement from a wound received in her service was perfectly proper, both in the design itself, and in all the circumstances of its execution. The latter represent it as an instance of highly indecorous eagerness on the part of a married lady to express to another man a sympathy and kind regard which she had ceased to feel for her husband.
Bothwell himself was married as well as Mary. He had been married but a few months to a beautiful lady a few years younger than the queen. The question, however, whether Mary did right or wrong in paying this visit to him, is not, after all, a very important one. There is no doubt that she and Bothwell loved each other before they ought to have done so, and it is of comparatively little consequence when the attachment began. The end of it is certain. Bothwell resolved to kill Darnley, to get divorced from his own wife, and to marry the queen. The world has never yet settled the question whether she was herself his accomplice or not in the measures he adopted for effecting these plans, or whether she only submitted to the result when Bothwell, by his own unaided efforts, reached it. Each reader must judge of this question for himself from the facts about to be narrated.
Plot for Darnley's destruction.
Bothwell's intrigues.
Bothwell first communicated with the nobles about the court, to get their consent and approbation to the destruction of the king. They all appeared to be very willing to have the thing done, but were a little cautious about involving themselves in the responsibility of doing it. Darnley was thoroughly hated, despised, and shunned by them all. Still they were afraid of the consequences of taking his life. One of them, Morton, asked Bothwell what the queen would think of the plan. Bothwell said that the queen approved of it. Morton replied, that if Bothwell would show him an expression of the queen's approval of the plot, in her own hand-writing, he would join it, otherwise not. Bothwell failed to furnish this evidence, saying that the queen was really privy to, and in favor of the plan, but that it was not to be expected that she would commit herself to it in writing. Was this all true, or was the pretense only a desperate measure of Bothwell's to induce Morton to join him?
Desperate schemes attributed to Darnley.
His illness.
Mary's visit.
Most of the leading men about the court, however, either joined the plot, or so far gave it their countenance and encouragement as to induce Bothwell to proceed. There were many and strange rumors about Darnley. One was, that he was actually going to leave the country, and that a ship was ready for him in the Clyde. Another was, that he had a plan for seizing the young prince, dethroning Mary, and reigning himself in her stead, in the prince's name. Other strange and desperate schemes were attributed to him. In the midst of them, news came to Mary at Holyrood that he was taken suddenly and dangerously sick at Glasgow, where he was then residing, and she immediately went to see him. Was her motive a desire to make one more attempt to win his confidence and love, and to divert him from the desperate measures which she feared he was contemplating, or was she acting as an accomplice with Bothwell, to draw him into the snare in which he was afterward taken and destroyed?
Return to Edinburgh.