He had just been taken down with the small-pox at Glasgow, and the conspirators, well knowing Mary's forgiving temper, feared, as well they might, that his illness would lead to a reconciliation between them.
Although Bothwell had shared less in the bounty of the queen than the others, his motive was no less powerful for seeking the death of Darnley. He aspired to Darnley's place as the queen's husband, and his ambition was no secret to Murray and the others. Full willingly they lent themselves to aid him, knowing that, if successful, his plans would be fatal both to the queen and to himself.
Queen Mary went from Edinburgh to Glasgow, to visit Darnley on his sick-bed. On this visit hinges a mass of accusations against Mary by her enemies. We regret that the passages of Mr. Hosack's book in which he dissects and analyzes all the evidence covering the period from the journey to Glasgow down to the explosion at Kirk-a-field are too long to be copied here. They are masterly, and more thoroughly dispose of the slanders than any statement we have seen. He moreover demonstrates that the queen's journey to Glasgow, heretofore relied on as a proof of her duplicity because she went uninvited, was undertaken at Darnley's own urgent request. It is during this visit to Glasgow that Mary is charged with having written the two casket letters, which, if genuine, certainly would prove her to be accessory to the murder of her husband. With thorough knowledge of Scotch localities, language, customs, and peculiarities, and with a perfect mastery of all the details of testimony, pro and con, in existence on the subject—a mastery which Mr. Froude is far from possessing—Mr. Hosack makes the examination of this question of the genuineness of the Glasgow letters with an application of the laws of evidence that enables him—if we may be permitted the homely phrase—to turn them inside out. Contrasted with the sweet, trusting, child-like confidence with which the letters are received by Mr. Froude, Mr. Hosack's treatment of them is shockingly cool. In commenting upon Hume's opinion that the style of the second Glasgow letter was inelegant but "natural," Mr. Hosack remarks that human depravity surely has its limits, and the most hardened wretches do not boast, and least of all in writing, of their treachery and cruelty. Even in the realm of fiction we find no such revolting picture.
Of the third letter, the historian Robertson long since remarked that, "if Mary's adversaries forged her letters, they were certainly employed very idly when they produced this." And this remark may correctly be applied to the fourth letter. The difference between the two first and the two last is the most striking. The Glasgow letters breathe only lust and murder; but these are written, to all appearance, by a wife to her husband, in very modest and becoming language. She gently reproaches him with his forgetfulness, and with the coldness of his writings, sends him a gift in testimony of her unchangeable affection, and finally describes herself as his obedient, lawful wife. This is not the language of a murderess, and these simple and tender thoughts were not traced by the same hand that composed the Glasgow letters. They are the genuine letters of Mary, not to Bothwell, but to her husband Darnley, and they are here by result of an ingenious device to mix up a few genuine letters of Mary with those intended to prove her guilty of the murder. The only letters of importance as testimony against the queen are the two first, and they were conclusively proven by Goodall, more than a century ago, to have been written originally in Scotch.
Concerning Paris, whose testimony is strongly relied on by Mary's enemies, Mr. Hosack has made a very important discovery. According to a letter of Murray to Queen Elizabeth, Paris arrived in Leith (a prisoner) about the middle of June, 1569. But Professor Schiern, of Copenhagen, in compliance with a request made by Mr. Hosack to search the Danish archives for any papers relating to Scotland, found the receipt of Clark, Murray's agent, acknowledging the delivery to him of the prisoner Paris on the 30th of October, 1568. So that Paris was delivered up nearly a year before his so-called deposition was produced. The authenticity of his deposition, monstrous though it be, has been stoutly maintained by several of Mary's enemies. Even Hume remarks upon it,
"It is in vain at present to seek improbabilities in Nicolas Hubert's dying confession, and to magnify the smallest difficulty into a contradiction. It was certainly a regular judicial paper, given in regularly and judicially, and ought to have been canvassed at the time, if the persons whom it concerned had been assured of their own innocence."
Mr. Hume is an attractive writer, but as a historian it is long since people ceased to rely upon him for facts. The passage here quoted is a characteristic exemplification of his extraordinary carelessness. According to Mr. Hosack, the short sentence cited contains three distinct and palpable mistakes. In the first place, the paper containing the depositions of Paris was authenticated by no judicial authority. Secondly, it was not given in regularly and judicially; for it was secretly sent to London in October, 1569, many months after the termination of the Westminster conferences. Lastly, it was impossible that it could have been canvassed at the time by those whom it concerned; for it was not only kept a profound secret from the queen and her friends during her life, but it was not made public for nearly a century and a half after her death. The depositions of Paris were first given to the world in the collections of Anderson in 1725.
It did not at all suit Murray's purpose to produce Paris in open court. So, after being tortured, he was executed, and in place of a witness who might have told what he saw and heard, was produced a so-called deposition professedly written by a servant of Murray, and attested by two of his creatures, Buchanan and Wood, both pensioners of Cecil, and both enemies of the Queen of Scotland. Buchanan, of course, had full cognizance of the Paris deposition, for he subscribed it as a witness; and yet we have the singular fact that, although he appended to his Detectio the depositions of Hay, Hepburn, and Dalgleish, that of Paris is omitted. Again, in his History of Scotland, published subsequently, although he refers to Paris in several passages, he is still silent as to his deposition. The solution of this seeming singularity is simple. He rejected it for its manifest extravagance and absurdity, which, he wisely concluded, could not impose on the worst enemies of the queen.
Fable and fiction answering Mr. Froude's purpose just as well as authentic history, he of course accepts the "Paris" paper as perfectly true. A successful writer of the romance of history, Mr. Froude deserves great credit for his industry in gathering every variety of material for his novel without any absurd sentimental squeamishness as to its origin.
And now, little by little, the truth begins to come out. For full two years after the murder of Darnley, no one was publicly charged with the crime but Bothwell and the queen. And this because it was the interest of the ruling faction in Scotland, (themselves the murderers,) to confine the accusation to these two persons. But as in time events develop, we find the leaders of this faction, quarrelling among themselves, begin to accuse each other of the crime, until the principal nobility of Scotland are implicated in it. Mr. Hosack's conclusion, from a searching analysis of all the evidence on record, is, that the mysterious assassination of Darnley was not a domestic but a political crime; and it was one which for many a day secured political power to that faction which from the first had opposed his marriage, and had never ceased from the time of his arrival in Scotland to lay plots for his destruction.