Borthwick. But they were surrounded before they had had time to rest, and it was with the utmost difficulty that, eluding the pursuers, they managed to reach Dunbar. It is said that Mary, had she chosen, might at this time have quitted Bothwell, and my friend asks me to explain why (on the assumption of the Queen's innocence) she did not do so. On June 15 the forces of the Queen and of the Confederate Lords faced each other all day at Carberry Hill. There was no fighting, however; an arrangement being come to by which Bothwell was permitted to return to Dunbar, and Mary gave herself into the hands of those who, by their own account, had risen to release her from her ravisher. They took her back to Edinburgh a banner bearing a picture of the mangled body of Darnley, with the words, Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!' blazoned upon it, being borne in front-and kept her a close prisoner in the Provost's house. It is alleged that during this time she succeeded in conveying a letter or message to Bothwell, and to prevent the possibility of any further intercourse, as well as for greater security, she was conveyed, on the morning of the 17th, to the Castle of Lochleven, near Kinross.

My friend contends that if Mary was not guilty, the languor and facility which she manifested after the murder, and again after the ' ravishment,' are utterly inconsistent with the marvellous ardour and energy of spirit which she had previously displayed. The argument, at a first glance, is extremely plausible; but I do not think that it is sound.

For at least a year after the murder of Rizzio Mary was hardly herself, either in body or mind. Her health was seriously shaken. Her confinement took place in July; in October or November she was for several days at the point of

death; the young Prince was baptised in December, and on that occasion the French Ambassador found her weeping sore,' and complaining of 'a grievous pain in her side:' in February the Marshal of Berwick informed Cecil that she breaketh much,' and 'is subject to frequent fainting fits.' There can be no doubt, moreover, that the tragic events which she had witnessed had to a certain extent unnerved her, and increased the constitutional melancholy from which she frequently suffered. Peradventure it might be better for me to die than to live,' she had exclaimed before she sailed for Scotland; and many other speeches are recorded, which indicate that ever and again Mary lost heart. I could wish to have died!' she said to her friend De Croc, when recovering from the fever she had caught at Jedburgh. On more than one occasion she expressed an anxious desire to quit Scotland, and return to the pleasant land where her happiest days had been spent-once after the murder of Rizzio, again after the murder of Darnley. A deep despondency had taken possession of her.

She began to comprehend the implacable character of the forces among which she was placed -she felt the net closing round her-she longed to escape from all this fraud and violence and intrigue. It is clear that a woman thus situ ated-unhinged both in body and mind-could not be expected to show that bold front to danger which in happier days had become her so well. The sorrowful and enfeebled woman who was seized by Bothwell at the Almond Bridge, was a very different creature from the high-spirited girl who, with Darnley at her side, had scattered the Lords of the Congregation.

We might have supposed, gentlemen, had my learned friend's theory been correct, that Mary would have enjoyed at least one

brief hour of happiness. She had stained her soul with murder. She had cast her good name to the winds. She had placed her Crown in peril. For what? To enable her to gratify a frantic and absorbing passion. At length all obstacles were removed, and the lovers were united. In such a union there would have been much to darken the horizon of love: but if it had been a union of hearts, she would certainly have obtained one transitory glimpse of rapture. Yet, on the very day of her marriage, she was found weeping disconsolately, and longing only for death; and her demeanour throughout these melancholy nuptials was sad and sombre. It is clear that she had braced herself for the trial; but she was very wretched, and she was unable to conceal her wretchedness.

But even if Mary had been herself, it is difficult to see what she could have done to avert the marriage. Assuming that she was ignorant of Bothwell's intention to capture her, and that she was carried to Dunbar against her will, what door of escape was open to her? The bond' assured her that all the great houses approved of the marriage. The name of almost every Peer of distinction was attached to it. And then the outrage was exactly of the kind which is calculated to paralyse and render helpless the most highspirited of women. 'Let the of fence be condoned-let the scandal be covered-let as little be said about it as possible '-that is what ninety-nine women out of every hundred would have urged. The instinct of the feminine heart in such cases counsels silence. Even if actual violence was not used, the honour of Mary was cruelly compromised. Leave me if you like,' Bothwell might have said, 'but what will the world think of the Queen who has secluded herself for a week in the society of the most disso

lute of her subjects, who to gratify her passion has cast her good name and her fair reputation to the winds ?' To have accepted the alternative would have demanded an almost heroic amount of moral courage from the victim; and Mary, at the moment, as we have seen, was sick both in body and soul.

My learned friend affirms that the fidelity with which Mary clung to Bothwell after the marriage supplies the best possible evidence that she was attached to him. The assertion that she clung to him in this tenacious way has not been proved, and rests at best upon very questionable rumour. Mary had told Lethington that she would follow Bothwell round the world in her petticoatso at least some one had heard somebody say. But the time at which the expression was used (if it was used-which I don't believe), deprives it of any importance. It was when Mary, thrilling with resentment at the indignities offered to her, was being ignominiously carried into Edinburgh. There was a certain loyalty and faithfulness in her nature which prevented her from deserting those who, to use a vulgar phrase, were in the same boat with her. The woman who had never loved Bothwell in his prosperous days, clung courageously to him in his adversity. And the perfidious hypocrisy which the Confederate Lords were then exhibiting must have been positively revolting to a nature like Mary's. These were the men who had truly murdered Darnley, and yet they dared to flaunt a banner in the face of heaven which called for vengeance on his murderers 'Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!' When she found that Bothwell's accomplices had turned upon him, like a pack of famished wolves, it is not difficult to understand how in utter tearless shame and indignation she might have told them that he was a better man than any of them.

But, as I have said, there is no good evidence to show that Mary parted from Bothwell reluctantly, and there is plenty of the best evidence to show that after they were parted she never manifested the slightest desire to rejoin him. The delirium under which she is alleged to have laboured must have been very transitory in its nature.

Now, gentlemen, let me condense into one or two sentences the results at which we have arrived. We have seen that, constitutionally, Mary was not a person likely to come under the sway of a violent and absorbing passion. Her whole nature was masculine in its moderation, its firmness, its magnanimity. She was tolerant, uncapricious, capable of carrying out a purpose steadily, yet with tact and policy. She was never hysterical, never fanciful. To her love was not an engrossing occupation on the contrary to Mary, as to most men, it was but the child and plaything of her leisure. Her lovers went mad about her, but she never went mad about her lovers. She sent Chatelar to the scaffold. She saw Sir John Gordon beheaded. She admitted Rizzio to a close intimacy. Rizzio was her intellectual mate, the depositary of her state secrets, her politic guide and confidant: but the very notoriety of her intercourse with him showed how innocent and unsexual it was in its nature-the frank companionship of friendly statesmen. Had she been Rizzio's mistress, nay even had love in the abstract been a more important matter to her than it was, she would have been more cautious and discreet: however important the public business which they were transacting might have been, she would not have kept the Italian secretary in her boudoir half the night. Her marriage with Darnley was not exclusively a love match: it was a marriage to which her judgment,

as well as her heart, consented. Her love-letters abound in pretty trifles: her business letters are clear, strong, rapid, brilliantly direct. By the fantastic irony of fate this masculine unsentimental career has been translated into an effeminate love-story-the truth being, as I have had to say again and again, that no woman ever lived to whom love was less of a necessity. This was the strength of Mary's character as a Queen-as a woman, its defect. A love-sick girl, when her castle in the air was shattered, might have come to hate Darnley with a feverish feminine hatred; but the sedate and politic intelligence of the Queen could only have been incidentally affected by such considerations. She knew that even at the worst, Darnley was a useful ally, and the motives which induced her to marry him restrained her from murdering him. Bothwell, again, was in her estimation a loyal retainer, a trusted adviser of the Crown; but he was nothing more. Yet it need not surprise us that after her forcible detention at Dunbar, she should have resolved to submit with a good grace to the inevitable. Saving Argyle and Huntley, Bothwell was the most powerful of her peers. He was essentially a strong man; fit, it seemed, to rule that turbulent nobility. He had been recommended to her acceptance by the unanimous voice of the aristocracy, Protestant and Catholic. As the honest Craig observed, 'the best part of the realm did approve it, either by flattery or by their silence.' On a woman of ardent sentimentality these considerations would have had little effect: they were exactly the considerations which would appeal to Mary's masculine common sense. Yet, though she made what seemed to her the best of a bad business, she was very wretched apart from her own private grief and chagrin, she

:

felt that the task in hand (marvellous as her powers of self-recovery had hitherto proved) was too great for her strength. A corrupt combination of treachery and ambition had wrecked the fair promise of her life.

This, I venture to say, is a consistent and credible delineation; what, on the other hand, gentlemen, does my learned friend require you to believe?

The woman whom he has sketched had led a highly successful, adroit, diplomatic life for five years, when suddenly she gave way to a blind, irrational, devastating passion for a man whom she had known from childhood, which upset her reason, tore her fine-spun web in pieces, traversed the splendid

career which a haughty and resolute ambition had marked out. She was borne away on a wave of furious and brutal lust, which left her helplessly imbecile, for the first time and the last time in her life, during an interval of six weeks! The astonishing pranks that human nature plays are known to all of us, and the cold deliberate treachery of a woman on fire with passion has not been unrepresented in dramatic art: but anything so incredible as this story, or, when taken in connection with the admitted facts of Mary Stuart's character, anything so anomalous and incomprehensible, I have not met with in history.

At this point in the learned counsel's speech, a brief adjournment took place.