some 'that she should be warded in Stirling Castle till she had approved in Parliament what they had done, established their religion, and given to the King the whole government of the realm.'

Some measure of this sort they were without doubt prepared to venture; it had been implied in the very nature of their enterprise: yet to carry it out they required Darnley's countenance, and fool and coward as they knew him to be they had not fathomed the depth of his imbecility and baseness. While the lords were in consultation the Queen had wormed the whole secret from him; he told her of the plot for the return of Murray and his friends, with the promises which had been made to himself; he revealed every name that he knew, concealing nothing save that the murder had been his own act and design and provoked by his accusations against herself; he had forgotten that his own handwriting could be produced in deadly witness against him. From that moment she played upon him like an instrument; she showed him that if he remained with the lords he would be a tool in their hands; she assured him of the return of her own affection for him, and flattered his fancy with visions of greatness which might be in store for him if he would take his place again at her side; she talked of 'his allies the confederate princes,' who would be displeased if he changed his religion; she appealed again to the unborn heir of their united greatness, and she bound him soul and body to do her bidding.

After possessing him with the plans which she had

formed to escape, she sent him to the lords to promise in her name that she was ready to forget the past, and to bury all unkindness in a general reconciliation. They felt instinctively that what they had done could never really be pardoned; but Ruthven, Morton, and Murray returned with Darnley to her presence, when again, with the seeming simplicity of which she was so finished a mistress, she repeated the same assurances. She was ready, she said, to bind herself in writing if they would not trust her word; and while the two other noblemen were drawing a form for her to sign, she took Murray by the hand and walked with him for an hour. She then retired to her room. Darnley, as soon as the bond was ready, took charge of it, promising to return it signed on the following day; and meanwhile he pressed again that after so much concession on her part they were bound to meet her with corresponding courtesy, and to spare her the ignominy of being longer held a prisoner in her own palace.

Had they refused to consent, an attempt would have been made that night by Bothwell to carry her off by force. But to reject the request of Darnley, whose elevation to a share of the throne was the professed object of the conspiracy, was embarrassing and perhaps dangerous; they gave way after another warning; the guard was withdrawn, Ruthven protesting as he yielded that whatever bloodshed followed should be on the King's head.

The important point gained, Darnley would not awake suspicion by returning to the Queen; he sent her

word privately that all was well;' and at eight in the evening Stewart of Traquair, Captain of the Royal Guard, Arthur Erskine, whom she would trust with a thousand lives,' and Standen, a young and gallant gentleman, assembled in the Queen's room to arrange a plan for the escape from Holyrood. The first question was where she was to go. Though the gates were no longer occupied the palace would doubtless be watched; and to attempt flight and to fail would be certain ruin. In the Castle of Edinburgh she would be safe with Lord Erskine, but she could reach the Castle only through the streets which would be beset with enemies; and unfit as she was for the exertion, she determined to make for Dunbar.

She stirred the blood of the three youths with the most touching appeal which could be made to the generosity of man. Pointing to the child that was in her womb, she adjured them by their loyalty to save the unborn hope of Scotland. So addressed they would have flung themselves naked on the pikes of Morton's troopers. They swore they would do her bidding be it what it would; and then after her sweet manner and wise directions, she dismissed them till midnight to put all in order as she herself excellently directed.'

'The rendezvous appointed with the horses was near the broken tombs and demolished sepultures in the ruined Abbey of Holyrood." A secret passage led underground from the palace to the vaults of the abbey;

1 Then standing at the south-eastern angle of the Royal Chapel.

and at midnight Mary Stuart, accompanied by one servant and her husband-who had left the lords under pretence of going to bed-crawled through the charnelhouse, among the bones and skulls of the antient kings,' and 'came out of the earth' where the horses were shivering in the March midnight air.

The moon was clear and full. 'The Queen with incredible animosity was mounted en croup behind Sir Arthur Erskine upon a beautiful English double gelding,' 'the King on a courser of Naples;' and then away -away-past Restalrig, past Sir Arthur's Seat, across the bridge and across the field of Musselburgh, past Seton, past Prestonpans, fast as their horses could speed; 'six in all-their Majesties, Erskine, Traquair, and a chamberer of the Queen.' In two hours the heavy gates of Dunbar had closed behind them, and Mary Stuart was safe.1

Whatever credit is due to iron fortitude and intellectual address must be given without stint to this extraordinary woman. Her energy grew with exertion; the terrible agitation of the three preceding days, the wild escape, and a midnight gallop of more than twenty miles within three months of her confinement, would have

1 The account of the escape is | Bedford and Randolph, printed by taken from a letter of Antony WRIGHT; the two Italian accounts Standen, preserved among the Cecil in the seventh volume of LABAMSS. at Hatfield; the remaining | NOFF; details of the murder and the circumstances connected with it, are collected from RUTHVEN's narrative, printed in KEITH; the letters of

VOL. VII.

CALDERWOOD's History; Mary Stuart's letter to the Archbishop of Glasgow, and a letter of Paul de Foix, printed by TEUlet.

26

shaken the strength of the least fragile of human frames, but Mary Stuart seemed not to know the meaning of the word exhaustion; she had scarce alighted from her horse than couriers were flying east, west, north, and south, to call the Catholic nobles to her side; she wrote her own story to her minister at Paris, bidding the Archbishop in a postscript anticipate the false rumours which would be spread against her honour, and tell the truth -her version of the truth-to the Queen-mother and the Spanish ambassador.

To Elizabeth she wrote with her own hand, fierce, dauntless, and haughty, as in her highest prosperity.1 'Ill at ease with her escape from Holyrood, and suffering from the sickness of pregnancy, she demanded to know whether the Queen of England intended to support the traitors who had slain her most faithful servant in her presence. If she listened to their calumnies and upheld them in their accursed deeds, she was not so unprovided of friends as her sister might dream; there were princes enough to take up her quarrel in such a

cause.'

The loyalty of Scotland answered well its sovereign's summons. The faithful Bothwell, ever foremost in good or evil in Mary Stuart's service, brought in the nightriders of Liddesdale, the fiercest of the Border marauders; Huntly came, forgetting his father and brother's death and his own long imprisonment; the Archbishop of St

1 This letter may be seen in the | strong, firm, and without sign of Rolls House; the strokes thick and tremulousness. slightly uneven from excitement, but