QUEEN MARY.

(Continued.)

THE QUEEN AND HER ADMIRERS-MYSTERIOUS STORY OF THE PROJECT OF ARRAN AND BOTHWELL-BOTHWELL INDICTED FOR IT-HISTORY OF CHATELAR-HIS ADVENTURES-HIS FATE-POLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE—THE PROJECTS OF THE HOUSE OF GUISE-QUEEN MARY'S OWN VIEWS-PROJECT FOR UNION WITH THE HEIR OF THE SPANISH MONARCHY-POLITICAL PROSPECTS OF SUCH A UNION MARY'S FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE ABOUT IT - HER SCHEMES TRAVERSED BY CATHERINE OF MEDICI―OTHER PROJECTS— QUEEN ELIZABETH-HER ESCAPADES ABOUT LEICESTER-PROPOSED MEETING OF MARY AND ELIZABETH-MARY MEETS HENRY STEWART, LORD DARNLEY-MARY'S SECRET EMISSARIES-DAVID RIZZIO-REACTION IN FAVOUR OF THE ROMANIST PARTY-GLOOM AND DIFFICULTIES OF THE REFORMERS-PROTESTANT RIOT SUPPRESSEDQUESTION OF CONSULTING THE ESTATES ABOUT THE MARRIAGE— MARRIAGE OF MARY AND DARNLEY.

EVER Since the death of her husband, the admirers of the young queen had been very troublesome. Besides the members of reigning houses who were offered or spoken of after the usual fashion of projected royal alliances, her steps were infested by audacious and demonstrative adorers, who had no claims to such a destiny. Whether the passive influence of her wonderful wit and beauty rendered this phenomenon inevitable, or it might be in any measure promoted by some little touches of seductive fascination in her manner, is a question which students of her history will in general decide for themselves. The most eminent among these miscellaneous admirers, and the one who came nearest to the rank which might have justified the expectation of her hand,

was D'Amville, the second son of the Constable Montmorency, who afterwards succeeded to the offices and honours of his family--the most illustrious among the unregal nobility of France. He was one of those who accompanied the queen to Scotland. He had a wife; but to such homage as he was entitled to tender, that was no hindrance.

Arran, the heir of the house of Hamilton, was numbered among the queen's suitors. The position of that family at the juncture of Mary's return was very peculiar, and so was their conduct. The head of the house was next heir to the crown, and held this position not merely by genealogical tenure, but by the repeated acknowledgments of Parliament, which had made provision for his claims becoming effectual if the succession opened. It was not in human nature that the man so placed should enter, with the indifference of an ordinary subject, into questions about the most suitable alliance for his sovereign, and the desirableness of a direct heir appearing to the house of Stewart. Whether from temper or policy, he evaded the usual demands of homage paid by the nobility. His absence from Court was of course noticed, and was in fact rather the assumption of a diplomatic position than an ordinary discourtesy. Something of menace, too, appeared in his movements, and especially in his jealously fortifying and keeping well garrisoned the fortress of Dumbarton. The annalists of the day mention a sudden alarm arising in Holyrood House one summer night in the year 1561, when the Lord James was absent suppressing the borderers, and the palace was peculiarly unprotected. This incident is isolated-unconnected with any train of events preceding or following it. It is briefly recorded in the quaint manner of Knox's History, in a spirit of latent sarcasm : The queen upon a night took a fray in her bed, as if horsemen had been in the close, and the palace had been enclosed about. Whether it proceeded of her own womanly fantasy, or if men put her in fear for displeasure of the Earl of Arran, and for other purposes, as for the erecting of the guard, we know not. But the fear was so great that the town was called to the watch."

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The shape into which the cause of this panic was put, was a design by young Arran to seize the queen and carry her into the district where the house of Hamilton was supreme. If the queen had, as Knox and others thought, no ground for her apprehensions, yet such an enterprise was not inconsistent with the spirit of the times, and it is impossible to disconnect it with certain subsequent transactions in which the name of so very practical a person as the Earl of Bothwell is mixed up. The alarm in Holyrood must have occurred in November 1561, the date of Murray's absence on the border; the further incidents now to be noticed belong to the spring of the following year. Knox was intimately concerned in them, and they are narrated with much distinctness in his History. The affair begins by Bothwell desiring a private interview with Knox, which was gladly conceded; and they met in the house of James Barron, a worshipful bur-* gess of Edinburgh. The scene resolved itself into a sort of Protestant confessional. The earl bewailed his sinful life, and entered into particulars of his offences, whereof he heartily repented. But there remained behind a practical object in which he desired the Reformer's intervention-it pressed hard on him that he was at enmity with the Earl of Arran, and he solicited Knox's good offices for their reconciliation. Knox undertook the task with thorough goodwill; in some way or other it is evident that the heart of the austere preacher had been gained. He said his grandfather, father, and father-in-law had served under the banner of the Hepburns-this by the way, as connecting them together by the obligation of their "Scottish kindness;" but he had another and a more solemn function as the public messenger of glad tidings, and so he bestowed on the penitent a suitable admonition to prove the sincerity of his penitence by his reformation.

Bothwell stuck to the practical point-of a reconciliation with Arran. Knox busied himself in the matter, and after overcoming some practical difficulties, he had the satisfaction to see them meet and embrace, the Earl of Arran saying to his new friend, "If the hearts be upright,

few ceremonies may serve and content me." Knox, who seems to have been mightily pleased with his handiwork, left them with the benediction following: "Now, my lords, God hath brought you together by the labours of simple men, in respect of those who would have travailed therein. I know my labours are already taken in an evil part, but because I have the testimony of a good conscience before my God, that whatsoever I have done, I have done it in His fear, for the profit of you both, for the hurt of none, and for the tranquillity of this realm." The good work seemed to be perfected, when next day Bothwell and " some of his honest friends came to the sermon with the earl foresaid, whereat many rejoiced."

But in a few days the scene was changed. Arran came repeatedly to Knox, and poured into his ears a tale how Bothwell had offered to help him to carry off the queen, and put her in his hands in Dumbarton Castle, proposing at the same time the slaughter of Murray, Lethington, and the others that "misguide her." These revelations seem to have gone on for some time, when Knox at last found that his informant was raving. "He devised of wondrous signs that he saw in the heaven; he alleged that he was bewitched; he would have been in the queen's bed, and affirmed that he was her husband; and finally, he behaved in all things so foolishly that his frenzy could not be hid."1

He was subjected to the process by which in Scotland insane persons are deprived of the management of their property. His madness cannot be doubted, whether or not it was rightly attributed to his despairing love for the queen. However it arose, his accusations against Bothwell, to which he resolutely adhered, were not only gravely considered and examined at the time, but were three years afterwards, when Bothwell returned from France, solemnly resuscitated in the form of a criminal indictment or summons of treason. In this document it is specifically set forth that Bothwell proposed a plan for seizing the queen when she was hunting in the fields, or in one of

1 Knox, ii. 322-329.

2 Mor. Dict. Dec., 6275.

her rural merrymakings, and conveying her with a sufficient force to Dumbarton Castle. There she was to be at the disposal of Arran; and it was part of the charge that by this Bothwell seduced him to join in the enterprise. As Bothwell did not appear to answer to the charge, he was outlawed, and the affair was forgotten amid the more stirring historical incidents in which he was to figure.1 As the conclusion of this episode, it is proper to note that in the end of April 1562, a month after the date attributed to Bothwell's conversation with Arran, the Castle of Dumbarton was yielded up to Captain Anstruther, to be held for the queen.2 In Knox's History the extraction of this fortress from the hands of the Hamiltons is spoken of as a breach of faith, on the ground that the custody of it had been granted to them "till that lawful succession should be seen of the queen's body." Thus the fortress was understood to stand as a material guarantee for the protection of the house of Hamilton's right of succession to the throne.

It has been already recorded how the unfortunate Sir John Gordon, the son of the rebel Earl of Huntly, conducted himself as a lover of the queen. But the most troublesome and preposterous of all her train of admirers was a Frenchman named Chatelar or Chastelard, who also fell a victim to his follies. Little is known of him, except from the pages of Brantome; but his mere appearance there, accompanied by expressions of eulogy and warm attachment, is sufficient to mark him as a man of distinction. The biographer says he was a native of Dauphiné, and a grand-nephew by his mother of the illustrious Bayard, whom he resembled in person. According to the same authority, he owned in a high degree not only all the warlike and polite accomplishments of a high-bred gallant of the day, but possessed original literary genius, and could accompany his lute by his own poetry— usant d'une poésie fort douce et gentile en cavalier." He was a follower of the Constable Montmorency, with whom he joined the body of gentlemen who escorted the queen

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1 Pitcairn, i. 462*. 2 Diurnal of Occurrents. 3 Knox, ii. 330.