Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/627

Rh OF SCOTLAND.] MARY 599 Lochleven, there to obtain the queen s signature to an act of abdication in favour of her son, and another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and a commission of regency was established till the return from France of Murray, who, on the 15th of August, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athole. According to his own account, the expostulations as to her past con duct which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears, confessions, and attempts at extenua tion or excuse ; but when they parted next day on good terms she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for bedfellows. Their mother and the regent s, her father s former mistress, was herself not impervious to her prisoner s lifelong power of seduction and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm. A rumour transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for herself ; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun in France. It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on March 25, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterwards remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and perplexity to herself, succeeded on May 2d in assisting her to escape by a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland, where George Douglas, Lord Seton, and others were awaiting her. Thence they rode to Seton s castle of Niddry, and. next day to Hamilton Palace, round which an army of 6000 men was soon assembled, and whither the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The queen s abdication was revoked, messengers were despatched to the English and French courts, and word was sent to Murray at Glasgow that he must resign the regency, and should be pardoned in common with all offenders against the queen. But on the day when Mary arrived at Hamilton Murray had summoned to Glasgow the feudatories of the crown, to take arms against the insurgent enemies of the infant king. Elizabeth sent conditional offers of help to her kinswoman, provided she would accept of English intervention and abstain from seeking foreign assistance ; but the messenger came too late. Mary s followers had failed to retake Dunbar Castle from the regent, and made for Dumbarton instead, marching two miles south of Glasgow, by the village of Langside. Here Murray, with 4500 men, under leaders of high distinction, met the GOOO of the queen s army, whose ablest man, Herries, was as much distrusted by Mary as by every one else, while the Hamiltons could only be trusted to think of their own interests, and were suspected of treasonable designs on all who stood between their house and the monarchy. On the 13th of May the battle or skirmish of Laugsids determined the result of the campaign in three quarters of an hour. Kirkaldy of Grange, who commanded the regent s cavalry, seized and kept the place of vantage from the beginning, and at the first sign of wavering on the othsr side shattered at a single charge the forces of the queen, with a loss of one man to three hundred. Mary fled 60 miles from the field of her last battle before she halted at Sauquhar, and for three days of flight, according to her own account, had to sleep on the hard ground, live on oatmeal and sour milk, and fare at night like the owls, in hunger, cold, and fear. On the third day from the rout of Langside she crossed the Solway, and landed at Workington in Cumberland, May 16, 1568. On the 20th Lord Scrope and Sir Francis Knollys were sent from court to carry messages and letters of comfort from Elizabeth to Mary at Carlisle. On June llth Knollys wrote to Cecil at once the best description and the noblest panegyric extant of the queen of Scots, enlarging, with a brave man s sympathy, on her indifference to form and ceremony, her daring grace and openness of manner, her frank display of a great desire to be avenged of her enemies, her readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of victory, her delight to hear of hardihood and courage, commending by name all her enemies of approved valour, sparing no cowardice in her friends, but above all things athirst for victory by any means at any price, so that for it^ sake pain and peril seemed pleasant to her, and wealth and all things, if com pared with it, contemptible and vile. Vhat was to be done with such a princess, whether she were to be nourished in one s bosom, above all whether it could be advisable or safe to try any diplomatic tricks upon such a lady, Knollys left for the minister to judge. It is remarkable that he should not have discovered in her the qualities so obvious to modern champions of her character, easiness, gullibility, incurable innocence and invincible ignorance of evil, incapacity to suspect or resent anything, readiness to believe and forgive all things. On the 15th of July, after various delays interposed by her reluctance to leave the neighbourhood of the border, where on her arrival she had received the welcome and the homage of the leading Catholic houses of Northumberland and Cumberland, she was removed to Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. During her residence here a conference was held at York between her own and Elizabeth s commissioners and those appointed to represent her son as king of Scots. These latter, of whom Murray himself was the chief, privately laid before the English commissioners the contents of the famous casket. On the 24th of October the place of the conference was shifted from York to London, where the inquiry was to be held before Queen Elizabeth in council. Mary was already aware that the chief of the English commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, was secretly an aspirant to the peril of her hand ; and on October 21st she gave the first sign of assent to the suggestion of a divorce from Bothwell. On the 26th of October the charge of complicity in the murder of Darnley was distinctly brought forward against her in spite of Norfolk s reluctance and Murray s previous hesitation. Elizabeth, by the mouth of her chief justice, formally rebuked the audacity of the subjects who durst bring such a charge against their sovereign, and challenged them to advance their proofs. They complied by the pro duction of an indictment under five heads, supported by the necessary evidence -of documents. The number of English commissioners was increased, and they were bound to preserve secrecy as to the matters revealed. Further evidence was supplied by Thomas Crawford, a retainer of the house of Lennox, tallying so exactly with the text of the casket letters as to have been cited in proof that the latter must needs be a forgery. Elizabeth, on the close of the evidence, invited Mary to reply to the proofs alleged before she could be admitted to her presence ; but Mary simply desired her commissioners to withdraw from the conference. She declined with scorn the proposal made by Elizabeth through Knollys, that she should sign a second abdication in favour of her son. On January 10, 1569, the judgment given at the conference acquitted Murray and his adherents of rebellion, while affirming that nothing had been proved against Mary, a verdict accepted by Murray as equivalent to a practical recognition of his office as regent for the infant king. This position he was not long to hold ; and the fierce exultation of Mary at the