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Updated: May 27, 2025
A dispensation allowed Mary to wed a Protestant, and she married Bothwell three months after Darnley's death. Here one sees the consummation of what had begun many years before in France. From the moment that she and Bothwell met, their union was inevitable. Seas could not sunder them. Other loves and other fancies were as nothing to them.
"Oh, if my death were sudden and easy," cried Mary, "yes, I should accept it as an expiation for my faults; for if I am proud when I compare myself with others, Melville, I am humble when I judge myself. I am unjustly accused of being an accomplice of Darnley's death, but I am justly condemned for having married Bothwell."
It was an isolated abbey, and little calculated by its position to dissipate the fears that the king entertained; for it was situated between two ruined churches and two cemeteries: the only house, which was distant about a shot from a cross-bow, belonged to the Hamiltons, and as they were Darnley's mortal enemies the neighbourhood was none the more reassuring: further, towards the north, rose some wretched huts, called the "Thieves' cross-roads". In going round his new residence, Darnley noticed that three holes, each large enough for a man to get through, had been made in the walls; he asked that these holes, through which ill-meaning persons could get in, should be stopped up: it was promised that masons should be sent; but nothing was done, and the holes remained open.
"Everything is ready," replied Balfour, "and we were waiting for you to set fire to the fuse". "That is well," Bothwell answered "but first I want to make sure that he is in his room." At these words, Bothwell opened the pavilion door with a false key, and, having groped his way up the stairs; he went to listen at Darnley's door.
Now there is a picture in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham Hall which answers pretty closely to Vasari's description. This magnificent portrait at Cobham was last exhibited at the Old Masters in 1895, and the suggestion was then made that it might be the very picture mentioned by Vasari in the passage quoted above.
News of this reached the fugitives to increase their desperate rage. But what drove the iron into the soul of the arch-murderer Ruthven was Darnley's solemn public declaration denying all knowledge of or complicity in Rizzio's assassination; nor did it soothe his fury to know that all Scotland rang with contemptuous laughter at that impudent and cowardly perjury.
Rizzio was the author of this policy; and when Darnley called on his kinsmen to aid him in attacking Rizzio, the Douglases grasped at his proposal. Their aid and their promise of the crown matrimonial were bought by Darnley's consent to the recall of the fugitive lords and of Murray. The plot of the Douglases was so jealously hidden that no whisper of it reached the Queen.
Nothing, indeed, but the infatuation of an amorous woman for a brutally strong man could have so blinded her to her own great aims as to make her take Bothwell, the prime mover of Darnley's murder, for her husband. As soon as the crime was known, all fingers were pointed to Bothwell and the queen as the murderers, and Protestants everywhere hastened to cast obloquy upon Mary for it.
It was here that the young Pretender gave the ball which makes one of the scenes in Waverley. Thence we passed into the old historic rooms of the Palace, Darnley's and Queen Mary's apartments, which everybody has seen and described.
"But you forget," I said, "that we are not rich, and can but ill afford this inactive life. We came to Australia to make a living, and so far, with the exception of the booty which we captured from Black Darnley's gang, we have not made a dollar. Even our prize money will have to be given up to the government, to be returned to its rightful owners, and besides "
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