them, yet her denial was accompanied with the most earnest anxiety that they should be destroyed, while it would have been by their preservation alone that she could successfully disprove her hand in them.1 The age which could have produced forgeries so ingenious would have produced also the skill which could detect them, and her mere assertion weighs little against the recorded results of a careful examination by men who had the highest interest in discovering a fraud. It is in a high degree unlikely that a forger would have ventured on producing so many letters, touching on so many subjects, with the danger of exposure increasing in an accelerating ratio, when a single letter would have served his purpose. It is still more unlikely—it

1 Sergeant Barham, during the | but there was some variance in the Duke of Norfolk's trial, mentioned a phrase, by which variance, as God curious fact in connection with these would, the subtlety of that practice letters, and with Mary Stuart's anx- came to light.' iety about them. 'The Duke,' he said, 'was privy to the device that Lidington accompanied the Earl of Murray (to York) only to understand his secrets and to betray him, and that Lidington stole away the letters and kept them one night, and caused his wife to write them out. Howbeit the same were but copies translated out of French into Scotch, which when Lidington's wife had written out, he caused them to be sent to the Scottish Queen. She laboured to translate them again into French as near as she could to the originals whence she wrote them -but that was not possible to do,

This passage as it stands increases the mystery rather than relieves it. Why should the Queen of Scots make a re-translation? If she succeeded exactly, she would only have added a fresh proof against herself. She perhaps intended to make duplicates, which could be exchanged for the originals, in which the compromising passages could be omitted; but the conjecture most inadequately meets the difficulty. It is only evident that she was in deep anxiety about the letters, and did everything in her power to prevent them from being examined.

is morally impossible-that if they had been forged, some evidence of the truth should not eventually have The secret must have been known to many

come out.

and Herries could Maitland, for one,

persons, and the Bishop of Ross hardly have missed the traces of it. must have known it, for the letters were in existence before Murray's return from France, when the entire control of the Confederate party lay with him and the Earls of Morton and Mar. Maitland went over to Mary Stuart's party, devoted what remained of his life to her, and died in her cause. At any moment he might have secured her triumph by revealing the fraud. If fear for himself kept him silent while alive, he might have left papers behind him which told the truth after his death. Yet no

hint of the kind was ever dropped To have carried out a complicated

by him or any one. forgery with such complete success that, neither at the time nor after, the traces of it should ever be discovered, must have been a feat of such extraordinary difficulty, that only the very strongest inconsistency in the letters themselves with the other features of the case would justify a belief that it had been accomplished.

And assuredly that inconsistency does not exist. The hardihood of Mary Stuart's advocates has grown with time. The Catholics made her innocence an article of faith. Under the Stuarts it became an article of loyalty. Through religious and political tradition it has been passed on to the spurious chivalry of modern times, which assumes that she could not have been wicked because she was beautiful and a Queen. A seem

ing solid surface will form on a morass by long accretion of weeds and scum, and in like manner out of supposition and conjecture, and hard assertion, out of the mere mass of so called authorities who profess to have examined the evidence and come to a favourable conclusion, a plausible ground has been erected from which she can be noisily and boldly defended. Her original champion was contented with a more modest tone. The Bishop of Ross would unquestionably have said all in her favour which the most strained probabilities allowed. During the progress of the Catholic conspiracy he published a tract to satisfy the doubts which were abroad about her, and he was driven to arguments such as these:-The Queen of Scots was unlikely to have murdered her husband, because had she desired his death, she could have had him executed for the assassination of Rizzio. It was unlikely that Bothwell would have preserved such letters as she was said to have written to him. These letters were neither signed, sealed, nor dated, and her hand could easily be counterfeited. If they were genuine they did not contain any express commandment of any unlawful act or deed to be committed or perpetrated,' neither did they 'ratify or specify the accomplishment of any such fact already past.' They afforded only presumptions by unseen and uncertain queries, aims, and conjectural supposings.' Allowing that she was as guilty as the Lords pretended, they had no right to depose her. Considering Lord Darnley's offence, a simple murder, in her being a prince could not deserve such extreme punishment,' and 'subjects

had no warrant to set their hands upon their sovereign.' 'David was an adulterer and murderer, and God was angry with him, yet was he not by his subjects deprived.' They ought to have 'dissembled the matter,' and to have left her punishment to Heaven.1

The reasoning required falsehood to carry it down. The Bishop said that Murray was self-convicted, because on his first coming to York he did not allege any such crime against the Queen of Scots, but produced the charge only when he could not otherwise serve his turn.' None knew better than the Bishop of Ross for

1 Defence of Queen Mary's Honour, | bed. Thus far to prove my arguby Morgan Philips: Printed by AN- ment that she ought to be prayed DERSON. The real author was the for. And further, all sinners ought Bishop of Ross. The parallel of to be prayed for. If we should not David was so obviously apt that it pray for sinners, whom for should was much in use among the more we pray? seeing God came not to naïve of the Queen of Scots' support- call the righteous, but sinners to reers. On the 4th of June, 1571, when pentance. Saint David was an adulEdinburgh was in the hands of the terer, and so was she. Saint David Queen's friends, the Bishop of Gal- committed murder in slaying Uriah loway, who was entirely devoted to for his wife, and so did she. But her, preached a sermon in St Giles' what is this to the matter? The church, with the intention of bring- more wicked she be, her subjects ing back the more obstinate citizens should pray for her to bring her to to their loyalty. The ministers had the spirit of repentance. For Judas objected to pray for the Queen. was a sinner, and if he had been would wish you, oh inhabitants of prayed for he had not died in deEdinburgh,' said the Bishop, 'to spair. No inferior subject has power send for your ministers and cause to deprive or depose the lawful them pray for the Queen. For this magistrate, he or she whatsoever; albeit they commit whoredom, murder, incest, or any other crime.'Sermon preached by the Bishop of Galloway, June 4, 1571: MSS. Scotland, Rolls House.

'I

I may say, she is their lawful magistrate, for that her father was our native King, and her mother was likewise an honourable princess, and she gotten and born in lawful

what reason Murray had been silent. None had been more urgent to keep him silent. With even greater audacity he declared that 'the nobles of England appointed to hear the matter not only found the Queen of Scots innocent, but fully understood that her accusers were the contrivers and workers of the crime, and perfectly knowing her innocency, they had moved her to accept the noblest man in England in marriage.'

"1

What 'the noblest man in England' himself thought about the matter, and what the Bishop of Ross knew that he thought, has been already seen. Elizabeth's extraordinary sentence had alone made it possible to publish so enormous a lie. The details of the proceedings fortunately survive to test the value of the Bishop's words.

But the Bishop put forward his defence only to serve an immediate purpose, and it is not to be accepted even as an expression of his private opinion. When the conspiracy broke down, and Mary Stuart's air-castles had dissolved, and the web of treason so diligently wrought was rent in pieces, then, seeing the end of his falsehoods, the Bishop dropped the mask and betrayed his real estimate of his mistress's character-an estimate by the side of which Buchanan's Mary is an angel.

Doctor Wilson, the Master of the Court of Requests, thus described the language in which the Bishop of Ross spoke to him of his mistress :

'He seemeth very glad that these practices are come

1 The Duke of Norfolk.