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Elizabeth carried further her dignity on this occasion. She had received the subsidy without any condition; but as it was believed that the commons had given her that gratuity with a view of engaging her to yield to their requests, she thought proper, on her refusal, voluntarily to remit the third payment; and she said, that money in her subjects’ purses was as good to her as in her own exchequer.[***]

* D’Ewes, p. 130.

** D’Ewes, p. 116, 117.

*** J Camden, p. 400.

But though the queen was able to elude, for the present, the applications of parliament, the friends of the queen of Scots multiplied every day in England; and besides the Catholics, many of whom kept a treasonable correspondence with her, and were ready to rise at her command,[*] the court itself of Elizabeth was full of her avowed partisans. The duke of Norfolk, the earls of Leicester, Pembroke, Bedford, Northumberland, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, and most of the considerable men in England, except Cecil, seemed convinced of the necessity of declaring her the successor. None but the more zealous Protestants adhered either to the countess of Hertford, or to her aunt, Eleanor, countess of Cumberland; and as the marriage of the former seemed liable to some objections, and had been declared invalid, men were alarmed, even on that side, with the prospect of new disputes concerning the succession. Mary’s behavior, also, so moderate towards the Protestants, and so gracious towards all men, had procured her universal respect;[**] and the public was willing to ascribe any imprudences into which she had fallen to her youth and inexperience. But all these flattering prospects were blasted by the subsequent incidents; where her egregious indiscretions, shall I say, or atrocious crimes, threw her from the height of her prosperity and involved her in infamy and in ruin.

The earl of Bothwell was of a considerable family and power in Scotland; and though not distinguished by any talents either of a civil or military nature, he had made a figure in that party which opposed the greatness of the earl of Murray and the more rigid reformers. He was a man of profligate manners; had involved his opulent fortune in great debts, and even reduced himself to beggary by his profuse expenses;[***] and seemed to have no resource but in desperate counsels and enterprises.

* Haynes, p. 446, 448.

** Melvil, p. 53, 61, 74.

*** Keith, p. 240.

He had been accused more than once of an attempt to assassinate Murray; and though the frequency of these accusations on all sides diminish somewhat the credit due to any particular imputation, they prove sufficiently the prevalence of that detestable practice in Scotland, and may in that view serve to render such rumors the more credible. This man had of late acquired the favor and entire confidence of Mary; and all her measures were directed by his advice and authority. Reports were spread of more particular intimacies between them; and these reports gained ground from the continuance, or rather increase, of her hatred towards her husband.[*] That young prince was reduced to such a state of desperation by the neglects which he underwent from his queen and the courtiers, that he had once resolved to fly secretly into France or Spain, and had even provided a vessel for that purpose.[**] Some of the most considerable nobility, on the other hand, observing her rooted aversion to him, had proposed some expedients for a divorce, and though Mary is said to have spoken honorably on the occasion, and to have embraced the proposal no further than it should be found consistent with her own honor and her son’s legitimacy,[***] men were inclined to believe, that the difficulty of finding proper means for effecting that purpose, was the real cause of laying aside all further thoughts of it. So far were the suspicions against her carried, that when Henry, discouraged with the continual proofs of her hatred, left the court and retired to Glasgow, an illness of an extraordinary nature, with which he was seized immediately on his arrival in that place, was universally ascribed by her enemies to a dose of poison, which, it was pretended, she had administered to him.

* Melvil, p. 66, 77.

** Keith, p. 345-348.

*** Camden, p. 404. Goodall’s Queen Mary, vol. ii. p. 317.

While affairs were in this situation, all those who wished well to her character, or to public tranquillity, were extremely pleased, and somewhat surprised, to hear that a friendship was again conciliated between them, that she had taken a journey to Glasgow on purpose to visit him during his sickness, that she behaved towards him with great tenderness, that she had brought him along with her, and that she appeared thenceforth determined to live with him on a footing more suitable to the connections between them. Henry, naturally uxorious, and not distrusting this sudden reconciliation, put himself implicitly into her hands, and attended her to Edinburgh. She lived in the palace of Holyrood House; but as the situation of the palace was low, and the concourse of people about the court was necessarily attended with noise, which might disturb him in his present infirm state of health, these reasons were assigned for fitting up an apartment for him in a solitary house at some distance, called the Kirk of Field. Mary here gave him marks of kindness and attachment; she conversed cordially with him; and she lay some nights in a room below his; but on the ninth of February, she told him that she would pass that night in the palace, because the marriage of one of her servants was there to be celebrated in her presence. About two o’clock in the morning, the whole town was much alarmed at hearing a great noise; and was still more astonished, when it was discovered that the noise came from the king’s house, which was blown up by gunpowder; that his dead body was found at some distance in a neighboring field; and that no marks, either of fire, contusion, or violence appeared upon it.[*]

No doubt could be entertained but Henry was murdered; and general conjecture soon pointed towards the earl of Bothwell as the author of the crime.[**] But as his favor with Mary was visible, and his power great, no one ventured to declare openly his sentiments; and all men remained in silence and mute astonishment. Voices, however, were heard in the streets, during the darkness of the night, proclaiming Bothwell, and even Mary herself, to be murderers of the king; bills were secretly affixed on the walls to the same purpose; offers were made, that, upon giving proper securities, his guilt should be openly proved; but after one proclamation from the court, offering a reward and indemnity to any one that would discover the author of that villany, greater vigilance was employed in searching out the spreaders of the libels and reports against Bothwell and the queen, than in tracing the contrivers of the king’s assassination, or detecting the regicides.[***]

The earl of Lenox, who lived at a distance from court in poverty and contempt, was roused by the report of his son’s murder, and wrote to the queen, imploring speedy justice against the assassins; among whom he named the earl of Bothwell, Sir James Balfour, and Gilbert Balfour his brother, David Chalmers, and four others of the queen’s household; all of them persons who had been mentioned in the bills affixed to the walls at Edinburgh.[****]

* It was imagined that Henry had been strangled before the
house was blown up. But this supposition is contradicted by
the confession of the criminals; and there is no necessity
to admit it in order to account for the condition of his
body. There are many instances that men’s lives have been
saved who had been blown up in ships. Had Henry fallen on
water, he had not probably been killed.

** Melvil, p. 78. Cabbala, p. 136.

*** Anderson’s Collections, vol. ii. p. 38; vol. iv. p. 167,
168. Spotswood, p. 200. Keith, p. 374.

**** Keith, p. 372. Anderson, vol. ii. p. 3.