months before the birth of her child. Stern swords are drawn, and daggers gleam--her words, her prayers are vain-- The ruffian steel is in his heart--the faithful Rizzio’s slain! Then Mary Stuart brushed aside the tears that trickling fell: “Now for my father’s arm,” she said, “my woman’s heart, farewell!”[17] A year later, on the night of Sunday, 9th February 1567, there were doings grave and gay in Edinburgh. Darnley lay “full of small-pox in a velvet-hung bed in an upper storey of the Prebendaries’ chamber at Kirk-o’-Field. The infant Prince James slept in his carved cradle at Holyrood. Bastian, one of the Queen’s servants, was celebrating his marriage in the palace. The “Queen’s Grace” went from her husband’s sick-room, afoot under a silken canopy, with a guard of Archers, “with licht torches up the Blackfriar Wynd,” to attend the masque at Holyrood in honour of the marriage. Lord Bothwell, disguised in “a loose cloak such as the Swartrytters wear,”[18] skulked with his accomplices in the shadows of the Cowgate. And then--“a little after two hours after midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown in the air,”--and Darnley was dead. It was to Holyrood that Darnley’s body was brought, and the Queen lay in a darkened room and her voice sounded “very doleful.” Well it might, for the vicious Darnley dead and embalmed was to prove a greater curse to her than had proved the vicious Darnley living. It was in the old Chapel at Holyrood, at two o’clock on a May morning three months later, that Queen Mary was married to Bothwell, “not with the Mass, but with preaching,” by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. “At this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used, as use was wont to be used when princes were married.”[19] There were at least two causes and [Illustration: THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACE An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date. Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door, through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.] just impediments why those two persons should not have been joined together in holy Matrimony; but none declared them.