It was to Holyrood that Queen Mary was brought on foot at eight o’clock on the evening of the day after the battle of Carberry Hill; after the parting with Bothwell; after the hootings and hideous insults of the mobs gathered in the windows and on the fore-stairs as she rode vanquished through her capital. She had spent the night “in the Provost’s lodging” in the town. Thence she was brought to Holyrood for a wretched interval before she was forced to ride, “mounted on a sorry hackney,” at a furious pace all the June night, between the coarse and brutal Ruthven and Lindsay, “men of savage manners, even in that age,” says Mignet, to Lochleven and captivity. After the days of the hapless Queen Mary the history of Holyrood consists only of a series of more or less dramatic scenes. The first three of these are in James VI.’s reign, and end the days when Holyrood was the home of a Royal race. James VI.’s two sons, Prince Henry, afterwards the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., were christened at Holyrood. All the earls of James VI.’s creation were created at Holyrood. And it was into the courtyard of Holyrood, on Saturday evening the 26th of March 1603, when the King and Queen had supped and retired, and “the palace lights were going out one by one,” that Sir Robert Carey clattered, half dead with fatigue and excitement, having ridden from London to Edinburgh in three days, and dropt on his knees before the King and cried, “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.” Did the shades of all the brave and splendid Scottish kings hover near as the words were spoken? Bruce, who fought at Bannockburn--Bruce, whose daughter Marjory was the mother of the first Stuart king; all the Stuarts, down to the gallant James who had ridden into his capital with his Tudor bride behind him on the palfrey, and had fallen on the field of Flodden; their son who, with Tudor blood in his veins, had died cursing England, and whose daughter the English Elizabeth had beheaded--did all their shades hover near as the words were spoken in Holyrood? James VI., eighth of the line from the High Steward of Scotland, knew himself to be King of the “auld enemy”--and the lights of Holyrood went out one by one.