his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two. After his first abrupt salutation of King James in Holyrood that Saturday night, there was naturally a longish colloquy between them. In the course of this colloquy the King’s first excitement of joy was damped for a moment by the reflection that the messenger had come of his own motive merely, and without letters from the English Privy Council. The production of a sapphire ring by Sir Robert removed, he tells us, all doubts. The ring, it appears, had been thrown to him out of one of the windows of Richmond Palace, just before he left, by his sister Lady Scroope; and one account makes it out that it had been a gift by King James himself to Queen Elizabeth, and that Lady Scroope took it off the withered finger of the Queen after her death, to serve as a token that could not be mistaken. Sir Robert’s own account does not quite imply this, but _may_ be so interpreted. All the members of the Hunsdon family, one gathers, were known to King James as having been for some time active in his interest. It was late before the colloquy ended, and Sir Robert was dismissed by the King for his much-needed rest of some days, in or near Holyrood, in charge of the Master of the Household, and under care of a surgeon. Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very track of Sir Robert’s ride (he had himself ordered them in Northumberland), the community of Edinburgh could still have remained ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English Privy Council; and they did not arrive,—the laggards!—till the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and knights of the English Council; and it opened thus—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of