During the time that Knox was in England, that tragedy, so well known in Scottish history, was acted, which led to a complete revolution in the government of the kingdom, and, contrary to the designs of the principal actors, threw the power wholly into the hands of the protestants. Mary’s affection for her husband, which had cooled soon after their marriage, {151} was, from the time of Rizzio’s assassination, converted into a fixed hatred, which she was at little pains to conceal. The birth of an heir to the crown produced no reconciliation between the royal parents; the king was not allowed to be present at the baptism of his own son, and was treated with such marked disrespect, even by the servants, that he abandoned the court, and shut himself up in his father’s house. In proportion as the queen’s mind was alienated from her husband, the unprincipled earl of Bothwell grew in her favour. He engrossed the whole management of public affairs, was loaded with honours, and treated by her majesty with every mark of personal regard and affection. In these circumstances, the neglected, unhappy king, was decoyed to Edinburgh, lodged in a solitary dwelling at the extremity of the city, and murdered on the morning of the 10th of February, 1567; the house in which he lay being blown up with gunpowder. It would be unsuitable to the nature of the present work to enter into the controversy respecting the authors of this murder, which has been agitated with uncommon keenness from that day to the present time. The accusation of the earl of Murray as a party to the deed, is destitute of all proof, and utterly incredible. It was at first circulated with the evident design of turning away the public mind from the real perpetrators; it was insinuated, and afterwards directly brought forward, in the conferences at York and Westminster, as a retaliation upon him for the charge which he exhibited against the queen; {152} and it is now kept up only by the most blind and bigoted of her partisans. That Bothwell was the prime contriver and agent in the murder, cannot admit of a doubt with any impartial and judicious enquirer. And that Mary was privy to the design, and accessory to its execution by permission and approbation, there is, I think, all the evidence, moral and legal, which could reasonably be expected in a case of this kind. The whole of her behaviour towards the king, from the time that she brought him from Glasgow till she left him on the fatal night; the remissness which she discovered in enquiring into the murder; the shameful manner in which she suffered the farce of Bothwell’s trial to be conducted; the glaring act (which struck the whole of Europe, and even her own friends, with horror) of taking to her bed, with indecent haste, the man who was stigmatized as the murderer of her husband; and the manner in which she refused to defend herself, and broke off the conference to which she had agreed, as