It is necessary to detail these facts thus minutely, as Mary's principal calumniator, Buchanan, endeavours to establish, by a tissue of falsehoods, that immediately after her delivery, or perhaps before it, she conceived a criminal attachment for Bothwell. This absurdity has gained credit with several later writers, and particularly with Robertson, whose knowledge of Mary's motions and domestic arrangements at the period of which we speak, appears to have been very superficial. Yet he may be regarded as even a more dangerous enemy than the former. Buchanan's virulence and evident party spirit, carry their own contradiction along with them; whilst Robertson, not venturing to go the same lengths, (though guided in his belief entirely by Buchanan), imparts to the authority on which he trusts a greater air of plausibility, by softening down the violence of the original, to suit the calmer tone of _professedly_ unprejudiced history. In the progress of these Memoirs, it will not be difficult to show that Robertson's affected candour, or too hastily formed belief, is as little to be depended on as Buchanan's undisguised malice. Buchanan wishes it to be believed, in the first place, that Mary entertained a guilty love for Rizzio. He then proceeds to assert, that in little more than three months after his barbarous assassination, she had fallen no less violently in love with Bothwell, although, in the meantime, she had been employed in giving birth to her first child, by a husband, whom he allows she doated on nine or ten months before. To bolster up this story, he perverts facts with the most reckless indifference. One specimen of his style we have already seen in his account of the Queen's voyage to Alloa; and proceeding with his narrative, we find him positively asserting in the sequel, that for the two or three following months, Mary was constantly in the company of Bothwell, and of Bothwell alone, knowing as he must have done all the while, that Murray and Darnley, Bothwell's principal enemies, were her chief associates, and that Bothwell spent most of the time in a distant part of the kingdom.