[123] Buchanan alone, of all the Scottish historians, has dared to insinuate the probability of an illicit intercourse having subsisted between Mary and Rizzio; and the calumny is too self-evidently false to merit a moment's notice. Every respectable writer reprobates so disgusting a piece of scandal, however unfavourably inclined towards Mary in other respects. Camden, Castelnau, Robertson, Hume, Tytler, Laing, and Dr Stuart, all of whom think it worth while to advert to the subject in Notes, put the falsehood of Buchanan's assertion beyond the most distant shadow of a doubt. Indeed, it is paying it too great a compliment to advert to it at all. [124] Miss Benger, oddly enough, says, it was on Saturday the 5th of April; a mistake into which no other historian with whom we are acquainted has fallen.--Miss Benger's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 233. [125] The Parliament had met upon the 7th, and Mary had opened it in person, unattended by Darnley, who refused to give it his countenance; but no business of importance had as yet been transacted. [126] This disease was "an inflammation of the liver, and a consumption of the kidneys."--_Keith_, _Appendix_, _p._ 119. [127] Blackwood in Jebb, vol. ii. p. 204.--Goodall, vol. i. p. 252. [128] Stranguage, p. 33.--Crawford's Memoirs, p. 9. [129] Keith, Appendix, p. 122. [130] Conæus in Jebb. Vol. ii. p. 25. [131] Robertson's Appendix to vol. i. No. xv. [132] Keith, p. 330.--Appendix, p. 119.--Melville's Memoirs, p. 148.--Buchanan's History of Scotland, Book xvii.--Martyre de Marie in Jebb, vol. ii. p. 204.--Knox, p. 392.--Holinshed's Chronicles, p. 382.--Robertson, Appendix to Vol. i. No. xv.--Some historians have maintained, that Rizzio was actually despatched in Mary's presence. But this is not the fact, for Mary remained ignorant of his fate till next day. In a letter which the Earl of Bedford and Randolph wrote to the Privy Council of England, giving an account of this murder, and which has been published in the first series of "Ellis's Original Letters, illustrative of English History," (vol. ii. p. 207), we find these words:--"He was not slain in the Queen's presence, as was said." Holinshed and others are equally explicit. It has been likewise said, that it was not intended to have killed him that evening; but to have tried him next day, and then to have hanged or beheaded him publicly. That there is no foundation for this assertion, is proved by the authorities quoted above; and to these may be added the letter from Morton and Ruthven to Throckmorton, and "the bond of assurance for the murder to be committed," granted by Darnley to the conspirators, on the 1st of March, both preserved by Goodall, vol. i. p. 264 and 266. That the conspirators meant, as others have insisted, to take advantage of the situation in which Mary then was, and terrify her into a miscarriage, which might have ended in her death, is unsupported by any evidence; nor can we see what purposes such a design would have answered.