Such was the man who was now inseparably joined to Mary, and who, by fraud and villany, had made himself, for the time, so absolute in Scotland, that her possession of the throne of her ancestors, nay, her very life, seems to have depended upon his will and pleasure. CHAPTER VI. THE REBELLION OF THE NOBLES, THE MEETING AT CARBERRY HILL, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. Mary's first step, after her marriage, was to send, at her husband's desire, ambassadors into England and France, to explain to these Courts the motives by which she had been actuated. The instructions given to these ambassadors, as Buchanan has justly remarked, and after him the French historians De Thou and Le Clerc, were drawn up with much art. They came, no doubt, from the pen of Bothwell's friend, Secretary Maitland; and they recapitulate so forcibly all the Earl's services, both to Mary and her mother, enlarge so successfully upon his influence in Scotland, his favour with the nobility, and their anxiety that he should become King; and finally, colour so dexterously his recent conduct, that after their perusal, one is almost induced to believe that the Queen could not have chosen a better husband in all Christendom. Of course, Mary would herself see them before they were despatched, as they are written in her name; and the consent she must have given to the attempt made in them to screen her husband from blame, confirms the belief that she did not plan, along with him, the scheme of the abduction; for she would, in that case, have represented, in a much stronger light, the consequences necessarily arising from it. If she had consented to such a scheme, it must have been with the view of making it be believed that her marriage with a suspected murderer (suspected at least by many, though probably not by Mary herself), was a matter of necessity; and she could never have been so inconsistent as labour to convince her foreign friends, that though violence had been used in the first instance, she had ultimately seen the propriety of voluntarily becoming Bothwell's wife. But it was her sincere and laudable desire, now that she was married, to shelter her husband as much as possible; and, conscious of her own innocence, she did not anticipate that the measures she took in his behalf might be turned against herself. It must indeed be distinctly remembered, in tracing the lamentable events which followed this marriage, that though force and fraud were not perhaps employed on the very day of its consummation, yet that they had previously done their utmost, and that it was not the Queen who surrendered herself to Bothwell, but Bothwell who forced himself upon the Queen.