Though Mary attempted to conceal her misery from the prying eye of the world, they who had an opportunity of being near her person easily saw that her peace of mind was wrecked. So little love existed either on the one side or the other, that even the days usually set aside for nuptial rejoicings, were marked only by suspicions and wranglings. They remained together at Holyrood from the 15th of May to the 7th of June; but during the whole of that time, Bothwell was so alarmed, lest she should yet break from him, and assert her independence, that he kept her "environed with a continual guard of two hundred harquebuziers, as well day as night, wherever she went;"--and whoever wished an audience with her, "it behoved him, before he could come to her presence, to go through the ranks of harquebuziers, under the mercy of a notorious tyrant,--a new example, wherewith this nation had never been acquainted; and yet few or none were admitted to her speech, for his suspicious heart, brought in fear by the testimony of an evil conscience, would not suffer her subjects to have access to her Majesty as they were wont to do."[96] The letter from which these passages are quoted, deserves, at this period of Mary's history, every attention, for it was written, scarcely two months after her marriage, by the Lords who had associated themselves against Bothwell, but who had not yet discovered the necessity of implicating Mary in the guilt with which they charged him. The declarations therefore, they then made, contrasted with those which ambition and selfishness afterwards prompted, prove their sincerity in the first instance, and their wickedness in the last. "They firmly believe," they say, "that whether they had risen up against her husband or not, _the Queen would not have lived with him half a year to an end_, as may be conjectured by the short time they lived together, and _the maintaining of his other wife at home at his house_." This last fact is no less singular than it is important. It seems distinctly to imply, that though Bothwell was divorced from his first wife, and that though her brother, the Earl of Huntly, had given his consent to the divorce, yet that in reality, the dissolution of the marriage was, on the part of Bothwell, merely _pro forma_, to enable him to prosecute his scheme of ambition, that his attachment to the Lady Jane Gordon continued unabated, and that if Mary had ever loved him, she must have loved him, knowing that he did not return her affection. No wonder that under such an accumulation of miseries--the suspicion with which she was regarded by foreign courts,--the ready hatred of many of her more bigoted Presbyterian subjects,--the dependence, almost amounting to a state of bondage, in which she was kept,--and the brutal treatment she experienced from her worthless husband,--no wonder that Mary was heard, in moments almost of distraction, to express an intention of committing