she herself was King James V.'s lawful wife, and her son, the Earl of Murray, his legitimate issue, and true heir of the crown. The Lady Loch-Leven was not only mother to the Earl of Murray, but likewise to the Lord Lindsay's lady, by her husband Robert Douglas of Loch-Leven. The family of Loch-Leven was moreover heirs-apparent to that of Morton; and to that family they did actually succeed some time after. The Lord Ruthven also had to wife a natural daughter of the Earl of Angus;--all which considerations centering together in one, made the house of Loch-Leven, humanly speaking, a most sure and close prison for the Royal captive."[108] To give an air of something like justice to a measure so violent and unexpected, Morton and his friends endeavoured to sanction it by what they were pleased to term an Act of Privy Council. They experienced, however, no little difficulty in determining on the proper mode of expressing this act. They recollected the proclamations in the Queen's favour to which they had so recently put their names; they recollected also the solemn engagement into which they had entered at Carberry Hill; and though _might_ was with them of greater value than _right_, they did not choose, if they could avoid it, to stand convicted of treason in the face of the whole country. They tried, therefore, to excuse the step they had taken, by asserting, that though they still believed her Majesty had unwillingly married Bothwell, and had been kept in bondage by him, and that, though she had quitted his company for theirs at Carberry, yet that after they had "opened and declared unto her Highness her own estate and condition, and the miserable estate of this realm, with the danger that her dearest son the Prince stood in, requiring that she would suffer and command the murder and authors thereof to be punished, they found in her Majesty such untowardness and repugnance thereto, that rather she appeared to fortify and maintain the said Earl Bothwell and his accomplices in the said wicked crimes." The truth of this statement is directly contradicted by the transactions of the 15th of June, when Mary, though at the head of an army, had agreed to do every thing the Lords desired, and when, with a degree of facility only to be accounted for on the supposition that she was anxious to escape from his company, she had separated herself finally from Bothwell in the face of the whole world. So far from charging her with "fortifying" and "maintaining" him in his crimes, these Lords themselves declared, on the 11th, that they had assembled "to deliver their sovereign's most noble person out of bondage and captivity;" and, a month afterwards, they told the English ambassador they "firmly believed the Queen would not have lived with Bothwell half a year to an end."[109]