The wise policy of James V. to respect the native laws and liberties of Orkney had been swept away by time; and the conflicting influences and interests of the Reformation had surrounded his daughter with Counsellors who thought only of turning to most profit the difficulties of their Queen and country. Moray, as chief of the Reforming party, had secured the lion’s share of the spoils of the Crown and Church for himself and his brother-in-law Argyle, and their influence obtained for his bastard brother, Lord Robert Stewart, a Feu Charter of the Islands of Orkney and Zetland (26th May 1565), a gift exactly suited to his character and capacity, as a sphere of safe and indefinite peculation, unexposed to political dangers. This memorable grant was the first express sanction of Tulloch’s policy of identifying the _libere tenentes_, as the Odallers were styled, with the serf-like Rentaller of the Scottish Crown, and was essentially as illegal as unjust—illegal, because neither sanctioned by Parliament nor bestowed on a lawful Prince, and unjust, because it disposed not only of the ancient Earldom, Skatts, and actual property of the Crown, but of the Feudal Superiority, Lands, and Services of the Odallers, which could be neither conveyed by Norway, acquired by Scotland, nor bestowed upon a subject. But their fate was still suspended for a little by accident or the fluctuations of Court interest. The rise of Darnley was the fall of Moray, and the cupidity of some new courtier searched out the inherent flaw in Lord Robert’s title. His Government and Sheriffship were conferred upon Gilbert Balfour of Westray, now Master of the Queen’s Household (3rd January 1565–6), but subject to the native laws which were again solemnly recognized by Parliament (6th December 1567), and Lord Robert was partially consoled for his loss of Orkney by a grant of the rich temporalities of the Abbey of Holyrood (16th April 1567). In the same eventful year (12th May 1567) Queen Mary sought to grace her last fatal nuptials, solemnized by Bishop Adam, with a wedding gift to James Earl of Bothwell, of the Islands and Dukedom of Orkney—a shortlived dignity of a month, forgotten in the immortal infamy of his older title. On his flight from Carberry, he plunged like an angry meteor from another sphere across his Northern Dukedom, leaving there, as elsewhere, no traces but of evil. Baffled in Orkney by the opposition of Balfour, his semi-piratical exactions in Zetland afforded the precedent for the future annual burden of Ox-money, and he continued his flight to Norway, chased like a hunted wolf by Bishop Adam, who, in the new-born zeal of his pursuit of his fallen friend, was wrecked upon the rock still named from his ship The Unicorn—the monument of his first and last visit to his Northern Diocese—but the two Bothwells, Earl and Bishop, have involved local history in a strange Comedy of Errors.