There Darnley perished, strangled with his page, during the night of February 9, 1567. The house was blown up by means of a barrel of gunpowder, placed there to give the idea of an accident. During this time Marie had gone to a masked ball at Holyrood, not having quitted her husband until that evening, when all was prepared to its slightest detail. Bothwell, who was present for a time at the ball, left Edinburgh after midnight and presided at the killing. These circumstances are proved in an irrefragable manner by the testimony of witnesses, by the confessions of the actors, and by the letters of Marie Stuart, the authenticity of which M. Mignard, with decisive clearness, places beyond all doubt. She felt that in giving herself thus to Bothwell’s projects she furnished him with weapons against herself and gave him grounds to distrust her in turn. He might say to himself, as the Duke of Norfolk said later, that “the pillow of such a woman was too hard” to sleep upon. During the preparation of this horrible trap she more than once showed her repugnance to deceive the poor sick dupe who trusted her. “I shall never rejoice,” she writes, “through deceiving him who trusts me. Nevertheless, command me in all things. But do not conceive an ill opinion of me; because you yourself are the cause of this; for I would never do anything against him for my own particular vengeance.” And truly this rôle of Clytemnestra, or of Gertrude in Hamlet was not in accordance with her nature, and could only have been imposed upon her. But passion rendered her for this once insensible to pity, and made her heart (she herself avows it) “as hard as diamond.” Marie Stuart soon put the climax to her ill-regulated passion and desires by marrying Bothwell; thus revolting the mind of her whole people, whose morality, fanatical as it was, was never in the least depraved, and was far more upright than that of the nobles. The crime was echoed beyond the seas. L’Hôpital, that representative of the human conscience in a dreadful era, heard, in his country retreat, of the misguided conduct of her whose early grace and first marriage he had celebrated in his stately epithalamium; and he now recorded his indignation in another Latin poem, wherein he recounts the horrors of that funereal night, and does not shrink from calling the wife and the young mother “the murderess, alas! of a father whose child was still at her breast.” On the 15th of May, three months--only three months after the murder, at the first smile of spring, the marriage with the murderer was celebrated. Marie Stuart justified in all ways Shakespeare’s saying: “Frailty, thy name is Woman.” For none was ever more a woman than Marie Stuart.