But in connection with Mr. Froude’s declaration that his faith rests on them because they were submitted to the _English Peerage_, impartial statement of evidence demands another comparison between these conflicting testimonies upon a different link in the chain of evidence for and against the guilt of Mary Stuart. Randolph was the English ambassador at the court of Scotland, and in some of his letters to Leicester he has revealed the English plotting and connivance in the scheme to ruin Mary, Queen of Scots. Regarding this point Miss Strickland says:— “In the selfsame letter which records the round of banquets, masks, and princely pleasures, the English Mephistopheles, Randolph, exultingly unfolds to Leicester the items of the black budget prepared with his approval, against the meeting of the Scottish Parliament, by the unscrupulous coalition of traitors who were secretly allied with their sovereign’s husband and his father in a dastardly bond for murder, premeditated in cold blood, and intended to be perpetrated in the presence of their queen; and the crime was to be justified, as such deeds generally are, by slander. “‘I know now for certain,’ writes he, ‘that this queen repenteth her marriage,—that she hateth him and all his kin. I know that he knoweth himself that he hath a partner in play and game with him. I know that there are practices in hand, contrived between the father and the son, to come by the crown against her will. I know that if it take effect, which is intended, David, with the consent of the king, shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many thing _grieveouser_, and worse than these are brought to my ears, yea, of things _intended against her own person_, which, because I think better to keep secret than to write to Mr. Secretary, I speak not of them, but now to your lordship.’ By one of the secret articles of the atrocious pact to which our worthy ambassador alludes, the life-long imprisonment of Mary was agreed, and her death, in case of her attempting to resist the transfer of the whole power of the crown to the ungrateful consort she had associated in her regality; and to this wrong Cecil, Bedford, and Elizabeth tacitly consented.” Such was the villanous treachery of Darnley and his father, leagued with the English ministers and malcontents in Scotland, headed by Murray, the plotting half-brother of the queen, against Mary Stuart, who time and again received her inconstant and petulant husband into favor, forgiving his outrageous behavior towards her. But Darnley little knew the schemes of his vile fellow-conspirators. They but used him as a tool, as long as he could avail their purposes, and then blew him up with gunpowder, when they had matured their infamous plans, so that his death should seemingly be the work of his shamefully abused and marvellously forbearing wife. Miss Strickland further says:—