In revising this book I have corrected a number of misreadings in the Arabic numerals of dates of years. I owe much to Mr. David Bruce-Gardyne and Mr. Hay Fleming. In deference to other criticisms offered privately, I have somewhat modified certain phrases about the hypothetical forged letter, as quoted by Moray and Lennox (pp. 211-236). That such a letter once existed is, of course, an inference on which readers must form their own opinion. The passage as to the site of Darnley’s house, Kirk o’ Field (pp. 124-131), ought to have been banished to an Appendix. On any theory the existence of the town wall, shown in the contemporary chart opposite p. 130, is a difficulty. The puzzle is caused by the chart of 1567, reduced in the design given at p. 130. In all published forms the drawing is given as it is here. But it reverses the points of the compass, east and west. Mr. A. H. Millar has suggested to me that if reflected in a mirror some errors of the chart disappear, whence one infers that it was drawn in reverse for an engraving. I have, therefore, corrected the text in this sense. But difficulties remain: there is a town wall, running south to north, of which we have no other knowledge; and Hamilton House (if the chart is reversed) is placed east instead of west of Kirk o’ Field, where it actually stood. The original design contains only the name of Hamilton House. In our chart the house is copied from the picture of it as part of the University buildings, in the map of 1647. INTRODUCTION Mr. Carlyle not unjustly described the tragedy of Mary Stuart as but a personal incident in the true national History of Scotland. He asked for other and more essential things than these revelations of high life. Yet he himself wrote in great detail the story of the Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette. The diamonds of the French, the silver Casket of the Scottish Queen, with all that turned on them, are of real historical interest, for these trifles brought to the surface the characters and principles of men living in an age of religious revolution. Wells were sunk, as it were, deep into human personality, and the inner characteristics of the age leaped upwards into the light.