Casket; playing cards, spying, dancing, and winning hearts, and forging letters: a versatile man of considerable charm and knowledge of the world. His life, after 1581, is a varied but always sordid chapter of romance. A grimmer and a godlier man is Mr. John Wood, secretary of Moray, with whom he had been in France, an austere person, a rebuker of Mary’s dances and frivolity. He, too, was a Lord of Session, and was wont to spur Moray on against Idolaters. We shall find him very busy in managing the Casket Letters. He was slain by young Forbes of Reres, the son of the corpulent Lady Reres, rumoured to have been the complacent confidant of Mary’s amour with Bothwell. Reres had certainly no reason to love Mr. John Wood. George Buchanan, too, is on the scene, the Latin poet, the Latin historian, who sang of and libelled his Queen, his pupil. Old now, and a devoted partisan of the Lennoxes, no man contributed more to the cause of Mary’s innocence than Buchanan, so grossly inaccurate and amusingly inconsistent are his various indictments of her behaviour. ‘He spak and wret as they that wer about him for the tym infourmed him,’ says Sir James Melville, ‘for he was becom sleprie and cairles.’ Melville speaks of a later date, but George’s invectives against Mary are ‘careless’ in all conscience. Besides these there is a pell-mell of men and women; crafty courteous diplomatists like the two Melvilles; burly Kirkcaldy of Grange, a murderer of the Cardinal, a spy of England when he was in French service, a secret agent of Cecil, a brave man and good captain, but accused of forgery, and by no means ‘the second Wallace of Scotland,’ the frank, manly, open-hearted Greysteil of historical tradition. Huntly and Argyll make little mark on the imagination: both astute, both full of promise, both barren of accomplishment. The Hamiltons have a lofty position, but are destitute of brains as of scruples; even the Archbishop, most unscrupulous of all, is no substitute for Cardinal Beaton.