Sir James Melvil, one of those cosmopolitan Scotsmen who were in so much request at European Courts in the sixteenth century, had been sent by the Emperor and the Elector Palatine, to whom he was then attached, to propose a marriage between the boy-king, Charles IX., and one of the granddaughters of the Emperor Ferdinand, and whilst he was still in Paris, early in 1564, his own Queen, Mary of Scotland, recalled him. He had lived abroad for many years--since he was a child--and Catharine de Medici made him tempting offers to remain with her, but he decided to obey Mary’s summons and return home. He had, of course, first to go to Heidelberg and take leave of his master, the Palatine. Some time before this the Palatine’s second son, the famous Duke Hans Casimir, had requested Melvil to carry an offer of marriage from him to Elizabeth. Melvil refused, as he says he had reason to believe from what he had heard that Elizabeth knew herself incapable of child-bearing, and “would never subject herself to any man.” When Melvil was taking leave of the Palatine, Hans Casimir forgot his resentment sufficiently to request the Scotch courtier to take his portrait and present it to the Queen on his way through London, and after considerable demur Melvil consented to do so on condition that he carried with him portraits of all the rest of the Elector Palatine’s family, so that Hans Casimir’s picture might be introduced as if accidentally. Melvil took with him also an important message from the Protestant princes of Germany to Elizabeth; and, with his polish and wit, very soon got into the Queen’s good graces. He deftly introduced the subject of the portraits, and she at once asked him pointedly whether he had that of Hans Casimir, as she wished to see it. He told her he had left the portraits in London, he being then at Hampton Court, whereupon she said he should not go until she had seen the pictures. Melvil delivered them to her next day, and even suggested that she should keep them. But she only asked Dudley’s opinion about them, “and would have none of them. I had also sure information that first and last she despised Duke Casimir.” Which, indeed, seems highly probable. In one of the Queen’s familiar chats with Melvil she told him she had determined to propose two persons as fit husbands for his Queen, and promised to make the Scotsman her agent in the matter, which, he says, at the persuasion of Dudley, she failed to do. He was soon sent back again to London as Mary’s envoy, to, if possible, mollify Elizabeth’s anger at the Scotch queen’s cool reception of her matrimonial advice, and at Mary’s intimacy with Lennox, the father of Darnley.