continually
against him to Heaven, and the Queen feigned a widow's sorrow.

The whole realm was as when the ark of the covenant of the Lord was
removed from Israel and captive in the hands of the Philistines. The
injured sought not the redress of their wrongs; even the guilty were
afraid of one another, and by the very cowardice of their distrust were
prevented from banding at a time when they might have rioted at will.
What aggravated these portents of a kingdom falling asunder, was the
mockery of law and justice which the court attempted. Those who were
accused of the King's death ruled the royal councils, and were greatest
in the Queen's favour. The Earl of Bothwell dictated the very
proceedings by which he was himself to be brought to trial,--and when
the day of trial arrived, he came with the pomp and retinue of a
victorious conqueror--to be acquitted.

But acquitted, as the guilty ever needs must be whom no one dares to
accuse, nor any witness hazards to appear against, his acquittal served
but to prove his guilt, and the forms thereof the murderous
participation of the Queen. Thus, though he was assoilzied in form of
law, the libel against him was nevertheless found proven by the
universal verdict of all men. Yet, in despite of the world, and even of
the conviction recorded within their own bosoms, did the infatuated Mary
and that dreadless traitor, in little more than three months from the
era of their crime, rush into an adulterous marriage; but of the
infamies concerning the same, and of the humiliated state to which poor
Scotland sank in consequence, I must refer the courteous reader to the
histories and chronicles of the time--while I return to the narrative of
my grandfather.

When the Earl of Bothwell, as I have been told by those who heard him
speak of these deplorable blots on the Scottish name, had been created
Duke of Orkney, the people daily expected the marriage. But instead of
the ordinary ceremonials used at the marriages of former kings and
princes, the Queen and all about her, as if they had been smitten from
on high with some manifest and strange phrenzy, resolved, as it were in
derision and blasphemy, notwithstanding her own and the notour popery of
the Duke, to celebrate their union according to the strictest forms of
the protestants; and John Knox being at the time in the West Country,
his colleague, Master Craig, was ordered by the Queen in council to
publish the bans three several Sabba