him how much she admired
him; but yet more than this,--we cannot doubt that she let herself be
drawn into a passionate connexion with him. Who does not know the
sonnets and the love-intoxicated letters she is believed to have
addressed to him? I would not say that every word of the latter is
genuine; through the several translations--from the French original
(which is lost) into the Scotch idiom, from this into Latin, and then
back into French as we now have them--they may have suffered much
alteration: we have no right to lay stress on every expression, and
interpret it by the light of later events: but in the main they are
without doubt genuine: they contain circumstances which no one else
could then know and which have since been proved to be true; no human
being could have invented them.[222] It does not seem as if Mary's
fondness for Bothwell was returned by him in the same degree: in her
letters and poems she is constantly combating a rival, to whom his
heart seems to give the preference. This was Bothwell's own wife whom
he had only shortly before married: she stayed with him for a time in
the neighbourhood of the court, but he took care that the Queen knew
nothing of her being there. As he was before all things ambitious and
desirous of power, he only cared for the Queen's love and the
possession of her person so far as it would enable him to share her
authority and to obtain the supreme power in Scotland. But for this
another thing was necessary; the King must be removed out of the way.
As Darnley had once joined Riccio's political enemies in the Holyrood
assassination, so Bothwell now united himself with Darnley's enemies
with a view to his murder, for which they were already quite prepared.
Morton was asked to join the enterprise this time also: but he
demanded a declaration from the Queen that she was not against it:
and this Bothwell could not obtain.

But, it may be said, was not the Queen in collusion with him? Did she
not purposely bring back her husband, who had fallen sick at Glasgow,
to Edinburgh, and did she not lodge him in a lonely house there not
far from the palace under the pretence that the purer air would
contribute to his recovery, but in fact to deliver him over all the
more surely to destruction? Such has been always the general belief:
even her partisans, the zealous Catholics, at that time inclined to
believe that the Queen at least connived in the plot.[223] But there
was yet another vi