a woman? To her court in Holyrood
came Bothwell once again, and this time Mary knew that he was all the
world to her. Darnley had shrunk from the hardships of battle. He was
steeped in low intrigues. He roused the constant irritation of the
queen by his folly and utter lack of sense and decency. Mary felt she
owed him nothing, but she forgot that she owed much to herself.

Her old amorous ways came back to her, and she relapsed into the joys
of sense. The scandal-mongers of the capital saw a lover in every man
with whom she talked. She did, in fact, set convention at defiance. She
dressed in men's clothing. She showed what the unemotional Scots
thought to be unseemly levity. The French poet, Chastelard, misled by
her external signs of favor, believed himself to be her choice. At the
end of one mad revel he was found secreted beneath her bed, and was
driven out by force. A second time he ventured to secrete himself
within the covers of the bed. Then he was dragged forth, imprisoned,
and condemned to death. He met his fate without a murmur, save at the
last when he stood upon the scaffold and, gazing toward the palace,
cried in French:

"Oh, cruel queen! I die for you!"

Another favorite, the Italian, David Rizzio, or Riccio, in like manner
wrote love verses to the queen, and she replied to them in kind; but
there is no evidence that she valued him save for his ability, which
was very great. She made him her foreign secretary, and the man whom he
supplanted worked on the jealousy of Darnley; so that one night, while
Mary and Rizzio were at dinner in a small private chamber, Darnley and
the others broke in upon her. Darnley held her by the waist while
Rizzio was stabbed before her eyes with a cruelty the greater because
the queen was soon to become a mother.

From that moment she hated Darnley as one would hate a snake. She
tolerated him only that he might acknowledge her child as his son. This
child was the future James VI. of Scotland and James I. of England. It
is recorded of him that never throughout his life could he bear to look
upon drawn steel.

After this Mary summoned Bothwell again and again. It was revealed to
her as in a blaze of light that, after all, he was the one and only man
who could be everything to her. His frankness, his cynicism, his
mockery, his carelessness, his courage, and the power of his mind
matched her moods completely. She threw away all semblance of
concealment. She ignored the fact t