fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and
jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention
of art.

Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven, and Sir
Robert Melville were despatched to Lochleven, there to obtain the
Queen's signature to an act of abdication in favor of her son, and
another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and
a commission of regency was established till the return from France of
Murray, who, on August 15th, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athol.
According to his own account the expostulations as to her past conduct
which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears,
confessions, and attempts at extenuation or excuse; but when they parted
next day on good terms, she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from
that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close
keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for
bedfellows. Their mother and the Regent's, her father's former mistress,
was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction
and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm.
A rumor transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had
proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for
herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by
him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a
daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun
in France.

It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from
Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on
March 25, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands
under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the
household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterward
remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and
perplexity to herself, succeeded on May 2d in assisting her to escape by
a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland,
where George Douglas, Lord Seton, and others were awaiting her. Thence
they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton palace,
round which an army of six thousand men was soon assembled, and whither
the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The
Queen's abdication was revoked, messengers were desp