st of the Queen's mistakes. Better for her had she taken with
Darnley the direct way that was her right. Better for her, if acting
strongly then, she had banished or hanged him for his part in the
treason that had inspired the murder of Rizzio. Unfortunately, a factor
that served to quicken her abhorrence of him served also to set a curb
of caution upon the satisfaction of it.

This factor that came so inopportunely into her life was her regard for
the arrogant, unscrupulous Earl of Bothwell. Her hand was stayed by fear
that men should say that for Bothwell's sake she had rid herself of a
husband become troublesome. That Bothwell had been her friend in the
hour when she had needed friends, and knew not whom she might trust;
that by his masterfulness he seemed a man upon whom a woman might lean
with confidence, may account for the beginnings of the extraordinary
influence he came so swiftly to exercise over her, and the passion he
awakened in her to such a degree that she was unable to dissemble it.

Her regard for him, the more flagrant by contrast with her contempt for
Darnley, is betrayed in the will she made before her confinement in
the following June. Whilst to Darnley she bequeathed nothing but the
red-enamelled diamond ring with which he had married her--"It was with
this that I was married," she wrote almost contemptuously. "I leave it
to the King who gave it me"--she appointed Bothwell to the tutelage of
her child in the event of her not surviving it, and to the government of
the realm.

The King came to visit her during her convalescence, and was scowled
upon by Murray and Argyll, who were at Holyrood, and most of all
by Bothwell, whose arrogance by now was such that he was become the
best-hated man in Scotland. The Queen received him very coldly, whilst
using Bothwell more than cordially in his very presence, so that he
departed again in a deeper humiliation than before.

Then before the end of July there was her sudden visit to Bothwell
at Alloa, which gave rise to so much scandal. Hearing of it, Darnley
followed in a vain attempt to assert his rights as king and husband,
only to be flouted and dismissed with the conviction that his life was
no longer safe in Scotland, and that he had best cross the Border.
Yet, to his undoing, detained perhaps by the overweening pride that
is usually part of a fool's equipment, he did not act upon that wise
resolve. He returned instead to his hawking and his hunting, and