b, vol. ii. p. 456.

Soon after her arrival in Scotland, Secretary Lidington was sent to
London, in order to pay her compliments to the queen, and express
her desire of friendship and a good correspondence; and he received
a commission from her, as well as from the nobility of Scotland, to
demand, as a means of cementing this friendship, that Mary should, by
act of parliament or by proclamation, (for the difference between these
securities was not then deemed very considerable,) be declared successor
to the crown. No request could be more unreasonable, or made at a more
improper juncture. The queen replied, that Mary had once discovered
her intention not to wait for the succession, but had openly, without
ceremony or reserve, assumed the title of Queen of England, and had
pretended a superior right to her throne and kingdom: that though her
ambassadors and those of her husband, the French king, had signed a
treaty, in which they renounced that claim, and promised satisfaction
for so great an indignity, she was so intoxicated with this imaginary
right, that she had rejected the most earnest solicitations, and
even, as some endeavored to persuade her, had incurred some danger, in
crossing the seas, rather than ratify that equitable treaty: that her
partisans every where had still the assurance to insist on her title,
and had presumed to talk of her own birth as illegitimate: that while
affairs were on this footing; while a claim thus openly made, so far
from being openly renounced, was only suspended till a more favorable
opportunity; it would in her be the most egregious imprudence to fortify
the hands of a pretender to her crown by declaring her the successor:
that no expedient could be worse imagined for cementing friendship than
such a declaration; and kings were often found to bear no good will to
their successors, even though their own children; much more when
the connection was less intimate, and when such cause of disgust and
jealousy had already been given, and indeed was still continued, on the
part of Mary: that though she was willing, from the amity which she
bore her kinswoman, to ascribe her former pretensions to the advice of
others, by whose direction she was then governed, her present refusal to
relinquish them could proceed only from her own prepossessions, and was
a proof that she still harbored some dangerous designs against her:
that it was the nature of all men to be disgusted with the present,
to en