. 402. Anderson, voL i. p. 128,
134, Crawford, p. 11. Keith, Pref. p. 9.

It was every where said, that even though no particular and direct
proofs had as yet been produced of the queen's guilt, the whole tenor
of her late conduct was sufficient, not only to beget suspicion, but
to produce entire conviction against her: that her sudden resolution
of being reconciled to her husband, whom before she had long and justly
hated; her bringing him to court, from which she had banished him by
neglects and rigors; her fitting up separate apartments for him; were
all of them circumstances which, though trivial in themselves, yet,
being compared with the subsequent events, bore a very unfavorable
aspect for her: that the least which, after the king's murder, might
have been expected in her situation, was a more than usual caution in
her measures, and an extreme anxiety to punish the real assassins, in
order to free herself from all reproach and suspicion: that no woman who
had any regard to her character, would allow a man, publicly accused of
her husband's murder, so much as to approach her presence, far less give
him a share in her councils, and endow him with favor and authority that
an acquittal, merely in the absence of accusers, was very ill fitted to
satisfy the public; especially if that absence proceeded from a designed
precipitation of the sentence, and from the terror which her known
friendship for the criminal had infused into every one: that the very
mention of her marriage to such a person, in such circumstances, was
horrible; and the contrivances of extorting a consent from the nobility,
and of concerting a rape, were gross artifices, more proper to discover
her guilt than prove her innocence: that where a woman thus shows a
consciousness of merited reproach, and instead of correcting, provides
only thin glosses to cover her exceptionable conduct, she betrays a
neglect of fame, which must either be the effect or the cause of the
most shameful enormities: that to espouse a man who had, a few days
before, been so scandalously divorced from his wife, who, to say
the least, was believed to have a few months before assassinated her
husband, was so contrary to the plainest rules of behavior, that no
pretence of indiscretion or imprudence could account for such a conduct:
that a woman who, so soon after her husband's death, though not attended
with any extraordinary circumstances, contracts a marriage which might
in i