; but though the earl of Murray, they added, and the other
commissioners, had so far forgotten the duty of allegiance to their
prince, the queen never would overlook what she owed to her friend, her
neighbor, and her kinswoman; and she therefore desired to know what they
could say in their own justification.[***] Murray, thus urged, made no
difficulty in producing the proofs of his charge against the queen of
Scots; and among the rest, some love-letters and sonnets of hers to
Bothwell, written all in her own hand, and two other papers, one written
in her own hand, another subscribed by her, and written by the earl of
Huntley; each of which contained a promise of marriage with Bothwell,
made before the pretended trial and acquittal of that nobleman.

* Lesley's Negotiations in Anderson, vol. iii. p. 25.
Haynes, p. 487.

** See note K, at the end of the volume.

*** Anderson, vol. iv. part ii. p. 147. Goodall, vol. ii. p.
233.

All these important papers had been kept by Bothwell in a silver box or
casket, which had been given him by Mary, and which had belonged to her
first husband, Francis; and though the princess had enjoined him to burn
the letters as soon as he had read them, he had thought proper carefully
to preserve them, as pledges of her fidelity, and had committed them
to the custody of Sir James Balfour, deputy governor of the Castle of
Edinburgh. When that fortress was besieged by the associated lords,
Bothwell sent a servant to receive the casket from the hands of the
deputy governor. Balfour delivered it to the messenger; but as he had
at that time received some disgust from Bothwell, and was secretly
negotiating an agreement with the ruling party, he took care, by
conveying private intelligence to the earl of Morton, to make the papers
be intercepted by him, They contained incontestable proofs of Mary's
criminal correspondence with Bothwell, of her consent to the king's
murder, and of her concurrence in the violence which Bothwell
pretended to commit upon her.[*] Murray fortified this evidence by some
testimonies of corresponding facts;[**] and he added, some time after,
the dying confession of one Hubert, or French Paris, as he was called, a
servant of Bothwell's, who had been executed for the king's murder, and
who directly charged the queen with her being accessory to that criminal
enterprise.[***]

Mary's commissioners had used every expedient to ward this blow, which
the