them on the night of June 14th, and
they marched before dawn with twenty-two hundred men to meet him near
Musselburgh. Mary meanwhile had passed from Dunbar to Haddington, and
thence to Seton, where sixteen hundred men rallied to her side. On June
15th, one month from their marriage day, the Queen and Bothwell, at the
head of a force of fairly equal numbers but visibly inferior discipline,
met the army of the confederates at Carberry hill, some six miles from
Edinburgh.

It was agreed that the Queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell
be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar with the few followers who
remained to him. Mary took leave of her first and last master with
passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies,
and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her
death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate
spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile
flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and
crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped
the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand"
she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a
yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner
representing the corpse of Darnley, with her child beside it, invoking
on his knees the retribution of divine justice.

From the violence of a multitude, in which women of the worst class were
more furious than the men, she was sheltered in the house of the
provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing
aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could
look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to
Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under
guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the
20th a silver casket containing letters and French verses, miscalled
sonnets, in the handwriting of the Queen, was taken from the person of a
servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to
Dunbar. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from
the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text
which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his
accession to the English throne--even in these possibly disfigured
versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous