ceedings against the ruffians who did the bloody work of these sanguinary lords, wofully confirmed it. We have seen how the disclosures of Hay of Tollo had startled Murray and his accomplices, and made them thrust him and his fellows back into their dungeons. Meantime, Grango and Tullibardine, though they had failed in the main object of their expedition, the seizure of Bothwell, had secured one of his ships containing Hepburn of Bolton, one of the accomplices; and his confession, taken in private, was of a like tenor with that of Hay. It was, therefore, deemed the only safe course, to prevent their disclosures becoming public to the certain conviction of the real instigators of the murder, to get them out of the world as fast as possible. They were, therefore, arraigned—that is, Hepburn, Hay, Dalgleish, and Powrie—convicted, and hanged in all haste on one day, the 3rd of January, 1568. Yet they did not entirely succeed in suppressing the truth. Hepbern, on the scaffold, boldly proclaimed that not only Bothwell, but Argyll, Huntley, and Maitland, had signed the bend for the king's death. Notwithstanding this, no inquiry took place, for these were the very men who maintained Murray in his place. The judicial confessions of this very man, however, as well as the rest, were garbled, and afterwards brought forward in England, in proof that they implicated no one but Bothwell and themselves. To conceive a complete idea of the iniquity by which these proceedings were accomplished, we must include the facts that Argyll, one of the authors of the murder, was Lord Justice-General, that the confessions were made before the Privy Council—and who were those Privy Councillors? The chief of them were Morton, Huntley, Argyll, Maitland, and Balfour, all parties to the murder; whilst Murray, the regent and ruler, was the man called and set up by this extraordinary junto of assassins.
To maintain his pre-eminence, it was necessary that Murray should bribe these coadjutors and supporters. To Maitland he gave the sheriffship of Lothian; to Hume, that of Lauderdale; to Morton, the post of Lord High Admiral, forfeited by Bothwell; to Kirkaldy, the governership of Edinburgh Castle; to Huntley and Argyll, his daughter and his sister-in-law in marriage. But he could not satisfy them, and they soon began to look coldly on each other; whilst less favoured men, or those who thought themselves so in comparison of their imagined merits, grew jealous and hostile. Herries and the Melvilles, the Hamiltons, and Atholl were all suspected of disaffection and resentment. Balfour, with all his great bargain, did not deem himself sufficiently paid or respected, and quitted the Court in disgust. As for Maitland, he was double-faced to every party from the beginning; and the people, perceiving, as their passions subsided, the real state of things, were the most ill-affected of all. Instead of the glory and power to which Murray imagined himself mounting, by baseness in himself, upon base materials, he found himself in the midst of a discordant chaos of hateful and incompatible natures. Whilst all seemed crumbling and shaking around him, an earthquake suddenly heaved beneath his feet.
The queen, seeing herself deserted and deceived by Murray, and destined by him to perpetual captivity, resolved to exert every faculty to effect her escape. Probably some rumours of the unsatisfactory condition of the Government, and the returning affection of the people, had penetrated the recesses of her prison-house. She assumed gradually an air of resignation, of cheerfulness. Instead of treating the Douglases with the haughty distance of an injured captive, she opened to them the natural charms of her mind and conversation. No person, man or woman, could long remain insensible to her fascinations. George Douglas, a younger brother of the house of Lochleven, became deeply in love with her; and the proud mother relaxed her severity, and in the brilliant prospect of a marriage of this young and gallant son with the Queen of Scotland, forgot the interests of her son the regent, who left her to occupy, distant from Court, the odious office of a turnkey. George Douglas entered into the plot to effect the queen's escape, with all the ardour of youth and passion. He had planned to convey her to shore disguised as a laundry-woman, but on the passage she was detected by the remarkable whiteness and delicacy of her hands, and was carried back, whilst Douglas was expelled from the castle.
The most rigid surveillance was now maintained over Mary; but, with her indefatigable lover on shore, she never despaired. He was more useful there than in the castle, for he was flying about rousing the Hamiltons and the Seatons to muster their forces, and to be ready at some favourable moment to receive and defend her. Within the castle he had a very ingenious coadjutor in a relative, William Douglas, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, called the Little Douglas. The Little Douglas acted as page to the castellan; and on Sunday, the 2nd of May, 1568, he contrived, while waiting at supper, to drop a napkin over the key of the castle, which lay at the castellan's side, and abstract it unobserved. He flew with it to the queen, who, taking one of her maidens with her, hurried down to the outer gate, which they locked after them, and flinging the key into the lake, entered the boat and rowed away. The signal to the parties on the watch on shore, was to be a light left in a particular window of the castle. The boy had not forgotten this, and Lord Seaton and a party of his own people and the Hamiltons were eagerly awaiting them on the shore. A man, lying at length on the shore, soon gave notice that he could perceive a female figure with two attendants flying hastily from the outer gate of the castle, and springing into the boat. Soon the preconcerted sign, the white veil of the queen with its red fringe was visible, and presently the little boat approaching, Mary sprang on shore, in the rapture of recovered freedom. The faithful George Douglas was the first to receive her; she was immediately surrounded by Lord Seaton and his friends, and being mounted on a swift steed, they galloped with all speed to the ferry, crossed, and pursued their flight to Niddry, in West Lothian, where the next day she proceeded to Hamilton, attended by Lord Claud Hamilton, who had met them on the road with fifty horse. At Niddry she had snatched time to write a hasty announcement of her escape to France; and, true to her unconquerable affection to Bothwell, dispatched a letter to him, sending Hepburn of Riccarton to Dunbar to summon the castle to surrender to her, and then to speed onwards to Denmark, and convey to Bothwell the news of her freedom.
The news of the escape of the queen flew like lightning in every direction; the people, forgetting her failings in
