‘The bancket was maid efter the best forme they could for the tyme’ (MS. quoted in Documents relative to the Reception at Edinburgh of the Kings and Queens of Scotland, cited in the introduction to the Maitland Club Letters, p. xvii). The king's intention of speedily returning to Scotland, announced in his proclamation, was once more frustrated by stormy weather; and at the invitation of the queen dowager and council of Denmark the newly married couple spent the remainder of the winter in that country, where Anne appears to have gone through the marriage ceremony for the third time at Kronenborg. According to Archbishop Spottiswoode (History of the Church and State of Scotland, fol., p. 380, incorrectly given by Miss Strickland, u. s. p. 337), the Danish government, on the occasion of the ‘compleating’ of the marriage, abandoned all claim of right to the Orkneys till King Christian IV should have come of age. This was a temporary abandonment only, and the most recent historian of Scotland states it to have been ‘a question fertile in ingenious speculations in international law, whether, if payment of the dower of Margaret of Norway should at any time be offered, Britain would be bound to restore the islands’ (Burton, iii. 166).
On 21 April 1590 the royal couple sailed from Kronenborg, and on 1 May they landed at Leith. Great preparations had been made to welcome them, and the lord provost and baillies of Edinburgh had judiciously resolved to ‘propyne’ the queen with a magnificent jewel which the king had pledged to the town for 4,000l. But Holyrood Palace was, after all, not ready for their reception till the 6th of that month. The queen's solemn entry into Edinburgh was to have taken place on the same day as her coronation, 17 May; but as this was the Lord's Day, it was decided ‘among the ministers’ that, though the coronation might be held upon it, the entry might not, and the latter ceremony was accordingly deferred to the 19th. On this occasion the queen enjoyed a foretaste of that allegorical pageantry which afterwards became one of the ruling passions of her life; and Andrew Melville delivered an oration to the Danish ambassadors which was commended by Joseph Scaliger in the memorable words, ‘Profecto nos talia non possumus’ (Calderwood, u. s. 95–6). Immediately after her arrival in Scotland she had taken legal possession of the three lordships of Falkland, Dunfermline, and Linlithgow belonging to her dowry. She afterwards indulged her love of building in the renovation of her palace at Dunfermline. As late, however, as 1593, a Danish embassy arrived to ‘demand a just rental of her dowry in Scotland’ (Historie of James the Sext).
According to the enthusiastic testimony of the minister who married her at Upslo, Anne was at this time a beautiful girl. Even in later times her white skin and yellow hair were admired, though Osborne, in his ‘Traditionall Memoyres,’ unkindly describes the former as ‘far more amiable than the features it covered.’ But though the world and she might now seem to smile on one another, there were other reasons besides her youth and good looks why it behoved her to move warily in the strange court and country in which her lot had fallen. The ceaseless strife of the Scottish factions was full of perils for her high spirit and inexperience, and she was quite out of sympathy with the dominant religious sentiment of the people. At first she manifested a dislike to the counsellor whom the king had placed in her household; but, if Sir James Melville's account is to be trusted, the successful way in which he fulfilled his delicate functions at length gained him her goodwill. To the charges brought against Bothwell (Francis Stuart) of having been guiltily mixed up with the witchcraft that had delayed her coming, she was of course a stranger. Scandalous rumours arose on the occasion of the death of the Earl of Murray (son-in-law of the Regent Murray), who, being supposed to favour Bothwell's desperate designs, was massacred by the Earl of Huntly and his Roman catholic followers in February 1592. But there is no clear proof that the deed was done by the king's command, and no proof of any kind to show that the queen had given him cause for jealousy (Burton, vi. 59). Nor is there anything to connect Queen Anne with the escapade of her gentlewoman, Margaret Twynstoun, who in the same year enabled Wemys of Logie, accused of intercourse with Bothwell, to escape at night-time out of the window of the queen's chamber (Historie and Life of James the Sext, 253–4). It would, however, certainly seem as if the party which was opposed to the influence of the chancellor Maitland, and which had brought about his temporary dismissal, had found a supporter in the queen, till he contrived to make his peace with her after recovering the royal favour (Melville, 405). To suppose, on the other hand, that she in any way abetted the mad attempts of Bothwell upon the royal palaces and their inmates, would amount to nothing short of injustice. The birth of her eldest son at Stirling on 19 Feb. 1594—the year of the last of Bothwell's exploits—was the best encouragement for the loyalty which had
