the fate of Wishart to go for nothing? Setting the natural influences of bigotry aside, and with every consideration for the zeal which could hurry even so good a man as Sir Thomas More to express, in words at least, a desire to see the faggot and the stake in full operationwhat shall we say to the individual who could calmly issue his infernal orders, and, in the full pomp of ecclesiastical vanity, become a pleased spectator of the sufferings of a human being, undergoing the most hideous of all imaginable deaths? Truly this, that the brute deserved to die in return; and that we, at all events, shall not stigmatise those who killed him as guilty of murder. Poor old Sharpe was murdered, if ever man was, in a hideous and atrocious manner; but as for Beatoun, he deserved to die, and his death was invested with a sort of judicial sanction, having been perpetrated in presence of the sheriff of the bounds.

The tidings of this act of vengeance spread, not only through Scotland, but through Europe, like wildfire. According as men differed in religious faith, they spoke of it either with horror or exultation. Even the most moderate of the reforming party were slow to blame the deed which freed them from a bloody persecutor; and Sir David Lindesay of the Mount, the witty and satirical scholar, did not characterise it more severely than as expressed in the following verses :—

"As for the cardinal, I grant

He was the man we well might want;
God will forgive it soon.
But of a truth, the sooth to say,
Although the loon be well away,

The deed was foully done." Meanwhile the conspirators had conceived the daring scheme of holding the castle of St Andrews against all comers, and of setting the authority of the regent at defiance. They calculated upon receiving support from England, in case France thought fit to interfere; and perhaps they imagined that a steady resistance on their part might excite a general insurrection in Scotland. Besides this, they had retained in custody the son and heir of the Regent Arran, whom they had found in the castle, and who was a valuable hostage in their hands.

The force they could command was not great. Amongst others, John Knox joined them with his three pupils; several Fife barons espoused their cause; and altogether they mustered about one hundred and fifty armed men. This was a small body, but the defences of the place were more than usually complete, and they were well munimented with artillery. Accordingly, though formally summoned, they peremptorily refused to surrender.

John Knox, when he entered the castle, was probably under the impression that he was joining a company of men, serious in their deportment, rigid in their conversation, and self-denying in their habits. If so, he must very soon have discovered his mistake. The young Reforming gentry were not one whit more scrupulous than their Catholic coevals: Norman Leslie, though brave as steel, was a thorough-paced desperado; and, from the account given by our author of the doings at St Andrews, it may easily be understood how uncongenial such quarters must have been to the stern and ascetic Reformer.

Arran had probably no intention of pushing matters to extremity, though compelled, for appearance' sake, to invest the fortress. After a siege of three weeks it remained unreduced; and a pestilence which broke out in the town of St Andrews, afforded the regent a pretext for agreeing to an armistice. Hitherto the conspirators had received the countenance and support of Henry VIII., who remitted them large sums from time to time, and promised even more active assistance. But this never arrived. Death at last put a stop to the bereavements of this unconscionable widower; and thereupon the French court despatched a fleet of one-and-twenty vessels of war, under the command of Leon Strozzio-a famous Florentine noble, who had risen in the Order of the Hospital to the rank of Prior of Capua-for the purpose of reducing the stubborn stronghold of heresy. Strozzio's name was so well known as that of a most skilful commander and tactician, and the weight of the ordnance he brought with him was so great, that the besieged had no hope of escaping this time; yet, on being

summoned, they replied, with the most undaunted bravery, that they would defend the castle against the united powers of Scotland, England, and France. With such resolute characters as these, it was no use to parley further; and the Prior accordingly set about his task with a dexterity which put to shame the feeble tactics of Arran.

"By sea and land the siege was pressed with great fury. From the ramparts of the Abbey Church, from the college, and other places in the adjoining streets, the French and Scottish cannoneers maintained a perpetual cannonade upon the castle. Those soldiers who manned the steeples and St Salvador's tower occupied such an elevation, that, by depressing their cannon, they shot down into the inner quadrangle of the castle, the pavement of which could be seen dabbled with the blood of the garrison; and, to aggravate the increasing distress of the latter, the pestilence found its way among them--many died, and all were dismayed. Walter Melville, one of their bravest leaders, fell deadly sick; while watching, warding, and scanty fare, were rapidly wearing out the rest; and John Knox dinned continually in their ears, that their present perils were the just reward of their former corrupt lives and licentiousness, and reliance on England rather than Heaven.

"For the first twenty days of this siege, said he, 'ye prospered bravely: but when ye triumphed at your victory, I lamented, and ever said that ye saw not what I saw. When ye boasted of the thickness of your walls, I said they would be but as egg-shells: when ye vaunted, England will rescue us-I said, ye shall not see it; but ye shall be delivered into your enemies' hands, and carried afar off into a strange country.'

"This gloomy prophesying was but cold comfort for those whom his precepts and exhortations had urged to rebellion, to outlawry, and to bloodshed; but their affairs were fast approaching a crisis."

If John Knox showed little judgment in adopting this tone of vaticination, he is, at all events, entitled to some credit for his courage-since Norman Leslie possessed a temper which it was rather dangerous to aggravate, and must sometimes have been sorely tempted to toss the querulous Reformer into the sea.

The garrison finally surrendered to Leon Strozzio, but not until battle

ment and wall had been breached, and an escalade rendered practicable.

The prisoners, including William Kirkaldy, were conveyed to France, and there subjected to treatment which varied according to their station. Those of knightly rank were incarcerated in separate fortresses; the remainder were chained to oars in the galleys on the Loire. John Knox was one of those who were forced to undergo this ignominious punishment; and we quite agree with our author in holding that, "it is not probable, that the lash of the tax-master increased towards his goodwill

popery."

William Kirkaldy was shut up in the great castle of Mont Saint Michel, along with Norman Leslie, his uncle of Parkhill, and Peter Carmichael of Kilmadie. But, however strong the fortress, it was imprudent in their gaolers to lodge four such fiery spirits together. They resolved to break prison; and did so, having, by an ingenious ruse, succeeded in overpowering the garrison, and, after some vicissitudes and wanderings, made good their escape to England.

After this event there is a blank of some years, during which we hear little of Kirkaldy. It is, however, an important period in northern history, for it includes the battle of Pinkie, the removal of the child, Queen Mary, to France, and her betrothment to the Dauphin. Kirkaldy seems not to have arrived in England until the death of Edward VI, when the Romanist party attained a temporary ascendency. We next find him in the service of Henry II. of France, engaged in the wars between that monarch and the Emperor Charles V. In these campaigns, says our author, by his bravery and conduct, he soon attained that eminent distinction and reputation, as a skilful and gallant soldier, which ceased only with his life.

Kirkaldy was not the only member of the stout garrison of St Andrews who found employment in the French service. Singularly enough, Norman Leslie, the head of the conspirators, had also a command, and was in high favour with the famous Constable Anne de Montmorencie. His death, which occurred the day before the battle of Renti, is thus graphically

recounted in the Memoirs, and is a picture worth preserving :

"The day before the battle, the constable, perceiving by the manœuvres of the Spanish troops that Charles meant to take possession of certain heights, which sloped abruptly down to the camp or bivouac of the French, sent up Leslie's Scottish lances and other horsemen to skirmish with these Imperialists, and drive them back. Melville, his fellowsoldier, thus describes him :-In view of the whole French army, the Master of Rothes, with thirty Scotsmen, rode up the hill upon a fair gray gelding. He had, above his coat of black velvet, his coat of armour, with two broad white crosses, one before and the other behind, with sleeves of mail, and a red bonnet upon his head, whereby he was seen and known afar off by the constable, the Duke d'Enghien, and the Prince of Condé.' His party was diminished to seven by the time he came within lance-length of the Imperialists, who were sixty in number; but he burst upon them with the force of a thunderbolt, escaping the fire of their hand-culverins, which they discharged incessantly against him. He struck five from their saddles with his long lance, before it broke into splinters; then, drawing his sword, he rushed again and again among them, with the heedless bravery for which he had ever been distinguished.

At the critical moment of this unequal contest, of seven Scottish knights against sixty Spaniards, a troop of Imperial spearmen were hastily riding along the hill to join in the encounter. By this time Leslie had received several bullets in his person; and, finding himself unable to continue the conflict longer, he dashed spurs into his horse, galloped back to the constable, and fell, faint and exhausted, from his saddle, with the blood pouring through his burnished armour on the turf.

"By the king's desire he was immediately borne to the royal tent, where the Duke d'Enghien and Prince Louis of Condé remarked to Henry, that Hector of Troy had not behaved more valiantly than Norman Leslie.'

in France until the unfortunate death of Henry II., who was accidentally killed in a tournament. The estimation in which he was held, after his achievements in the wars of Picardy, may be learned from the following contemporary testimony:

"I heard Henry II.," Melville states, "point unto him and sayYonder is one of the most valiant men of our age.'" And the same writer mentions that the proud old Montmorencie, the great constable of France, treated the exiled Kirkaldy with such deference that he never addressed him with his head covered." This was high tribute, when paid to a soldier then under thirty years of

age.

Ten years after he had been conveyed a prisoner from St Andrews on board the French galley, Kirkaldy returned to Scotlaud, but not to repose under the laurels he had already won. Soon after this we find him married, in possession, through the death of his father, of his ancestral estates, the intimate friend of Maitland of Lethington and of Lord James, afterwards the Regent Moray, and a stanch supporter of the Lords of the Congregation. This period furnishes to us one of the most melancholy chapters of Scottish history. Mary of Guise, the queen-regent, on the one haud, was resolute to put down the growing heresy; on the other, the landed nobility were determined to overthrow the Catholic church. Knox, who had by this time returned from France, and other Reformed preachers, did their utmost to fan the flame; and the result was that melancholy work of incendiarism and ruin, which men of all parties must bitterly deplore. Then came the French auxiliaries under D'Oisel, wasting the land, ravaging the estates of the Protestants, and burning their houses and villages; a savage mode of warfare, from which Kirkaldy suffered much-Fife having been pillaged from one end to the other-but for which he exacted an ample vengeance. The details of this partisan warfare are given with much minuteness, but great spirit, by the chronicler; and it did not cease until the death of Mary of Guise.

A new victim was now to be offered

to the distempered spirit of the age: on the 19th August 1561, the young Queen Mary arrived at Leith. She was then in the nineteenth year of her age, and endowed with all that surpassing loveliness which was at once her dower and her misfortune. Her arrival was dreaded by the preachers, who detested the school in which she had been educated, and the influence she might be enabled to exercise; but the great mass of the people hailed her coming with acclamations of unfeigned delight :

"Despite the efforts of these darkbrowed Reformers, agitated by the memory of her good and gallant father, -the king of the poor-by that of her thirteen years' absence from them, and stirred by that inborn spirit of loyalty which the Scots possessed in so intense a degree, the people received their beautiful queen with the utmost enthusiasm, and outvied each other in her praise.

"Her mother's dying advice to secure the support of the Protestants, and to cultivate the friendship of their leaders, particularly Maitland of Lethington and *Kirkaldy of Grange, whom the Constable de Montmorencie had named the first soldier in Europe,' had been faithfully conveyed to Mary in France by the handsome young Count de Martigues, the Sieur de la Brosse, the Bishop of Amiens, and others, who had witnessed the last moments of that dearly-loved mother in the castle of Edinburgh; and Mary

treasured that advice in her heart-but it availed her not."

Hurried on by her evil destiny, and persecuted by intrigues which had their origin in the fertile brain of Elizabeth, Mary determined to bestow her hand upon Darnley, a weak, dissolute, and foolish boy, whose only recommendations were his birth and his personal beauty. Such a marriage never could, under any circumstances, have proved a happy one. At that juncture it was peculiarly unfortunate, as it roused the jealousy of the house of Hamilton against that of Lennox; and was further bitterly opposed by Moray, a cold, calculating, selfish man, who concealed, under an appearance of zeal for the Protestant faith, the most restless, unnatural, and insatiable ambition. Talents he did possess, and of no ordinary kind: above all, he was gifted with the faculty of imposing upon men more

open and honourable than himself. Knox was a mere tool in his hands: Kirkaldy of Grange regarded him as a pattern of wisdom. For years, this straightforward soldier surrendered his judgment to the hypocrite, and, unfortunately, did not detect his mistake until the Queen was involved in a mesh from which extrication was impossible. Moray's first attempt at rebellion proved an arrant failure: the people refused to join his standard, and he, with the other leading insurgents, was compelled to seek refuge in England.

All might have gone well but for the folly of the idiot Darnley. No long period of domestic intercourse was requisite to convince the unfortunate Queen that she had thrown away her affections, and bestowed her hand upon an individual totally incapable of appreciating the one, and utterly unworthy of the other. Darnley was a low-minded, fickle, and imperious fool-vicious as a colt, capricious as a monkey, and stubborn as an Andalusian mule. Instead of showing the slightest gratitude to his wife and mistress, for the preference which had raised him from obscurity to a position for which kings were suitors, he repaid the vast boon by a series of petty and unmanly persecutions. He aimed to be not only prince-consort, but master; and because this was denied him, he threw himself precipitately into the counsels of the enemies of Mary. It was not difficult to sow the seeds of jealousy in a mind so well prepared to receive them; and Riccio, the Italian secretary, was marked out by Ruthven and Morton, the secret adherents of Moray, as the victim. Even this scheme, though backed by Darnley, might have miscarried, had not Mary been driven into an act which roused, while it almost justified, the worst fears of the Protestant party in Scotland. This was her adhesion to the celebrated Roman Catholic League, arising from a coalition which had been concluded between France, Spain, and the Emperor, for the destruction of the Protestant cause in Europe. "It was," says Tytler, "a design worthy of the dark and unscrupulous politicians by whom it had been planned-Catherine of Medicis

and the Duke of Alva. In the summer of the preceding year, the queendowager of France and Alva had met at Bayonne, during a progress in which she conducted her youthful son and sovereign, Charles IX., through the southern provinces of his kingdom; and there, whilst the court was dissolved in pleasure, those secret conferences were held which issued in the resolution that toleration must be at an end, and that the only safety for the Roman Catholic faith was the extermination of its enemies." To this document, Mary, at the instigation of Riccio, who was in the interest of Rome, and who really possessed considerable influence with his mistress, affixed her signature. The bond was abortive for its ostensible purposes, but it was the death-warrant of the Italian secretary, and ultimately of the Queen.

It is not our province to usurp the functions of the historian, and there fore we pass willingly over that intri cate portion of history which ends with the murder of Darnley. It was notoriously the work of Bothwell, but not his alone, for Lethington, Huntly, and Argyle, were also deeply implicated. Bothwell now stands forward as a prominent character of the age. He was a bold, reckless, desperate adventurer, with little to recommend him save personal daring, and a fidelity to his mistress which hitherto had remained unshaken. Lethington, in all probability, merely regarded him as an instrument, but Bothwell had a higher aim. With daring ambition, he aimed at the possession of the person of Mary, and actually achieved his purpose.

This unhappy and most unequal union roused the ire of the Scottish nobles. Even such of them as, intimidated by the reckless character of Bothwell, had sworn to defend him if impeached for the slaughter, and had recommended him as a fitting match for Mary, now took up arms, under the pretext that he had violently abducted their sovereign. We fear it cannot be asserted with truth that much violence was used. Poor Queen Mary had found, by bitter experience, that she could hardly depend upon one of her principal subjects. Darnley, Moray, Morton, Lethington, and Arran, each

had betrayed her in turn; everywhere her steps were surrounded by a net of the blackest treachery: not one true heart seemed left to beat with loyalty for its Queen. Elizabeth, with fiendish malice, was goading on her subjects to rebellion. The Queen of England had determined to ruin the power of her sister monarch; the elderly withered spinster detested the young and blooming mother. Why, then, should it be matter of great marvel to those who know the acuteness of female sensibility, if, in the hour of desertion and desolation, Mary should have allowed the weakness of the woman to overcome the pride of the sovereign, and should have opposed but feeble resistance to the advances of the only man who hitherto had remained stanch to her cause, and whose arm seemed strong enough to insure her personal protection? It is not the first time that a daring villain has been taken for a hero by a distressed and persecuted woman.

The

But Bothwell had no friends. whole of the nobles were against him; and the Commons, studiously taught to believe that Mary was a consenting party to Darnley's death, were hostile to their Queen. Kirkaldy, at the instance of Moray, came over from his patrimonial estates to join the confederates, and his first feat in arms was an attack on Borthwick Castle, from which Bothwell and the Queen escaped with the utmost difficulty. Then came the action, if such it can be called, of Carberry Hill, when Bothwell challenged his accusers to single combat-a defiance which was accepted by Lord Lindesay of the Byres, but prevented from being brought to the test of combat by the voluntary submission of the Queen. Seeing that her forces were utterly inadequate to oppose those of the assembled nobles, she sent for Sir William Kirkaldy of Grange, as a knight in whose honour she could thoroughly confide, and, after a long interview, agreed to pass over to the troops of the confederates, provided they would again acknowledge and obey her as their sovereign. This being promised, she took her last leave of Bothwell, and her first step on the road which ultimately brought her to Lochleven.

We must refer our readers to the