mischievous machinery of the courts of the old Officials was freshly revived in the courts of the venerable 'Superintendents' and the more formal judicature of the 'Commissaries.' The evil pervaded all classes, but the highest ranks are most prominent in the records of shame. The alliance of James IV. with the daughter of Henry VII. seemed made under the happiest auspices, to give peace and union to the two kingdoms; and so at length it came to pass, but not as men devised. Margaret Tudor was married at thirteen. Her progress into Scotland and her reception by the gay and gallant James had more of chivalrous and romantic splendour than usually attends royal spousals. While the King lived, though he was not altogether uxorious, Margaret never attracted scandal. She had borne him three sons (two died infants) and was about again to become a mother when widowed by the fatal field of Flodden. She was then not twenty-four. In less than a year. after the King's death-in little more than three months after the birth of their son Alexander-she married Angus, a handsome boy. Margaret was fair and buxom, and might almost have been called beautiful if we did not find from even the rude portraits of that age that her countenance was devoid of delicacy and feminine expression. She was covetous of power and of money, like her brother and her father, and not without talent for business. Buttrue sister of Henry VIII.—all considerations of policy were thrown' to the wind under the influence of passion. She had sacrificed her sway in Scotland, as guardian of her son, to gratify her sudden love for Angus; and when she was tired of him, she threw away the support of England and her brother by her open amour with the Regent John Duke of Albany. It is said they meditated marriage, though Albany, like herself, was already married. But that proceeding was too tedious. Who next cccupied her affections after the Regent's estrangement and absence, we do not learn; but in 1524 she became desperately smitten with young Henry Stuart of Avondale, and resolved at all hazards to marry him. Angus for some time opposed her desire for a divorce, but at length yielded, and furnished the requisite evidence of his having been pre-contracted to a gentlewoman (a daughter of Traquair) who bore a child to him before he married the Queen; and so, by reason of the pre-contract, he could not be her lawful husband.' The sentence of nullity was pronounced by the Cardinal Bishop of Ancona on the 11th of March 1527; and we are not surprised to learn that the Queen's agents at Rome pingues expectant propinas, ita quod omnes non possunt contentari cum 600 ducatibus.* The Queen lost no time, and on Original letter to Albany, in the Archives du Royaume at Paris. 6 E 2 the the 2nd day of April she gave her hand to Henry Stuart, afterwards Lord Methven, whom she tired of almost as soon as she had done of Angus. They lived on for some time unhappily enough. Henry VIII. was much scandalised by his sister's licentious use of matrimony! But Margaret had no weak scruples. She determined to be free to marry a fourth time, and for this object had recourse once more to the Church courts. She was able to prove that Methven was cousin, eight degrees removed, to her second husband Angus; and upon the plea that this constituted an affinity between her and Methven, she demanded to have her third marriage set aside. The Official, either yielding to the imperious woman, or satisfied of the fact that they were within the forbidden degrees, pronounced a decree annulling that marriage, which is found written and registered in the extant volume of the record of his court. Her son, the James V., however, stayed its promulgation, and prevented the additional disgrace to his family. Margaret died three years afterwards. young Upon these divorces Mr. Riddell raises some curious speculation. We find that Angus married again as well as Queen Margaret. It may be convenient to suppose that the gentlewoman who bore a child' was dead, but that is not known, and is not to be presumed merely from the fact of his new marriage. The same machinery used before might serve him again. He might show that some unsuspected cousinship existed between him and the 'gentlewoman,' or that he had had at some still earlier date a criminal intercourse with some third party sib to the gentlewoman.' Such evidence was to be had for the buying, and then 'the precontract' disappeared. 6 Granting this solution,' says Mr. Riddell, in what a strange predicament Angus and the parties would have been, though doubtless not incapable of being rescued from it by the devices and venality of lawyers. His marriage with the Queen would then have turned out to be lawful, and after proper procedure still valid and binding—which at the same time-the Earl surviving the Princess-would have respectively annulled those they latterly contracted. How all classes must have been more or less contaminated by such example of the upper! But a still more material reflection suggests itself from this and the general unhinged condition of individuals,—what a number of bastards there must have been !'--Riddell, p. 474. Janet Betoun, the Lady Buccleuch of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, has an unfortunate pre-eminence in those cases where law was made to pander to passion. She was the eldest daughter of Sir John Betoun, of Creich, a branch of the respectable family of Balfour in Fife, which was brought into more than its due place by by having given successive archbishops to St. Andrews and Glas- 'When startled burghers fled afar Saw lances gleam and falchions redden, Then the chief of Branksome fell.' She. After his death (in 1552) the Lady of Branksome, though not, as the Minstrel feigns, the mother of the young chief—who was of a former marriage-was, nevertheless, allowed to rule the household and the estates of Buccleuch, and even rode at the head of the rough clan.' She was in favour and correspondence too with the Queen Dowager, Mary of Guise. In the mean time she was seeking consolation in her widowhood, and, though not wedded in face of Church, she allowed the privileges of a husband to a dangerous man, who afterwards became too celebrated. She was proved to be quietly married or handfast' to James Earl of Bothwell in 1559. When Bothwell's subsequent adventures bring him more prominently on the stage, the dark heroine of Branksome is again somewhat somewhat strangely mixed up with his fortunes. He had married, as is well known, the Lady Jean Gordon in 1565. It would seem the 'handfasting' with Dame Janet was not considered an impediment to that match, nor was even worthy to be pleaded when Mary and Bothwell wished to set it aside for when the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor had resolved at all hazards to espouse Bothwell herself, other means were sought for removing the obstacle of an existing wife. His Countess, certainly collusively, though also perhaps of her own free will, sued a divorce on the ground of his adultery with a servant-and she obtained it with but small show of resistance.' At the same time, the Earl was plaintiff in a similar suit against her; and procured a decree annulling their marriage on the ground of their being sib within the fourth degree. The lady's suit was before the new, legal, Commissary Court -the jurisdiction and grounds of action both chosen to please the Reformed party: the Earl's, founding on the canonical nullity, was in a hastily constituted ecclesiastical Court☺ to suit the views of those of the old faith; and that Court did its work expeditiously, for the proceedings commenced on the 5th, and decree of nullity was pronounced on the 7th of May, 1567.* At the time of Darnley's murder and the other crowded events of Mary's tragedy, the Lady of Buccleuch-thrice, perhaps four times a widow-ought to have been well past the turmoils of young blood; yet in the popular belief she was still associated with her former lover, Bothwell. Mr. Riddell says she was charged with administering magic philtres to the Queen, with a view to secure her Majesty's love to him-a very curious termination for a life like Dame Janet's. It is not necessary to maintain of the Lady of Branksome that 'She wrought not by forbidden spell ;' but perhaps the learned author has no other authority for the strange tale than one which may bear a different construction -the well-known placard exhibited in the streets of Edinburgh, accusing of Darnley's end, Bothwell, black Mr. John Spens, *Lady Jean Gordon, a daughter of Huntly, and a zealous Romanist, some years after her divorce from Bothwell married the Protestant Earl of Sutherland, and again upon his death Sir Alexander Ogilvie, of the knightly house of Boyne. She had a numerous family by Sutherland, and, notwithstanding her third marriage, and her steadiness to her religion-then out of fashion-continued both to enjoy the dowry of Bothwell, and to manage most vigorously the affairs of the Sutherland Earldom, till her death, at the age of eighty-four. A picture of her, at Dunrobin, preserves the high manly features of her race and country, and an expression not to be mistaken of resolution and sense. She is dressed in a sort of cowl, with a rosary and cross in her hand. The collar, like a man's shirt-collar of the present day, adds to the masculine character of the portrait. 'who was principal deviser of the murder, and the Quene assenting thairto throw the persuasion of the Erle Bothwell and the witchcraft of Lady Buccleuch. If it were allowed to speculate on such narrow grounds, it would seem more reasonable to attribute the dealings of the lady, the paramour of Bothwell, to jealousy of a formidable rival, than to a wish of securing for him the affection of the young and beautiful Queen. A few other cases will show that the machinery of the Church court could be set in motion for others than crowned heads. George, first Earl of Rothes, after living for twenty years with his wife, wished to change. But their eldest son was already married to a daughter of the house of St. Clair, and that family was thus concerned for the legitimacy of the Rothes children. The parties went to work in business-like form, named arbiters, and bound themselves to abide by their award. It was settled that Rothes should take a divorce, or rather a declaration of nullity of his marriage, on the ground of his countess and himself being within the forbidden degrees. But, to take off the consequent illegitimacy, he was to depose judicially that he did not know of the sib-ness till after the birth of all his children. Another striking enough case did not come into the Commissary Court till after the Reformation-but the facts had taken place at the period we are considering. Thomas Ogilvie of Craig married Jannet Fraser of Lovat openly in face of the Church, and they lived together, and had diverse bairns.' Then, somewhat tiring of the first wife, he chose to add a second, Beatrix Chisholm. The banns were proclaimed in the parish church of Glenlyon, where Jannet Fraser dwelt, and she offered no opposition-by manifest collusion.' In this way Ogilvie, who had two mansion-houses on his estate, had also for some time two wives openly entertained by him, the one, Jannet, dwelling in the 'Over Craig,' the other, Beatrix, in the West or Nether Craig.' The suit to put an end to this bigamous display was by the Fiscal or public prosecutor, and not raised by either of the ladies. Both must have been quite well aware of the circumstances all along. But it probably now suited both that the first wife should be set wholly aside; and that which they saw their neighbours do under colour of law, they chose in the highlands of Perthshire to manage without the expense of the Consistorial Court. The legitimation of irregular offspring by the subsequent marriage of the parents, never very conducive to morality, was set about in Scotland, as in some countries on the Continent, with remarkable ceremony. Mr. Riddell quotes a case where parties were married in the face of holy kirk,' in the chapel of Broomhill, they holding their natural son, called Claud Hamilton, under |