The Sun.
London, England, 1855-02-26 00:00:00

: • :••;:3:lAde y!'
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James, was thereupon brought to a Moi*.*e as.'-s 3 sia,‘"je
cessful, climax than the similar conspira4liti*4l2.s,Ts',:4 14;24
quently contrived against the latter prineessdiens
thirty-eight years afterwards, wearing the e44.lessaei-.„:„: 7
crowns of Scotland and England, scarcely lb- - •=s
his august position as the representative of Me e
blended Stuart and Tudor dynasties than in his sze
paramount character as an " Orthodox Protestant
Sovereign." So wondrously had the wheel re-
volved—the rotating spokes and tire of the wheel
of Fortune—between the occasion of those two
grim conspiracies—the Gunpowder Plot of Guy
Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of James Both-
well. The former avoided by the son ! The latter
accomplished against the father ! The first of these
conspiracies successfully directed, in 1567, against
the King Consort of Scotland because of his being
a Roman Catholic—the second unsuccessfully
directed, in 1605, against the King Regnant of the
United Kingdoms because of his being a Protes-
tant. So that the treasonous fanaticism of Fawkes
might be regarded as an attempted Nemesis in 1605
for the atrocity perpetrated in 1567 at Robert Bal-
four's house in Kirk-of-Field ! On the morning of
the date of that earlier catastrophe the victim, as
we have seen, had "heard mass devoutly." Towards
the evening of the same day (Sunday), about seven
of the clock, the royal invalid was visited in his
temporary residence by Mary, who there assembled
in her husband's sick chamber the great nobles of
the realm, for the purpose of affording him congra-
tulation on his recovery by the homage of an im-
promptu court or small reception. During the
very time when Mary and her nobles were actually
assembled in converse in the chamber of Darnley, the
infamous Earl ofßo thwell with his ‘‘ruffianrout" was
actually causing gunpowder to be conveyed to the
Queen's apartment on the ground floor of the same
house from his own rooms in the palace- of Holy-
rood. The explosive dust being carried thence to
its destination in a trunk and a leathern mail, there
to be strewn furtively about the floor under the
rushes. Unconscious of all these hideous prepara-
tions, Mary, who had left a state "four o'clock
supper" at the Bishop of Argyll's for the purpose
of visiting her invalid spouse, remained with Darn-
ley until nearly eleven, although pledged to go
that night to a masked ball in the palace of Holy-
rood, on the occasion of the wedding of Sebastian
Paiges and Margaret Carwood, the fair bride being
one of the Queen's peculiar favourites. Remain-
ing with her husband as long as she could under
those circumstances, Mary parted from him at last,
but most reluctantly; as she did so drawing from
her finger a valuable ring and placing it on his as
a pledge of her affection. Mary thus retiring
from Darnley, says their latest historian, " kissed
and embraced him with endearing words of leave-
taking, and promises that she would soon return to
visit him again and so they parted, to meet in
life no more !" An hour or two after midnight
came the- explosion. The whole structure was a
shattered mass of ruins—" dung into dross," ac-
cording to the quaint language of the Privy Coun-
cil. And yet when the locality was searched by
the Royal Guards, under the orders of their cap-
tain, James Stuart of Ochiltree—the body of Darn-
ley was discovered unmutilated and even unsinged
eighty yards from the ruins, under a tree in a neigh-
bouring orchard—clad only in his night shirt, though
near him lay his fur pelisse and pantouffies. Every-
thing indicating, indeed, that:the unfortunate King,
alarmed from his sleep before the powder ignited,
had, " with the instinctive caution of an invalid
dreading an exposure to the cold night air," snatched
up his garments, fled into the darkness from his
assassin, being thereupon pursued and strangled in
the orchard, while the dwelling from which he had.
escaped was whirling into fragments from the de-
tonation of the gunpowder. According to Moretta,
the Savoyard Ambassador, certain women servants,
roused from sleep in their apartments adjoining
the garden, overheard the King cry out patheti-
cally —" Ah ! my kinsmen (fratelli miei) have
mercy on me, for the love of Him who had mercy
onus all !"—showing him to have been surprised,
and surprised, moreover, by those (Miss Strickland
suggests " Morton, or Morton's deputy, Douglas")
having ties of consanguinity. So perished miser-
ably, on_that fatal 10th of February, in the year
of our Lord 1567, stripped and strangled in the
orchard at Kirk-of-Field, the young Prince, who
had only attained his twentieth birthday in the
preceding December—Darnley, of whose personal
aspect our fair annalist (and well may Miss Strick-
land be so designated with more than a compli-
mentary significance) has thus written :—" Nature
had endowed him. with a complexion so fine, and a
lice of features so perfect, that but for his tower-
ing height, the haughty carriage of his head, and a
scornful 'curl of the lip and nostril, his beauty
would have been of too delicate a character." Re-
ferring elsewhere in this volume to a more impor-
tant theme, however, than even the alluring
graces of Darnley referring, that is, to the
long questioned innocence or criminality of
Mary in regard to the murder of her hus-
band, Miss Strickland here proves, beyond
all further doubt, to our thinking, the absolute
absurdity of the ghastly imputations thrown upon
the unhappy Queen of Scots by her malignant
censurers, Buchanan and others, who would have
had us to conclude from their daring, but utterly
irreconcilable declarations, that she was an accom-
plice in -that infamous deed of assassination.
Miss Strickland here clearly demonstrates the in-
nocence of Mary iu regard to the murder of
Darnley—as clearly, indeed,- as she after-
wards reveals to us the despair of the luckless
Queen at the period of her forcednuptials with the
" brutal ruffian" Bothwell. In allusion to the
former event, what says Monsieur Clernault, then
French Envoy at the Court of Holyrood ? He
says—" The fact being communicated to the poor
Queen, we can scarcely think what distress - and
agony it has thrown her into !" In reference to
the latter calamity—the forced marriage with
Bothwell what says Du Croc ? Why, that
Mary declared to him the day after that
unnatural espousal, the espousal by Darnley's
widow of the murderer of Darnley—Du Croc,
we seas, tells us that the day after those nup-
tials Mary declared to him in, the presence of Both-
well, " that he (Du Croc) must not be surprised if
he saw her sorrowful, for she could not rejoice, nor
ever should again"—adding—"All she desired
was death !" Nay more, do we not learn from
" Teulet's Collections," that the next day(two days
after her nuptials) when alone in her cabinet with
Bothwell, she was heard by those in her privy
chamber to scream and threaten self-destruc-
tion ? And has not the Captain of her Guard,
Arthur Erskine, corroborated this explicitly enough
by averring " that she called for a knife to stab
herself, or else,' said she, shall drown myself.' "
We know not indeed which is the more heartrend-
ing picture here presented to our imagination—
Mary stunned into profound woe by the sudden
' murder of Darnley, or Mary maddened into despair
on the morrow of her hated union with the remorse-
less Bothwell. Contrast, indeed, for an instant the
two heroes in this terrible tragedy—Darnley and
Bothwell. Darnley, whom Mary loved so ten-
derly, in spite of all his faults, and slights, and
weaknesses, to whom in the will, written in the
anticipation of her speedy dissolution, she left so
lovingly the ring of their betrothal, or, rather,
of their first, private espousal, and from whom
she parted so reluctantly with lover-like kisses
and embraces but an hour or so before his dis-
mal assassination. Bothwell to compare with
Darnley ! " Hyperion to a Satyr!" The tra-
ducers of Mary never calculated probabilities
when, in defiance of all the proven facts here
brought together by the research and. industry
of Miss Strickland, they strove to lure pos-
terity into the belief that for the ruffian
Earl, the future . Duke of Orkney, Mary
Stuart abandoned to his midnight murderers the
winning and princely stripling, Henry, the Lord.
Darnley, the youthful spouse of her heart, who
at twenty ceased, as we have seen, by strangula-
tion and not by the explosion of powder in Kirk-
of-Field, to be Lord of her Life not less than
King Consort of Scotland. Of the manly beauty
of Darnley there is evidence enough before us in
the charming profile of his handsome face prefixed
to the present volume as its frontispiece. Confronting •
which we observe a scarcely less attractive engraving
in the graceful vignette delineative of Queen Mary's
forced abdication, wherein the artist has effectively
depicted what Sir Walter had long since nervously
expressed—

-- Haggard Lindsay's iron eye
That saw fair Mary weep in vain.,,

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Happy, we cannot but again observe, thrice happy,
indeed, has it been for the memory of Mary Stuart,
some time Queen of Soots, that the truthful, vigor-
ous, and uncompromising pen of Agnes Strickland
has undertaken to relate the calamitous history of
that loveliest and most forlorn of our insular sove-
reigns.

MR. A.IOITATT, M.P.—We regret to learn that the
hon. member for Ashburton is still confined to his house
by indispAtion.— Western. Times.
NEW WAREHOUSES IN MANCHaSTER.—Amongst the
splendid new piles of warehouses which have sprung up
in Manchester is one, in place of some old buildings
recently burnt down, for a wholesale house in the home
trade. This warehouse forms a block of masonry occa-
pying the entire area between two streets, and it is
300 feet long by 75 feet wide. The cost of erection
has been about 11,000/. A still larger warehouse for
(.tnether firm in the general trade is just commencing
in Portland-street, one of the estimates for which was
45,000/. It will be 300 feet long by 90 feet wide,
and 95 feet extreme height. It is to have four floors
besides the basement, so that it will Lave a total avail-
able area for goods of nearly 135,000 square feet. It
' is estimated to require from 60,000 to 70,000 cubic
feet of timber to supply the internal fittings of wood
work alone.