The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-11-15

Bothwell in his hurried departure left in the castle of Edinburgh a casket con taining letters to him from the queen which prove her complicity In the mur- der of parnley; there is however, great doubt as to the genuineness of these let ters, and of the doubt the luckless queen ought surely to get the benefit. The lords of the congregation, however evil dently believed them authentic, for they had the frantic queen secretly removed from Holyrood to the castle of Loeb Leven.
 Thither she was followed on July %, 1567 by Lord Lindsay and Sir Robert Melville with two instruments for her to sign-one a deed of abdication in fa vor of her infant son, James VI, (af- rewards James I of England) the other appointing her illegitimate brother, James Stuart, earl of Moray, regent during the minority It took more than verbal argument to procure the neces- sary signatures to these documents, but ''haggard Lindsay's iron eye saw fair Mary weep in vain" and tradition whispers that the stern baron forced the goose-quill between her fingers and com pelled the action of her hand by which six years after her return from France Mary Stuart Gas the documents gravely tell us) ''of her own free will' ceased to be queen of Scots.
 Mary's keeper at Loch Leven occu- pied a curious position towards the de- posed queen.
 She was the Lady Margaret Douglas, r,,o+bar of NTorx,,s i1Iaoi+i,,,o tn Iro+l,a,, the regent, and had buried in the past a well founded hope of being queen of Scotland. She, however, saw that dig nity pass by her to Mary of Lorraine, and now the daughter of Mary of LOT raine, dethroned and captive, is con- signed to her custody, while her own son is elevated to be the actual though not the titular king of Scots.
 There is no mention of unkindness having been shown by Lady Douglas to the daughter of the woman who supplanted her and Marys old time fas- cinating brilliancy returned, captivating among others William Douglas, youth of eighteen, who was foolishly deemed too young to be impressed by the blandishments of an accomplished beau- ty of twenty-five.
 On an appointed night young Douglas | disabled all the boats on the island but one, stole the chief keys of the castle, escorted Mary through the gate, locked it behind them, threw the keys into the lake and delivered her once more free to party of her friends waiting on the mainland
 Two days later she appeared at the head of small army at Hamilton, which, while conveying her for security to Dumbarton castle, was intercepted and defeated by the regent at the vil- lage of Langsyde. This defeat was the annihilation of her last hope, and she fled like hunted creature, neither knowing nor caring about her destina- tion. She reached the abbey of Dun drennan on the Solway, where she spent the last night in Scotland, crossed over to England in an open boat, was escort ed to Carlisle, where she surrendered to the governor Nineteen years of prison l life in England brings her on February g. 1887, to the scaffold at Fotheringay to suffer for an improved charge where her strange, chequered life of little over forty-four years was brought to a close in the sad scene pictured as follows by Henry Glassford Bell:
 Alas! the change! She placed her foot
 upon triple throne
 And on the scaffoId now she stands,
 beside the block, alone.
 The little dog that licks her hand, the
 last of all the crowd
 Who sunn'd themselves beneath her
 glance,and round her footsteps how'd; Her neck is barred; the blow is struck
 the soul is passed away.
 The bright, the beautiful, is now a
 bleeding piece of clay;
 The dog is moaning piteously, and, as
 it gurgles OCT,
 Laps the warm blood that trickling
 runs unheeded to the floor.
 The blood of beauty, wealth and power
 the heart blood of a queen.
 The noblest of the Stuart race-the fair
 est earth hath seen
 Lapp'd by a dog! Go, thing of it, in
 silence and alone,
 Then weigh against grain of sand, the
 glories of a throne"