In the evening she was taken to Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under guard, with her attend ants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the loth a silver cas ket containing letters and French verses, miscalled sonnets, in the handwriting of the queen, was taken from the person of a servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to Dunbar. (See CASKET LETTERS.) Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven and Sir Robert Melville were des patched to Lochleven, there to obtain the queen's signature to an act of abdication in favour of her son, and another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and a com mission of regency was established. After an imprisonment of II months, in the course of which Elizabeth intervened on her behalf, and sent Mary a letter and a ring in token of her protection, a young member of the household at Lochleven, Willie Douglas, aged 18, succeeded on May 2 in assisting her to escape by a pos tern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland, where George Douglas, Lord Seton and others were awaiting her. Thence they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton Palace, round which an army of 6,000 men was soon assembled. The queen's forces made for the castle of Dumbarton, marching 2m. south of Glasgow, by the village of Langside. Here Murray, with 4,500 men, met and defeated his sister's army on May 13. Mary fled 6om. from the field of her last battle before she halted at Sanquhar, and for three days of flight, according to her own account, had to sleep on the hard ground, live on oatmeal and sour milk, and fare at night like the owls, in hunger, cold and fear. On the third day from the rout of Langside she crossed the Solway and landed at Workington in Cumberland, May 16, 1568. On the loth Lord Scrope and Sir Francis Knollys were sent from court to carry messages and letters of comfort from Elizabeth to Mary at Carlisle. Her fateful choice of Eng land instead of France was determined by her thirst for victory. She believed that Elizabeth's horror of rebellion would lead the English queen to assist her to regain her crown, and she knew no such help could be expected from France, embroiled in the wars of religion. On July 15, after various delays inter posed by her reluctance to leave the neighbourhood of the border, where on her arrival she had received the welcome and the homage of the leading Catholic houses of Northumberland and Cumberland, she was removed to Bolton Castle in north Yorkshire. During her residence here a conference was held at York between her own and Elizabeth's commissioners and those appointed to represent her son as a king of Scots. These latter, of whom Murray himself was the chief, privately laid before the English commissioners the contents of the famous casket. On Oct. 24 the place of the conference was shifted from York to Lon don, where the enquiry was to be held before Queen Elizabeth in council. Mary was already aware that the chief of the English commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, was secretly an aspirant to the peril of her hand; and on Oct. 21 she gave the first sign of assent to the suggestion of a divorce from Bothwell. On Oct. 26 the charge of complicity in the murder of Darnley was distinctly brought forward against her, in spite of Norfolk's reluctance and Murray's previous hesitation. On Jan. 1o, 1569, the judgment given at the conference acquitted Murray and his adherents of rebellion, while affirming that nothing had been proved against Mary:--a verdict accepted by Murray as equivalent to a practical recognition of his office as regent for the infant king. This posi tion he was not long to hold; and the fierce exultation of Mary at the news of his murder gave reason to fear, if her liberty of correspondence and intrigue were not restrained, the likelihood of a similar fate for Elizabeth. On Jan. 26, 1569 she had been removed from Bolton Castle to Tutbury in Staffordshire, where proposals were conveyed to her, at the instigation of Leicester, for a marriage with the duke of Norfolk, to which she gave a graciously conditional assent ; but the discovery of these proposals consigned Norfolk to the Tower, and on the outbreak of an insur rection in the north Mary, by Lord Hunsdon's advice, was again removed to Coventry, when a body of her intending deliverers was within a day's ride of Tutbury. In October Cecil had an interview with Mary at Chatsworth, when the conditions of her possible restoration to the throne in compliance with French demands were debated at length. The queen of Scots, with daunt less dignity, refused to yield the castles of Edinburgh and Dum barton into English keeping, or to deliver up her fugitive English partisans then in Scotland ; upon other points they came to terms, and the articles were signed Oct. 16. On the same day Mary wrote to Elizabeth, requesting the favour of an interview which might reassure her against the suggestion that this treaty was a mere pretence. On Nov. 28 she was removed to Sheffield Castle, where she remained for the next 14 years in charge of the earl of Shrewsbury. The detection of a plot, in which Norfolk was implicated, for the invasion of England by Spain on behalf of Mary, who was then to take him as the fourth and most con temptible of her husbands, made necessary the reduction of her household and the stricter confinement of her person. On May 28, 1572, a demand from both houses of parliament for her execution as well as Norfolk's was rejected by Elizabeth, who, however, entered into negotiations with successive Scottish regents for Mary's delivery into their hands and her immediate execution.
In 1581 Mary accepted the advice of Catherine de' Medici and Henry III. that she should allow her son's title to reign as king of Scotland conjointly with herself when released and restored to a share of the throne. This plan was but part of a scheme including the invasion of England by her kinsman, the duke of Guise, who was to land in the north and raise a Scottish army to place the released prisoner of Sheffield beside her son on the throne of Elizabeth. After the overthrow of the Scottish ac complices in this notable project, Mary poured forth upon Eliza beth a torrent of pathetic and eloquent reproach for the many wrongs she had suffered at the hands of her hostess, and pledged her honour to the assurance that she now aspired to no kingdom but that of heaven. In the spring of 1583 she retained enough of this saintly resignation to ask for nothing but liberty, without a share in the government of Scotland; but Lord Burghley not unreasonably preferred, if feasible, to reconcile the alliance of her son with the detention of his mother. In the autumn of she was removed to Wingfield Manor under charge of Sir Ralph Sadler and John Somers, who accompanied her also on her next removal to Tutbury in Jan. 1585. On Christmas Eve, 1585, she was removed from the hateful shelter of Tutbury to the castle of Chartley in the same county. Her correspondence in cipher from thence with her English agents abroad, intercepted by Walsingham and deciphered by his secretary, gave eager en couragement to the design for a Spanish invasion of England under the prince of Parma. In 1585 Anthony Ba'bington was induced to undertake the deliverance of the queen of Scots by the murder of the queen of England. In the conduct and detection of her cor respondence with Babington, traitor was played off against traitor, and spies were utilized against assassins, with as little scruple as could be required or expected in the diplomacy of the time. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall park. At Tixall Mary was detained till her papers at Chartley had undergone thorough research. Her secre taries were examined in London, and one of them gave evidence that she had first heard of the conspiracy by letter from Babing ton, of whose design against the life of Elizabeth she thought it best to take no notice in her reply, though she did not hold herself bound to reveal it. On Sept. 25 she was removed to the castle of Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. On Oct. 6 she was desired to answer the charges brought against her before certain of the chief English nobles.
On Oct. 14 and 15, 1586, the trial was held in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. Mary conducted the whole of her own defence with courage incomparable and unsurpassable ability, insisting on the production of proof in her own handwriting as to her com plicity with the project of the assassins, who had expiated their crime on the 2oth and 21st of the month preceding. Elizabeth de termined to adjourn the judgment and transfer the place of it to the star-chamber. Here, on Oct. 25, the commissioners again met ; and one of them alone, Lord Zouch, dissented from the verdict by which Mary was found guilty of having, since June preceding, compassed and imagined divers matters tending to the destruction of Elizabeth. This verdict was conveyed to her, about three weeks later, by Lord Buckhurst and Robert Beale. She wrote to Elizabeth and the duke of Guise two letters of almost matchless eloquence and pathos, admirable especially for their loyal and grateful remembrance of all her faithful servants.
Elizabeth was uncertain how James VI., then 20 years of age, might take the execution of his mother. When Elizabeth dis covered that James was much more interested in the succession to the English throne than in his mother's life, and that, if he was assured that her trial and condemnation would not prejudice his claim to the succession, he would (in his own words) "digest" his resentment, she rejected the intercessions made by France and Scotland, and on Feb. 1, .1587, she signed the death-warrant. On Feb. 7 the earls of Shrewsbury and Kent arrived at Fotheringay with the commission of the council for execution of the sentence. Mary received the announcement with majestic tranquillity, ex pressing in dignified terms her readiness to die, her consciousness that she was a martyr for her religion, and her total ignorance of any conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth. At eight next morning she entered the hall of execution, having taken leave of the weep ing envoy from Scotland, to whom she gave a brief message for her son ; took her seat on the scaffold, listened with an air of even cheerful unconcern to the reading of her sentence, solemnly de clared her innocence of the charge conveyed in it and her consola tion in the prospect of ultimate justice, rejected the professional services of Richard Fletcher, dean of Peterborough, lifted up her voice in Latin against his in English prayer, and when he and his fellow-worshippers had fallen duly silent prayed aloud for the prosperity of her own Church, for Elizabeth, for her son, and for all her enemies ; then, with no less courage than had marked every hour and every action of her life, received the stroke of death from the wavering hand of the headsman.