She grasped
the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand"
she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a
yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner
representing the corpse of Darnley, with her child beside it, invoking
on his knees the retribution of divine justice.
From the violence of a multitude, in which women of the worst class were
more furious than the men, she was sheltered in the house of the
provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing
aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could
look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to
Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under
guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the
20th a silver casket 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. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from
the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text
which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his
accession to the English throne--even in these possibly disfigured
versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous
fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and
jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention
of art.
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