Committee of Privileges on the Claim of W. Constable Maxwell,
Esquire, to the title of Lord Herries of Terregles. It is a copy of
the Contract of Marriage between Queen Mary and the Earl of
Bothwell, which, although it is said to have been printed by
Carmichael, in his _Various Tracts relating to the Peerage of
Scotland, extracted from the Public Records_, has not been referred
to by Robertson, or other historians of Scotland, not even by the
most recent of them, Mr. Tytler.

Mr. Tytler tells us that on the 12th of May, 1567, Bothwell was
created Duke of Orkney, "the Queen with her own hands placing the
coronet on his head," and that the marriage took place on the 15th
of May, at four o'clock in the morning in the presence-chamber at
Holyrood; and that on the following morning a paper, with this
ominous verse, was fixed on the palace gate:--


"Mense malas Maio nubere vulgus ait."


The Contract, which is dated on the fourteenth of May, is preserved
in the Register of Deeds in the Court of Session (Vol. IX. p. 86.),
and as the copy produced before the House is authenticated--and
consequently it may be presumed a more strictly accurate one than
that which Carmichael has given--it seems well deserving of being
transferred to our columns, and so made more available to the
purposes of the historian, than it has been found to be in
Carmichael's _Tract_, or is likely to be when buried in a
Parliamentary Blue Book.]