for Darnley, is betrayed in the will she made before her confinement
in the following June. Whilst to Darnley she bequeathed nothing but
the red-enamelled diamond ring with which he had married her - "It
was with this that I was married," she wrote almost contemptuously.
"I leave it to the King who gave it me" - she appointed Bothwell to
the tutelage of her child in the event of her not surviving it, and
to the government of the realm.

The King came to visit her during her convalescence, and was scowled
upon by Murray and Argyll, who were at Holyrood, and most of all by
Bothwell, whose arrogance by now was such that he was become the
best-hated man in Scotland. The Queen received him very coldly,
whilst using Bothwell more than cordially in his very presence, so
that he departed again in a deeper humiliation than before.

Then before the end of July there was her sudden visit to Bothwell
at Alloa, which gave rise to so much scandal. Hearing of it,
Darnley followed in a vain attempt to assert his rights as king and
husband, only to be flouted and dismissed with the conviction that
his life was no longer safe in Scotland, and that he had best cross
the Border. Yet, to his undoing, detained perhaps by the overweening
pride that is usually part of a fool's equipment, he did not act
upon that wise resolve. He returned instead to his hawking and his
hunting, and was seldom seen at Court thereafter.

Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death
at Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again
without any assurance that she would recover. But then the facts
of her illness, and how it had been contracted, were not such as to
encourage kindness in him, even had he been inclined to kindness.