intention to send copies of the narrative to France and Scotland (Cal. State Papers, Scot. Ser. i. 232; see Ruthven's ‘Narrative’ published first in 1699, reprinted in Appendix to ‘Some Particulars of the Life of D. Rizzio,’ forming No. vi. of Miscellanea Antiqua Anglicana, 1815; in Tracts illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1826, pp. 326–60; and in Keith's Hist. No. xi. in Appendix). Meantime on 19 March they had been summoned before the privy council of Scotland (Reg. i. 437), and on 9 June they were denounced as rebels (ib. i. 462). Though Elizabeth had countenanced the plot, its failure made it necessary to disavow connection with it, and the welcome she gave the conspirators was of a dubious character. Morton on 16 June set sail for Flanders (Cal. State Papers, For. Ser. 1566–8, entry 497), but had returned to England by 4 July (ib. Scot. Ser. i. 236), and a week afterwards was ordered to ‘convey himself to some secret place, or else to leave the kingdom’ (ib. 237).
Morton had in Scotland a powerful friend in Moray, but though unmolested Moray only remained to witness the engrossment of the queen's favour by Bothwell, whom he knew to be his mortal enemy. Each, however, had his own ends to serve by a temporary amnesty. The recall of Morton was to the party of Moray of supreme importance, and this could be obtained only through Bothwell. The breach between the queen and Darnley had been hopelessly widened by the revelation of the bond signed by him for Rizzio's murder. Bothwell, the chief succourer of Mary in her distresses, now resolved to make use of her antipathy to Darnley and of the contemptuous hatred cherished towards Darnley by the friends of Morton to further his own ambition. On condition that the queen would agree to pardon Morton, his friends offered to find means to enable her to be ‘quit of her husband without prejudice to her son,’ and although she answered that she would ‘do nothing to touch her honour and conscience’ (‘Protestation of the Earls of Argyll and Huntly’ in Keith, Appendix No. xvi), she at last agreed, about the end of December, to pardon Morton and the other conspirators, with the exception of George Douglas and Andrew Car (Bedford to Cecil, 30 Dec. 1566; Cal. Scot. Ser. i. 241). Bothwell's mediation had been purchased by the consent of a party of Morton's friends to the murder of Darnley; and in Morton's recall Darnley seems to have read his doom, for ‘without word spoken or leave taken he stole away from Stirling and fled to his father.’ When Morton and Bothwell met in the yard of Whittinghame, Bothwell, according to Morton, proposed to him the murder, inquiring ‘what would be his part therein, seeing it was the queen's mind that the king should be tane away’ (Morton's confession in Richard Bannatyne's Memorials, p. 318); but Morton, being, as he expressed it, ‘scarcely clear of one trouble,’ had no wish to rush headlong into another, and adroitly met the reiterated solicitations of Bothwell with a demand for the ‘queen's handwrite of that matter,’ of ‘which warrant,’ he adds, Bothwell ‘never reported to me.’ The position of Morton was one of extraordinary perplexity. He knew, as is evident from Ruthven's ‘Narrative,’ that the queen had sworn to be revenged on the murderers of Rizzio, and he could not suppose that Bothwell had consented to his recall except for the promotion of his own designs. What security had Morton that his own ruin as well as that of Darnley was not intended by entangling him in the murder and making him suffer—as he finally did—as the scapegoat of Bothwell and Mary? But if he had resolved not to endanger his life by murdering Darnley, he also shrank from endangering it by endeavouring to save him. He said he was ‘myndit’ to warn him, but knew him ‘to be sic a bairne that there was naething tauld him but he would reveal it to the queen again’ (ib. 319). Argyll and others had allowed themselves to be made the tools of Bothwell by signing the Craigmillar bond, but neither Moray nor Morton had compromised themselves by writing of any kind, and when the tragedy happened at Kirk-o'-Field neither was in Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards Morton at a midnight interview with the queen received again the castle of Tantallon and other lands, but when summoned to serve as a juryman on the trial of Bothwell for Darnley's murder he warily declined; ‘for that the Lord Darnley was his kinsman,’ he said, ‘he would rather pay the forfeit.’ Before the trial Moray had, on 9 April, left Edinburgh on foreign travel, but had taken care, according to Herries, to set in motion a scheme for Bothwell's overthrow, and had left ‘the Earl of Morton head to the faction, who knew well enough how to manage the business, for he was Moray's second self’ (Hist. Marie Queen of Scots, p. 91).
Mr. Froude, overlooking Morton's own confession that he signed the bond for Bothwell's marriage with the queen (Bannatyne, Memorials, pp. 319–20)—in addition to the endorsement in Randolph's hand on a copy of the bond, ‘Upon this was founded the accusation of the Earl of Morton’—asserts that Morton can be proved distinctly not to have signed. This confident negative seems to rest wholly on a letter of Drury to Cecil, 27 April, in which he says: ‘The lords have
