61.
These events passed with such rapidity, that men had no leisure to admire sufficiently one incident, when they were surprised with a new one equally rare and uncommon.

There still, however, remained one difficulty which it was not easy to foresee how the queen and Bothwell, determined as they were to execute their shameful purpose, could find expedients to overcome.

The man who had procured the subscription of the nobility, recommending him as a husband to the queen, and who had acted this seeming violence on her person, in order to force her consent, had been married two years before to another woman; to a woman of merit, of a noble family, sister to the earl of Huntley.

But persons blinded by passion, and infatuated with crime, soon shake off all appearance of decency.

A suit was commenced for a divorce between Bothwell and his wife; and this suit was opened at the same instant in two different, or rather opposite courts; in the court of the archbishop of St.Andrew's, which was Popish, and governed itself by the canon law; and in the new consistorial or commissariot court, which was Protestant, and was regulated by the principles of the reformed teachers.