Minstrelsy of the Scottish border - National Library of Scotland

THF. SCOTTISH BORDER. 419
mended by having avenged the cause of their niece.
Queen Mary, upon her ungrateful brother. De Thou
nas recorded, that an attempt was made to engage him
o assassinate Gaspar de Coligni, the famous admiral of
France, and the buckler of the Huguenot cause. But
the character of Bothwellhaugh was mistaken. He was
no mercenary trader in blood, and rejected the offer
with contempt and indignation. He had no authority,
he said, from Scotland, to commit murders in France ;
he had avenged his own just quarrel, but he would nei-
ther, for price nor prayer, avenge that of another man.
— Thnanus, cap. 46.
The regent's death happened 23d January, 15f)9. It
is applauded or stigmatized, by contemporary historians,
according to their religious or party prejudices. The
triumph of Blackwood is unbounded. He not only ex-
tols the pious feat of Bothwellhaugh, " who," he ob-
serves, " satisfied, with a single ounce of lead, him,
^' whose sacrilegious avarice had stripped the metropo
" litan church of St Andrews of its covering ;" but he
ascribes it to immediate divine inspiration, and the escape
of Hamilton to little less than the miraculous interfe-
rence of the Deity.
—
Jebb, vol. H. p. 0.63. With equal
injustice, it was, by others, made the ground of a gene-
ral national reflection ; for, when Mather urged Berney
to assassinate Burleigh, and quoted the examples of
Poltrot and Bothwellhaugh, the other conspirator an-
swered, " that neyther Poltrot nor Hambleton did at-
"^ tempt their enterpryse, without some reason or con-