In the year of 1569 the hapless French page, Nicholas Hubert, commonly known as French Paris was executed on the 16th of August as an accessory to the crime of the Kirk-of-Field. Both what we know and what we do not know of the conditions surrounding his death have been made of moment through the importance imputed to them by the vindicators of Queen Mary, and therefore it is necessary to note them. The execution was not in Edinburgh but in St Andrews, and no record of the trial or judgment has been preserved. To these facts, deemed suspicious, it has been recently added, that when Queen Elizabeth suggested to Murray that the execution might be deferred, he answered that it was already over; and in his letter to her he stated that Hubert had arrived from Denmark at Leith in the middle of the preceding month of June, whereas he had sailed from Denmark on the 15th of October 1568. The inference from this discrepancy is, that Murray had him in hand during the progress of the York and London conference, that he could thus have produced him as a witness, and that to conceal this suppression of evidence he had told a falsehood about the time of Hubert's arrival in Scotland.

* - certain edits to the original text have been made for clarity