Excerpt from Maitland of Lethington, the Minister of Mary Stuart: A Study of His Life and Times The following narrative - for these pages aim at little more than a concise and truthful statement of the facts of history, supported by authoritative refer ences, and eschew controversy as far as possible - is founded almost exclusively on the State Papers and official documents of the time, Scottish, English, French, Spanish and Venetian. These are really the only reliable authorities, each within its own sphere, as the student of history increasingly finds out. Contemporary Writings - chronicles like Pitscottie's, memoirs like those of Sir James Melville; narratives like the anonymous Life and Death of James the Seat - are of the utmost value as a means of gaining insight into what has been called the atmosphere of the time, its ways of thinking and feeling and acting in relation to political and social and religious questions, its standards of morals and its code of honour - as indeed is its whole literature in prose and verse. But they are far from being reliable as to the truth of history, and the undue credit sometimes given to them by historians, not of one school only, has proved seriously misleading. Defective knowledge. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.