Abstract
This essay addresses an intriguing though neglected instance of sixteenthcentury political satire. During the late 1560s and early 1570s a series of broadside poems papered the market crosses and kirk doors of Scottish burghs. The broadsides first appeared in Edinburgh in 1567 after the sensational murder of the second husband of Mary Queen of Scots, Henry, Lord Darnley, and her rumored affair with the prime suspect, James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell. The early poems depict the Queen as an adulterous, murderous Jezebel who deserves to lose her crown. Mary and her advisors immediately recognized the political threat posed by such broadside literature. On April 19 she and her parliament sought to curb the trend of
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