The marriage, however, came to Essex's ears, and Hamilton was called to account.

He denied the marriage, the old priest having been now dead, and none but the Protestant clergyman of the parish being alive to bear testimony to the fact of the marriage.

He endeavored to prevail upon the clergyman also to deny the marriage, which he refused to do, whereupon he was found murdered.

His wife by this marriage having learned from Essex that Hamilton had most treacherously deceived her, fell into premature labor and died; but her last words were an awful curse upon him, and his children after him, to the last generation.
"'May the Eye that lured me to destruction,' she said, 'become a curse to you and your descendants forever! May it blight and kill all those whom it looks upon, and render it dreadful and dreaded to all those who will place confidence in you or your descendants!'" "God knows I couldn't much blame her; it was her last Christian benediction to the villain who had destroyed her, and, setting-charity aside, I don't see how she could have spoken otherwise.
"When the proofs of the marriage, however, were about to be brought against him, the Protestant clergyman, who, on discovering his iniquity, was too honest to conceal it, and who felt bitterly the fraud that had been practised on him, was found murdered, as I have said, because he was now the only evidence left against Hamilton's crime.

The latter did not, however, get rid of him by that atrocious and inhuman act.