On the 3rd of May Bothwell's divorce from his wife was decreed by the civil court, on the ground of his adultery with a maidservant, and on the 7th by the Roman Catholic court on the ground of consanguinity.
The gens in turn was regarded as an expansion of the family, as was the state of the gens; and members of these larger units by worship of common ancestors - usually mythical - kept alive the feeling that they were a single organic whole animated by a common soul and joined in consanguinity.
There have been exceptions, however, especially in the case of high chiefs; but usually great care is taken to prevent the union of those within the prescribed limits of consanguinity.
A law passed in May 1908 against nepotism (closely following the Texas law of 1907) forbids public officers to appoint (or vote for) any person related to them by affinity or consanguinity within the third degree to any position in the government of which they are a part; makes persons thus related to public officers ineligible to positions in the branch in which their relative is an official; and renders any official making such an appointment liable to fine and removal from office.
On the 3rd of May Lady Jane Gordon, who had become countess of Bothwell on the 22nd of February of the year preceding, obtained, on the ground of her husband's infidelities, a separation which, however, would not under the old laws of Catholic Scotland have left him free to marry again; on the 7th, accordingly, the necessary divorce was pronounced, after two days' session, by a clerical tribunal which ten days before had received from the queen a special commission to give judgment on a plea of somewhat apocryphal consanguinity alleged by Bothwell as the ground of an action for divorce against his wife.