Stuart” by M. Dargaud, a writer of talent, whose book has been much
praised and much read. M. Dargaud made, in his own way, various
researches about the heroine of his choice; he went expressly to England
and Scotland, and visited as a pilgrim all the places and scenes of
Marie Stuart’s sojourns and captivities. While drawing abundantly from
preceding writers, M. Dargaud does them justice with effusion and
cordiality; he sheds through every line of his history the sentiment of
exalted pity and poesy inspired within him by the memory of that royal
and Catholic victim; he deserves the fine letter which Mme. Sand wrote
him from Nohant, April 10, 1851, in which she congratulates him, almost
without criticism, and speaks of Marie Stuart with charm and eloquence.
If I do not dwell at greater length upon the work of M. Dargaud, it is,
I must avow, because I am not of that too emotional school which softens
and enervates history. I think that history should not necessarily be
dull and wearisome, but still less do I think it should be impassioned,
sentimental, and as if magnetic. Without wishing to depreciate the
qualities of M. Dargaud, which are too much in the taste of the day not
to be their own recommendation, I shall follow in preference a more
severe historian, whose judgment and whose method of procedure inspire
me with confidence.
Marie Stuart, born December 8, 1542, six days before the death of her
father, who was then combating, like all the kings his predecessors, a
turbulent nobility, began as an orphan her fickle and unfortunate
destiny. Storms assailed her in her cradle,--
“As if, e’en then, inhuman Fortune
Would suckle me with sadness and with pain,”
as an old poet, in I know not what tragedy, has made her say. Crowned at
the age of nine months, disputed already in marriage between the French
and English parties, each desiring to prevail in Scotland, she was
early, through the influence of her mother, Marie de Guise (sister of
the illustrious Guises), bestowed upon the Dauphin of France, the son of
King Henri II. August 13, 1548, Marie Stuart, then rather less than six
years old, landed at Brest. Betrothed to the young dauphin, who, on his
father’s death became François II., she was brought up among the
children of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, and remained in France,
first as dauphine, then as queen, until the premature death of her
husband. She lived there in every respect as a French princess. These
twelve or thirteen years in France were her joy and her charm, and the
source of her ruin.
She grew up in the bosom of the most polished, most learned, most
gallant Court of those times, shining there in her early bloom like a
rare and most admired marvel, knowing music and all the arts (_divinæ
Palladis artes_), learning the languages of antiquity, speaking themes
in Latin, superior in French rhetoric, enjoying an intercourse with
poets, and being herself their rival with her poems. Scotland, during
all this time, seemed to her a barbaric and savage land, which she
earnestly hoped never to see again, or, at any rate, never to inhabit.
Trained to a policy wholly of the Court and wholly personal, they made
her sign at Fontainebleau at the time of her marriage (1558) a secret
deed of gift of the kingdom of Scotland to the kings of France, at the
same time that she publicly gave adherence to the conditions which the
commissioners from Scotland had attached to the marriage, conditions
under which she pledged herself to maintain the integrity, the laws, and
the liberties of her native land. It was at this very moment that she
secretly made gift to the kings of France of her whole kingdom by an act
of her own good-will and power. The Court of France prompted her to that
imprudent treachery at the age of sixteen. Another very impolitic
imprudence, which proclaimed itself more openly, was committed when
Henri II., on the death of Mary Tudor, made Marie Stuart, the dauphine,
bear the arms of England beside those of Scotland, thus presenting her
thenceforth as a declared rival and competitor of Elizabeth.
When Marie Stuart suddenly lost her husband (December 5, 1560), and it
was decided that she, a widow at eighteen, should, instead of remaining
in her dowry of Touraine, return to her kingdom of Scotland to bring
order to the civil troubles there existing, universal mourning took
place in the world of young French seigneurs, noble ladies, and poets.
The latter consigned their regrets to many poems which picture Marie
Stuart to the life in this decisive hour, the first really sorrowful
hour she had ever known. We see her refined, gracious, of a delicate,
fair complexion, the form and bust of queen or goddess,--L’Hôpital
himself had said of her, after his fashion, in a grave epithalamium:--
“Adspectu veneranda, putes ut Numen inesse:
Tantus in ore decor, majestas regia tanta est!--
of a long hand, elegant and slender (_gracilis_), an alabaster forehead
dazzling beneath the crape, and with golden hair--which needs a brief
remark. It is a poet (Ronsard) who speaks of “the gold of her ringed and
braided hair,” and poets, as we know, employ their words a little
vaguely. Mme. Sand, speaking of a portrait she had seen as a child in
the English Convent, says, without hesitation, “Marie was beautiful, but
red-haired.” M. Dargaud speaks of another portrait, “in which a sunray
lightens” he says rather oddly, “the curls of her living and electric
hair.” But Walter Scott, reputed the most correct of historical
romance-writers, in describing Marie Stuart a prisoner in Lochleven
Castle, shows us, as though he had seen them, her thick tresses of “dark
brown,” which escaped now and then from her coif. Here we are far from
the red or golden tints, and I see no other way of conciliating these
differences than to rest on “that hair so beautiful, so blond and fair”
[_si blonds et cendrés_] which Brantôme, an ocular witness,
admired,--hair that captivity whitened, leaving the poor queen of
forty-six “quite bald” in the hands of her executioner, as l’Estoile
relates. But at nineteen, the moment of her departure from France, the
young widow was in all the glory of her beauty, except for a brilliancy
of colour, which she lost at the death of her first husband, giving
place to a purer whiteness.
Withal a lively, graceful, and sportive mind, and French raillery, an
ardent soul, capable of passion, open to desire, a heart which knew not
how to draw back when flame or fancy or enchantment stirred it. Such was
the queen, adventurous and poetical, who tore herself from France in
tears, sent by politic uncles to recover her authority amid the roughest
and most savage of “Frondes.”
Scotland, since Marie Stuart left it as a child, had undergone great
changes; the principal was the Reformed religion which had taken root
there and extended itself vigorously. The great reformer Knox preached
the new doctrine, which found in Scotland stern, energetic souls ready
made to receive it. The old struggle of the lords and barons against the
kings was complicated and redoubled now by that of cities and people
against the brilliant beliefs of the Court and the Catholic hierarchy.
The birth of modern society, of civil equality, of respect for the
rights of all was painfully working itself out through barbaric scenes,
and by means of fanaticism itself. Alone and without counsel, contending
with the lords and the nobility as her ancestors had done, Marie Stuart,
quick, impulsive, subject to predilections and to antipathies, was
already insufficient for the work; what therefore could it be when she
found herself face to face with a religious party, born and growing
during recent years, face to face with an argumentative, gloomy party,
moral and daring, discussing rationally, Bible in hand, the right of
kings, and pushing logic even into prayer? Coming from a literary and
artificial Court, there was nothing in her that could comprehend these
grand and voiceless movements of the people, either to retard them or
turn them to her own profit by adapting herself to them. “She returned,”
says M. Mignet, “full of regrets and disgust, to the barren mountains
and the uncultured inhabitants of Scotland. More lovable than able, very
ardent and in no way cautious, she returned with a grace that was out of
keeping with her surroundings, a dangerous beauty, a keen but variable
intellect, a generous but rash soul, a taste for the arts, a love of
adventure, and all the passions of a woman joined to the excessive
liberty of a widow.”
And to complicate the peril of this precarious situation she had for
neighbour in England a rival queen, Elizabeth, whom she had first
offended by claiming her title, and next, and no less, by a feminine and
proclaimed superiority of beauty and grace,--a rival queen capable,
energetic, rigid, and dissimulating, representing the contrary religious
opinion, and surrounded by able counsellors, firm, consistent, and
committed to the same cause. The seven years that Marie Stuart spent in
Scotland after her return from France (August 19, 1561) to her
imprisonment (May 18, 1568) are filled with all the blunders and all the
faults that could be committed by a young and thoughtless princess,
impulsive, unreflecting, and without shrewdness or ability except in the
line of her passion, never in view of a general political purpose. The
policy of Mme. de Longueville, during the Fronde, seems to me of the
same character.
As to other faults, the moral faults of poor Marie Stuart, they are as
well known and demonstrated to-day as faults of that kind can well be.
Mme. Sand, always very indulgent, regards as the three black spots upon
her life the abandonment of Chastellard, her feigned caresses to the
hapless Darnley, and her forgetfulness of Bothwell.
Chastellard, as we know, was a gentleman of Dauphiné, musician and poet,
in the train of the servitors and adorers of the queen, who at first was
very agreeable to her. Chastellard was one of the troop who escorted
Marie Stuart to Scotland, and sometime later, urged by his passion, he
returned there. But not knowing how to restrain himself, or to keep, as
became him, to poetic passion while waiting to inspire, if he could, a
real one, he was twice discovered beneath the bed of the queen; the
second time she lost patience and turned him over to the law. Poor
Chastellard was beheaded; he died reciting, so they say, a hymn of
Ronsard’s, and crying aloud: “O cruel Lady!” After so stern an act, to
which she was driven in fear of scandal and to put her honour above all
attainder and suspicion, Marie Stuart had, it would seem, but one course
to pursue, namely: to remain the most severe and most virtuous of
princesses.
But her severity for Chastellard, though shown for effect, is merely a
peccadillo in comparison with her conduct to Darnley, her second
husband. By marrying this young man (July 29, 1565), her vassal, but of
the race of the Stuarts and her own family, Marie escaped the diverse
political combinations which were striving to attract her to a second
marriage; and it would have been, perhaps, a sensible thing to do, if
she had not done it as an act of caprice and passion. But she fell in
love with Darnley in a single day, and became disgusted in the next.
This tall, weakly youth, timid and conceited by turns, with a heart
“soft as wax,” had nothing in him which subjugates a woman and makes her
respect him. A woman such as Marie Stuart, changeable, ardent, easily
swayed, with the sentiment of her weakness and of her impulsiveness,
likes to find a master and at moments a tyrant in the man she loves,
whereas she soon despises her slave and creature when he is nought but
that; she much prefers an arm of iron to an effeminate hand.
Less than six months after her marriage Marie, wholly disgusted,
consoled herself with an Italian, David Riccio, a man thirty-two years
of age, equally well fitted for business or pleasure, who advised her
and served her as secretary, and was gifted with a musical talent well
suited to commend him to women in other ways. The feeble Darnley
confided his jealousy to the discontented lords and gentlemen, and they,
in the interests of their faction, prodded his vengeance and offered to
serve it with their sword. Ministers and Presbyterian pastors took part
in the affair. The whole was plotted and managed with perfect unanimity
as a chastisement of Heaven, and, what is more, by help of deeds and
formal agreements which simulated legality. The queen and her favourite,
apparently before they had any suspicions, were taken in a net. David
Riccio was seized by the conspirators while supping in Marie’s cabinet
(March 9, 1566), Darnley being present, and from there he was dragged
into the next room and stabbed. Marie, at this date, was six months
pregnant by her husband. On that day, outraged in honour and embittered
in feeling, she conceived for Darnley a deeper contempt mingled with
horror, and swore to avenge herself on the murderers. For this purpose
she bided her time, she dissimulated; for the first time in her life she
controlled herself and restrained her actions. She became politic--as
the nature is of passionate women--only in the interests of her passion
and her vengeance.
Here is the gravest and the most irreparable incident of her life. Even
after we have fully represented to ourselves what the average morality
of the sixteenth century, with all the treachery and atrocities it
tolerated, was, we are scarcely prepared for this. Marie Stuart’s first
desire was to revenge herself on the lords and gentlemen who had lent
their daggers to Darnley, rather than on her weak and timid husband. To
reach her end she reconciled herself with the latter and detached him
from the conspirators, his accomplices. She forced him to disavow them,
thus degrading and sinking him in his own estimation. At this point she
remained as long as a new passion was not added to her supreme contempt.
Meantime her child was born (June 19), and she made Darnley the father
of a son who resembled both parents on their worst sides, the future
James I. of England, that soul of a casuist in a king. But by this time
a new passion was budding in the open heart of Marie Stuart. He whom she
now chose had neither Darnley’s feebleness nor the salon graces of a
Riccio; he was the Earl of Bothwell, a man of thirty, ugly, but martial
in aspect, brave, bold, violent, and capable of daring all things. To
him it was that this flexible and tender will was henceforth to cling
for its support. Marie Stuart has found her master; and him she will
obey in all things, without scruple, without remorse, as happens always
in distracted passion.
But how rid herself of a husband henceforth odious? How unite herself to
the man she loves and whose ambition is not of a kind to stop half way?
Here again we need--not to excuse, but to explain Marie Stuart--we need
to represent to our minds the morality of that day. A goodly number of
the same lords who had taken part in Riccio’s murder, and who were
leagued together by deeds and documents, offered themselves to the
queen, and, for the purpose of recovering favour, let her see the means
of getting rid of a husband who was now so irksome. She answered this
overture by merely speaking of a divorce and the difficulty of obtaining
it. But these men, little scrupulous, said to her plainly, by the mouth
of Lethington, the ablest and most politic of them all: “Madame, give
yourself no anxiety; we, the leaders of the nobility, and the heads of
your Grace’s Council, will find a way to deliver you from him without
prejudice to your son; and though my Lord Murray, here present (the
illegitimate brother of Marie Stuart), is little less scrupulous as a
Protestant than your Grace is as a Papist, I feel sure that he will look
through his fingers, see us act, and say nothing.”
The word was spoken; Marie had only to do as her brother did, “look
through her fingers,” as the vulgar saying was, and let things go on
without taking part in them. She did take a part however; she led into
the trap, by a feigned return of tenderness, the unfortunate Darnley,
then convalescing from the small-pox. She removed his suspicions without
much trouble, and, recovering her empire over him, persuaded him to come
in a litter from Glasgow to Kirk-of-Field, at the gates of Edinburgh,
where there was a species of parsonage, little suitable for the
reception of a king and queen, but very convenient for the crime now to
be committed.
There Darnley perished, strangled with his page, during the night of
February 9, 1567. The house was blown up by means of a barrel of
gunpowder, placed there to give the idea of an accident. During this
time Marie had gone to a masked ball at Holyrood, not having quitted her
husband until that evening, when all was prepared to its slightest
detail. Bothwell, who was present for a time at the ball, left Edinburgh
after midnight and presided at the killing. These circumstances are
proved in an irrefragable manner by the testimony of witnesses, by the
confessions of the actors, and by the letters of Marie Stuart, the
authenticity of which M. Mignard, with decisive clearness, places beyond
all doubt. She felt that in giving herself thus to Bothwell’s projects
she furnished him with weapons against herself and gave him grounds to
distrust her in turn. He might say to himself, as the Duke of Norfolk
said later, that “the pillow of such a woman was too hard” to sleep
upon. During the preparation of this horrible trap she more than once
showed her repugnance to deceive the poor sick dupe who trusted her. “I
shall never rejoice,” she writes, “through deceiving him who trusts me.
Nevertheless, command me in all things. But do not conceive an ill
opinion of me; because you yourself are the cause of this; for I would
never do anything against him for my own particular vengeance.” And
truly this rôle of Clytemnestra, or of Gertrude in Hamlet was not in
accordance with her nature, and could only have been imposed upon her.
But passion rendered her for this once insensible to pity, and made her
heart (she herself avows it) “as hard as diamond.” Marie Stuart soon put
the climax to her ill-regulated passion and desires by marrying
Bothwell; thus revolting the mind of her whole people, whose morality,
fanatical as it was, was never in the least depraved, and was far more
upright than that of the nobles.
The crime was echoed beyond the seas. L’Hôpital, that representative of
the human conscience in a dreadful era, heard, in his country retreat,
of the misguided conduct of her whose early grace and first marriage he
had celebrated in his stately epithalamium; and he now recorded his
indignation in another Latin poem, wherein he recounts the horrors of
that funereal night, and does not shrink from calling the wife and the
young mother “the murderess, alas! of a father whose child was still at
her breast.”
On the 15th of May, three months--only three months after the murder, at
the first smile of spring, the marriage with the murderer was
celebrated. Marie Stuart justified in all ways Shakespeare’s saying:
“Frailty, thy name is Woman.” For none was ever more a woman than Marie
Stuart.
Here I am unable to admit the third reproach of Mme. Sand, that of Marie
Stuart’s forgetfulness of Bothwell. I see, on the contrary, through all
the obstacles, all the perils immediately following this marriage, that
Marie had no other idea than that of avoiding separation from her
violent and domineering husband. She loved him so madly that she said to
whosoever might hear her (April, 1567) that “she would quit France,
England, and her own country, and follow him to the ends of the earth in
nought but a white petticoat, rather than be parted from him.” And soon
after, forced by the lords to tear herself from Bothwell, she reproaches
them bitterly, asking but one thing, “that both be put in a vessel and
sent away where Fortune led them.” It was only enforced separation,
final imprisonment, and the impossibility of communication, which
compelled the rupture. It is true that Marie, a prisoner in England,
solicited the Parliament of Scotland to annul her marriage with
Bothwell, in the hope she then had of marrying the Duke of Norfolk, who
played the lover to herself and crown, though she never saw him. But,
Bothwell being a fugitive and ruined, can we reproach Marie Stuart for a
project from which she hoped for restoration and deliverance? Her
passion for Bothwell had been a delirium, which drove her into
connivance with crime. That fever calmed, Marie Stuart turned her mind
to the resources which presented themselves, among which was the offer
of her hand. Her wrong-doing does not lie there; amid so many
infidelities and horrors, it would be pushing delicacy much too far to
require eternity of sentiment for the remains of an unbridled and bloody
passion. That which is due to such passions, when they leave no hatred
behind them, that which becomes them best, is oblivion.
Such conduct, and such deeds, crowned by her heedless flight into
England and the imprudent abandonment of her person to Elizabeth, seem
little calculated to make the touching and pathetic heroine we are
accustomed to admire and cherish in Marie Stuart. Yet she deserves all
pity; and we have but to follow her through the third and last portion
of her life, through that long, unjust, and sorrowful captivity of
nineteen years (May 18, 1568, to February 5, 1587) to render it
unconsciously. Struggling without defence against a crafty and ambitious
rival, liable to mistakes from friends outside, the victim of a grasping
and tenacious policy which never let go its prey and took so long a time
to torture before devouring it, she never for a single instant fails
towards herself; she rises ever higher. That faculty of hope which so
often had misled her becomes the grace of her condition and a virtue.
She moves the whole world in the interest of her misfortunes; she stirs
it with a charm all-powerful. Her cause transforms and magnifies itself.
It is no longer that of a passionate and heedless woman punished for her
frailties and her inconstancy; it is that of the legitimate heiress of
the crown of England, exposed in her dungeon to the eyes of the world,
a faithful, unshaken Catholic, who refuses to sacrifice her faith to the
interests of her ambition or even to the salvation of her life. The
beauty and grandeur of such a rôle were fitted to stir the tender and
naturally believing heart of Marie Stuart. She fills her soul with that
rôle; she substitutes it, from the first moment of her captivity, for
all her former personal sentiments, which, little by little, subside and
expire within her as the fugitive occasions which aroused them pass
away. She seems to remember them no more than she does the waves and the
foam of those brilliant lakes that she has crossed. For nineteen years
the whole of Catholicity is disquieted and impassioned about her; and
she is there, half-heroine, half-martyr, making the signal and waving
her banner behind the bars. Captive that she was, do not accuse her of
conspiring against Elizabeth; for with her ideas of right divine and of
absolute kingship from sovereign to sovereign, it was not conspiring,
she being a prisoner, to seek for the triumph of her cause; it was
simply pursuing the war.