+The Text+ given here is from Sharpe's _Ballad Book_ (1824). Professor
Child collected and printed some twenty-eight variants and fragments,
of which none is entirely satisfactory, as regards the telling of the
story. The present text will suit our purpose as well as any other, and
it ends impressively with the famous pathetic verse of the four Maries.
+The Story.+--Lesley in his _History of Scotland_ (1830) says that when
Mary Stuart was sent to France in 1548, she had in attendance 'sundry
gentlewomen and noblemen's sons and daughters, almost of her own age, of
the which there were four in special of whom everyone of them bore the
same name of Mary, being of four sundry honourable houses, to wit,
Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton of Creich.' The four Maries were
still with the Queen in 1564. Hamilton and Carmichael appear in the
ballad in place of Fleming and Livingston.
Scott attributed the origin of the ballad to an incident related by Knox
in his _History of the Reformation_: in 1563 or 1564 a Frenchwoman was
seduced by the Queen's apothecary, and the babe murdered by consent of
father and mother. But the cries of a new-born babe had been heard;
search was made, and both parents were 'damned to be hanged upon the
public street of Edinburgh.'
In 1824, in his preface to the _Ballad Book_, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe
produced a similar story from the Russian court. In 1885 this story was
retold from authentic sources as follows. After the marriage of one of
the ministers of Peter the Great's father with a Hamilton, the Scottish
family ranked with the Russian aristocracy. The Czar Peter required that
all his Empress Catharine's maids-of-honour should be remarkably
handsome; and Mary Hamilton, a niece, it is supposed, of the above
minister's wife, was appointed on account of her beauty. This Mary
Hamilton had an amour with one Orlof, an aide-de-camp to the Czar;
a murdered babe was found, the guilt traced to Mary, and she and Orlof
sent to prison in April 1718. Orlof was afterwards released; Mary
Hamilton was executed on March 14, 1719.
Professor Child, in printing this ballad in 1889, considered the details
of the Russian story[1] (most of which I have omitted) to be so closely
parallel to the Scottish ballad, that he was convinced that the later
story was the origin of the ballad, and that the ballad-maker had
located it in Mary Stuart's court on his own responsibility. In
September 1895 Mr. Andrew Lang contributed the results of his researches
concerning the ballad to _Blackwood's Magazine_, maintaining that the
ballad must have arisen from the 1563 story, as it is too old and too
good to have been written since 1718. Balancing this improbability--that
the details of a Russian court scandal of 1718 should exactly correspond
to a previously extant Scottish ballad--against the improbability of the
eighteenth century producing such a ballad, Child afterwards concluded
the latter to be the greater. The coincidence is undoubtedly striking;
but neither the story nor the name are uncommon.
[Footnote 1: See Waliszewski's _Peter the Great_ (translated by
Lady Mary Loyd), vol. i. p. 251. London, 1897.]
It is, of course, possible that the story is older than 1563--it should
not be difficult to find more than one instance--and that it was first
adapted to the 1563 incident and afterwards to the Russian scandal, the
two versions being subsequently confused. But there is no evidence for
this.