to act her part rendered her own way intricate and uncertain. A
devotee of the Catholic faith, she was placed upon the throne of
Scotland at the very hour when that country, under the powerful
leadership of John Knox, was fast becoming Protestant. This state of
affairs made her task as ruler in her own realm sufficiently trying.
But her difficulties were increased by the inevitable antagonisms
with her great Protestant rival, Elizabeth of England, and through
the involved relations of Great Britain with Spain and Catholic
Europe generally. These historical puzzles seem always to call for
fresh explanation. No less perplexing are the circumstances into
which this Queen was drawn by her marital relations and other
personal entanglements.
Upon all these matters Swinburne sheds light through the medium of
a sound critical judgment, in a style no less conspicuous for its
fascination than by reason of its illuminative power.
Mary (1542-1587), Queen of Scots, daughter of King James V and his wife
Mary of Lorraine, was born in December, 1542, a few days before the
death of her father, heart-broken by the disgrace of his arms at Solway
Moss, where the disaffected nobles had declined to encounter an enemy of
inferior force in the cause of a king whose systematic policy had been
directed against the privileges of their order, and whose representative
on the occasion was an unpopular favorite appointed general in defiance
of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following, the ceremony of
coronation was duly performed on the infant. A scheme for her betrothal
to Edward, Prince of Wales, was defeated by the grasping greed of his
father, whose obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scotland at once to
that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation
of Scottish patriotism. In 1548 the Queen of six years old was betrothed
to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived
August 15th.
The society in which the child was thenceforward reared is known to
readers of Brantome as well as that of Imperial Rome at its worst is
known to readers of Suetonius or Petronius--as well as that of papal
Rome at its worst is known to readers of the diary kept by the domestic
chaplain of Pope Alexander VI. Only in their pages can a parallel be
found to the gay and easy record which reveals, without sign of shame or
suspicion of offence, the daily life of a court compared to which the
court of King Charles II is as the court of Queen Victoria to the
society described by Grammont.
Debauchery of all kinds, murder in all forms, were the daily matter of
excitement or of jest to the brilliant circle which revolved around
Queen Catherine de' Medici. After ten years' training under the tutelage
of the woman whose main instrument of policy was the corruption of her
own children, the Queen of Scots, aged fifteen years and five months,
was married to the eldest and feeblest of the brood on April 24, 1558.
On November 17th, Elizabeth became Queen of England, and the princes of
Lorraine--Francis the great Duke of Guise, and his brother the
Cardinal--induced their niece and her husband to assume, in addition to
the arms of France and Scotland, the arms of a country over which they
asserted the right of Mary Stuart to reign as legitimate heiress of Mary
Tudor. Civil strife broke out in Scotland between John Knox and the
Queen Dowager--between the self-styled "Congregation of the Lord" and
the adherents of the Regent, whose French troops repelled the combined
forces of the Scotch and their English allies from the beleaguered walls
of Leith, little more than a month before the death of their mistress in
the castle of Edinburgh, on June 10, 1560.
On August 25th Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed
in Scotland by a convention of states assembled without the assent of
the absent Queen. On December 5th Francis II died; in August, 1561, his
widow left France for Scotland, having been refused a safe-conduct by
Elizabeth on the ground of her own previous refusal to ratify the treaty
made with England by her commissioners in the same month of the
preceding year. She arrived nevertheless in safety at Leith, escorted by
three of her uncles of the house of Lorraine, and bringing in her train
her future biographer, Brantome, and Chastelard, the first of all her
voluntary victims. On August 21st she first met the only man able to
withstand her; and their first passage of arms left, as he has recorded,
upon the mind of John Knox, an ineffaceable impression of her "proud
mind, crafty wit, and indurate heart against God and his truth."
And yet her acts of concession and conciliation were such as no fanatic
on the opposite side could have approved. She assented, not only to the
undisturbed maintenance of the new creed, but even to a scheme for the
endowment of the Protestant ministry out of the confiscated lands of the
Church. Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her
chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and
most liberal thinker in the country. By the influence of Lord James, in
spite of the earnest opposition of Knox, permission was obtained for her
to hear mass celebrated in her private chapel--a license to which, said
the reformer, he would have preferred the invasion of ten thousand
Frenchmen.
Through all the first troubles of her reign the young Queen steered her
skilful and dauntless way with the tact of a woman and the courage of a
man. An insurrection in the North, headed by the Earl of Huntly under
pretext of rescuing from justice the life which his son had forfeited by
his share in a homicidal brawl, was crushed at a blow by the lord James
against whose life, as well as against his sister's liberty, the
conspiracy of the Gordons had been aimed, and on whom, after the father
had fallen in fight and the son had expiated his double offence on the
scaffold, the leading rebel's earldom of Murray was conferred by the
gratitude of the Queen. Exactly four months after the battle of
Corrichie, and the subsequent execution of a criminal whom she is said
to have "loved entirely," had put an end to the first insurrection
raised against her, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard, who had returned
to France with the other companions of her arrival, and in November,
1562, had revisited Scotland, expiated with his head the offence of the
misfortune of a second detection at night in her bedchamber.
In the same month, twenty-five years afterward, the execution of his
mistress, according to the verdict of her contemporaries in France,
avenged the blood of a lover who had died without uttering a word to
realize the apprehension which, according to Knox, had before his trial
impelled her to desire her brother "that, as he loved her, he would slay
Chastelard, and let him never speak word." And in the same month, two
years from the date of Chastelard's execution, her first step was
unconsciously taken on the road to Fotheringay, when she gave her heart
at first sight to her kinsman Henry, Lord Darnley, son of Matthew
Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who had suffered an exile of twenty years in
expiation of his intrigues with England, and had married the niece of
King Henry VIII, daughter of his sister Margaret, the widow of James IV,
by her second husband, the Earl of Angus. Queen Elizabeth, with the
almost incredible want of tact or instinctive delicacy which
distinguished and disfigured her vigorous intelligence, had recently
proposed as a suitor to the Queen of Scots her own low-born favorite,
Lord Robert Dudley, the widower if not murderer of Amy Robsart; and she
now protested against the project of marriage between Mary and Darnley.
Mary, who had already married her kinsman in secret at Stirling castle
with Catholic rites celebrated in the apartment of David Rizzio, her
secretary for correspondence with France, assured the English
ambassador, in reply to the protest of his mistress, that the marriage
would not take place for three months, when a dispensation from the Pope
would allow the cousins to be publicly united without offence to the
Church. On July 29, 1565, they were accordingly remarried at Holyrood.
The hapless and worthless bridegroom had already incurred the hatred of
two powerful enemies, the Earls of Morton and Glencairn; but the former
of these took part with the Queen against the forces raised by Murray,
Glencairn, and others, under the nominal leadership of Hamilton, Duke of
Châtelherault, on the double plea of danger to the new religion of the
country, and of the illegal proceeding by which Darnley had been
proclaimed king of Scots without the needful constitutional assent of
the estates of the realm.
Murray was cited to attend to the "raid" or array levied by the King and
Queen, and was duly denounced by public blast of trumpet for his
non-appearance. He entered Edinburgh with his forces, but failed to hold
the town against the guns of the castle, and fell back upon Dumfries
before the advance of the royal army, which was now joined by James
Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, on his return from a three years' outlawed
exile in France. He had been accused in 1562 of a plot to seize the
Queen and put her into the keeping of Earl of Arran, whose pretensions
to her hand ended only when his insanity could no longer be concealed.
Another new adherent was the son of the late Earl of Huntly, to whom the
forfeited honors of his house were restored a few months before the
marriage of his sister to Bothwell. The Queen now appealed to France for
aid; but Castelnau, the French ambassador, replied to her passionate
pleading by sober and earnest advice to make peace with the malcontents.
This counsel was rejected, and in October, 1565, the Queen marched an
army of eighteen thousand men against them from Edinburgh; their forces
dispersed in face of superior numbers, and Murray, on seeking shelter in
England, was received with contumely by Elizabeth, whose half-hearted
help had failed to support his enterprise, and whose intercession for
his return found at first no favor with the Queen of Scots.
But the conduct of the besotted boy, on whom at their marriage she had
bestowed the title of king, began at once to justify the enterprise and
to play into the hands of all his enemies alike. His father set him on
to demand the crown matrimonial, which would at least have assured him
the rank and station of independent royalty for life. Rizzio, hitherto
his friend and advocate, induced the Queen to reply by a reasonable
refusal to this hazardous and audacious request. Darnley at once threw
himself into the arms of the party opposed to the policy of the Queen
and her secretary--a policy which at that moment was doubly and trebly
calculated to exasperate the fears of the religious and the pride of the
patriotic. Mary was invited if not induced by the King of Spain to join
his league for the suppression of Protestantism; while the actual or
prospective endowment of Rizzio with Morton's office of chancellor, and
the projected attainder of Murray and his allies, combined to inflame at
once the anger and the apprehension of the Protestant nobles.
According to one account, Darnley privately assured his uncle George
Douglas of his wife's infidelity; he had himself, if he might be
believed, discovered the secretary in the Queen's apartment at midnight,
under circumstances yet more unequivocally compromising than those which
had brought Chastelard to the scaffold. Another version of the pitiful
history represents Douglas as infusing suspicion of Rizzio into the
empty mind of his nephew, and thus winning his consent to a deed already
designed by others.
A bond was drawn in which Darnley pledged himself to support the
confederates who undertook to punish "certain privy persons" offensive
to the state, "especially a stranger Italian called Davie"; another was
subscribed by Darnley and the banished lords, then biding their time in
Newcastle, which engaged him to procure their pardon and restoration,
while pledging them to insure to him the enjoyment of the title he
coveted, with the consequent security of an undisputed succession to the
crown, despite the counter-claims of the house of Hamilton, in case his
wife should die without issue--a result which, intentionally or not, he
and his fellow-conspirators did all that brutality could have suggested
to accelerate and secure.
On March 9th the palace of Holyrood was invested by a troop under the
command of Morton, while Rizzio was dragged by force out of the Queen's
presence and slain without trial in the heat of the moment. The
parliament was discharged by proclamation issued in the name of Darnley
as king; and in the evening of the next day the banished lords, whom it
was to have condemned to outlawry, returned to Edinburgh. On the
following day they were graciously received by the Queen, who undertook
to sign a bond for their security, but delayed the subscription until
the next morning under plea of sickness. During the night she escaped
with Darnley, whom she had already seduced from the party of his
accomplices, and arrived at Dunbar on the third morning after the
slaughter of her favorite. From thence they returned to Edinburgh on
March 28th, guarded by two thousand horsemen under the command of
Bothwell, who had escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder, to
raise a force on the Queen's behalf with his usual soldierly
promptitude.
The slayers of Rizzio fled to England, and were outlawed; Darnley was
permitted to protest his innocence and denounce his accomplices; after
which he became the scorn of all parties alike, and few men dared or
cared to be seen in his company. On June 19th a son was born to his
wife, and in the face of his previous protestations he was induced to
acknowledge himself the father. But, as Murray and his partisans
returned to favor and influence no longer incompatible with that of
Bothwell and Huntly, he grew desperate enough with terror to dream of
escape to France. This design was at once frustrated by the Queen's
resolution. She summoned him to declare his reasons for it in the
presence of the French ambassador and an assembly of the nobles; she
besought him for God's sake to speak out, and not spare her; and at last
he left her presence with an avowal that he had nothing to allege.
The favor shown to Bothwell had not yet given occasion for scandal,
though his character as an adventurous libertine was as notable as his
reputation for military hardihood; but as the summer advanced, his
insolence increased with his influence at court and the general aversion
of his rivals. He was richly endowed by Mary from the greater and lesser
spoils of the Church; and the three wardenships of the border, united
for the first time in his person, gave the lord high admiral of Scotland
a position of unequalled power. In the gallant discharge of its duties
he was dangerously wounded by a leading outlaw, whom he slew in single
combat; and while yet confined to Hermitage castle he received a visit
of two hours from the Queen, who rode thither from Jedburgh and back
through twenty miles of the wild borderland, where her person was in
perpetual danger from the free-booters whom her father's policy had
striven and had failed to extirpate.
On January 22, 1567, the Queen visited her husband, who was ill at
Glasgow, and proposed to remove him to Craigmillar castle, where he
would have the benefit of medicinal baths; but instead of this resort he
was conveyed on the last day of the month to the lonely and squalid
shelter of the residence which was soon to be made memorable by his
murder. Between the ruins of two sacred buildings, with the town hall to
the south and a suburban hamlet known to ill-fame as the Thieves' Row to
the north of it, a lodging was prepared for the titular King of
Scotland, and fitted up with tapestries taken from the Gordons after the
battle of Corrichie. On the evening of Sunday, February 9th, Mary took
her last leave of the miserable boy who had so often and so mortally
outraged her as consort and as queen. That night the whole city was
shaken out of sleep by an explosion of gunpowder which shattered to
fragments the building in which he should have slept and perished; and
next morning the bodies of Darnley and a page were found strangled in a
garden adjoining it, whither they had apparently escaped over a wall, to
be despatched by the hands of Bothwell's attendant confederates.
Upon the view which may be taken of Mary's conduct during the next three
months depends the whole debatable question of her character. According
to the professed champions of that character, this conduct was a tissue
of such dastardly imbecility, such heartless irresolution, and such
brainless inconsistency as forever to dispose of her time-honored claim
to the credit of intelligence and courage. It is certain that just three
months and six days after the murder of her husband she became the wife
of her husband's murderer. On February 11th she wrote to the Bishop of
Glasgow, her ambassador in France, a brief letter, of simple eloquence,
announcing her providential escape from a design upon her own as well as
her husband's life. A reward of two thousand pounds was offered by
proclamation for discovery of the murderer. Bothwell and others, his
satellites or the Queen's, were instantly placarded by name as the
criminals. Voices were heard by night in the streets of Edinburgh
calling down judgment on the assassins.
Four days after the discovery of the bodies, Darnley was buried in the
chapel of Holyrood with secrecy as remarkable as the solemnity with
which Rizzio had been interred there less than a year before. On the
Sunday following, Mary left Edinburgh for Seton palace, twelve miles
from the capital, where scandal asserted that she passed the time
merrily in shooting-matches, with Bothwell for her partner, against
Lords Seton and Huntly; other accounts represent Huntly and Bothwell
as left at Holyrood in charge of the infant Prince. Gracefully and
respectfully, with statesmanlike yet feminine dexterity, the demands of
Darnley's father for justice on the murderers of his son were accepted
and eluded by his daughter-in-law. Bothwell, with a troop of fifty men,
rode through Edinburgh defiantly denouncing vengeance on his concealed
accusers. As weeks elapsed without action on the part of the royal
widow, while the cry of blood was up throughout the country, raising
echoes from England and abroad, the murmur of accusation began to rise
against her also. Murray, with his sister's ready permission, withdrew
to France.
On April 21st Mary went to visit her child at Stirling, where his
guardian, the Earl of Mar, refused to admit more than two women in her
train. It was well known in Edinburgh that Bothwell had a body of men
ready to intercept her on the way back, and carry her to Dunbar--not,
as was naturally inferred, without good assurance of her consent. On
April 24th, as she approached Edinburgh, Bothwell accordingly met her
at the head of eight hundred spearmen, assured her--as she afterward
averred--that she was in the utmost peril, and escorted her, together
with Huntly, Lethington, and Melville, who were then in attendance, to
Dunbar castle. On May 3d Lady Jane Gordon, who had become Countess of
Bothwell on February 22d 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 day when the first or Protestant divorce was pronounced, Mary
and Bothwell returned to Edinburgh with every prepared appearance of a
peaceful triumph. Lest her captivity should have been held to invalidate
the late legal proceedings in her name, proclamation was made of
forgiveness accorded by the Queen to her captor in consideration of his
past and future services, and her intention was announced to reward them
by further promotion; and on the same day (May 12th) he was duly created
duke of Orkney and Shetland. The Duke, as a conscientious Protestant,
refused to marry his mistress according to the rites of her Church, and
she, the chosen champion of its cause, agreed to be married to him,
not merely by a Protestant, but by one who before his conversion had
been a Catholic bishop, and therefore should have been more hateful
and contemptible in her eyes than any ordinary heretic, had not
religion as well as policy, faith as well as reason, been absorbed or
superseded by some more mastering passion or emotion. This passion or
emotion, according to those who deny her attachment to Bothwell, was
simply terror--the blind and irrational prostration of an abject spirit
before the cruel force of circumstances and the crafty wickedness of
men. Hitherto, according to all evidence, she had shown herself on
all occasions, as on all subsequent occasions she indisputably
showed herself, the most fearless, the most keen-sighted, the most
ready-witted, the most high-gifted and high-spirited of women; gallant
and generous, skilful and practical, never to be cowed by fortune, never
to be cajoled by craft; neither more unselfish in her ends nor more
unscrupulous in her practice than might have been expected from her
training and her creed.
But at the crowning moment of trial there are those who assert their
belief that the woman who on her way to the field of Corrichie had
uttered her wish to be a man, that she might know all the hardship and
all the enjoyment of a soldier's life, riding forth "in jack and
knapskull"--the woman who long afterward was to hold her own for two
days together, without help of counsel, against all the array of English
law and English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and
supported by the resentment of a nation--showed herself devoid of moral
and physical resolution; too senseless to realize the significance and
too heartless to face the danger of a situation from which the simplest
exercise of reason, principle, or courage must have rescued the most
unsuspicious and inexperienced of honest women who was not helplessly
deficient in self-reliance and self-respect.
The famous correspondence produced next year in evidence against her at
the conference of York may have been, as her partisans affirm, so
craftily garbled and falsified by interpolation, suppression,
perversion, or absolute forgery as to be all but historically worthless.
Its acceptance or its rejection does not in any degree whatever affect,
for better or for worse, the rational estimate of her character. The
problem presented by the simple existence of the facts just summed up
remains in either case absolutely the same.
That the coarse and imperious nature of the hardy and able ruffian who
had now become openly her master should no less openly have shown itself
even in the first moments of their inauspicious union is what any
bystander of common insight must inevitably have foreseen. Tears,
dejection, and passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for
death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier
yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her
affectionate gayety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and
improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he
kept cap in hand as a subject she would snatch it from him and clap it
on his head again; while in graver things she took all due or possible
care to gratify his ambition by the insertion of a clause in their
contract of marriage which made their joint signature necessary to all
documents of state issued under the sign manual. She despatched to
France a special envoy, the Bishop of Dunblane, with instructions
setting forth at length the unparalleled and hitherto ill-requited
services and merits of Bothwell, and the necessity of compliance at once
with his passion and with the unanimous counsel of the nation--a people
who would endure the rule of no foreign consort, and whom none of their
own countrymen were so competent to control, alike by wisdom and by
valor, as the incomparable subject of her choice.