advanced in a letter to her ambassador in England. But that neither plea
would avail her for a moment in Scotland she had ominous evidence on the
thirteenth day after her marriage, when no response was made to the
usual form of proclamation for a raid or levy of forces under pretext of
a campaign against the rievers of the border. On June 6th Mary and
Bothwell took refuge in Borthwick castle, twelve miles from the capital,
where the fortress was in the keeping of an adherent whom the diplomacy
of Sir James Melville had succeeded in detaching from his allegiance to
Bothwell. The fugitives were pursued and beleaguered by the Earl of
Morton and Lord Hume, who declared their purpose to rescue the Queen
from the thraldom of her husband. He escaped, leaving her free to follow
him or to join the party of her professed deliverers.
But whatever cause she might have since marriage to complain of his
rigorous custody and domineering brutality was insufficient to break the
ties by which he held her. Alone, in the disguise of a page, she slipped
out of the castle at midnight, and rode off to meet him at a tower two
miles distant, whence they fled together to Dunbar. The confederate
lords on entering Edinburgh were welcomed by the citizens, and after
three hours' persuasion Lethington, who had now joined them, prevailed
on the captain of the castle to deliver it also into their hands.
Proclamations were issued in which the crime of Bothwell was denounced,
and the disgrace of the country, the thraldom of the Queen, and the
mortal peril of her infant son were set forth as reasons for summoning
all the lieges of the chief cities of Scotland to rise in arms on three
hours' notice and join the forces assembled against the one common
enemy. News of his approach reached them on the night of June 14th, and
they marched before dawn with twenty-two hundred men to meet him near
Musselburgh. Mary meanwhile had passed from Dunbar to Haddington, and
thence to Seton, where sixteen hundred men rallied to her side. On June
15th, one month from their marriage day, the Queen and Bothwell, at the
head of a force of fairly equal numbers but visibly inferior discipline,
met the army of the confederates at Carberry hill, some six miles from
Edinburgh.
It was agreed that the Queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell
be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar with the few followers who
remained to him. Mary took leave of her first and last master with
passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies,
and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her
death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate
spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile
flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and
crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped
the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand"
she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a
yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner
representing the corpse of Darnley, with her child beside it, invoking
on his knees the retribution of divine justice.
From the violence of a multitude, in which women of the worst class were
more furious than the men, she was sheltered in the house of the
provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing
aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could
look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to
Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under
guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the
20th a silver casket containing letters and French verses, miscalled
sonnets, in the handwriting of the Queen, was taken from the person of a
servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to
Dunbar. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from
the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text
which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his
accession to the English throne--even in these possibly disfigured
versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous
fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and
jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention
of art.
Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven, and Sir
Robert Melville were despatched to Lochleven, there to obtain the
Queen's signature to an act of abdication in favor of her son, and
another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and
a commission of regency was established till the return from France of
Murray, who, on August 15th, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athol.
According to his own account the expostulations as to her past conduct
which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears,
confessions, and attempts at extenuation or excuse; but when they parted
next day on good terms, she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from
that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close
keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for
bedfellows. Their mother and the Regent's, her father's former mistress,
was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction
and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm.
A rumor transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had
proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for
herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by
him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a
daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun
in France.
It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from
Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on
March 25, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands
under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the
household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterward
remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and
perplexity to herself, succeeded on May 2d in assisting her to escape by
a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland,
where George Douglas, Lord Seton, and others were awaiting her. Thence
they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton palace,
round which an army of six thousand men was soon assembled, and whither
the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The
Queen's abdication was revoked, messengers were despatched to the
English and French courts, and word was sent to Murray at Glasgow that
he must resign the regency, and should be pardoned in common with all
offenders against the Queen. But on the day when Mary arrived at
Hamilton, Murray had summoned to Glasgow the feudatories of the crown,
to take arms against the insurgent enemies of the infant King.
On the 13th of May the battle or skirmish of Langside determined the
result of the campaign in three-quarters of an hour. Kirkaldy of Grange,
who commanded the Regent's cavalry, seized and kept the place of vantage
from the beginning, and at the first sign of wavering on the other side
shattered at a single charge the forces of the Queen with a loss of one
man to three hundred. Mary fled sixty miles from the field of her last
battle before she halted at Sanquhar, and for three days of flight,
according to her own account, had to sleep on the hard ground, live on
oatmeal and sour milk, and fare at night like the owls, in hunger, cold,
and fear.
On the third day from the rout of Langside she crossed the Solway, and
landed at Workington in Cumberland, May 16, 1568. On the 20th Lord
Scrope and Sir Francis Knollys were sent from court to carry messages
and letters of comfort from Elizabeth to Mary at Carlisle. On June 11th
Knollys wrote to Cecil at once the best description and the noblest
panegyric extant of the Queen of Scots--enlarging, with a brave man's
sympathy, on her indifference to form and ceremony, her daring grace and
openness of manner, her frank display of a great desire to be avenged of
her enemies, her readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of
victory, her delight to hear of hardihood and courage, commending by
name all her enemies of approved valor, sparing no cowardice in her
friends, but above all things athirst for victory by any means at any
price, so that for its sake pain and peril seemed pleasant to her, and
wealth and all things, if compared with it, contemptible and vile.
Mary was held a prisoner in England for seventeen years. In 1585 she was
accused of favoring Anthony Babington's plot against the life of
Elizabeth, her captor. Anthony Babington, in his boyhood a ward of
Shrewsbury, resident in the household at Sheffield castle, and thus
subjected to the charm before which so many victims had already fallen,
was now induced to undertake the deliverance of the Queen of Scots by
the murder of the Queen of England. It is maintained by those admirers
of Mary who assume her to have been an almost absolute imbecile, gifted
with the power of imposing herself on the world as a woman of
unsurpassed ability, that, while cognizant of the plot for her
deliverance by English rebels and an invading army of foreign
auxiliaries, she might have been innocently unconscious that this
conspiracy involved the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth. In the
conduct and detection of her correspondence with Babington, traitor was
played off against traitor, and spies were utilized against assassins,
with as little scruple as could be required or expected in the diplomacy
of the time.
As in the case of the casket letters, it is alleged that forgery was
employed to interpolate sufficient evidence of Mary's complicity in a
design of which it is thought credible that she was kept in ignorance by
the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her
service--that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a
would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen
and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as
inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the
conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall
Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At
Tixall she was detained till her papers at Chartley had undergone
thorough research. That she was at length taken in her own toils, even
such a dullard as her admirers depict her could not have failed to
understand; that she was no such dastard as to desire or deserve such
defenders, the whole brief course of her remaining life bore consistent
and irrefragable witness.
Her first thought on her return to Chartley was one of loyal gratitude
and womanly sympathy. She cheered the wife of her English secretary, now
under arrest, with promises to answer for her husband to all accusations
brought against him; took her new-born child from the mother's arms, and
in default of clergy baptized it, to Paulet's Puritanic horror, with her
own hands by her own name.
The next or the twin-born impulse of her indomitable nature was, as
usual in all times of danger, one of passionate and high-spirited
defiance on discovering the seizure of her papers. A fortnight afterward
her keys and her money were confiscated, while she, bedridden and unable
to move her hand, could only ply the terrible weapon of her bitter and
fiery tongue. Her secretaries were examined in London, and one of them
gave evidence that she had first heard of the conspiracy by letter from
Babington, of whose design against the life of Elizabeth she thought it
best to take no notice in her reply, though she did not hold herself
bound to reveal it. On September 25th she was removed to the strong
castle of Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. On October 6th she was
desired by letter from Elizabeth to answer the charges brought against
her before certain of the chief English nobles appointed to sit in
commission on the cause. In spite of her first refusal to submit, she
was induced by the arguments of the vice-chamberlain, Sir Christopher
Hatton, to appear before this tribunal on condition that her protest
should be registered against the legality of its jurisdiction over a
sovereign, the next heir of the English crown.
On October 14 and 15, 1586, the trial was held in the hall of
Fotheringay castle. Alone, "without one counsellor on her side among so
many," Mary conducted the whole of her own defence with courage
incomparable and unsurpassable ability. Pathos and indignation, subtlety
and simplicity, personal appeal and political reasoning, were the
alternate weapons with which she fought against all odds of evidence or
inference, and disputed step by step every inch of debatable ground. She
repeatedly insisted on the production of proof in her own handwriting as
to her complicity with the project of the assassins who had expiated
their crime on the 20th and 21st of the month preceding. When the charge
was shifted to the question of her intrigues with Spain, she took her
stand resolutely on her right to convey whatever right she possessed,
though now no kingdom was left her for disposal, to whomsoever she might
choose.
One single slip she made in the whole course of her defence, but none
could have been more unluckily characteristic and significant. When
Burghley brought against her the unanswerable charge of having at that
moment in her service, and in receipt of an annual pension, the
instigator of a previous attempt on the life of Elizabeth, she had the
unwary audacity to cite in her justification the pensions allowed by
Elizabeth to her adversaries in Scotland, and especially to her son. It
is remarkable that just two months later, in a conversation with her
keepers, she again made use of the same extraordinary argument in reply
to the same inevitable imputation, and would not be brought to admit
that the two cases were other than parallel. But, except for this single
instance of oversight or perversity, her defence was throughout a
masterpiece of indomitable ingenuity, of delicate and steadfast courage,
of womanly dignity and genius. Finally, she demanded, as she had
demanded before, a trial either before the states of the realm lawfully
assembled, or else before the Queen in council.
So closed the second day of the trial; and before the next day's work
could begin, a note of two or three lines hastily written at midnight
informed the commissioners that Elizabeth had suddenly determined to
adjourn the expected judgment and transfer the place of it to the
star-chamber. Here, on October 25th, the commissioners again met; and
one of them alone, Lord Zouch, dissented from the verdict by which Mary
was found guilty of having, since the 1st of June preceding, compassed
and imagined divers matters tending to the destruction of Elizabeth.
This verdict was conveyed to her, about three weeks later, by Lord
Buckhurst and Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council. At the
intimation that her life was an impediment to the security of the
received religion, "she seemed with a certain unwonted alacrity to
triumph, giving God thanks, and rejoicing in her heart that she was held
to be an instrument" for the restoration of her own faith. This note of
exultation as in martyrdom was maintained with unflinching courage to
the last. She wrote to Elizabeth and the Duke of Guise two letters of
almost matchless eloquence and pathos, admirable especially for their
loyal and grateful remembrance of all her faithful servants. Between the
date of these letters and the day of her execution wellnigh three months
of suspense elapsed.
Elizabeth, fearless almost to a fault in face of physical danger,
constant in her confidence even after discovery of her narrow escape
from the poisoned bullets of household conspirators, was cowardly even
to a crime in face of subtler and more complicated peril. She rejected
with resolute dignity the intercession of French envoys for the life of
the Queen Dowager of France; she allowed the sentence of death to be
proclaimed, and welcomed with bonfires and bell-ringing throughout the
length of England; she yielded a respite of twelve days to the pleading
of the French ambassador, and had a charge trumped up against him of
participation in a conspiracy against her life; at length, on February
1, 1587, she signed the death warrant, and then made her secretaries
write word to Paulet of her displeasure that in all this time he should
not of himself have found out some way to shorten the life of his
prisoner, as in duty bound by his oath, and thus relieve her singularly
tender conscience from the guilt of bloodshed.
Paulet, with loyal and regretful indignation, declined the disgrace
proposed to him in a suggestion "to shed blood without law or warrant";
and on February 7th the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent arrived at
Fotheringay with the commission of the council for execution of the
sentence given against his prisoner. Mary received the announcement with
majestic tranquillity, expressing in dignified terms her readiness to
die, her consciousness that she was a martyr for her religion, and her
total ignorance of any conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth. At
night she took a graceful and affectionate leave of her attendants,
distributed among them her money and jewels, wrote out in full the
various legacies to be conveyed by her will, and charged her apothecary
Gorion with her last messages for the King of Spain. In these messages
the whole nature of the woman was revealed. Not a single friend, not a
single enemy, was forgotten; the slightest service, the slightest wrong,
had its place assigned in her faithful and implacable memory for
retribution or reward. Forgiveness of injuries was as alien from her
fierce and loyal spirit as forgetfulness of benefits; the destruction of
England and its liberties by Spanish invasion and conquest was the
strongest aspiration of her parting soul.
At eight o'clock next morning she entered the hall of execution, having
taken leave of the weeping envoy from Scotland, to whom she gave a brief
message for her son; took her seat on the scaffold; listened with an air
of even cheerful unconcern to the reading of her sentence; solemnly
declared her innocence of the charge conveyed in it, and her consolation
in the prospect of ultimate justice; rejected the professional services
of Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough; lifted up her voice in Latin
against his in English prayer; and when he and his fellow-worshippers
had fallen duly silent, prayed aloud for the prosperity of her own
Church, for Elizabeth, for her son, and for all the enemies whom she had
commended over night to the notice of the Spanish invader; then, with no
less courage than had marked every hour and every action of her life,
received the stroke of death from the wavering hand of the headsman.
FOUNDING OF ST. AUGUSTINE
MASSACRE OF THE HUGUENOTS IN AMERICA
A.D. 1565
GEORGE R. FAIRBANKS
Although Florida was discovered by Ponce de Leon as early as 1513,
and was soon after visited by other Spanish explorers, no Spaniard
gained permanent foothold there until after the middle of the
sixteenth century. But when the Spaniards did secure such a
foothold, it was to found the first permanent settlement on the
mainland of the United States.
The vast territory which the Spaniards named Florida was claimed by
Spain in right of the discoveries of Columbus, the grant of the
pope, and various expeditions to the region; by England in right of
Cabot's discovery; and by France on account of Verrazano's voyage
(1524) and "vague traditions" of French visitors to the coast.
Following the early Spanish attempts at colonization, came the first
Huguenot settlers from France, seeking refuge in the New World from
persecution at home. What they did and what befell them in the
Florida country, and how the founding of our oldest town, St.
Augustine, was begun by their Spanish supplanters, is told by
Fairbanks in an interesting and carefully verified account.
The settlement of Florida had its origin in the religious troubles
experienced by the Huguenots under Charles IX in France. Their
distinguished leader, Admiral Coligny, as early as 1555, projected
colonies in America, and sent an expedition to Brazil, which proved
unsuccessful. Having procured permission from Charles IX to found a
colony in Florida, a designation which embraced in rather an indefinite
manner the whole country from the Chesapeake to the Tortugas, he sent an
expedition in 1562 from France, under command of Jean Ribault, composed
of many young men of good family. They first landed at the St. John's
River, where they erected a monument, but finally established a
settlement at Port Royal, South Carolina, and erected a fort. After some
months, however, in consequence of dissensions among the officers of the
garrison and difficulties with the Indians, this settlement was
abandoned.
In 1564 another expedition came out under the command of René de
Laudonnière, and made their first landing at the River of Dolphins,
being the present harbor of St. Augustine, and so named by them in
consequence of the great number of dolphins (porpoises) seen by them at
its mouth. They afterward coasted to the north, and entered the river
St. John's, called by them the river May.
Upon an examination of this river Laudonnière concluded to establish his
colony on its banks, and, proceeding about two leagues above its mouth,
built a fort upon a pleasant hill of "mean height," which, in honor of
his sovereign, he named Fort Caroline. The colonists, after a few
months, were reduced to great distress, and were about taking measures
to abandon the country a second time, when Ribault arrived with
reënforcements.
It is supposed that intelligence of these expeditions was communicated
by the enemies of Coligny to the court of Spain. Jealousy of the
aggrandizement of the French in the New World, mortification for their
own unsuccessful efforts in that quarter, and a still stronger motive of
hatred to the faith of the Huguenot, induced the bigoted Philip II of
Spain to despatch Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a brave, bigoted, and
remorseless soldier, to drive out the French colony, and take possession
of the country for himself. The compact made between the King and
Menendez was, that he should furnish one galleon completely equipped,
and provisions for a force of six hundred men; that he should conquer
and settle the country.
He obligated himself to carry one hundred horses, two hundred horned
cattle, four hundred hogs, four hundred sheep and some goats, and five
hundred slaves--for which he had a permission free of duties--the third
part of which should be men, for his own service and that of those who
went with him, to aid in cultivating the land and in building; that he
should take twelve priests, and four fathers of the Jesuit order. He was
to build two or three towns of one hundred families, and in each town
should build a fort according to the nature of the country. He was to
have the title of _Adelantado_ of the country, as also to be entitled a
marquis (and his heirs after him), to have a tract of land, receive a
salary of two thousand ducats, a percentage of the royal duties, and
have the freedom of all the other ports of New Spain.