THE DEATH OF MAGDALENE.
"Envy and calumny will destroy innocence and pleasure; the oppressed
will be sacrificed to the oppressor; and, in proportion as tyranny
makes kings distrustful, judicial murders will depopulate the
state."--_Telemachus_, Book XX.
During these passages the young queen, Magdalene, had daily become
worse, and the "catarrh, which descended into her stomach," as Madame
de Montreuil says in one of her letters, had brought her to the verge
of the grave.
The sorrow and alarm of James were great; and remorsefully he now
remembered the warnings of Francis I., contrary to whose most urgent
advice he had espoused her, instead of the blooming Mary of Lorraine.
Foreign physicians were sent by their kings from distant courts and
cities, even from Syria and the remote countries of the east, and
daily they crowded the antechamber with their long beards and longer
garments, their grave visages and solemn quackeries; but their
presence had no other effect than to bring lower and lower the health
of poor Magdalene, and to excite the wrath and jealousy of John of
the Silvermills, who (as the king's apothecary, and deacon of the
barber-chirurgeons of Edinburgh), by the presence of these strangers,
felt his dignity encroached upon, and his reputation impugned.
The love of the amiable French girl for her gallant young husband was
excessive; it strengthened as her strength decayed; and finding that
matters of state separated them long and frequently, contrary to all
advice, she left Balmerino, with its shady woods and mellow air, and,
to be near her beloved James V., returned to the grey and solemn
courts of Holyrood on the eighth day of June.
There, to the joy of her husband, she seemed to revive a little; and
the preparations for her coronation (which was to be on a scale of
magnificence hitherto unknown in Scotland) had been resumed with
renewed vigour; but alas! on the tenth of July, three days after the
arrest of Lady Jane Seton, she suddenly threw up her hands to heaven
and expired, at a moment when, stooping over her couch, the king, her
husband, was playfully caressing and conversing with her; and the
great solemn bells of St. Giles's, and those of the abbey church, the
Dominicans, the Cistercians, and other friaries, as slowly and sadly
they tolled a knell, warning all good people to pray for the passing
soul, announced that direful event which plunged the whole land in
sorrow; for James V., "the king of the poor," was really a monarch
who reigned in the hearts of a people who were then loyal and
generous as they were brave.
She was solemnly interred by torchlight in the royal vault at
Holyrood; and, in her strong prison, Jane Seton heard the deep hoarse
boom of the minute guns, as they broke upon the still midnight sky
from the towers of King David, St. Margaret, and the ramparts of that
stately fortress which enclosed her.
So great was the grief of the nation, that this was the first
occasion of a general mourning in Scotland; and in the accounts of
the lord high treasurer there are still preserved numerous entries of
the Scottish and Holland cloths, French blacks, white crosses upon
sable velvets, and many other articles for the court, together with
the expenses of Magdalene's magnificent obsequies, the dirges sung
and solemn masses said on that melancholy event, which became the
all-absorbing topic of the time.
The whole nation mourned with the king; and everywhere, at kirk or
market, on highway or in burgh-town, black cloaks and sable feathers
had replaced the gaudier colours and fashions of the age. A great
funeral escutcheon hung in each of the eight cathedrals, and over the
gates of all the royal palaces. Like those used in France and
Germany, they were lozenge-formed, bearing the royal arms of Scotland
on a black ground, surrounded by those of the sixteen families from
whom the queen was descended. At the four corners were placed (as
usual among us at the present day) mort-heads, and the black
interstices were _semée_ with powdered tears.
After the funeral, King James, with a small retinue, retired to the
solitude of his beautiful country palace at Falkland.
If the hidden cause of the queen's illness had puzzled the learned
physicians and astrologers who had gathered around her couch, as it
were, from the four winds of heaven, it occasioned greater
speculation among the superstitious people of Scotland, and a
universal whisper of _sorcery_, followed by a cry for vengeance on
the cause of an effect so dire, went throughout the land, from the
Caledonian to the German Sea.
Fettered to a sick bed, suffering under the extremes of mental and
bodily agony--the double wounds, received first from Roland Vipont,
and secondly from the earl, all combined, and acting upon a frame
weakened by a previous illness, had brought Sir Adam Otterburn to the
brink of the grave.
His hours of delirium were full of visions either of love and
delight--of Jane Seton and a successful suit, or of sanguinary
horror--of conflicts, tortures, and executions; while the hours of
comparative calm that succeeded--the mere result of utter
exhaustion--were occupied by deep-laid schemes of avenging himself
upon the authors of so many miseries.
His mind had now but two thoughts--a delirium of love and a delirium
of hate; and they corroded his heart between them.
He had cast off Jane Seton; for so he strove to think, and so, unto
himself, he said a thousand times; he had rent her from his heart,
and abandoned her to the terrors in store for her. Then love would
come again, and he strove wildly to stifle it like a rising flame;
for he had given the first impulse to the ball of fate, and he
resolved to let it roll on its course to destruction.
In his moments of calm agony, when every voice in his heart was still
but those which whispered of jealousy and revenge, he deliberately
dictated, and drew up with bitter care, certain articles of
accusation, implicating Jane Seton wholly and solely in the death of
the queen, by sorcery of the most malignant character; and, armed by
a warrant, the town mansion of the Ashkirk family, which had not been
opened since the Albany herald, John Hamilton of Darnagaber, had
placed his seal on every door and lockfast place thereof, was opened
and searched by that unwilling functionary and the witch-finder,
Nichol Birrel.
After the dose he had been compelled to swallow at Cairntable, the
latter, it may be supposed, had reached Edinburgh with considerable
difficulty; and, like his master, animated by personal and implacable
vengeance against Sir Roland Vipont, he entered with heart and soul
into the public prosecution. Thus, when by order of his lord and
patron, Redhall, he was searching the house of the Setons, he
contrived most opportunely to discover in the boudoir of Lady Jane a
little wooden image bearing a crown, and marked with the initials
M.B. It was stuck full of pins, and was partly scorched by fire; but
after being duly sprinkled with holy water, and exorcised by the late
queen's French confessor, was deposited in the hands of the lord
advocate, who sealed it up in a box marked with the cross, as being
the most tremendous and damning proof of guilt that had ever come
under the notice of the newly-constituted College of Justice.
With one voice the whole city now accused, and without a moment's
hesitation condemned, Jane Seton. The preparations for her trial
went on rapidly; and the king, who was absorbed in his own grief, and
remained secluded among the woods of Falkland, abandoned her to her
fate; but the wretched Redhall suffered more than either the hapless
Jane or the bereaved king, for remorse grew side by side with his
anger.
Those sentiments of generosity, of pity, and of lingering love, which
ever and anon dawned in the arid desert of his heart, and impelled
him to free her, to sue for pardon, or to fly his country, were
invariably stifled under a torrent of jealousy and hate when he
thought of Roland Vipont; and then his half-healed wounds would sting
him anew, as if probed by poniards; the perspiration would burst from
his temples, and he writhed on his sick bed in an agony indescribable.
"She is indeed a sorceress!" he would exclaim; upon which his nurse
and housekeeper, an old and wrinkled dame who attended him, and who
never left his bedside, would make signs of the cross, and feel for
the reliques which were sewed in the lining of her long piked stays,
which, with her ruff and coif, made her resemble those quaint figures
which still live in the pictures of Holbein.
Credulity has existed in every age of the world; and thus chiromancy,
astrology, physiognomy, and the wildest theories of abstruse science,
have risen and flourished on the ignorance and folly of the human
mind; but there were none that equalled the _witch-mania_, which,
strange to say, grew in Scotland, and flourished side by side with
religious freedom and reform.
It is a curious fact, that before the epoch of Knox sorcery was
almost unknown among us. In our earliest record of criminal trials,
that comprehending the years 1493-1504, there is not one prosecution
for sorcery. In the days of James V. it began to be much spoken of,
and rapidly became a source of terror. Lady Jane's was nearly the
first indictment; but the earliest statute against it was passed in
1563, by the first reformed parliament, and that portion of the law
which refers to consultations "with sorcerers and witches" was not
enacted until 1594--fully thirty years after the Reformation had been
established by the law of Scotland.
Then, indeed, from that period, kirk sessions and presbyteries,
ministers, elders, sheriffs, and justiciars, went with heart and hand
into the matter; for in the _witch-mania_, that atrocious madness
which spread over Europe, though Scotland was the last to catch the
contagion, she was in no way behind neighbouring countries in the
cruelty of her prosecutions.
According to Barrington, thirty thousand witches were burned in
England, five hundred perished in three months at Geneva, and a
thousand at Como in one year. The number committed to the flames in
Scotland is incalculable, but no less than six hundred witches were
indicted during the sitting of one parliament at Edinburgh.
Suspicion, abhorrence, accusation, trial, and death followed each
other with appalling rapidity.
Thus we find in history, that the savage spirit of ignorance and
credulity which impelled the great Cardinal Beaton to burn six men at
the stake, on the charge of heresy, was out-Heroded by the still
greater ignorance and credulity of his successors, who, for each of
these six, sacrificed more than thousands for the imaginary crime of
witchcraft.