FOOTNOTES:

[1] The name (Heb. [Hebrew: Miriam]), that of the sister of Moses and

Aaron, is of uncertain etymology; many interpretations have been

suggested, including _Stella maris_ ("star of the sea"), which,

though it has attained considerable currency through Jerome (the

_Onomasticon_), may be at once dismissed. It seems to have been very

common among the Jews in New Testament times: besides the subject of

the present notice there are mentioned (1) "Mary (the wife) of

Clopas," who was perhaps the mother of James "the little" ([Greek: ho

mikros]) and of Joses; (2) Mary Magdalene, i.e. of Magdala; (3) Mary

of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus; (4) Mary, the mother of

Mark; and (5) Mary, an otherwise unknown benefactress of the apostle

Paul (Rom. xvi. 6).

[2] _De Inst. Virg._, "quæ est hæc porta nisi Maria? ... per quam

Christus intravit in hunc mundum, quando virginali fusus est partu et

genitalia virginitatis claustra non solvit."

[3] See Gieseler (_KG._, Bd. i. Abth. 1), who points out instances in

which anti-Arianizing zeal went so far as to call David [Greek:

theopatôr] and James [Greek: adelphotheos].

[4] Labbé, _Conc._ iii. 51. Considerable extracts are given by

Augusti (_Denkw._ iii.); see also Milman (_Lat. Christ._ i. 185), who

characterizes much of it as a "wild labyrinth of untranslatable

metaphor."

[5] The term [Greek: theotokas] does not actually occur in the canons

of Ephesus. It is found, however, in the creed of Chalcedon.

[6] It is true that Irenaeus (_Haer._ v. 19, 1) in the passage in

which he draws his well-known parallel and contrast between the first

and second Eve (cf. Justin, _Dial. c. Tryph._ 100), to the effect

that "as the human race fell into bondage to death by a virgin, so is

it rescued by a virgin," takes occasion to speak of Mary as the

"advocata" of Eve; but it seems certain that this word is a

translation of the Greek [Greek: sunêgoros], and implies hostility

and rebuke rather than advocacy.

[7] It is probable that the commemorations and invocations of the

Virgin which occur in the present texts of the ancient liturgies of

"St James" and "St Mark" are due to interpolation. In this connexion

ought also to be noted the chapter in Epiphanius (_Haer._, 79)

against the "Collyridians," certain women in Thrace, Scythia and

Arabia, who were in the habit of worshipping the Virgin ([Greek: haei

parthenon]) as a goddess, the offering of a cake ([Greek: kallurida

tina]) being one of the features of their worship. He rebukes them

for offering the worship which was due to the Trinity alone; "let

Mary be held in honour, but by no means worshipped." The cultus was

probably a relic of heathenism; cf. Jer. xliv. 19.

[8] "Numquid quia ita deificata, ideo nostrae humanitatis oblita es?

Nequaquam, Domina.... Data est tibi omnis potestas in coelo et in

terra. Nil tibi impossibile." _Serm. de nativ. Mariae_, ap. Gieseler,

_KG._, Bd. ii. Abth. 1.

[9] The points taught in the catechism are--that she is truly the

Mother of God, and the second Eve, by whose means we have received

blessing and life; that she is the Mother of Pity, and very specially

our advocate; that her merits are highly exalted, and that her

dispositions towards us are extremely gracious; that her images are

of the utmost utility. In the _Missal_ her intercessions (though

alluded to in the canon and elsewhere) are seldom directly appealed

to except in the Litany and in some of the later offices, such as

those for the 8th of September and for the Festival of the Seven

Sorrows (decree by Benedict XIII. in 1727). Noteworthy are the

versicles in the office for the 8th of December (The Feast of the

Immaculate Conception), "Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula originalis

non est in te," and "Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, Maria, quia fecit

tibi magna qui potens est."

MARY, known as MARY MAGDALENE, a woman mentioned in the Gospels, first

in Luke viii. 2, as one of a company who "healed of evil spirits and

infirmities ... ministered unto them (Jesus and the apostles) of their

substance." It is said that seven demons were cast out of her, but this

need not imply simply one occasion. Her name implies that she came from

Magdala (el-Mejdel, 3 m. N.W. from Tiberias: in Matt. XV. 39 the right

reading is not Magdala by Magadan). She went with Jesus on the last

journey to Jerusalem, witnessed the Crucifixion, followed to the burial,

and returned to prepare spices. John XX. gives an account of her finding

the tomb empty and of her interview with the risen Jesus. Mary of

Magdala has been confounded (1) with the unnamed fallen woman who in

Simon's house anointed Christ's feet (Luke vii. 37); (2) with Mary of

Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha.

MARY I., queen of England (1516-1558), unpleasantly remembered as "the

Bloody Mary" on account of the religious persecutions which prevailed

during her reign, was the daughter of Henry VIII. and Catherine of

Aragon, born in the earlier years of their married life, when as yet no

cloud had darkened the prospect of Henry's reign. Her birth occurred at

Greenwich, on Monday, the 18th February 1516, and she was baptized on

the following Wednesday, Cardinal Wolsey standing as her godfather. She

seems to have been a singularly precocious child, and is reported in

July 1520, when scarcely four and a half years old, as entertaining some

visitors by a performance on the virginals. When she was little over

nine she was addressed in a complimentary Latin oration by commissioners

sent over from Flanders on commercial matters, and replied to them in

the same language "with as much assurance and facility as if she had

been twelve years old" (Gayangos, iii. pt. 1, 82). Her father was proud

of her achievements. About the same time that she replied to the

commissioners in Latin he was arranging that she should learn Spanish,

Italian and French. A great part, however, of the credit of her early

education was undoubtedly due to her mother, who not only consulted the

Spanish scholar Vives upon the subject, but was herself Mary's first

teacher in Latin. She was also well instructed in music, and among her

principal recreations as she grew up was that of playing on the

virginals and lute.

It was a misfortune that she shared with high-born ladies generally in

those days that her prospects in life were made a matter of sordid

bargaining from the first. Mary was little more than two years old when

she was proposed in marriage to the dauphin, son of Francis I. Three

years afterwards the French alliance was broken off, and in 1522 she was

affianced to her cousin the young emperor Charles V. by the Treaty of

Windsor. No one, perhaps, seriously expected either of these

arrangements to endure; and, though we read in grave state papers of

some curious compliments and love tokens (really the mere counters of

diplomacy) professedly sent by the girl of nine to her powerful cousin,

not many years passed away before Charles released himself from this

engagement and made a more convenient match. In 1526 a rearrangement was

made of the royal household, and it was thought right to give Mary an

establishment of her own along with a council on the borders of Wales,

for the better government of the Marches. For some years she accordingly

kept her court at Ludlow, while new arrangements were made for the

disposal of her hand. She was now proposed as a wife, not for the

dauphin as before, but for his father Francis I., who had just been

redeemed from captivity at Madrid, and who was only too glad of an

alliance with England to mitigate the severe conditions imposed on him

by the emperor. Wolsey, however, on this occasion, only made use of the

princess as a bait to enhance the terms of the compact, and left Francis

free in the end to marry the emperor's sister.

It was during this negotiation, as Henry afterwards pretended, that the

question was first raised whether Henry's own marriage with Catherine

was a lawful one. Grammont, bishop of Tarbes, who was one of the

ambassadors sent over by Francis to ask the princess in marriage, had,

it was said, started an objection that she might possibly be considered

illegitimate on account of her mother having been once the wife of her

father's brother. The statement was a mere pretence to shield the king

when the unpopularity of the divorce became apparent. It is proved to be

untrue by the strongest evidence, for we have pretty full contemporary

records of the whole negotiation. On the contrary, it is quite clear

that Henry, who had already for some time conceived the project of a

divorce, kept the matter a dead secret, and was particularly anxious

that the French ambassadors should not know it, while he used his

daughter's hand as a bait for a new alliance. The alliance itself,

however, was actually concluded by a treaty dated Westminster, the 30th

of April 1527, in which it was provided, as regards the Princess Mary,

that she should be married either to Francis himself or to his second

son Henry duke of Orleans. But the real object was only to lay the

foundation of a perfect mutual understanding between the two kings,

which Wolsey soon after went into France to confirm.

During the next nine years the life of Mary, as well as that of her

mother, was rendered miserable by the conduct of Henry VIII. in seeking

a divorce. During most of that period mother and daughter seem to have

been kept apart. Possibly Queen Catherine had the harder trial; but

Mary's was scarcely less severe. Removed from court and treated as a

bastard, she was, on the birth of Anne Boleyn's daughter, required to

give up the dignity of princess and acknowledge the illegitimacy of her

own birth. On her refusal her household was broken up, and she was sent

to Hatfield to act as lady-in-waiting to her own infant half-sister. Nor

was even this the worst of her trials; her very life was in danger from

the hatred of Anne Boleyn. Her health, moreover, was indifferent, and

even when she was seriously ill, although Henry sent his own physician,

Dr Buttes, to attend her, he declined to let her mother visit her. So

also at her mother's death, in January 1536, she was forbidden to take a

last farewell of her. But in May following another change occurred. Anne

Boleyn, the real cause of all her miseries, fell under the king's

displeasure and was put to death. Mary was then urged to make a humble

submission to her father as the means of recovering his favour, and

after a good deal of correspondence with the king's secretary, Cromwell,

she actually did so. The terms exacted of her were bitter in the

extreme, but there was no chance of making life tolerable otherwise, if

indeed she was permitted to live at all; and the poor friendless girl,

absolutely at the mercy of a father who could brook no contradiction, at

length subscribed an act of submission, acknowledging the king as

"Supreme Head of the Church of England under Christ," repudiating the

pope's authority, and confessing that the marriage between her father

and mother "was by God's law and man's law incestuous and unlawful."

No act, perhaps, in the whole of Henry's reign gives us a more painful

idea of his revolting despotism. Mary was a high-spirited girl, and

undoubtedly popular. All Europe looked upon her at that time as the only

legitimate child of her father, but her father himself compelled her to

disown the title and pass an unjust stigma on her own birth and her

mother's good name. Nevertheless Henry was now reconciled to her, and

gave her a household in some degree suitable to her rank. During the

rest of the reign we hear little about her except in connexion with a

number of new marriage projects taken up and abandoned successively, one

of which, to the count palatine Philip, duke of Bavaria, was specially

repugnant to her in the matter of religion. Her privy purse expenses for

nearly the whole of this period have been published, and show that

Hatfield, Beaulieu or Newhall in Essex, Richmond and Hunsdon were among

her principal places of residence. Although she was still treated as of

illegitimate birth, it was believed that the king, having obtained from

parliament the extraordinary power to dispose of the crown by will,

would restore her to her place in the succession, and three years before

his death she was so restored by statute, but still under conditions to

be regulated by her father's will.

Under the reign of her brother, Edward VI. she was again subjected to

severe trials, which at one time made her seriously meditate taking

flight and escaping abroad. Edward himself indeed seems to have been

personally not unkind to her, but the religious revolution in his reign

assumed proportions such as it had not done before, and Mary, who had

done sufficient violence to her own convictions in submitting to a

despotic father, was not disposed to yield an equally tame obedience to

authority exercised by a factious council in the name of a younger

brother not yet come to years of discretion. Besides, the cause of the

pope was naturally her own. In spite of the forced declaration formerly

wrung from herself, no one really regarded her as a bastard, and the

full recognition of her rights depended on the recognition of the pope

as head of the Church. Hence, when Edward's parliament passed an Act of

Uniformity enjoining services in English and communion in both kinds,

the law appeared to her totally void of authority, and she insisted on

having Mass in her own private chapel under the old form. When ordered

to desist, she appealed for protection to the emperor Charles V., who,

being her cousin, intervened for some time not ineffectually,

threatening war with England if her religious liberty was interfered

with. But Edward's court was composed of factions of which the most

violent eventually carried the day. Lord Seymour, the admiral, was

attainted of treason and beheaded in 1549. His brother, the Protector

Somerset, met with the same fate in 1552. Dudley, duke of

Northumberland, then became paramount in the privy council, and easily

obtained the sanction of the young king to those schemes for altering

the succession which led immediately after his death to the usurpation

of Lady Jane Grey. Dudley had, in fact, overawed all the rest of the

privy council, and when the event occurred he took such energetic

measures to give effect to the scheme that Lady Jane was actually

recognized as queen for some days, and Mary had even to fly from Hunsdon

into Norfolk. But the country was really devoted to her cause, as indeed

her right in law was unquestionable, and before many days she was

royally received in London, and took up her abode within the Tower.

Her first acts at the beginning of her reign displayed a character very

different from that which she still holds in popular estimation. Her

clemency towards those who had taken up arms against her was altogether

remarkable. She released from prison Lady Jane's father, Suffolk, and

had difficulty even in signing the warrant for the execution of

Northumberland. Lady Jane herself she fully meant to spare, and did

spare till after Wyatt's formidable insurrection. Her conduct, indeed,

was in every respect conciliatory and pacific, and so far as they

depended on her personal character the prospects of the new reign might

have appeared altogether favourable. But unfortunately her position was

one of peculiar difficulty, and the policy on which she determined was

far from judicious. Inexperienced in the art of governing, she had no

trusty councillor but Gardiner; every other member of the council had

been more or less implicated in the conspiracy against her. And though

she valued Gardiner's advice she was naturally led to rely even more on

that of her cousin, the emperor, who had been her mother's friend in

adversity, and had done such material service to herself in the

preceding reign. Following the emperor's guidance she determined almost

from the first to make his son Philip her husband, though she was eleven

years his senior. She was also strongly desirous of restoring the old

religion and wiping out the stigma of illegitimacy upon her birth, so

that she might not seem to reign by virtue of a mere parliamentary

settlement.

Each of these different objects was attended by difficulties or

objections peculiar to itself; but the marriage was the most unpopular

of all. A restoration of the old religion threatened to deprive the new

owners of abbey lands of their easy and comfortable acquisitions; and it

was only with an express reservation of their interests that the thing

was actually accomplished. A declaration of her own legitimacy

necessarily cast a slur on that of her sister Elizabeth, and cut her off

from the succession. But the marriage promised to throw England into the

arms of Spain and place the resources of the kingdom at the command of

the emperor's son. The Commons sent her a deputation to entreat that she

would not marry a foreigner, and when her resolution was known

insurrections broke out in different parts of the country. Suffolk,

whose first rebellion had been pardoned, proclaimed Lady Jane Grey again

in Leicestershire, while young Wyatt raised the county of Kent and,

though denied access by London Bridge, led his men round by Kingston to

the very gates of London before he was repulsed. In the midst of the

danger Mary showed great intrepidity, and the rebellion was presently

quelled; after which, unhappily, she got leave to pursue her own course

unchecked. She married Philip, restored the old religion, and got

Cardinal Pole to come over and absolve the kingdom from its past

disobedience to the Holy See.

It was a more than questionable policy thus to ally England with

Spain--a power then actually at war with France. By the treaty, indeed,

England was to remain neutral; but the force of events, in the end,

compelled her, as might have been expected, to take part in the quarrel.

Meanwhile the country was full of faction, and seditious pamphlets of

Protestant origin inflamed the people with hatred against the Spaniards.

Philip's Spanish followers met with positive ill-usage everywhere, and

violent outbreaks occurred. A year after his marriage Philip went over

to Brussels to receive from his father the government of the Low

Countries and afterwards the kingdom of Spain. Much to Mary's distress,

his absence was prolonged for a year and a half, and when he returned in

March 1557 it was only to commit England completely to the war; after

which he went back to Brussels in July, to return no more to England.

Hostilities with France were inevitable, because France had encouraged

disaffection among Mary's subjects, even during the brief truce of

Vaucelles. Conspiracies had been hatched by English refugees in Paris,

and an attempt to seize Scarborough had been made with the aid of

vessels from the Seine. But perhaps the strangest thing about the

situation was that the pope took part with France against Spain; and so

the very marriage which Mary had contracted to bring England back to the

Holy See made her the wife of the pope's enemy. It was, moreover, this

war with France that occasioned the final calamity of the loss of

Calais, which sank so deeply into Mary's heart some time before she

died.

The cruel persecution of the Protestants, which has cast so much infamy

upon her reign, was not due, as commonly supposed, to inhumanity on her

part. When the kingdom was reconciled to Rome and absolved by Cardinal

Pole, it followed, almost as a matter of necessity, that the old heresy

laws should be revived, as they were then by Act of Parliament. They had

been abolished by the Protector Somerset for the express purpose of

promoting changes of doctrine which did violence to what was still the

prevailing religious sentiment; and now the old religion required to be

protected from insult and fanatical outrages. Doubts were felt as to the

result even from the first; but the law having been once passed could

not be relaxed merely because the victims were so numerous; for that

would only have encouraged the irreverence which it was intended to

check. No doubt there were milder men among the heretics, but as a class

their stern fanaticism and ill-will to the old religion made them

dangerous, even to the public peace. Rogers, the first of the martyrs,

was burnt on the 4th of February 1555. Hooper, bishop of Gloucester, had

been condemned six days before, and suffered the same fate upon the 9th.

From this time the persecution went on uninterrupted for three years and

three quarters, numbering among its victims Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer.

It came to an end at last on the death of Mary. It seems to have been

more severe in the eastern and southern parts of England, and the

largest number of sufferers was naturally in the diocese of Bonner,

bishop of London. From first to last nearly three hundred victims are

known to have perished at the stake; and their fate certainly created a

revulsion against Rome that nothing else was likely to have effected.

Mary was of weak constitution and subject to frequent illnesses, both

before and after her accession. One special infirmity caused her to

believe a few months after her marriage that she was with child, and

thanksgiving services were ordered throughout the diocese of London in

November 1554. The same delusion recurred in March 1558, when though she

did not make her expectation public, she drew up a will in anticipation

of the dangers of childbirth, constituting her husband regent during the

minority of her prospective heir. To this she added a codicil on the

28th of October following, when the illness that was to be her last had

set in, showing that she had ceased to have much expectation of

maternity, and earnestly entreating her "next heir and successor by the

laws" (whom she did not name) to allow execution of the instrument. She

died on the 17th of November.

Her name deserved better treatment than it has generally met with; for

she was far from cruel. Her kindness to poor people is undoubted, and

the severe execution of her laws seemed only a necessity. Even in this

matter, moreover, she was alive to the injustice with which the law was

usually strained in behalf of the prerogative; and in appointing Sir

Richard Morgan chief justice of the Common Pleas she charged him "not to

sit in judgment otherwise for her highness than for her subjects," and

to avoid the old error of refusing to admit witnesses against the Crown

(Holinshed III. 1112). Her conduct as queen was certainly governed by

the best possible intentions; and it is evident that her very zeal for

goodness caused most of the trouble she brought upon herself. Her

subjects were entirely released, even by papal authority, from any

obligation to restore the confiscated lands of the Church. But she

herself made it an object, at her own expense, to restore several of the

monasteries; and courtiers who did not like to follow her example,

encouraged the fanatics to spread an alarm that it would even yet be

made compulsory. So the worldly minded joined hands with the godly

heretics in stirring up enmity against her. (J. Ga.)

MARY II. (1662-1694), queen of England and wife of king William III.,

elder daughter of James, duke of York, afterwards King James II., by his

first wife, Anne, daughter of Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, was

born in London on the 30th of April 1662. She was educated as a

Protestant, and as it was probable that she would succeed to the English

throne after the deaths of her uncle, Charles II., and her father, the

choice of a husband for her was a political event of high importance.

About 1672 the name of William, prince of Orange, was mentioned in this

connexion; and after some hesitation on both sides caused by the

condition of European politics, the betrothal of William and Mary took

place in October 1677, and was quickly followed by their marriage in

London on the 4th of November. Mary's married life in Holland does not

appear to have been a happy one. Although she soon became popular among

the Dutch, she remained childless, while William treated her with

neglect and even with insult; and her troubles were not diminished after

her father became king of England in 1685. James had treated his

daughter very shabbily in money matters; and it was increasingly

difficult for her to remain loyal to both father and husband when they

were so divergent in character and policy. Although Mary never entirely

lost her affection for her father the wife prevailed over the daughter;

and after the birth of her half-brother, the prince of Wales, in 1688,

she regarded the dethronement of James as inevitable. It cannot be said,

however, that William merited this confidence. Possibly he was jealous

of his wife as the heiress of the English throne, contrasting her future

position with his own; but according to Burnet, who was then staying at

the Hague, this cause of difference was removed by the tactful

interference of Burnet himself. The latter asserts that having divined

the reason of the prince's jealousy he mentioned the matter to the

princess, who in her ignorance of statecraft had never considered the

relative positions of herself and her husband with regard to the English

throne; and that Mary, by telling the prince "she would be no more but

his wife, and that she would do all that lay in her power to make him

king for life" (Burnet, _Supplement_, ed. Foxcroft, p. 309), probably

mollified her husband's jealousy. On the other hand Macaulay's statement

that henceforward there was "entire friendship and confidence" between

them must be taken with some reserve. Mary shared heartily in the events

which immediately preceded William's expedition to England in 1688.

After the success of the undertaking she arrived in London in February

1689; and by her faithful adherence to her promise made a satisfactory

settlement of the English crown possible. William and Mary were together

proclaimed king and queen of England, and afterwards of Scotland, and

were crowned on the 11th of April 1689. During the king's absence from

England the queen, assisted by a committee of the privy council, was

entrusted with the duties of government, duties which she performed

faithfully, but which she gladly laid down on William's return. In these

times of danger, however, she acted when necessary with courage and

promptitude, as when in 1690 she directed the arrest of her uncle Henry

Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon; but she was constantly anxious for

William's safety, and unable to trust many of her advisers. She was

further distressed by a quarrel with her sister Anne in 1692 following

the dismissal of Marlborough, and this event somewhat diminished her

popularity, which had hitherto been one of the mainstays of the throne.

Weak in body and troubled in mind, the queen died at Kensington Palace

from small-pox on the 28th of December 1694, and was buried in

Westminster Abbey. Mary was a woman of a remarkably modest and retiring

disposition, whose outstanding virtue was perhaps her unswerving loyalty

to William. Burnet has passed a remarkable panegyric upon her character.

She was extremely pious and charitable; her blameless private life was

in marked contrast with her surroundings, both in England and Holland;

without bigotry she was greatly attached to the Protestant faith and to

the Church of England; and she was always eager to improve the tone of

public morals, and to secure a better observance of Sunday. Greenwich

Hospital for Seamen was founded in her honour.

For the political events of Mary's life see WILLIAM III. For her

private life see Sir John Dalrymple, _Memoirs of Great Britain and

Ireland_ (London, 1790); Countess Bentinck, _Lettres et mémoires de

Marie, reine d'Angleterre_ (The Hague, 1880); _Memoires and Letters of

Mary Queen of England_ (ed. by R. Doebner, Leipzig, 1886); F. J. L.

Krämer, Maria II. Stuart (Utrecht, 1890); Agnes Strickland, _Lives of

the Queens of England_, vols. x. and xi. (London, 1847); G. Burnet,

_History of my own Time_ (Oxford, 1833); and O. Klopp, _Der Fall des

Hauses Stuart_ (Vienna, 1875-1888).

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS[1] (1542-1587), 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 favourite appointed general in defiance

of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following the ceremony of

coronation was duly performed upon 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 on the 15th of August. The society in which the child was

thenceforward reared is known to readers of Brantôme 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,

and 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 the 24th of April 1558. On the 17th

of November 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 the 10th of June 1560. On the 25th of August

Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed in Scotland by a

convention of states assembled without the assent of the absent queen.

On the 5th of December 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, Brantôme, and Chastelard, the first of all her voluntary

victims. On the 21st of August 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 licence 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

or the misfortune of a second detection at night in her bedchamber. In

the same month, twenty-five years afterwards, 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 Fotheringhay, 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 favourite,

Lord Robert Dudley, the widower if not the 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 the 29th of July 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 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 the 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 honours 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 18,000 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

favour 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 to 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 strange 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 the 9th of March 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 day following they were graciously

received by the queen, who undertook to sign a bond for their security,

but delayed the subscription till 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 favourite. From thence they returned

to Edinburgh on the 28th of March, 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

the 19th of June 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 favour 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 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 favour 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 20 miles of the wild borderland where her person was in

perpetual danger from the freebooters whom her father's policy had

striven and had failed to extirpate. The result of this daring ride was

a ten days' fever, after which she removed by short stages to

Craigmillar, where a proposal for her divorce from Darnley was laid

before her by Bothwell, Murray, Huntly, Argyle and Lethington, who was

chosen spokesman for the rest. She assented on condition that the

divorce could be lawfully effected without impeachment of her son's

legitimacy; whereupon Lethington undertook in the name of all present

that she should be rid of her husband without any prejudice to the

child--at whose baptism a few days afterwards Bothwell took the place of

the putative father, though Darnley was actually residing under the same

roof, and it was not till after the ceremony that he was suddenly struck

down by a sickness so violent as to excite suspicions of poison. He was

removed to Glasgow, and left for the time in charge of his father; but

on the news of his progress towards recovery a bond was drawn up for

execution of the sentence of death which had secretly been pronounced

against the twice-turned traitor who had earned his doom at all hands

alike. On the 22nd of the next month (Jan. 1567) the queen visited her

husband 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-wall 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, the 9th of

February, 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 the 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 a view which may be taken of Mary's conduct during the next three

months depends the whole debateable 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 for ever to dispose of her time-honoured

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 the 11th of February 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, 12 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. Already the report was abroad that the queen was

bent on marriage with Bothwell, whose last year's marriage with the

sister of Huntly would be dissolved, and the assent of his wife's

brother purchased by the restitution of his forfeited estates. According

to the _Memoirs_ of Sir James Melville, both Lord Herries and himself

resolved to appeal to the queen in terms of bold and earnest

remonstrance against so desperate and scandalous a design; Herries,

having been met with assurances of its unreality and professions of

astonishment at the suggestion, instantly fled from court; Melville,

evading the danger of a merely personal protest without backers to

support him, laid before Mary a letter from a loyal Scot long resident

in England, which urged upon her consideration and her conscience the

danger and disgrace of such a project yet more freely than Herries had

ventured to do by word of mouth; but the sole result was that it needed

all the queen's courage and resolution to rescue him from the violence

of the man for whom, she was reported to have said, she cared not if she

lost France, England and her own country, and would go with him to the

world's end in a white petticoat before she would leave him. On the 28th

of March the privy council, in which Bothwell himself sat, appointed the

12th of April as the day of his trial, Lennox, instead of the crown,

being named as the accuser, and cited by royal letters to appear at "the

humble request and petition of the said Earl Bothwell," who, on the day

of the trial, had 4000 armed men behind him in the streets, while the

castle was also at his command. Under these arrangements it was not

thought wonderful that Lennox discreetly declined the danger of

attendance, even with 3000 men ready to follow him, at the risk of

desperate street fighting. He pleaded sickness, asked for more time, and

demanded that the accused, instead of enjoying special favour, should

share the treatment of other suspected criminals. But, as no particle of

evidence on his side was advanced, the protest of his representative was

rejected, and Bothwell, acquitted in default of witnesses against him,

was free to challenge any persistent accuser to the ancient ordeal of

battle. His wealth and power were enlarged by gift of the parliament

which met on the 14th and rose on the 19th of April--a date made notable

by the subsequent supper at Ainslie's tavern, where Bothwell obtained

the signatures of its leading members to a document affirming his

innocence, and pledging the subscribers to maintain it against all

challengers, to stand by him in all his quarrels and finally to promote

by all means in their power the marriage by which they recommended the

queen to reward his services and benefit the country. On the second day

following 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 the 24th

of April, as she approached Edinburgh, Bothwell accordingly met her at

the head of 800 spearmen, assured her (as she afterwards 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 the 3rd of May Lady Jane Gordon, who had become countess of Bothwell

on the 22nd of February 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 7th, accordingly, the necessary divorce was pronounced,

after two days' session, by a clerical tribunal which ten days before

had received from the queen a special commission to give judgment on a

plea of somewhat apocryphal consanguinity alleged by Bothwell as the

ground of an action for divorce against his wife. The fact was

studiously evaded or concealed that a dispensation had been granted by

the archbishop of St Andrews for this irregularity, which could only

have arisen through some illicit connexion of the husband with a

relative of the wife between whom and himself no affinity by blood or

marriage could be proved. 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 12), 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 should

therefore 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 knapscull"--the woman who long

afterwards 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 equally devoid of moral and of 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 gaiety 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 Dumblane, 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

valour, as the incomparable subject of her choice. These personal merits

and this political necessity were the only pleas 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 the 6th or 7th of June 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 found 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 14, and they marched before

dawn with 2200 men to meet him near Musselburgh. Mary meanwhile had

passed from Dunbar to Haddington, and thence to Seton, where 1600 men

rallied to her side. On the 15th of June, 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. Du Croc,

the French ambassador, obtained permission through the influence of

Maitland to convey to the queen the terms proposed by their

leaders--that she and Bothwell should part, or that he should meet in

single combat a champion chosen from among their number. Bothwell

offered to meet any man of sufficient quality; Mary would not assent. As

the afternoon wore on their force began to melt away by desertion and

to break up for lack of discipline. Again the trial by single combat was

proposed, and thrice the proposal fell through, owing to objections on

this side or on that. At last 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 (see CASKET LETTERS[2]). 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 favour 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 the 15th

of August, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athole. 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

rumour 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 the 25th of March, 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

afterwards remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of

utmost risk and perplexity to herself, succeeded on the 2nd of May 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 6000 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.

Elizabeth sent conditional offers of help to her kinswoman, provided she

would accept of English intervention and abstain from seeking foreign

assistance; but the messenger came too late. Mary's followers had failed

to retake Dunbar Castle from the regent, and made for Dumbarton instead,

marching two miles south of Glasgow, by the village of Langside. Here

Murray, with 4500 men, under leaders of high distinction, met the 6000

of the queen's army, whose ablest man, Herries, was as much distrusted

by Mary as by every one else, while the Hamiltons could only be trusted

to think of their own interests, and were suspected of treasonable

designs on all who stood between their house and the monarchy. 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 60 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

the 11th of June 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 valour, 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. What was to be done with such a princess, whether

she were to be nourished in one's bosom, above all whether it could be

advisable or safe to try any diplomatic tricks upon such a lady, Knollys

left for the minister to judge. It is remarkable that he should not have

discovered in her the qualities so obvious to modern champions of her

character--easiness, gullibility, incurable innocence and invincible

ignorance of evil, incapacity to suspect or resent anything, readiness

to believe and forgive all things. On the 15th of July, after various

delays interposed by her reluctance to leave the neighbourhood of the

border, where on her arrival she had received the welcome and the homage

of the leading Catholic houses of Northumberland and Cumberland, she was

removed to Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. During her residence here a

conference was held at York between her own and Elizabeth's

commissioners and those appointed to represent her son as a king of

Scots. These latter, of whom Murray himself was the chief, privately

laid before the English commissioners the contents of the famous casket.

On the 24th of October the place of the conference was shifted from York

to London, where the inquiry was to be held before Queen Elizabeth in

council. Mary was already aware that the chief of the English

commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, was secretly an aspirant to the

peril of her hand; and on the 21st of October she gave the first sign of

assent to the suggestion of a divorce from Bothwell. On the 26th of

October the charge of complicity in the murder of Darnley was distinctly

brought forward against her in spite of Norfolk's reluctance and

Murray's previous hesitation. Elizabeth, by the mouth of her chief

justice, formally rebuked the audacity of the subjects who durst bring

such a charge against their sovereign, and challenged them to advance

their proofs. They complied by the production of an indictment under

five heads, supported by the necessary evidence of documents. The number

of English commissioners was increased, and they were bound to preserve

secrecy as to the matters revealed. Further evidence was supplied by

Thomas Crawford, a retainer of the house of Lennox, tallying so exactly

with the text of the casket letters as to have been cited in proof that

the latter must needs be a forgery. Elizabeth, on the close of the

evidence, invited Mary to reply to the proofs alleged before she could

be admitted to her presence; but Mary simply desired her commissioners

to withdraw from the conference. She declined with scorn the proposal

made by Elizabeth through Knollys, that she should sign a second

abdication in favour of her son. On the 10th of January, 1569, the

judgment given at the conference acquitted Murray and his adherents of

rebellion, while affirming that nothing had been proved against Mary--a

verdict accepted by Murray as equivalent to a practical recognition of

his office as regent for the infant king. This position he was not long

to hold; and the fierce exultation of Mary at the news of his murder

gave to those who believed in her complicity with the murderer, on whom

a pension was bestowed by her unblushing gratitude, fresh reason to

fear, if her liberty of correspondence and intrigue were not restrained,

the likelihood of a similar fate for Elizabeth. On the 26th of January

1569 she had been removed from Bolton Castle to Tutbury in

Staffordshire, where proposals were conveyed to her, at the instigation

of Leicester, for a marriage with the duke of Norfolk, to which she gave

a graciously conditional assent; but the discovery of these proposals

consigned Norfolk to the Tower, and on the outbreak of an insurrection

in the north Mary, by Lord Hunsdon's advice, was again removed to

Coventry, when a body of her intending deliverers was within a day's

ride of Tutbury. On the 23rd of January following Murray was

assassinated; and a second northern insurrection was crushed in a single

sharp fight by Lord Hunsdon. In October Cecil had an interview with Mary

at Chatsworth, when the conditions of her possible restoration to the

throne in compliance with French demands were debated at length. The

queen of Scots, with dauntless dignity, refused to yield the castles of

Edinburgh and Dumbarton into English keeping, or to deliver up her

fugitive English partisans then in Scotland; upon other points they came

to terms, and the articles were signed the 16th of October. On the same

day Mary wrote to Elizabeth, requesting with graceful earnestness the

favour of an interview which might reassure her against the suggestion

that this treaty was a mere pretence. On the 28th of November she was

removed to Sheffield Castle, where she remained for the next fourteen

years in charge of the earl of Shrewsbury. The detection of a plot, in

which Norfolk was implicated, for the invasion of England by Spain on

behalf of Mary, who was then to take him as the fourth and most

contemptible of her husbands, made necessary the reduction of her

household and the stricter confinement of her person. On the 28th of May

1572 a demand from both houses of parliament for her execution as well

as Norfolk's was generously rejected by Elizabeth; but after the

punishment of the traitorous pretender to her hand, on whom she had

lavished many eloquent letters of affectionate protestation, she fell

into "a passion of sickness" which convinced her honest keeper of her

genuine grief for the ducal caitiff. A treaty projected on the news of

the massacre of St Bartholomew, by which Mary should be sent back to

Scotland for immediate execution, was broken off by the death of the

earl of Mar, who had succeeded Lennox as regent; nor was it found

possible to come to acceptable terms on a like understanding with his

successor Morton, who in 1577 sent a proposal to Mary for her

restoration, which she declined, in suspicion of a plot laid to entrap

her by the policy of Sir Francis Walsingham, the most unscrupulously

patriotic of her English enemies, who four years afterwards sent word to

Scotland that the execution of Morton, so long the ally of England,

would be answered by the execution of Mary. But on that occasion

Elizabeth again refused her assent either to the trial of Mary or to her

transference from Sheffield to the Tower. In 1581 Mary accepted the

advice of Catherine de' Medici and Henry III. that she should allow her

son's title to reign as king of Scotland conjointly with herself when

released and restored to a share of the throne. This plan was but part

of a scheme including the invasion of England by her kinsman the duke of

Guise, who was to land in the north and raise a Scottish army to place

the released prisoner of Sheffield beside her son on the throne of

Elizabeth. After the overthrow of the Scottish accomplices in this

notable project, Mary poured forth upon Elizabeth a torrent of pathetic

and eloquent reproach for the many wrongs she had suffered at the hands

of her hostess, and pledged her honour to the assurance that she now

aspired to no kingdom but that of heaven. In the spring of 1583 she

retained enough of this saintly resignation to ask for nothing but

liberty, without a share in the government of Scotland; but Lord

Burghley not unreasonably preferred, if feasible, to reconcile the

alliance of her son with the detention of his mother. In 1584 the

long-suffering earl of Shrewsbury was relieved of his fourteen years'

charge through the involuntary good offices of his wife, whose daughter

by her first husband had married a brother of Darnley; and their orphan

child Arabella, born in England, of royal descent on the father's side,

was now, in the hopeful view of her grandmother, a more plausible

claimant than the king or queen of Scots to the inheritance of the

English throne. In December 1583 Mary had laid before the French

ambassador her first complaint of the slanders spread by Lady Shrewsbury

and her sons, who were ultimately compelled to confess the falsehood of

their imputations on the queen of Scots and her keeper. It was probably

at the time when a desire for revenge on her calumniatress made her

think the opportunity good and safe for discharge of such a two-edged

dart at the countess and the queen that Mary wrote, but abstained from

despatching, the famous and terrible letter in which, with many gracious

excuses and professions of regret and attachment, she transmits to

Elizabeth a full and vivid report of the hideous gossip retailed by Bess

of Hardwick regarding her character and person at a time when the

reporter of these abominations was on friendly terms with her husband's

royal charge. In the autumn of 1584 she was removed to Wingfield Manor

under charge of Sir Ralph Sadler and John Somers, who accompanied her

also on her next removal to Tutbury in January 1585. A letter received

by her in that cold, dark and unhealthy castle, of which fifteen years

before she had made painful and malodorous experience, assured her that

her son would acknowledge her only as queen-mother, and provoked at once

the threat of a parent's curse and an application to Elizabeth for

sympathy. In April 1585 Sir Amyas Paulet was appointed to the office of

which Sadler, accused of careless indulgence, had requested to be

relieved; and on Christmas Eve she was removed from the hateful shelter

of Tutbury to the castle of Chartley in the same county. Her

correspondence in cipher from thence with her English agents abroad,

intercepted by Walsingham and deciphered by his secretary, gave eager

encouragement to the design for a Spanish invasion of England under the

prince of Parma,--an enterprise in which she would do her utmost to make

her son take part, and in case of his refusal would induce the Catholic

nobles of Scotland to betray him into the hands of Philip, from whose

tutelage he should be released only on her demand, or if after her death

he should wish to return, nor then unless he had become a Catholic. But

even these patriotic and maternal schemes to consign her child and

re-consign the kingdom to the keeping of the Inquisition, incarnate in

the widower of Mary Tudor, were superseded by the attraction of a

conspiracy against the throne and life of Elizabeth. 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 cognisant 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

afterwards 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 the 25th of September she was removed to

the strong castle of Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. On the 6th of

October 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 the 14th and 15th of October 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 own 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 estates 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 the 25th of October, 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 the 1st of February 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 the 7th of February 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 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 overnight 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.

Mary Stuart was in many respects the creature of her age, of her creed,

and of her station; but the noblest and most noteworthy qualities of her

nature were independent of rank, opinion or time. Even the detractors

who defend her conduct on the plea that she was a dastard and a dupe are

compelled in the same breath to retract this implied reproach, and to

admit, with illogical acclamation and incongruous applause, that the

world never saw more splendid courage at the service of more brilliant

intelligence, that a braver if not "a rarer spirit never did steer

humanity." A kinder or more faithful friend, a deadlier or more

dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or to desire. Passion

alone could shake the double fortress of her impregnable heart and

ever-active brain. The passion of love, after very sufficient

experience, she apparently and naturally outlived; the passion of hatred

and revenge was as inextinguishable in her inmost nature as the emotion

of loyalty and gratitude. Of repentance it would seem that she knew as

little as of fear, having been trained from her infancy in a religion

where the Decalogue was supplanted by the Creed. Adept as she was in the

most exquisite delicacy of dissimulation, the most salient note of her

original disposition was daring rather than subtlety. Beside or behind

the voluptuous or intellectual attractions of beauty and culture, she

had about her the fresher charm of a fearless and frank simplicity, a

genuine and enduring pleasure in small and harmless things no less than

in such as were neither. In 1562 she amused herself for some days by

living "with her little troop" in the house of a burgess of St Andrews

"like a burgess's wife," assuring the English ambassador that he should

not find the queen there,--"nor I know not myself where she is become."

From Sheffield Lodge, twelve years later, she applied to the archbishop

of Glasgow and the cardinal of Guise for some pretty little dogs, to be

sent her in baskets very warmly packed,--"for besides reading and

working, I take pleasure only in all the little animals that I can get."

No lapse of reconciling time, no extent of comparative indulgence, could

break her in to resignation, submission, or toleration of even partial

restraint. Three months after the massacre of St Bartholomew had caused

some additional restrictions to be placed upon her freedom of action,

Shrewsbury writes to Burghley that "rather than continue this

imprisonment she sticks not to say she will give her body, her son, and

country for liberty"; nor did she ever show any excess of regard for any

of the three. For her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of

action, she cared much; for her creed she cared something; for her

country she cared less than nothing. She would have flung Scotland with

England into the hell fire of Spanish Catholicism rather than forgo the

faintest chance of personal revenge. Her profession of a desire to be

instructed in the doctrines of Anglican Protestantism was so

transparently a pious fraud as rather to afford confirmation than to

arouse suspicion of her fidelity to the teaching of her church.

Elizabeth, so shamefully her inferior in personal loyalty, fidelity and

gratitude, was as clearly her superior on the one all-important point of

patriotism. The saving salt of Elizabeth's character, with all its

wellnigh incredible mixture of heroism and egotism, meanness and

magnificence, was simply this, that, overmuch as she loved herself, she

did yet love England better. Her best though not her only fine qualities

were national and political, the high public virtues of a good public

servant; in the private and personal qualities which attract and attach

a friend to his friend and a follower to his leader, no man or woman was

ever more constant and more eminent than Mary Queen of Scots.

(A. C. S.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The biography of Mary Stuart being virtually the

history of Scotland during the period covered by her life, with which

the history of England at the same period is also largely concerned,

the chief events in which she figured are related in all the general

_Histories_ of both countries. The most important original authorities

are the voluminous _State Papers_ of the period, with other MS.

documents preserved at the British Museum, the Cambridge University

Library, Hatfield and elsewhere. See especially the _Reports_ of the

Hist. MSS. Commission; _Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland

and Mary Queen of Scots_ (Scottish Record Publ. 1898); _Calendar of

Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, principally in

the Archives at Simancas_ (vols. i.-iv., 1892-1899); and the

_Calendars of State Papers: Domestic Series, Edw. VI.-James I.;

Foreign Series, Elizabeth; Venice Series_.

The most important unofficial contemporary works are the _Histories_

of John Knox, Bishop John Lesley, George Buchanan, and Robert Lindsay

of Pitscottie; the _Diurnal of Remarkable Occurrents from the death of

James IV. till 1575_ (Bannatyne Club, 1833); Robert Birrell's "Diary"

in Sir J. G. Dalzell's _Fragments of Scottish History_ (Edinburgh,

1798); _History of Mary Stuart_, by her secretary Claude Nau, ed. by

J. Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1883); Sir James Melville's _Memoirs of his

own Life_ (Bannatyne Club, 1827); Richard Bannatyne, _Memoriales of

Transactions in Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 1836); William Camden's

_Annales_ (Eng. trans., London, 1635); Michel de Castelnau's

_Mémoires_ (Brussels, 1731); the _Mémoires_ of Brantôme (ed. by L.

Lalanne, 12 vols., Paris, 1864-1896); _Relations politiques de la

France et de l'Espagne avec l'Écosse au 16th siècle_ (ed. by J. B. A.

Teulet, 5 vols., Paris, 1862), containing important original letters

and documents; Thomas Wright's _Queen Elizabeth and her Times_ (2

vols., London, 1838), consists of private letters of Elizabethan

statesmen many of which refer to Mary Stuart, and others are to be

found in Sir Henry Ellis's _Original Letters illustrative of English

History_ (London, 1825-1846); much of Mary's own correspondence will

be found in Prince A. Labanoff's _Lettres inédites, 1558-1587_ (Paris,

1839), and _Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Marie Stuart_ (7

vols., London, 1844), selections from which have been translated into

English by W. Turnbull in _Letters of Mary Queen of Scots_ (London,

1845), and by Agnes Strickland in _Letters of Mary Queen of Scots and

Documents connected with her Personal History_ (3 vols., London,

1842).

Among authorities not actually contemporary but written within a

century of Mary's death are David Calderwood's _Hist. of the Kirk of

Scotland_ (8 vols., Edinburgh, 1842-1849); Archbishop Spottiswoode's

_Hist. of the Church of Scotland_ (ed. by M. Russell, 3 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1847-1851), and Robert Keith's _Hist. of Affairs of Church

and State in Scotland_ (Spottiswoode Society ed., 1844); to which

should be added the modern classic, George Grub's _Ecclesiastical

History of Scotland_ (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1861).

Of modern general histories those of chief importance on the subject

are the Histories of England by Hume, Lingard and Froude; and the

_Histories of Scotland_ by Robertson, P. F. Tytler, John Hill Burton,

Malcolm Laing and Andrew Lang. Numerous biographies of Mary Stuart

have been published, as well as essays and treatises dealing with

particular episodes in her life, of which the most worthy of mention

are: George Chalmers, _Life of Mary Queen of Scots_, (2 vols., London,

1818); Henry Glassford Bell, _Life of Mary Queen of Scots_ (2 vols.,

Edinburgh, 1828-1831); the "Life" in Agnes Strickland's _Lives of the

Queens of Scotland_ (8 vols., Edinburgh, 1850); J. D. Leader, _Mary

Queen of Scots in Captivity_ (Sheffield, 1880); Colin Lindsay, _Mary

Queen of Scots and her Marriage with Bothwell_ (London, 1883); Mrs

Maxwell-Scott, _The Tragedy of Fotheringay_ (London, 1895); F. A. M.

Mignet, _Histoire de Marie Stuart_ (2 vols., Brussels, 1851); Martin

Philippson, _Histoire du règne de Marie Stuart_ ( 3 vols., Paris,

1891); Sir John Skelton, _Mary Stuart_ (London, 1893), _Maitland of

Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stuart_ (2 vols., Edinburgh,

1887), _The Impeachment of Mary Stuart_ (Edinburgh, 1878), and _Essays

in History and Biography, including the Defence of Mary Stuart_

(Edinburgh, 1883); Joseph Stevenson, _Mary Stuart: The First Eighteen

Years of her Life_ (Edinburgh, 1886); D. Hay Fleming, _Mary Stuart_

(2nd ed. 1898); Jane Stoddart, _Girlhood of Mary Queen of Scots_.

With special reference to the controversy concerning the Casket

Letters, in addition to the article CASKET LETTERS and the

above-mentioned works by Sir John Skelton, the following should be

consulted: Walter Goodall, _Examination of the Letters said to be

written by Mary Queen of Scots to Bothwell_ (2 vols., Edinburgh,

1754), which contains the letters themselves; William Tytler, _Inquiry

into the Evidence against Mary Queen of Scots_ (2 vols., London,

1790); John Whitaker, _Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated_ (3 vols.,

London, 1788); F. de Peyster, _Mary Stuart, Bothwell and the Casket

Letters_ (London, 1890); T. F. Henderson, _The Casket Letters and Mary

Queen of Scots_ (Edinburgh, 1889); Andrew Lang, _The Mystery of Mary

Stuart_ (London, 1900).

In 1690 Giovanni Francesco Savaro published a play _La Maria Stuarda_,

and since then the story of the Queen of Scots has been the subject of

numerous poems and dramas, of which the most celebrated are Schiller's

_Maria Stuart_, and three tragedies by A. C. Swinburne--_Chastelard_

(1865), _Bothwell_ (1874), and _Mary Stuart_ (1881).