Andrew Lang

“ In thinking of old Edinburgh, as Mary knew it, our fancy naturally but erroneously dwells on the narrow wynds of the old town, cabined between grimy slate-roofed houses of some twelve or fifteen stories in height, ‘piled black and massy steep and high,’ and darkened with centuries of smoke, squalid, sunless, without a green tree in the near view, so we are apt to conceive the Edinburgh of Queen Mary. But we do the good town injustice: we are conceiving the Edinburgh of Queen Mary under the colours and in the forms of the Edinburgh of Prince Charles and of Robert Burns. ”

“ She loved, at sea, ‘to handle the boisterous cables,’ as Buchanan tells. Pursuing her brother, Moray, on a day of storm, or hard on the doomed Huntly’s track among the hills and morasses of the North; or galloping through the red bracken of the October moors, and the hills of the robbers, to Hermitage; her energy outwore the picked warriors in her company. At other times, in a fascinating languor, she would lie long abed, receiving company in the French fashion, waited on by her Maries, whose four names ‘are four sweet symphonies,’ Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming and Mary Livingstone. ”

“ A strong, patient, cautious man, capable of deep reserve, in his family relations, financial matters apart, austerely moral, Moray would have made an excellent king, but as a Queen’s brother he was most dangerous, when not permitted to be all powerful. He could not have rescued Darnley, or saved Mary from herself, without risks which a Knox or a Craig would certainly have faced, but which no secular leader in Scotland would have dreamed of encountering. ”

“ Mary was sorely bested, then, between the Young Fool, the Furious Man, the Puritan brother, and Michael Wylie (Machiavelli) as the Scots nicknamed Lethington. She was absolutely alone. There was no man whom she could trust. On every hand were known rebels, half pardoned, half reconciled. Feuds, above all that of her husband and his clan, the Lennox Stewarts, with the nearest heirs of the crown, the Hamiltons, broke out eternally. The Protestants hated her: the Preachers longed to drag her down: the English Ambassadors were hostile spies. ”

“ Within these seven years I never saw two good men, nor one good deed, but all kind of wickedness; and yet my God would not suffer me to be lost, and has drawn me from them as out of Hell ... for the which I thank him, and I am assured that I am one of his Elect.’ This devotee used to hang about Mary in Carlisle, when she had fled into England. ‘Not two good men, nor one good deed,’ saw Ormistoun, in seven long years of riding the Border, and following Bothwell to Court or Warden’s Raid. Few are the good men, rare are the good deeds, that meet us in this tragic History. ”

“ Most of the town of Mary’s [Pg 42] age was embraced by the ruinous wall, hastily constructed after the defeat and death of James IV. Such was the city: of the houses we may gain an idea from the fine old building traditionally called John Knox’s house: if we suppose it neat, clean, its roof scarlet, its walls not grimy with centuries of reek. The houses stood among green gardens, hedges, and trees, and on the grassy hills between the city and the sea, and to the east and west, were châteaux and peel-towers of lords and lairds. ”

“ Readers of Sir John Skelton’s interesting book, ‘Maitland of Lethington,’ must observe, if they know the facts, that, in presence of Lethington, Sir John is like ‘birds whom the charmer serpent draws.’ He is an advocate of Mary, but of Mary as a ‘charming sinner.’ By Lethington he is dominated: he will scarcely admit that there is a stain on his scutcheon, a scutcheon, alas! smirched and defaced. Could a man of to-day hold an hour’s converse with a man of that age, he would choose Lethington. ”

“ But History, the search for truth, should be as impersonal as the judge on the bench. I am not unaccustomed to be blamed for ‘destroying our illusions,’ but to cultivate and protect illusion has never been deemed the duty of the historian. Mary, at worst, and even admitting her guilt (guilt monstrous and horrible to contemplate) seems to have been a nobler nature than any of the persons most closely associated with her fortunes. She fell, if fall she did, like the Clytæmnestra to whom a contemporary poet compares her, under the almost demoniacal possession of passion ”

“ Mary at Eighteen.
Her costumes, when she would be queenly, have left their mark on the memory of men: the ruff from which rose the snowy neck; the brocaded bodice, with puffed and jewelled sleeves and stomacher; the diamonds, gifts of Henri II. or of Diane; the rich pearls that became the spoil of Elizabeth; the brooches enamelled with sacred scenes, or scenes from fable. Many of her jewels—the ruby tortoise given by Riccio; the enamel of the mouse and the ensnared lioness, passed by Lethington as a token into her dungeon of Loch Leven ”

“ The stage, as in Schiller’s ‘Marie Stuart,’ comes nearest to reality, if only the facts given by the poet were real; and next in vividness comes the novel, such as Scott’s ‘Abbot,’ with its picture of Mary at Loch Leven, when she falls into an hysterical fit at the mention of Bastian’s marriage on the night of Darnley’s death. Far less intimate than these imaginary pictures of genius are the statements of History, dull when they are not ‘picturesque,’ and when they are ‘picturesque,’ sometimes prejudiced, inaccurate, and misleading. ”

“ After her child’s birth, when she was holiday-making at Alloa, according to Buchanan, with Bothwell and his gang of pirates, she wrote to the Laird of Abercairnie, bidding him be merciful to a poor woman and her ‘company of puir bairnis’ whom he had evicted from their ‘kindly rowme,’ or little croft.
Her more than masculine courage her enemies have never denied. Her resolution was incapable of despair; ‘her last word should be that of a Queen.’ Her plighted promise she revered, but, in such an age, a woman’s weapon was deceit. ”

“ Sir John Skelton, in his ‘Maitland of Lethington,’ regarded the supposed falsification of Letter II. as an argument against all the Casket Letters (‘false in one thing, false in all’) . But it is clear that forgery may be employed to strengthen the evidence, even of a valid cause. If Mary’s enemies deemed that the genuine evidence which they had collected was inadequate, and therefore added evidence which was not genuine, that proves their iniquity, but does not prove Mary’s innocence. ”

“ The diamonds of the French, the silver Casket of the Scottish Queen, with all that turned on them, are of real historical interest, for these trifles brought to the surface the characters and principles of men living in an age of religious revolution. Wells were sunk, as it were, deep into human personality, and the inner characteristics of the age leaped upwards into the light.
For this reason the Mystery of Mary Stuart must always fascinate: moreover, curiosity has never ceased to be aroused by this problem of Mary’s guilt or innocence. ”

“ To have retired to the Castle, as on other occasions of danger, and to have remained there, would have been Mary’s natural conduct, had the slaying of Darnley alarmed and distressed her. Those who defend her, however, can always fall back, like Elizabeth, on the theory that Bothwell, Argyll, Huntly, and Lethington overawed her; that she could not urge the finding of the murderers, or even avoid their familiar society, any more than Moray could rescue or avenge Darnley, or abstain from sharing his salt with Bothwell. ”

“ A door must be open or shut. Thirdly, it was ridiculous to ask Elizabeth to be present, but only as a spectator. Fourthly, it was no less absurd to ask all the nobles to attend a trial which might be long, but they might choose representatives, if Mary desired it, to appear when convenient. Fifthly, it was ridiculous to demand the presence of ambassadors, who would be neither prosecutors, defenders, judges, clerks, nor witnesses: they could only be lookers-on, like other people. ”

“ The self-contradictory statements of Paris can be torn to shreds in cross-examination, whatever element of truth they may contain. The ‘dying confessions’ are contradictorily reported, and all the reports are worthless. The guilt of some Lords, and their alliance with the other accusers, made it impossible for the Prosecution to produce a sound case. As their case stands, as it is presented by them, a jury, however convinced, on other grounds, of Mary’s guilt, would feel constrained to acquit the Queen of Scots. ”

“ Leonard’s gardens, and boys like little James Melville were playing tennis and golf. The scenes in which the wild deeds were done are scarcely recognisable in modern Scotland. Holyrood is altered by buildings of the Restoration; the lovely chapel is a ruin, where Mary prayed, and the priests at the altar were buffeted. The Queen’s chamber is empty, swept and garnished, as is the little cabinet whereinto came the livid face of Ruthven, clad in armour, and Darnley, half afraid, and Standen, later to boast, with different circumstances, that he saved the Queen from the dirk of Patrick Ballantyne. ”

“ This queer rivalry would account for the style of Letter VIII., in which Mary labours to prove to Bothwell, as it were, that she is as capable as his wife of writing a fashionable, contorted, literary style, if she chooses: in poetry, too, if she likes. We naturally feel sorry for a man of action who received, at a moment when decisive action was needful, such an epistle as Letter VIII., and we naturally suppose that he never read it, but tossed it into the Casket with an explosion of profane words. ”

“ Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field. Bothwell and the murderers, in their attack on the Kirk o’ Field, had no such convenience for the carriage of themselves and their gunpowder. It is strange that Lennox and his agents, having access to several of the servants of Darnley, including Nelson who survived the explosion, accepted at one time, or expected others to accept, this legend of a secret passage. Edinburgh tradition holds that there was such a tunnel between Holyrood and the Castle, which may be the basis of this fairy-tale. ”

“ Yet from America, Russia, France, and Germany we receive works in which the guilt of Mary is denied, [Pg viii] and the arguments of Hume, Robertson, Laing, Mignet, and Froude are contested. Every inch of the ground has been inspected as if by detectives on the scene of a recent murder; and one might suppose that the Higher Criticism had uttered its last baseless conjecture and that every syllable of the fatal Casket Letters, the only external and documentary testimony to Mary’s guilt, must have been weighed, tested, and analysed. ”

“ Mary’s task was ‘to quieten the country,’ a task perhaps impossible. Her defenders might probably make a better case for her conduct and prudence, at this time, than they have usually presented. Her policy was, if possible, to return to the state of balance which existed before her marriage. She must allay the Protestants’ anxieties, and lean on their trusted Moray and on the wisdom of Lethington. But gratitude for the highest services compelled her to employ Huntly and Bothwell, who equally detested Lethington and Moray. Darnley was an impossible and disturbing factor in the problem. ”

“ Lady Bothwell kept the dispensation which enabled her to marry Bothwell, though he was divorced from her for the want of it. She married the Earl of Sutherland in 1573, and, after his death, returned à ses premiers amours, wedding her old true love who had wooed her in her girlhood, Ogilvy of Boyne. Their conversation must have been rich in curious reminiscences. The loves and hatreds of their youth were extinct; the wild hearts of Bothwell, Mary, Mary Beaton, Lethington, Darnley, and the rest, had long ceased to beat, and these two were left, Darby and Joan, alone in a new world. ”

“ III THE CHARACTERS BEFORE RICCIO’S MURDER
After sketching the characters and scenes of the tragedy, we must show how destiny interwove the life-threads of Bothwell and Mary. They were fated to come together. She was a woman looking for a master, he was a masterful and, in the old sense of the word, a ‘masterless’ man, seeking what he might devour. In the phrase of Aristotle, ‘Nature wishes’ to produce this or that result. It almost seems as if Nature had long ‘wished’ to throw a Scottish Queen into the hands of a Hepburn. ”

“ Now Mary had declared to Knollys that, if once Moray accused her publicly, they were ‘past all reconciliation.’ That was the only defensible position, yet her Commissioners, perhaps with her approval, receded from it. Elizabeth seized the opportunity. It was better, she said, and rightly, for her sister’s honour, that Mary’s accusers should be charged with their audacious defaming of their Queen, and punished for the same, unless they could show ‘apparent just causes of such an attempt.’ In fact, Elizabeth must see the Letters, or cause them to be seen by her nobles. ”