A were committed by her, with which her memory is charged; but this much at least is certain, that, though exposed to the severest ordeal; though surrounded by selfish and treacherous subjects; though exposed to the spies of a hostile Queen and a jealous rival, and incessantly assailed by the ruthless spirit of an adverse political and religious party, her memory remains clear of all those savage cruelties, or mean and despicable weaknesses, justly imputed to other queens, and charged only with the comparatively few though dark crimes with which her tragic fate is wound up. Doubtless the great and increasing interest with which Queen Mary is regarded, is in some degree owing to the important position which she occupied during life, and the heroic courage with which she met her fate in death. Though sovereign by inheritance only of the distant, poor, and distracted realm of Scotland, she was called to the highest destinies, and may be fairly said to have had her fate wound up with that of entire Christendom. She was married to the Dauphin, and became Queen of France; she was next heir, after Elizabeth, to the crown of England; and, by the whole Roman Catholic party throughout the world, was regarded as the rightful inheritor of that noble crown upon the decease of Mary. Though she herself perished by a rival's hatred on the scaffold, her descendants are at this moment seated on the thrones of Prussia, Austria, and Spain; till the Revolution closed their sway, they sat on that of France; and among the many and glorious ancestral honours which have descended to our present gracious sovereign, there is none on which she more prides herself than that she is lineally descended from Queen Mary. More than this, she was the representative of a principle, and she died its martyr. By a striking coincidence, the two thrones of Great Britain were at that period occupied by Queens, and those Queens were respectively representatives of the ancient and the new faith. The Roman Catholics throughout the world looked upon Queen Mary as the champion of their faith, and anticipated an entire stop to the progress of the great schism by her accession to the throne of England. With equal solicitude the Protestants everywhere looked to their protector Elizabeth, and daily offered up prayers in her behalf, as their only refuge against the grasping tyranny of the court of Rome. Thus the two Queens, rivals in inheritance, rivals in their claims to the English crown, rivals in conquest over the hearts of men, were at the same time the respective leaders of the two great divisions of the Christian world. The Protestant was successful in the strife, and her triumph is identified in all Protestant countries with the establishment of the Reformed Faith in the British Islands on an imperishable foundation. The Roman Catholic perished; but, like many other characters recorded in history, what she lost in life she gained in death; and her image is for ever engraven in the hearts of men, by the very calamities which clothed her earthly days with mourning. There is more in Queen Mary's case, however, than these circumstances, great and peculiar as they were. Other persons have died as martyrs to their faith-other women have displayed courage on the scaffold; but none have attained the fame, or awakened the enduring, and it may now be said imperishable interest, which Queen Mary has excited. Great part of the charm, it must be confessed, with which her memory is invested, has arisen from the mystery in which it is shrouded, and the obscurity in which, despite all the zeal of her friends, and all the eagerness of her enemies, the most momentous parts of her history are still involved. After three centuries of almost ceaseless disquisition and controversy on the subject, opinion is nearly as much divided as it was when Bothwell was brought to his mock trial for the murder of Darnley, or the English and Scotch commissioners met at York to determine on her alleged accession to the crime. The utmost zeal, and talents of the highest kind, are still exerted on the opposite sides of the great debate; and the interest of readers of both sexes and all ranks on the subject, so far from declining, is daily on the increase, and becomes only the greater with all fresh information or documents brought to light on the subject. served death; and yet she herself witnessed-with pain, it is true, but still witnessed-the execution of her faithful knight, Sir John Gordon, and sanctioned the confiscation of a noble family, whose subsequent fidelity to her in misfortune proved how little they had deserved the severity they had received at her hands. What renders the history of Queen Mary so perplexing, and at the same time so fascinating, is in some degree the contradictory nature of the qualities which she exhibited at different She inherited all the heroism of her periods of her life. It appears scarcely ancestor, Robert Bruce; the spirit of possible that a person who was so Richard Coeur-de-Lion, through the noble and heroic at one time, could long line of the Plantagenets, flowed be so rash or inconsiderate as she in her veins. She said with truth, unquestionably was at another. The after her perilous ride from Aberdeen extremes in her character are such as, to Inverness, through the doubtful despite the common proverb, it is territories of the Gordons, that all she scarcely possible could have met. She regretted was that she had not been was tender-hearted; her tears flowed a man, to feel the stern joy of headfreely and repeatedly at the sight of ing a charge of horse, or endure the suffering. She was adored by all her hardships of resting on the ground ladies and attendants, and noble deeds during a summer campaign. She of generosity illustrate her memory; exhibited at times, with this mascubut yet cruel and ruthless deeds are line and heroic spirit, the cruel and beyond all dispute proved against her, unrelenting disposition with which, which all the barbarous usages and on particular occasions, it has somesavage manner of the times cannot al- times been found to be connected. together extenuate. Generally speak- There are not wanting, it must be ing, she showed herself superior to the confessed, acts authorised by her more usual weaknesses of her sex: she had akin to the savage spirit which caused not the love of admiration in a greater Alexander to plunge his dagger in degree than every beautiful woman Hephæstion's breast, or the burst of has had it since the days of Eve; no passion which led Charles XII. to instances of ordinary frailty are prov- torture Patkul at Dresden, than the ed against her, even in an age when, mild and benignant disposition which beyond all others, they were regarded we figure to ourselves in a prinas venial weaknesses; and the ter- cess possessed of such transcendant rible catastrophes of her life were charms, and gifted in many reowing to profound passions, such as spects with such noble qualities. In too often spring up in powerful minds. this, however, she only followed, Yet she often gave way to sallies of though in a much less degree, the anger and spite strangely at variance bent of her Plantagenet ancestors. with the clearness of her intellect and No one acquainted with history need the general elevation of her feelings; be told what cruel and ferocious acts she indulged, with scarce any control, stain the memory of Richard Coeurin animosity, often unfounded, against de-Lion, Edward I., Edward III., individuals and families who in reality and the Black Prince. The British were her best friends; and many of the historian would willingly bury them in greatest misfortunes of her life were oblivion; but justice to those who owing to the license which she gave lived in those rude ages requires that her tongue, and the biting severity they should be prominently brought with which she indulged in sarcasms forward, lest a standard should be or jests against her rivals, less highly applied to human character, in regard gifted than herself with the most to them, entirely at variance with fascinating charms of nature. No their real merits. one ever exceeded her in the patience with which she endured a prolonged captivity, or the heroism with which she confronted a painful and unde VOL. LXXII.-NO. CCCCXLV. To give only one or two instances of the manners and ideas of the age in which Queen Mary's lot was cast. It is generally known that Henry 2 s VIII. put seventy-two thousand persons, of all religions and persuasions, to death on the scaffold during his single reign; but it is not equally known that his daughter Elizabeth had an array of three hundred heads of persons convicted of high treason placed on London bridge, including those of her cousin and friend Norfolk, and her romantic lover Essex; and that, so far from being shocked at the ghastly array, she took the foreign ambassadors to see it in order to show "how we serve traitors in England." Protestant historians have recounted with just indignation that the Bloody Mary cast two hundred and forty men, women, and children, into the flames during her brief and atrocious reign; but they have not equally prominently brought forward the fact, which is equally certain, that a still greater number of Catholic priests and partisans were, by her Protestant successor, secretly racked to the utmost limits which the human frame can endure in that awful scene of human agony, the Tower of London. After the massacre of St Bartholomew, the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long rows of the bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult, and, curiously turning them over when half-stripped of their garments, said to each other-" This must have been a charming lover; that was not worth looking at." And when the fanatic assassin Ravaillac was brought out into the square of the Louvre to undergo, during four hours, the most frightful tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human frame endure, the whole ladies of the court of Paris assembled to witness the spectacle, and as high prices were given for the seats nearest the scene of agony as will be given for the best places on the streets leading to St Paul's on the approaching occasion when the first and noblest of Britain attend her greatest hero to his last resting-place! It is perhaps the most difficult thing, in surveying the annals of the past, to bring ourselves to conceive how human beings could, in any age or under any circumstances, have been brought to lend themselves to such barbarities. But nothing is more certain than that the greatest and best did so, and deemed they were doing God a service when so engaged;-witness Sir Thomas More flogging a prisoner with his own hands in his garden, to convert him from heresy. If we are wise or just, we will judge of those who lived in these savage times according to the measure of the ideas with which they were surrounded, and not our own; and reflect with deeper thankfulness on our happier lot, when subjects are not called on to undergo such sacrifices in their duty to the sovereign, and the Queen upon the throne can exhibit the spirit of her Plantagenet forefathers, and the graces of her Stuart ancestress, without being exposed to the terrible trials which either underwent. In forming an impartial estimate of the character of Queen Mary, and the evidence with which the charges against her are supported, there are two circumstances which must be constantly kept in view. The first is, that she arrived in her dominions from France, and assumed the government without a standing army, guards, or armed force of any kind, and was therefore forced to throw herself upon the support of one of the great parties into which her kingdom was divided. Without such safeguard she could not have been secure against assassination any night of her life. This party was of necessity the Presbyterians, for it embraced the great majority of the property and numbers of the kingdom; and the partisans of the ancient faith, to which Mary herself was attached, though zealous and devoted, were chiefly in the North, too far removed from the seat of government to be able to furnish the requisite support to an administration formed of their adherents. Thus she fell into the hands of the Lords of the Congregation, of whom her natural brother, the Earl of Moray, was the head; and a more selfish, rapacious set of men than they were never existed. The support of such a body could only be gained, or their fidelity secured, by holding out to them the prospect of being enriched by the spoils and confiscations of the Lords of the opposite party. This system of rewarding present support by the confiscation of estates on the other side, had been so long established in Scotland, as well as in England, that it was looked upon as just as much a natural consequence of a change of Ministry, as the distribution of the seats in the Cabinet among the chiefs of the successful party now is. The great object of the successful party in power, the moment they were fairly installed, was to goad their opponents, through repeated insults, and sheer desperation, into overt acts of treason, in order to give them a decent pretext for confiscating their estates. This consideration explains many of the worst acts of Mary's government, particularly the persecution and ruin of the noble family of the Gordons the greatest reproach, as Miss Strickland justly remarks, of her whole reign. Mary was there the passive instrument of the rapacity of the Protestant Lords. Among the many advantages with which the institution of standing armies has been attended, it is not the least, though hitherto little observed, that it has provided a regularly paid body of defenders for the throne, and established a better mode of remunerating them than by driving their opponents to treason and confiscation. The second is, that Queen Mary was, during her whole reign, not only surrounded by the spies of a jealous and vindictive rival on the English throne, but watched by the Argus eyes of a numerous and powerful party in her own dominions, to the men of which she was, from her religion, an object of dread, and to the women, from her beauty, one of envy. No one is more aware than ourselves of the inestimable blessings which Scotland has derived from the Reformation, or the deep debt of gratitude which she owes to the undaunted spirits by whour, when their antagonists held the sword and faggot in their hand, the great deliverance was effected. If any one doubts it, let him compare the present state of this country and its subsequent history with that of Spain-" Si monumentum quæris, circumspice." It must also be recollected that the Reformers were in a manner driven into cease less watching and rigour against her, because she was the head in Britain of a faith which openly aimed at their destruction, and by the professors of which every imaginable cruelty against them would have been regarded as doing God a service. But, fully admitting this, it must at the same time be observed, in justice to Mary, that more rigid, austere, and often unjust judges than John Knox and his followers, of the court of a young and beautiful queen, cannot be conceived. She came from the court of France, where the graces of chivalry had reached the highest perfection, and the devotion of knights to the fair sex had been carried to the utmost height. She came to a country in which all such accomplishments were regarded not only without favour, but as the worst species of corruption; and an austere and ambitious priesthood, jealous of anything which tended to establish an influence that might rival their own, condemned even the most innocent freedom as an utter abomination. Dancing was to them, in an especial manner, an object of horror. They could tolerate men dancing with men, and women with women, but "promiscuous dancing," as they called it-that is, men dancing with women-they considered as the first step to perdition. Miss Strickland justly asks, what would John Knox, who was so horrified with the stately minuets and cotillons danced by Mary and her maids of honour at Holyrood, have said if he had seen the degenerate descendants of the Lords of the Congregation whirling in the mazes of the polka or the galoppe, in the arms of their cavaliers? Adverting to the puritanical rigour of the ecclesiastical party by which she was judged, and the political and female jealousy of the crowned rival by whom she was watched, and by whose spies she was surrounded, and to the extremely slight instances of levity of manner which are at all substantiated against her, we have no hesitation whatever of acquitting Mary entirely of every species of ordinary female frailty, and holding that she was more decorous in her demeanour and manner than per haps any other beautiful woman of her age. How Queen Mary suffered from the sway of her passions need be told to none: they are as household words in every realm. Married at the age of twenty to Darnley, whose royal lineage was almost equal to her own, and whose beauty of figure and elegance of accomplishment were so well calculated to win her heart, she felt for him the full force of a first love. Miss Strickland would fain represent her as deeply attached to her first husband, the Dauphin of France; but it is obvious that that could not have been the case. She may have felt, and doubtless did feel, for him the tenderness of a sisterthe affection of a nurse; but the beauteous and high-spirited Queen of seventeen could not have felt real love for her sickly nominal boy-husband of sixteen, whom she soon laid in a premature grave. It was with Darnley, therefore, that she felt the first transports of passion; and the venerable towers of Crookston, which still surmount the woods and adorn the park of Polloc, where her honeymoon was spent, were without doubt the scene of trust as entire, and affection as sincere, as was ever felt in the human breast. But these transports were of short duration, and Mary soon found, as so many of her sex have done, both before and since her time, that the qualities which most dazzle the eye or warm the feelings, are not always those which permanently attach the affections or enthral the heart. Darnley turned out a handsome sot; and, besides being incapable of any generous efforts, and void of every elevated feeling, he wounded his royal spouse in the tenderest point, by love intrigues with the most despicable and abandoned of her sex. It was in this state of mingled disappointment and jealousy, when a confiding and generous mind had found that the love which so many of the first and noblest had sighed for in vain, had been thrown away upon an unworthy and ungrateful object, and she was suffer ing the bitterest of all pangs-the pangs of unrequited love-that she met with Bothwell, who ever after exercised so great and disastrous an influence on her fate. The result is well known. She was inspired by him with the most ardent and romantic passion, which, unlike her passing fondness for the handsome but despicable Darnley, was of lasting endurance, and increased only by difficulty and absence, and led her to take those rash steps which brought on the loss of her crown, her freedom, and her life. It appears, at first sight, one of the many mysteries of this tragic life, that Bothwell, upon whom, with generous self-forgetfulness, and entire, but, as it proved, most ill-merited confidence, the Queen came at last to lavish her warmest affections-her tenderest love-was at first, on her part, the_object of persecution and hatred. In the early years of her reign she acted to him with great severity, and banished him, not only from her presence, but her dominions. It was by the earnest intercession of others that she was led to revoke the sentence of banishment against him, and again admit his perilous presence in her court. He met with her when her heart was on the rebound from the revolting infidelities and disgraceful profligacy of Darnley; and the transition was almost instantaneous from hatred to love. Bothwell was a profligate and unscrupulous character, but he was bold and adventurous; and possessed many qualities calculated to win the sympathetic heart which warmed with the blood of Bruce and Richard Coeurde-Lion. Mary's passion for him soon became such, that she said afterwards, in the days of her mourning, that "she would rather follow him in her shift, than sit on a throne with any other man." Is it surprising that this, in such an enthusiastic and selfforgetting character, should be the case, even when the object of it is unworthy? Is it so very unusual in real life to see a Cleveland who wins the heart of a Minna or Brenda? The seat of Sir John Maxwell, Bart., near Glasgow. |