The Author's picture of the Queen of Scots. 621

“She said that 'the matter had been tried in the country, and found to the contrary of that was reported.' Lord Robert was at the court, and none of his (servants) were at the attempt at his wife's house, and that it fell out as should neither touch his 'honesty nor her honour.'"-(Ibid., p. 298.)

THE ARRIVAL OF MARY IN SCOTLAND.

"The Queen of Scotland landed on the pier of Leith on the morning of the 19th of August. Though her coming had been so long talked of, her appearance took her people by surprise. They had made no preparation for her, and Holyrood Palace lay among its meadows, with the black precipices of Salisbury Crags frowning over it, like a deserted ruin.

"But the princess, who was returning to make her home there, was not to be made unhappy by small discomforts. She established herself, amidst laughter and kind words, in a few hurriedly arranged rooms. The puritan citizens serenaded her through her first night with psalm tunes, and she thanked them for their kindness. The dreaded harlot of Babylon seemed only an innocent and graceful girl, throwing herself with confiding trust upon the loyalty and love of her subjects. Her mother's friends expected to be recalled to power. To the surprise of all men, she chose for her chief advisers her brother and Maitland. She issued a proclamation forbidding the Catholics to attempt changes in the established religion. For herself only she pleaded, rather than insisted, that the promise made to her by the Estates should be observed, and that for the present she might have her own service in the royal chapel. "What sour austerity could refuse a request so gracefully urged? The Master of Lindsay and the gentlemen of Fife might croak out texts that the idolator should die the death.' Knox might protest that one mass was more terrible to him than 10,000 armed men.' The Council were Scots as well as Protestants. They could not force the queen's conscience, and drive her back to France. Lord James Stuart stood on guard at the chapel door while mass was being sung. Lord John and Lord Robert, her other brothers, took charge of the priests. The puritan noblemen came in from the country full of spirited indignation. A few hours of Mary's presence charmed them into loyal toleration."-(Vol. i. p. 366.)

We have said Mr Froude gives up Queen Mary. He does more. Believing in the genuineness of the celebrated letters. and love sonnets said to have been sent by her to Bothwell, and published in Buchanan's "Detection," he paints her in the foul colours of an adultress, a traitress, and a murderess. In a foot-note he promises to prove the authenticity of this correspondence in a subsequent volume. We seriously question the historical fairness of this postponement of evidence. History, like science, must furnish its proofs as it advances; its bills are all payable at sight. Besides, the question has been already largely canvassed, not only in the older disser

tations of Robertson and Laing on the one hand, and those of Goodall, Whittaker, and Tytler on the other, but in the later investigations of M. Mignet, who is very hard on the unhappy queen, and those of Miss Strickland, in her "Lives of the Scottish Queens," who is quite fanatical in her defence, and of M. L. Wiesener, professor of history in Paris, in his recent work, "Marie Stuart et le Comte de Bothwell," who writes, in answer to M. Mignet, with great ingenuity and force of argument; so that if any point remains yet undiscovered, it might surely have been told in a few sentences. Granting that the proper place for treating this question at large belongs to that period of the history when the correspondence was laid before Elizabeth and her council, the simple fact that Prince Labanof, in his collection of "Lettres, Instructions, et Mémoires de Marie Stuart," which fill seven splendid quarto volumes, did not consider it necessary even to mention that correspondence as a piece of contemporary scandal, and that in a later publication he expresses his conviction that the pieces in question were pure fabrications,* demanded that Mr Froude should have said something to warrant the public confidence, which has been so greatly shaken, as to the genuineness of these documents, before weaving them into his narrative, and dipping his brush so deeply into them to complete his dark picture.

Be this as it may, the question is still sub judice. On the one hand, we have the character of Murray, of Knox, and of Buchanan, which the Popish and Jacobitical partizans of Mary have deemed it necessary, for her sake, to blacken and defame, but which we rejoice to see receiving justice at the hands of Mr Froude. It will be long, we trust, before the Scottish public at least can be induced to distrust the noble integrity of "The Good Regent," the gruff honesty of Knox, or the

* " Avant-Propos" to " Recherches Historiques," &c., par Wm. Tytler. Paris, 1860.

The starting-point of the prepossessions against Murray among the partizans of Mary is to be found in the allegation which, if well-founded, would certainly cast a shade over all his subsequent conduct, viz., that he insidiously betrayed to Elizabeth the secrets of his sister Mary in France, and was bribed by the English to intrigue for the purpose of intercepting her coming over to Scotland. It is amazing that Mr P. Fraser Tytler should have given credit and currency to this report, for which he has no other authority than the "some believed" of Camden (apud Kennet, i. 387), and the repetition of this "belief" by Keith, who yet has given a letter of Lethington, distinctly repudiating the charge of " meaning to debar her majesty from her kingdom, or that we should wish she should never come home, for that were the part of an unnatural subject'' (Keith, Ap. 92). Mr Tytler adds a letter from the State Paper Office, to which, he says triumphantly, "I owe the detection of Murray's intrigues with Elizabeth" (Hist. v. 179). This letter affords no such proof; and, as if to furnish an antidote, he inserts another from Throgmorton, who praises Murray for "dealing so plainly with the queen his sovereign," and refusing the bribe of a cardinal's hat rather than betray his religion (p. 182).

Conflicting Opinions on the subject of Mary's Guilt. 623

stern fidelity of Buchanan, or to believe that such men would be guilty of the double baseness of charging their queen with crimes of which they knew her to be innocent, and of fabricating documents to support their calumnies. Then we have the damaging testimonies of Crawford and French Paris, the one an attendant on Darnley, the other the servant of Bothwell, which seem to tally with the letters. And lastly, we have the letters themselves, pronounced, first by the Scottish Parliament, and next by the Conference at York, to be in the genuine handwriting of the queen. On the other hand, besides the persistent denial of them as her letters by Mary, we have the strange fact, hitherto unexplained, of the refusal, repeatedly made at different times by Elizabeth and her ministers, to communicate the original letters, or even copies of them, to the Queen of Scots and her commissioners, during the Conference at York, and on the 7th January 1569, when the Bishop of Ross and his colleagues were admitted into the presence of Queen Elizabeth, and demanded them of her in the name of Mary Stuart, a refusal which, Prince Labanof says, "clearly proves that Burleigh and the other English ministers knew well that the pieces, if produced, could not stand a serious examination." Another startling proof of the innocence of Mary has been lately discovered in a letter which the Countess of Lennox, the mother of the murdered Darnley, addressed to her some years before the death of that princess. This, with another letter of Mary to the Archbishop of Glasgow, proves that the Countess of Lennox acknowledged the injustice of the accusations raised by herself in 1568 against her royal daughter-in-law, at the instigation of Queen Elizabeth, became reconciled to the unhappy princess, and expressed her trust in God" that all shall be well; the treachery of your traitors is known better than before."*

In the midst of these conflicting facts and proofs, the mystery appears to have become darker and more complicated than ever. For our part, we see only one way of accounting for such a mass of contradictions. Our theory is a very simple one. It does not oblige us to pronounce on the genuineness of the famous letters and sonnets. It leaves the characters of the Reformers untouched. It saves even the memory of the hapless Queen of Scots from much of the black infamy which has gathered around it. And it serves, we think, to account for facts apparently irreconcilable, and for the extreme views entertained on both sides of the question by writers of un

* Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of Scotland," vol v. Miss Strickland thinks the letter of the Countess had been intercepted. Frince Labanof shews it was not ("Pieces et Documents relatifs au Comte de Bothwell," Pref., xv.). Mary's letter to the Archbishop of Glasgow is given in Keith's App., 145.

doubted probity and penetration. In short, looking only to the undoubted facts of the case during the disgraceful period of her history in question, our verdict would be that of "Temporary Insanity.'

In no other way can we account for a course of action, involving outrages on common decency, not to speak of queenly dignity, as unlike the irreproachable purity of her earlier life, as it stands diametrically opposed to the quiet propriety of its closing years. In the face of evidence to the contrary, drawn from undoubted sources, it would neither be common justice nor Christian charity to assume that she must have carried with her to Scotland the worst vices of the French court. The levities of the youthful queen were severely handled by Knox and Buchanan; and no wonder, for they saw them first in connection with a craft and fanaticism which, regarding her as the tool of the Guises, they could not fail to dread, and finally they saw them in the lurid light of the tragedy that followed. But, in point of fact, till that fearful morning, when Edinburgh was startled from its slumbers by the explosion of the lone house in the Kirk-of-Field, Mary had not betrayed in her outward deportment anything on which prejudice could raise a charge to her dishonour. And yet, as subsequent events prove, a baleful change had come over her whole character, mental and moral, for some time before. The first symptoms of this mental hallucination appeared after the assassination of Rizzio -a scene of horror fitted, in the state in which she then was, to have unhinged a stronger mind than that of Mary-after which the contempt which she had conceived for the silly Darnley* curdled into the gall of hate and revenge. Thenceforth, he became her bête noire; the sight of him became a torture; and in the mysterious process of derangement it assumed, at last, all the symptoms of monomania. She would mope for days in moody melancholy, declaring that "she wished she were dead." Some of her rude nobles engaged to “make her quit of him." The leading man in the conspiracy, Bothwell, mainly, it would appear, from his professions of sympathy with her under this mania, obtained a maligu and fatal influence over her. Her liaison with this detestable man was of itself a proof of mental alienation. "Brutal, coarse, ugly, some say one-eyed," a dissolute debauchee, without a virtue to redeem his native unsightliness, "one of the worst men alive," as the Duke of Bedford reported him, "and addicted to the most abominable vices," it is difficult to conceive an

The Cardinal of Lorraine called him un hutandeau-an obsolete term of contempt, denoting "a high-born quarrelsome coxcomb."-Strickland,

vol. iv., 108.

"Etait brutal, grossier, laid, et on ajoute borgne."-Wiesener, p. 82.

Evidences of her temporary Insanity.

625

object less likely to win the affections of the refined and fastidious Mary. Let us now look at the facts, too well attested, that she lent herself as the tool of this base man's designs; that she allowed him to use her as his decoy-bird, to bring his victim within his power; that she fawned on him, and cringed to him-to him the husband of another woman; that she should have waited on the man she hated till nearly the last moment, not leaving the house of death till an hour when she might even have been suspected of having herself lighted the fatal match! And then view the events which followed with such fearful rapidity, the delay in bringing the assassins to justice, Bothwell's farcical trial, her loading with honours the man who was the object of general suspicion and execration, the pretended гаре, the indecent haste with which, after his shameful divorce, she took to her bed the reputed murderer of her husband; events which filled Europe with horror, and her best friends, at home and abroad, with consternation. Let us look at these facts, and we need no love-letters to deepen the darkness of the picture. If these were indeed the productions of her own pen, they were the productions of a madwoman. They are no more like her other writings than night is to day. But neither was her conduct like that of Mary Stuart in her sound senses. The common people, driven to their wit's end, could only set it down to the influence of necromancy or diabolic potions. It resembles nothing so much in modern times as the cantrips of mesmerism. Shakespeare might have had the Scottish queen in his eye when describing, in his "Midsummer's Night's Dream," the moonstruck fascination of Titania, under which the fair princess falls madly in love with Bottom, the weaver, whom she finds transformed into an ugly brute.

Equally incompatible with the idea of sanity was the conduct of Mary when viewed in a political and religious light. That on coming to Scotland she regarded herself, and was regarded by her friends abroad, as the main prop of the Roman Catholic party, who looked to her succession to the English throne as the surest step to the restoration of popery, is beyond all doubt. How is this to be reconciled with her whole behaviour during the period we have assigned to the reign of mental delirium? The correspondence of Father Edmonds with Cardinal Laurea, testifies that all the hopes of Rome were annihilated with Darnley; and he blames the queen for her temporising policy, in not adventuring on the measures which had been prescribed by the Pope and urged by Darnley. The foreign ambassadors reported to their respective courts the story of the murder "with bated breath," utterly at a loss for a decent excuse, or even a feasible reason to account for the catholic queen renouncing