BOOKS.

MORE ABOUT MARY STUART.*

Ws wonder how much reality there is in the feeling about Mary Queen of Scots which now and again keeps cropping up to the surface of contemporary literature and modern life. There is still enough vitality about the legend, which has now become very little else, to inspire the amiable handful of enthusiasts who wear the Stuart rose, and still believe in

• The Tragedy of Fotheringay, founded on the Journal of D. Bourgoing, Physician to Mary Queen of EC obi, and en the Published MS. Documents. By the

Hon. Mrs. Maxwell t cott of ebbotefold. Adam and Canes' Mark. 1895. the revival of that ancient specimen of a royal family. We suspect that at the bottom of that tradition larks a kind of longing for a race with a home-bred name, which might hold

its own with the high-strung pride of the Hapsburgs and Romanoffs and Hohenzollerns, and carry with it a less German sound than Guelphs can bear. But the adherents to the faith seem to forget that, as a matter of fact, our present Queen is, through direct descent, probably the nearest representative of the Stuarts now living. As to the rights and wrongs of the story of Mary, so long endeared to us by the pens of dramatists and romancers, as well as historians, allowed to give their imagination on such a matter as full play as the others, we suppose it will always be a moot-question whether

she was ange ou demon, the probability being that she was neither. One of the most puzzling features of her personality is the tradition of great beauty that she left behind her, whereas all her pictures, excepting only the one in Edinburgh Castle, agree in representing her as a bard-favoured and rather forbidding woman. Certainly the frontispiece at-

tached to the volume before us, taken as we are told from the memorial portrait in the possession of the trustees of Muir College, Aberdeen, quite carries out the latter idea. Her sorrows and her wrongs are of course, or ought to be, independent of anything like personal appearance ; never-- theless, we cannot but feel as we set the portrait down, that this was not a face to conjure with. It does not look sorrow-

ful even, only ill-tempered. We prefer to believe with the- romancers in the Mary of Schiller or of Walter Scott in his.

delightful Abbot, still more perhaps in the sweet Princess of Bdranger's fascinating song, which probably came nearer

the truth than anything else in representing her as French of the French at heart, with all her tastes and longings and regrets on the other side of the Channel, far away from stolid England and " l'inculte Cal6donie " :—

" From sceptred pomp and jewelled sheen Undazzled turns my backward glance ; I only wished to be a Queen,

To queen it o'er my darling France."

The blood-stains of Holyrood, and the mysteries of Rizzio and Darnley, have, and always must have, more of romance than of reality about them ; and Swinburne's Bothwell speaks to us when State-papers will not. Those honourable documents seem to plead with us in vain for any re-hearing of the old

case, which seems to have been given up as " not proven " either way, before Mrs. Maxwell Scott of Abbotsford, with all the credit that may attach to the legendary and historic- name, tries with the aid of her Scotch publishers, to make the matter live for us again. However, she cannot resist the spell, which in ber case takes the shape of giving to the old story a new but purely sensational name.

The Tragedy of Fotheringay would, in spite of itself, look better on the title-page of a play or a poem than on a professed

appendix to the chain of historical discovery and evidence. The main purpose of the work is to present Mary in the light of a martyr for the Roman Catholic faith, and the

opposite of the Protestant champion, Elizabeth, who had nothing so much at heart as Mary's conversion. If she had but consented to that, she might have been set free. We confess that we cannot believe this. Of course it is possible that a change of faith might have made Mary comparatively,' harmless, whereas it is certain that her life and presence as a

Catholic were a standing menace to Elizabeth's crown and person. What we do believe, is that the Queen really shrank for a very long time from the execution of Mary, not from

the desire to torture her—to which the victim set down the delay—but from an unfeigned reluctance to proceed to the extremity. But, from her point of view, it had to be done. Oar own feeling is, we fear, that both these historical ladies hated each other very cordially, and behaved very badly ; and that, had the situations been reversed, Catholic Mary would have sent Protestant Elizabeth to the block, not with the same light heart, but with the same heavy heart; and that, as times went, there would not

have been much else to be done. Both in their turn and time lived between axe and crown ; and the turn of the tide which whelmed the one would otherwise have sunk the other. There was a resemblance between the characters of the day

as between their positions. As it was said of Byron's heroines that a change of circumstances would have solaced Gulnare with Medora's lute, or armed Medora with the dagger of Gulnare, so, we believe, that if religion was to do it, Mary

would have been just as instant for Elizabeth's conversion, and Elizabeth just as determined to die for her Church.

All this having been said, however, the pathos of poor Mary's figure remains the same. It is the victim, and not the conqueror, who retains the sympathies of history, what- ever compensation that may be for a position so unpleasingly reversed at the time. So we can linger again, if we wish it, over the last stage of " Mary Stuart's weary pilgrimage," and the Sunday, September 25tb, 1586, when she passed through the gloomy gateway of Fotheringay Castle, and " bade farewell to hope and to life." Catherine of Arragon so dreaded the name of the place that she refused to go there unless bound with cart-ropes :—

" Tradition, often kinder than history, asserts that James VI., after his accession to the English Throne, destroyed the castle ; and though it is no longer possible to credit him with this act of filial love or remorse, time has obliterated almost every trace of the once firm fortress. A green mound, an isolated mass of masonry, and a few thistles, are all that now remain to mark the scene of Mary's last sufferings."

And in a characteristic little note Mrs. Scott informs us that the thistle is still to be found, both in England and Scotland, growing near all the places in which Mary resided or was imprisoned. Likewise, we suspect, in a great many where she was not. It is from the journal of Queen Mary's last physician, Dominique Bourgoing, published by M. Chante- lauze, in 1876, that Mrs. Maxwell Scott derives the informa- tion which gives her book what it possesses of the merit of novelty. It recounts, as she tells us, the events of the last seven months of Mary's life, informs us of details hitherto unknown, and gives an interesting report of the trial, of whidh he was an eye-witness :-

"Taken together with the letters of Sir Amyas Paulet, which, although written in a very different spirit, agree in the main with Bourgoing's narrative, the journal presents us with a complete picture of the daily life of the captive Queen and the inmates of Fotheringay. In the preface to his valuable book M. Chantelauze tells us of the happy acquisition of the MS. copy of Bourgoing's journal at Cluny, discusses the proof of its authenticity, and refers us to the passage in Queen Mary's last letter to Pope Sixtus V., which we must consider as Bourgoing's credentials. Vous avez,' writes Mary, ` le vrai recit de la fasson de ma derniere prise, et toutes les procedures contre moy et par ploy, afire qu'entendant la verite, les calomnies que lea ennemys de l'Eglise me vonedront imposer puissent etre par vous refutees et in verite oonnue : et h cet effet ai je vers vous envoys ce pasteur, requerant pour la fin votre saints Wnediction.' " The pathetic picture preserves its colouring throughout. Mary, at all events, always declares that were the positions reversed, she would not for a crown's ransom do her cousin Elizabeth any harm at all, while steadily maintaining her own position in the matter :— " I have offered myself to maintain the rights of my sister Queen Elizabeth as being the eldest, but I have no scruples of conscience in desiring the second rank, as being the legitimate and nearest heir. I am the daughter of James V., King of Scot- land, and grand-daughter of Henry VII. This cannot be taken from me by any law or council, assembly or judgment, nor conse- quently can my rights."

How sadly it always reads, this helpless protest of right, real or supposed, against might,—this melancholy record of splendid and banished Royalty : Katharine of Arragon pro-

testing in Shakespeare's pages, Marie Antoinette hounded down in France, Queen Caroline tracked and spied upon, with the endless heimtveh of the poor transplanted spirits. Truly it is a price to pay for crowns and their attributes. Cruel,

indeed, must have been the pinings of this French-bred nature, bred up in its atmosphere of gallantry and guidance com- bined, crushed out by the surroundings of the bitter North, preached to death by wild fanatics for so-called freedom of thought, and in the hands of a woman infinitely more clever in statecraft than herself. For her cousin Elizabeth Mary was no match at all ; and though we have said that we fully believe the English Queen's delay in bringing the sen- tence to bear to have been due to a genuine shrinking from the extreme measure, rather than to any taste for elaborate torture, still the record of the delay reads, as it always read, very cruelly. Would any real harm have been done if the poor little caged bird had been set free for a French flight ; would the daughter of James V. have accepted the position ; or would she have insisted on remaining on the spot till her fate became inevitable again ? As to the proposed assassi- nation of Elizabeth, there really does not seem to have been any colourable evidence whatever of that. But " the Dean said when it was all over "—who has not got Fronde's dramatic picture in his mind?—

"' And eo perish all her enemies!' Her head was grey as one of seventy years of age, polled very short, her face being so much altered immediately from the form she had when she was alive as few could remember for her dead face ; she glisped after her head was cut off by the space of half a quarter of an hour, and after the body lying there headless bleeding, my Lord of Kent standing by it, said with a loud voice. This be the end and reward of all that hate the gospel and her Majesty's government.' Then one of the executioners pulling off her stockings, her little, waiting dog was got under her clothes, which could not be gotten forth but by force, which afterwards came and lay betwixt her head and her shoulders, which, being imbued with her blood, was carried away and washed, and the executioners departed with money for their pains, and not leaving any one thing that belonged to her, either of her apparel or any other thing that was hers. And so the dead body and the head was carried by the sheriff and his men into the great chamber, lying there ready for the chirurgeons to embalme her."

And so for ever and for ever. So through the ages the acts of the royal tragedy wear on, with the variations of time and of place. This was one of the most picturesque of the tragedy's victims, but not more really pathetic than the latter-day Czar in the nets of the Nihilists, or the chosen President of a people the mark of an assassin's hand. Mary Stuart may be praying for England's conversion now, as some would have us to believe that Joan of Arc is. But it would seem to be the bounden duty of those of other views—for the glory of the gospel and her Majesty's Government—to pray that the good ladies may not be listened to. That light will come out of it all some day or another—on this poor, stricken, wandering, helpless world—is the one and only hope in which all may bow their heads to agree.