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 womans weapon was deceit.
She was the centre and pivot of innumerable intrigues. The fierce nobles looked on her as a means for procuring lands, office, and revenge on their feudal enemies. To the fiercer ministers she was an idolatress, who ought to die the death, and, meanwhile, must be thwarted and insulted. To France, Spain, and Austria she was a piece in the game of diplomatic chess. To the Pope she seemed an instrument that might win back both Scotland and England for the Church, while the English Catholics regarded her as either their lawful or their future Queen. To Elizabeth she was, naturally, and inevitably, and, in part, by her own fault, a deadly rival, whatever feline caresses might pass between them: gifts of Marys heart, in a heart-shaped diamond; Elizabeths diamond like a rock, a rock in which was no refuge. Yet Mary was of a nature so large and unsuspicious that, on the strength of a ring and a promise, she trusted herself to Elizabeth, contrary to the advice of her staunchest adherents. She was no natural dissembler, and with difficulty came to understand that others could be false. Her sense of honour might become perverted, but she had a strong native sense of honour.
One thing this woman wanted, a master. Even before Darnley and she were wedded, at least publicly, Randolph wrote, All honour that may be attributed unto any man by a wife, he hath it wholly and fully. In her authentic letters to Norfolk, when, a captive in England, she regarded herself as betrothed to him, we find her adopting an attitude of submissive obedience. The same tone pervades the disputed Casket Letters, to Bothwell, and is certainly in singular consonance with the later, and genuine epistles to Norfolk. But the tone if the Casket Letters are forged may have been borrowed from what was known of her early submission to Darnley.
The second dramatis persona is Darnley, The Young Fool. Concerning Darnley but little is recorded in comparison with what we know of Mary. He was the son, by the Earl of Lennox, a royal Stewart, of that daughter whom Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., and widow of James IV., bore to her second husband, the Earl of Angus. Darnleys father regarded himself as next to the Scottish crown, for the real nearest heir, the head of the Hamiltons, the Duke of Chatelherault, Lennox chose to consider as illegitimate. After playing a double and dishonest part in the troubled years following the death of James V., Lennox retired to England with his wife, a victim of the suspicions of Elizabeth.[6] The education of his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, seems to have been excellent, as far as the intellect and the body are concerned. The letter which, as a child of nine, he wrote to Mary Tudor, speaking of a work of his own, The New Utopia, is in the new Roman hand, carried to the perfection of copperplate. The Lennox MSS. say that the Queen was stricken with the dart of love by the comliness of his sweet behaviour, personage, wit, and vertuous qualities, as well in languages[7] and lettered sciencies, as also in the art of music, dancing, and playing on instruments. When his murderers had left his room at midnight, his last midnight, his chamber-child begged him to play, while a psalm was sung, but his hand, he replied, was out for the lute, so say the Lennox Papers. Physically he was a comely Prince of a fair and large stature, pleasant in countenance well exercised in martial pastimes upon horseback as any Prince of that age. The Spanish Ambassador calls him an amiable youth. But it is plain that the long lad, the gentil hutaudeau, with his girlish bloom, and early tendency to fulness of body, was a spoiled child. His mother, a passionate intriguer, kept this before him, that, as great-grandson of Henry VII., and as cousin of Mary Stuart, he should unite the two crowns. There were Catholics enough in England to flatter the pride of a future king, though now in exile. This Prince in partibus, like his far-away descendant, Prince Charles Edward, combined a show of charming manners, when he chose to charm, with an arrogant and violent petulance, when he deemed it safe to be insulting. At his first arrival in Scotland he won golden opinions, his courteous dealing with all men is well spoken of. As his favour with Mary waxed he dealt blows where he knew that they would be taken; he is said to have drawn his dagger on an official who brought him a disappointing message, and his foolish freedom of tongue gave Moray the alarm. It was soon prophesied that he could not continue long. To all honest men he is intolerable, and almost forgetful of her already, that has adventured so much for his sake. What shall become of her or what life with him she shall lead, that already taketh so much upon him as to control and command her, I leave it to others to think. So Randolph, the English Ambassador, wrote as early as May, 1565. She was blinded, transported, carried I know not whither or which way, to her own confusion and destruction: words of omen that were fulfilled.
Whether Elizabeth let Darnley go to Scotland merely for Marys entanglement, whether Mary fell in love with the handsome accomplished lad (as Randolph seems to prove) or not, are questions then, and now, disputed. The Lennox Papers, declaring that she was smitten by the arrow of love; and her own conduct, at first, make it highly probable that she entertained for the gentil hutaudeau a passion, or a passionate caprice.
Darnley, at least, acted like a new chemical agent in the development of Marys character. She had been singularly long-suffering; she had borne the insults and outrages of the extreme Protestants; she had leaned on her brother, Moray, and on Lethington; following or even leading these advisers to the ruin of Huntly, her chief coreligionist. Though constantly professing, openly to Knox, secretly to the Pope, her desire to succour the ancient Church, she was obviously regarded, in Papal circles, as slack in the work. She had been pliant, she had endured the long calculated delays of Elizabeth, as to her marriage, with patience; but, so soon as Darnley crossed her path, she became resolute, even reckless. Despite the opposition, interested, or religious, or based on the pretext of religion, which Moray and his allies offered, Mary wedded Darnley. She found him a petulant, ambitious boy; sullen, suspicious, resentful, swayed by the ambition to be a king in earnest, but too indolent in affairs for the business of a king.
At tennis, with Riccio, or while exercising his great horses, his favourite amusement, Darnley was pining to use his jewelled dagger. In the feverish days before the deed it is probable that he kept his courage screwed up by the use of stimulants, to which he was addicted. That he devoted himself to loose promiscuous intrigue injurious to his health, is not established, though, when her child was born, Mary warned Darnley that the babe was only too much his son, perhaps with a foreboding of hereditary disease. A satirist called Darnley the leper: leprosy being confounded with la grosse vérole. Mary, who had fainting fits, was said to be epileptic.
Darnley, according to Lennox, represented himself as pure in this regard, nor have we any valid evidence to the contrary. But his word was absolutely worthless.
Outraged and harassed, broken, at last, in health, in constant pain, expressing herself in hysterical outbursts of despair and desire for death, Mary needed no passion for Bothwell to make her long for freedom from the young fool. From his sick-bed in Glasgow, as we shall see, he sent, by a messenger, a cutting verbal taunt to the Queen; so his own friends declare, they who call Darnley that innocent lamb. It is not wonderful if, in an age of treachery and revenge, the character of Mary now broke down. I would not do it to him for my own revenge. My heart bleeds at it, she says to Bothwell, in the Casket Letter II., if that was written by her. But, whatever her part in it, the deed was done.
Darnley, according to Lennox, represented himself as pure in this regard, nor have we any valid evidence to the contrary. But his word was absolutely worthless.
Outraged and harassed, broken, at last, in health, in constant pain, expressing herself in hysterical outbursts of despair and desire for death, Mary needed no passion for Bothwell to make her long for freedom from the young fool. From his sick-bed in Glasgow, as we shall see, he sent, by a messenger, a cutting verbal taunt to the Queen; so his own friends declare, they who call Darnley that innocent lamb. It is not wonderful if, in an age of treachery and revenge, the character of Mary now broke down. I would not do it to him for my own revenge. My heart bleeds at it, she says to Bothwell, in the Casket Letter II., if that was written by her. But, whatever her part in it, the deed was done.
Of Bothwell, the third protagonist in the tragedy of Three, we have no portrait, and but discrepant descriptions. They who saw his body, not yet wholly decayed, in Denmark, reported that he must have been an ugly Scot, with red hair, mixed with grey before he died. Much such another was the truculent Morton.[8] Born in 1536 or 1537, Bothwell was in the flower of his age, about thirty, when Darnley perished. He was certainly not old enough to have been Marys father, as Sir John Skelton declared, for he was not six years her senior. His father died in 1556, and Bothwell came young into the Hepburn inheritance of impoverished estates, high offices, and wild reckless blood. According to Buchanan, Bothwell, in early youth, was brought up at the house of his great-uncle, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, who certainly was a man of profligate life. It is highly probable that Bothwell was educated in France.
Blockish or not, Bothwell had the taste of a bibliophile. One of two books from his library, well bound, and tooled with his name and arms, is in the collection of the University of Edinburgh. Another was in the Gibson Craig Library. The works are a tract of Valturin, on Military Discipline (Paris, 1555, folio), and French translations of martial treatises attributed to Vegetius, Sextus Julius, and Ælian, with a collection of anecdotes of warlike affairs (Paris, 1556, folio). The possession of books like these, in such excellent condition, is no proof of doltishness. Moreover, Bothwell appears to have read his CXX Histoires concernans le faite guerre. The evidence comes to us from a source which discredits the virulent rhetoric of Buchanans ally.
It was the cue of Marys foes to represent Bothwell as an ungainly, stupid, cowardly, vicious monster: because, he being such a man, what a wretch must the Queen be who could love him! Which love, whoever saw not, and yet hath seen him, will perhaps think it incredible But yet here there want no causes, for there was in them both a likeness, if not of beauty or outward things, nor of virtues, yet of most extream vices.[9] Buchanan had often celebrated, down to December 1566, Marys extreme virtues. To be sure his poem, recited shortly before Darnleys death, may have been written almost as early as Jamess birth, in readiness for the feast at his baptism, and before Marys intrigue with Bothwell could have begun. In any case, to prove Bothwells cowardice, some ally of Buchanans cites his behaviour at Carberry Hill, where he wishes us to believe that Bothwell showed the white feather of Marys pretty venereous pidgeon. As a witness, he cites du Croc, the French Ambassador, an aged and sagacious man. To du Croc he has appealed, to du Croc he shall go. That Ambassador writes: He (Bothwell) told me that there must be no more parley, for he saw that the enemy was approaching, and had already crossed the burn. He said that, if I wished to resemble the man who tried to arrange a treaty between the forces of Scipio and Hannibal, their armies being ready to join in battle, like the two now before us, and who failed, and, wishing to remain neutral, took a point of vantage, and beheld the best sport that ever he saw in his life, why then I should act like that man, and would greatly enjoy the spectacle of a good fight. Bothwells memory was inaccurate, or du Croc has misreported his anecdote, but he was certainly both cool and classical on an exciting occasion.
Du Croc declined the invitation; he was not present when Bothwell refused to fight a champion of the Lords, but he goes on: I am obliged to say that I saw a great leader, speaking with great confidence, and leading his forces boldly, gaily, and skilfully I admired him, for he saw that his foes were resolute, he could not be sure of the loyalty of half of his own men, and yet he was quite unmoved.[10] Bothwell, then, was neither dolt, lout, nor coward, as Buchanans ally wishes us to believe, for the purpose of disparaging the taste of a Queen, Buchanans pupil, whose praises he had so often sung.
In an age when many gentlemen and ladies could not sign their names, Bothwell wrote, and wrote French, in a firm, yet delicate Italic hand, of singular grace and clearness.[11] His enemies accused him of studying none but books of Art Magic in his youth, and he may have shared the taste of the great contemporary mathematician, Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor of Logarithms. Both Marys friends and enemies, including the hostile Lords in their proclamations, averred that Bothwell had won her favour by unlawful means, philtres, witchcraft, or what we call Hypnotism. Such beliefs were universal: Ruthven, in his account of Riccios murder, tells us that he gave Mary a ring, as an antidote to poison (not that he believed in it), and that both she and Moray took him for a sorcerer. On a charge of sorcery did Moray later burn the Lyon Herald, Sir William Stewart, probably basing the accusation on a letter in which Sir William confessed to having consulted a prophet, perhaps Napier of Merchistoun, the father, not the inventor of Logarithms.[12] Quite possibly Bothwell may really have studied the Black Art in Cornelius Agrippa and similar authors. In any case it is plain that, as regards culture, the author of Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, the man familiar with the Court of France, where he had held command in the Scots Guards, and had probably known Ronsard and Brantôme, must have been a rara avis of culture among the nobles at Holyrood. So far, then, Marys love for him, if love she entertained, was the reverse of incredible. It did not need to be explained by a common possession of extreme vices. The author, as usual, overstates his case, and proves too much: Lesley admits that Bothwell was handsome, an opinion emphatically contradicted by Brantôme.
Bothwell had the charm of recklessness to an unexampled degree. He was fierce, passionate, unyielding, strong, and, in the darkest of Marys days, had been loyal. He had won for her what Knollys tells us that she most prized, victory. A greater contrast could not be to the false fleeting Darnley, the bully with a heart of wax. In him Mary had more than enough of bloom and youthful graces: she could master him, and she longed for a master. If then she loved Bothwell, her love, however wicked, was not unnatural or incredible. He had been loved by many women, and had ruined all of them.
Among the other persons of the play, Moray is foremost, Marys natural brother, the son of her whom James V. loved best, and, it was said, still dreamed of while wooing a bride in France. Moray is an enigma. History sees him, as in Lethingtons phrase, looking through his fingers, looking thus at Riccios and at Darnleys murders. These fingers hide the face. He was undeniably a sound Protestant: only for a brief while, in Marys early reign, was he sundered from Knox. In war he was, as he aimed at being, a Captain in Israel, cool, courageous, and skilled. That he was extremely acquisitive is certain. Born a royal bastard, and trained for the Church, he clung as Commendator to the Churchs property which he held as a layman. His enormous possessions in land, collected partly by means that sailed close to the wind, partly from the grants of Mary, excited the rash words of Darnley, that they were too large.