THE MURDER OF RICCIO.
The introduction of Riccio by Mr. Froude (vol. viii. p. 120) is a good specimen of his best art. There is an accusation in every line, an insinuation in every word; yet when he is through, the reader is left in total ignorance of the Italian's real position. Mr. Froude calls him Ritzio, which is a piece of affectation. The name has heretofore been written Rizzio and Riccio. Ritzio, to the English eye, it is true, very nearly represents the Italian pronunciation of Rizzio. The man's name was Riccio, as is well determined by one letter of his, and two of his brother Joseph, all still in existence and perfectly accessible to Mr. Froude.
His age, variously stated from thirty to forty, is never put at less than thirty. Mr. Froude gives no figure, and calls him "the youth;" by which you may, if you choose, understand eighteen or twenty. His real employment is concealed, and at p. 247, vol. viii., he is called "a wandering musician." Riccio was a man of solid acquirements, able and accomplished. He succeeded to the post formerly held by Raulet—that of secretary for the queen's French correspondence—and was thoroughly versed in the languages as well as in the troubled politics of the day. He was, moreover, devotedly loyal, and inspired Mary with entire confidence in his integrity. Sir Walter Scott (History of Scotland) says that a person like him, "skilled in languages and in business," was essential to the queen, and adds, "No such agent was likely to be found in Scotland, unless she had chosen a Catholic priest, which would have given more offence to her Protestant subjects," etc.
"The queen," says Knox, "usit him for secretary in things that appertainit to her secret affairs in France and elsewhere."
"That he was old, deformed, and strikingly ugly, has been generally accepted by historians," says Burton.
Having, it appears, no access to these three Scotch historians, Mr. Froude is thrown on his own resources and evolves, "He became a favorite of Mary—he was an accomplished musician; he soothed her hours of solitude with love-songs," etc., etc.
In his statement of the circumstances of the plot for the murder, Mr. Froude dwells complacently on every injurious insinuation against Mary Stuart. Referring to a calumnious invention, falsely attributed to Darnley, (vol. viii. p. 248,) he is of opinion that "Darnley's word was not a good one; he was capable of inventing such a story;" that "Mary's treatment of him went, it is likely, no further than coldness or contempt;" but nevertheless he strives to convey the worst impression against her. If Mr. Froude has a "vivid pen," he also has a light one. He glides delicately over the character of the conspiracy to kill Riccio, and manages to veil the real motives. Riccio was assassinated on the ninth of March. Nearly a month previous, on the thirteenth of February, Randolph writes to Leicester, for Elizabeth's eye, (the letter need not be sought for in Froude,)
"I know that there are practices in hand, contrived between father and son, (Lennox and Darnley,) to come to the crown against her (Mary Stuart's) will. I know that if that take effect which is intended, David, (Riccio,) with the consent of the king, shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many things grievouser and worse than these are brought to my ears; yea, of things intended against her own person, which, because I think better to keep secret than to write to Mr. Secretary, I speak of them but now to your lordship."
And yet all this was but a part of the conspiracy.
Randolph is an authority against whom objection from Mr. Froude is impossible. Nevertheless, he ignores this letter and many others fully confirming it, (vol. viii. p. 254,) thrusts out of sight the real motives, which were political, and industriously works up notorious inventions aimed at Mary Stuart's character.
Looking at it as a mere work of art, and without reference to the facts, the murder scene is admirably described by Mr. Froude. (Vol. viii. p. 257, et seq.) One serious drawback is his insatiable desire for embellishment. For the mere purpose of description none is needed. The subject is full to overflowing of the finest dramatic material. The result of Mr. Froude's narration is very remarkable. He skilfully manages to centre the reader's sympathy and admiration on the assassin Ruthven, and, with device of phrase and glamour of type, places the sufferer and victim of an infamous brutality in the light of a woman who is merely undergoing some well-merited chastisement. The whole scene as pictured rests on the testimony of the leading assassin, (Ruthven,) from a London editio expurgata; for Chalmers shows (vol. ii. p. 352) that the account given by Ruthven and Morton, dated April 30th, is the revised and corrected copy of what they sent to Cecil on the 2d of April, asking him to make such changes as he saw fit before circulating it in Scotland and England. Their note of April 2d still exists; but Mr. Froude does not allude to it. Thus we have the story from the chief murderer, corrected by Cecil and embellished by Mr. Froude, who, while admitting that "the recollection of a person who had just been concerned in so tremendous a scene was not likely to be very exact," (vol. viii. p. 261,) nevertheless adopts the version of that person in preference to all others. Why not exercise the most rudimentary prudence and plainest judgment by controlling Ruthven's recital by that of another?—for there are several. And if, after all, we must perforce have Ruthven's, why not give it as it is, sparing us such inventions as "turning on Darnley as on a snake," and "could she have trampled him into dust upon the spot, she would have done it." Mr. Froude is all himself here. "Catching sight of the empty scabbard at his side, she asked him where his dagger was. He said he did not know. 'It will be known hereafter; it shall be dear blood to some of you if David's be spilt.'" This is a specimen of able workmanship. According to Keith, Mary's answer was, "It will be known hereafter." According to Ellis, Mary had previously said to Ruthven, "It shall be dear blood to some of you if David's be spilt." Now, let the reader observe that Mr. Froude takes these two phrases, found in two different authors, addressed separately to two different persons, reverses the order in which they are spoken, and puts them into one sentence, which he makes Mary address to Darnley! Do you see why so much industry and ingenuity should be exerted? Because in this form the phrase is a threat of murder; and thus the foundation is laid broad and deep in the reader's mind for the belief that from that moment Mary has a design upon Darnley's life.[56]
One thing Mr. Froude does state correctly. We mean Mary's words when told that Riccio was dead. In her fright, anguish, and horror she ejaculated, "Poor David! good and faithful servant! May God have mercy on your soul!" To those who know the human heart, this involuntary description of the precise place poor David occupied in Mary's esteem is more than answer to Mr. Froude's indecent note at page 261, and his malevolent insinuations on all his pages. Mary struggled to the window to speak to armed citizens who had flocked to her assistance. "Sit down!" cried one of the ruffian lords to her. "If you stir, you shall be cut into collops, and flung over the walls." A prisoner in the hands of these brutal assassins, after the unspeakable outrages to which she had been subjected, Mr. Froude yet has the admirable art of placing her before his readers in the light of a wicked woman deprived of her liberty for her own good. When night came, Ruthven called Darnley away, and the queen was left to her rest in the scene of the late tragedy; and, adds Mr. Froude with beautiful equanimity, "The ladies of her court were forbidden to enter, and Mary Stuart was locked alone into her room, amidst the traces of the fray, to seek such repose as she could find." This is true, and in that blood-stained place she passed the night alone.
"They had caged their bird," goes festively on our historian; but they "knew little of the temper which they had undertaken to control." ("Undertaken to control" is here positively delicious!) "Behind that grace of form there lay a nature like a panther's, merciless and beautiful." (Vol. viii. 265.) We have seen a panther's skin admired, but we never before heard that the animal had a beautiful nature. Such are the reflections suggested to Mr. Froude's sympathetic mind by the horrible scenes he has just described.[57] One instinctively trembles for those lambs, the lords, with such a "panther" near them. All this time Mr. Froude takes no further notice of Mary's physical condition than to treat the necessary results, which, almost miraculously, were not fatal, as "trick and policy." (Vol. viii. 266.) The queen was then in the sixth month of her pregnancy, and the possible consequences of the horrible tragedy thus thrust suddenly before her eyes were not unforeseen. The conspirators in their bonds had expressly provided for the contingency of her death. When Mary escapes from the band of assassins, Mr. Froude would have been utterly inconsolable but for the fact that her midnight ride gives him (vol. viii. p. 270) the opportunity of executing (tempo agitato) a spirited fantasia on his historic lyre in his description of the gallop of the fleeing cavalcade.[58] It sounds like a faint echo of Bürger's Lenore. Then he gives credit without stint to Mary's iron fortitude and intellectual address. He is entirely too liberal in this regard. Instead of riding "away, away, past Seton," she stopped there for refreshments and the escort of two hundred armed cavaliers under Lord Seton, who was advised of her coming. Then, too, the letter she "wrote with her own hand, fierce, dauntless, and haughty," to Elizabeth, and which Mr. Froude so minutely describes—"The strokes thick, and slightly uneven from excitement, but strong, firm, and without sign of trembling!" This insanity for the picturesque and romantic would wreck a far better historian. The prosaic fact is, that although, as Mr. Froude states, the letter may be seen in the Rolls House, Mary Stuart did not write it. It was written by an amanuensis, the salutation and signature alone being in her hand. This question was the subject of some controversy, during the past year, in Paris and London, and Mr. Wiesener, a distinguished French historical writer, requested Messrs. Joseph Stevenson and A. Crosby, of the Record Office, to examine the letter and give their opinion. Their reply was, "The body of the document is most certainly not in Mary's handwriting." But, after all, there was no occasion for controversy, and still less for Mr. Froude's blunder. If he had ever read the letter, he would have seen that Mary wrote, "Nous pensions vous écrire cette lettre de notre propre main afin de vous faire mieux comprendre, etc. Mais de fait nous sommes si fatiguée et si mal à l'aise, tant pour avoir couru vingt milles en cinq heures de nuit etc., que nous ne sommes pas en état de le faire comme nous l'aurions souhaité." It was her intention to have written this letter with her own hand, but on account of fatigue and illness could not as she would have desired. "Twenty miles in two hours," says Mr. Froude. Twenty miles in five hours, modestly writes Mary Stuart. Fortunately, we have been warned by Mr. Froude against testimony from that "suspected source!"
We close, for the present, with one specimen (not by any means the worst) of Mr. Froude's historical handicraft, which exemplifies his peculiar system of citation. He professes to give the substance of a letter of Mary Stuart published in Labanoff. (Vol. vii. p. 300.) Here is the letter, side by side with Mr. Froude's version of it. We select this out of numerous cases, for the reason that Labanoff is here more readily accessible than other authorities treated in like manner by Mr. Froude.
Mr. Froude's Statement
of the contents of a letter of April 4th, 1566, from Mary Stuart to Queen Elizabeth. (See vol. viii. p. 282.)
"In an autograph letter of passionate gratitude, Mary Stuart placed herself, as it were, under her sister's protection; she told her that, in tracing the history of the late conspiracy, she had found that the lords had intended to imprison her for life; and if England or France came to her assistance, they had meant to kill her. She implored Elizabeth to shut her ears to the calumnies which they would spread against her, and with engaging frankness she begged that the past might be forgotten; she had experienced too deeply the ingratitude of those by whom she was surrounded to allow herself to be tempted any more into dangerous enterprises; for her own part, she was resolved never to give offence to her good sister again; nothing should be wanting to restore the happy relations which had once existed between them; and should she recover safely from her confinement, she hoped that in the summer Elizabeth would make a progress to the north, and that at last she might have an opportunity of thanking her in person for her kindness and forbearance.
"This letter was sent by the hands of a certain Thornton, a confidential agent of Mary Stuart, who had been employed on messages to Rome. 'A very evil and naughty person, whom I pray you not to believe,' was Bedford's credential for him in a letter of the 1st of April to Cecil. He was on his way to Rome again on this present occasion.
"The public in Scotland supposed that he was sent to consult the pope on the possibility of divorcing Darnley, and it is remarkable that the Queen of Scots at the close of her own letter desired Elizabeth to give credit to him on some secret matter which he would communicate to her. She perhaps hoped that Elizabeth would now assist her in the dissolution of a marriage which she had been so anxious to prevent."
Translation of the Original Letter.
"Edinburgh, April 4, 1566."
[The opening paragraph of formal compliment acknowledges reception of Elizabeth's "favorable dispatch" by Melville.]
"When Melville arrived, he found me but lately escaped from the hands of the greatest traitors on earth, in the manner in which the bearer will communicate, with a true account of their most secret plot, which was, that even in case the escaped lords and other nobles, aided by you or by any other prince, undertook to rescue me, they would cut me in pieces and throw me over the wall. Judge for yourself the cruel undertakings of subjects against her who can sincerely boast that she never did them harm. Since then, however, our good subjects have counselled with us, ready to offer their lives in support of justice; and we have, therefore, returned to this city to chastise some of its people guilty of this great crime.
"Meantime, we remain in this castle, as our messenger will more fully give you to understand.
"Above all other things, I would especially pray you carefully to see that your agents on the Border comply with your good intentions toward me, and, abiding by our treaty of peace, expel those who have sought my life from their territory, where the leaders in this noted act are as well received as if your intention were the worst possible, (la pire du monde,) and the very reverse of what I know it to be.
"I have also heard that the Count (Earl) of Morton is with you. I beg of you to arrest and send him to me, or at least compel him to return to Scotland, by depriving him of safeguard in England. Doubtless he will not fail to make false statements to excuse himself; statements which you will find neither true nor probable. I ask of you, my good sister, to oblige me in all these matters, with the assurance that I have experienced so much ingratitude from my own people that I shall never offend by a similar fault. And to fully affirm our original friendship, I would ask of you in any event (quoique Dieu m'envoie) to add the favor of standing as godmother for my child. I moreover hope that, if I should recover by the month of July, and you should make your progress as near to my territory as I am informed you will, to go, if agreeable, and thank you myself, which above all things I desire to do. (Then follow apologies for bad writing, for which, she says, her condition must excuse her, the usual compliments in closing a letter, and wishes for Elizabeth's health and prosperity.)
"Postscript. I beseech your kindness in a matter I have charged the bearer to ask you for me; and furthermore, I will soon write you specially, (et au reste je vous depécherai bientôt exprès,) to thank you and to know your intention, if it pleases you, to send me some other minister, whom I may receive as resident, who would be more desirous of promoting our friendship than Randal[59] has been found to be."
We leave the reader to form his own estimate of this method of writing history. Instead of a letter of "passionate gratitude," written spontaneously, as insinuated, it turns out to be the answer to a dispatch (whether written or verbal, it matters not) transmitted by Elizabeth through Melville. Mary's attitude and language are dignified and independent, and the missive, so far from having any prayer for forbearance in its tone, is plainly one of complaint and warning to Elizabeth, couched, it is true, in terms of politeness. The main subject, "above all other things," is the hospitable reception accorded to Riccio's murderers in England, and Elizabeth is delicately but emphatically reminded of her duty and of the violation of it by her border agents. The passages of Mr. Froude's version marked in italics have no existence in Mary's letter, and are of his own invention. Mary Stuart says that she has experienced so much ingratitude from her own (people) that she would never offend any one by similarly sinning. (J'ai tant eprouvé l'ingratitude des miens que je n'offenserai jamais de semblable péché.) Mr. Froude makes of this that she had experienced too deeply the ingratitude, etc., "to allow herself to be tempted anymore into dangerous enterprises."
What dangerous enterprises? The murder of Riccio? Was she guilty of that too? Was it her midnight escape? Mr. Froude alone has the secret! And then the postscript? Randolph had not only offended, but deeply injured her, and she wishes Elizabeth to understand that he must not be sent back to Scotland.
It is found "remarkable" that Mary, in her postscript, desires Elizabeth to receive communication of some verbal matter (not secret, as Mr. Froude states) from the messenger. But the same request occurs twice in the body of the letter. Mr. Froude is, of course, accurately informed as to the hidden meaning of the postscript, and settles the matter with what "public opinion supposed," and his usual "perhaps."
This is also an invention of Mr. Froude. He supposes the supposition! Then, too, his "evil and naughty person" is uncalled for; for we know that it was Bedford's business, as it is Mr. Froude's calling, to judge any messenger of Mary Stuart to be "evil and naughty." In all this, the intelligent reader will see that, as at page 261, vol. viii., Mr. Froude lays the foundation of a plan of revenge by Mary against Darnley, so he here strives to fasten upon her the resolution of obtaining a divorce, all going to make cumulative evidence to be used when we come to the Darnley murder. "Deep, sir, deep!"
But there is a more serious aspect to this matter. For three centuries this Mary Stuart question has been a vexed one among historians, and the never-ending theme of acrimonious controversy. What prospect is there of reaching any solution if the subject continues to be treated as we find it in the work before us?
So far from settling any question in dispute, or even solving any of the numerous secondary problems underlying the main issue, Mr. Froude, by his violent partisanship, tortured citation, paltering with the sense while tampering with the text of authorities, attribution of false motives and a scandalous wealth of abusive epithets, greatly grieves the most judicious of those who condemn Mary Stuart, inspires with renewed confidence those who believe that she was a woman more sinned against than sinning, and begets the conviction that the cause must be bad indeed which needs such handling.
DION AND THE SIBYLS.
A CLASSIC, CHRISTIAN NOVEL.
BY MILES GERALD KEON, COLONIAL SECRETARY, BERMUDA, AUTHOR OF "HARDING THE MONEY-SPINNER," ETC.