And yielded to its will;
Giving all, forgiving all,
True and tender still.’
‘Happy’s the wooing that’s not long of doing,’ says a hopeful Scottish proverb. ‘Marry in haste, and repent at leisure,’ is a wholesome English warning, that may be considered the converse of the above.
‘Some, by construction, deem these words misplaced,
At leisure marry, and repent in haste,’
quoth Congreve, or one of the old dramatists. We may take our choice of maxims on the important topic of wedlock, satisfied that, ponder on it as we may, it is a matter in which blind fortune concerns herself more than in any other of our human affairs. Yes, ‘your marriage goes by destiny,’ no doubt, and sometimes the fates draw you off nectar, and sometimes wholesome bitters, and sometimes weak, insipid, flat, and stale small beer. Under any circumstances it is better not to pull a wry face at the draught. If the fairest woman the earth ever saw could not make sure of conjugal happiness, who has a right to complain?
Darnley was now Duke of Albany—the handsomest Duke in Christendom—and on the evening before her nuptials his affianced bride had somewhat prematurely caused him to be proclaimed King of Scotland. Two religions had prepared to consecrate the tie; the Pope’s dispensation, inasmuch as the lovers were blood relations, had been obtained from Rome, and the banns by which, according to the Reformed Persuasion ‘Harry Duke of Albany and Earl of Ross should be united to Mary, by the grace of God, Queen of Scots, and Sovereign of the Realm,’ had been proclaimed in the Parish Church of the Canongate.
The Queen had escaped the plot laid against her by her enemies at Leslie House, and, it is needless to say, how royal favour and ladies’ smiles were showered upon the daring rider who foundered ‘Wanton Willie’ for ever by the speed with which he brought his timely intelligence to Perth, a speed that enabled the Queen to sweep down to her capital with a strong, well-mounted escort, in advance of all the preparations made for her capture. She had quelled an insurrection at St Leonard’s Craigs since then; she had strengthened her party by all the means at her disposal, and even striven hard to listen without anger to the ill-timed remonstrances of Elizabeth, forwarded through Randolph, who, somewhat to his dismay, and much, to his disgust, found his importance waning, hour by hour, at the Scottish Court.