Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Henry Glassford Bell

O place and greatness! millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee! Volumes of report Run with these false and most contrarious guests Upon thy doings! Thousand ’scapes of wit Make thee the father of their idle dream, And rack thee in their fancies.—— Shakespeare.

Considering the very opposite opinions which have been long entertained, regarding the character and conduct of the Queen of Scots, no memoirs of her life would be complete, that did not contain some examination of the evidence upon which they who believe her guilty principally rest their conviction. This evidence consists of eight Letters, eleven Love-Sonnets, and one Marriage Contract, all alleged to have been written in the Queen’s own hand, and addressed to the Earl of Bothwell. In corroboration of these, another Contract, said to have been written by the Earl of Huntly, and signed by the Queen; and the Confessions and Depositions of some of the persons who were known to be implicated in Bothwell’s guilt, were likewise produced. Of the Letters, two were supposed to have been written from Glasgow, at the time Mary went thither to visit Darnley when he was ill, and are intended to prove her criminal connection with Bothwell; two or three from the Kirk-of-Field, for the purpose of facilitating the arrangements regarding the murder; and the rest after that event, and before her abduction, to show that the whole scheme of the pretended ravishment was preconcerted between them. The precise time at which it is pretended the Sonnets were composed, does not appear; but expressions in them prove, that it must have been posterior to the Queen’s residence at Dunbar. The Contract of Marriage, in Mary’s own hand, though without date, must have been written very soon after Darnley’s death, and contained a promise never to marry any one but Bothwell. The Contract, said to be in Huntly’s hand, was dated at Seton, the 5th of April 1567, eight weeks after Darnley’s death, a week before Bothwell’s trial and acquittal, and three weeks before he was divorced from his first wife. The Confessions and Depositions are various, but only in one or two of them is any allusion made to Mary. The Letters, Sonnets, and Contracts, were said to have been discovered in a small gilt coffer, which the Earl of Bothwell left in the Castle of Edinburgh, in the custody of Sir James Balfour, at the time he fled from Edinburgh to Borthwick, about a month after his marriage, and shortly before the affair at Carberry Hill. After his discomfiture there, he is stated to have sent his servant, Dalgleish, into Edinburgh from Dunbar, to demand the coffer from Balfour. Sir James, it was said, delivered it up, but at the same time gave intimation to the Earl of Morton, who seized Dalgleish, and made himself master of the box and its contents. The Letters and Sonnets, which were written in French, were afterwards all translated into Scotch, and three into Latin.

Anxious to put beyond a doubt, either the forgery or the authenticity of these writings, numerous authors have exercised their ingenuity and talents, in a most minute and laborious examination, not only of their leading features, but of every line, and almost of every word. It would seem, however, not to be necessary, in so far as the great interests of truth are concerned, to descend to such microscopic investigation, and tedious verbal criticism, as have extended pages into volumes, and rendered confused and tiresome, disquisitions which might otherwise have been simple and interesting. If Mary’s innocence is to be established, it must not be by the discovery of petty inconsistencies, or trifling inaccuracies. If her guilt is to be proved, the impartial reader is not to be satisfied with vague suspicions or ingenious suggestions, but must have a body of evidence set before him, which, if it does not amount to actual demonstration, contains a circumstantial strength equally calculated to convince.

It may be observed, at the outset, that unless the conclusions, to which these writings would lead, be corroborated by the established facts of History, it cannot be expected that a great deal of weight will be attached to them. Besides, it must not be forgotten, that as the originals have been lost, it is by means of translations alone that their alleged contents are known to the world. Upon their authority, Mary is accused of having first committed adultery, and then murder. Whatever opinion may have been formed of her from her behaviour during the rest of her existence,—however gentle her dispositions may have appeared,—however strong her sense of the distinction between right and wrong,—however constant her religious principles,—however wise her government,—however excellent the culture of her mind,—if the letters are to be credited, the whole was either hypocrisy from beginning to end, or, (overcome by some sudden impulse,) a year of gross criminality was introduced into the very middle of a well spent life. If she made so rapid a descent into a career of vice, she as rapidly rose again; and reassuming the character she had laid aside, lived and died with the purity of a saint, and the fortitude of a martyr. It cannot therefore be upon slight grounds that evidence so fatal to her reputation is to be admitted; and there will be little necessity to engage in minute cavilling, or to enter upon points of minor importance, if, by a distinct statement of some of the leading arguments against its authenticity, the whole shall be made to appear nugatory, improbable, and unentitled to credit.

The evidences naturally divide themselves into the two heads of external and internal; and, without further preface, it will be best to consider these in succession.

The External Evidences.—It was on the 20th of June 1567, that Dalgleish was seized, with the box and writings. The official account given by Buchanan is,—“That in the Castle of Edinburgh there was left by the Earl Bothwell, before his flying away, and was sent for by one George Dalgleish, his servant, who was taken by the Earl of Morton, a small gilt coffer, not fully a foot long, being garnished in sundry places with the Roman letter F, under a king’s crown, wherein were certain letters and writings well known, and by oaths, to be affirmed to have been written with the Queen of Scots own hand, to the Earl of Bothwell.”[211] The question to be decided is, whether these letters and writings are genuine, or whether they can be proved to be fabrications? That the latter is the correct conclusion, appears on the following grounds.

First, The conduct of Murray, Morton, and others of the Scottish nobility, on various occasions, proves that ambition was the ruling passion of their lives. Murray’s iniquitous extermination of the Gordons in 1562, the influence he afterwards exercised in Mary’s councils, and his unjustifiable opposition to her marriage with Darnley, carried even the length of open rebellion, illustrate his character no less clearly, than the share he had in the murder of Rizzio, and his proceedings after the meeting at Carberry Hill, do that of Morton. A train of events, arising out of the audacious machinations of Bothwell, placed Mary at the disposal of men thus devoted to the attainment of power. Yielding to their irresistible desire to secure its possession, they first imprisoned, and then dethroned their sovereign. She escaped from their hands, and, though driven from the country, threatened to return with foreign aid, to place herself at the head of her own party, which was still powerful, and to force from them their usurped authority. The urgency of the case called for a bold and decisive remedy. If Mary could prove, as there was no doubt she could, that, according to all the facts yet before the world, she had suffered severely and unjustly, they must either fall upon some means to vindicate their own actions, or be ruined for ever. Nothing would more naturally suggest itself than the expedient they adopted. The circumstance of Mary having been actually married to the man who murdered her former husband, opened a door to the very worst suspicions; and if they could artfully conceal the events which led to the marriage, and which not only justified it, but made it a matter of necessity, they hoped still to retain possession of the government. They were aware, indeed, that by their own proclamations and acts of council, they had acknowledged Mary’s innocence, and pointed out the real cause of her connection with Bothwell; and it was now not enough, after they had involved themselves in deeper responsibility, merely to retract their former allegations. They were called upon to show why they departed from them;—they were called upon to prove, that when they first imprisoned her, though they confessed the Queen was innocent, they were now satisfied she was guilty. There was a positive necessity for the appearance of the letters; and if they had not been fortunately discovered, just at the proper time, Murray and his colleagues must either have had recourse to some other expedient, or have consented to Mary’s restoration, and their own disgrace.

Second, That Mary may have written love-letters to Francis II., and to Darnley, before and after she was married to them, is not unlikely; that she wrote sonnets and letters of affection to many of her friends, both male and female, is beyond a doubt; but that she would ever have written such letters and sonnets to the Earl of Bothwell, whom she never loved, whom she at one time threw into prison, and at another sent into banishment, whom she knew to be a married man, and whose marriage she had herself countenanced and encouraged, is against all probability. If Bothwell had never become Mary’s husband, history does not record one circumstance, which would at all lead to the belief, that she was attached to him. Her very marriage, when fairly and fully considered, only makes the fact more certain, that she had no regard for Bothwell, else there would have been no forcible abduction on his part, or pretended reluctance on hers. Even though she had consented to marry Bothwell, which the clearest evidence proves her not to have done, it would afford no presumption against her, that he was afterwards discovered to have been the murderer of Darnley. He had not only been legally acquitted, but all her chief nobility had recommended him to her as a husband, stating the grounds of their recommendation to be the high opinion they entertained of his worth and loyalty. Robertson, Laing, and others, it is true, copying Buchanan, have laboured to show, that Mary discovered in various ways her extreme partiality for Bothwell. Most of their arguments have been already considered elsewhere; but it will be worth while attending for a moment to such of the circumstances collected by Robertson, and drawn up in formidable array, in the “Critical Dissertation” subjoined to his History of Scotland, as have not yet been noticed. The answers and explanations which immediately suggest themselves are so entirely satisfactory, that we can only wonder the historian did not himself perceive them.

Robertson states, that on the 15th of February 1567, five days after the murder, Mary bestowed on Bothwell the reversion of the superiority of the town of Leith, and that this grant was of much importance, as it gave him both the command of the principal port in the kingdom, and a great ascendancy over the citizens of Edinburgh. But this assignation, as is expressly stated in the charter, was made to Bothwell as a reward for his faithful services, both to Mary’s mother and to herself, especially on the occasion of Rizzio’s death, and must have been in contemplation for some time; nor can it be supposed to have occupied the Queen’s thoughts, at a moment when she was refusing to see any one, and was shut up by herself in a dark room, a prey to the bitterest regrets. It ought to be recollected, besides, that she had not yet conferred on Bothwell any adequate recompense for his fidelity and exertions after her escape from Morton; and that the grant of the superiority of the town of Leith, was only a very tardy acknowledgment of her obligations. She made presents of a similar description to others of her nobility about the same time: if any of them had afterwards forced her into a marriage, these gifts might have been raked up with equal plausibility, to prove that she was then in love with Morton, Huntly, Secretary Maitland, or any body else. At the Parliament which assembled on the 14th of April 1567, ratifications of grants were passed to many of the principal persons in the realm; and among others to the Earl of Mar, Morton, Crawford, Caithness, and Lord Robert Stuart.[212] It will not be asserted, that Mary was attached to any of these persons; and is there any thing wonderful that she included in the list of those to whom she made donations, her Lord High Admiral? The case, no doubt, would have been worse, had she known that Bothwell was the murderer of Darnley, but throughout the whole of this discussion, it must be remembered, that if Mary was really innocent, she could not believe Bothwell guilty till he had been actually proved so.

Robertson states further, that two days after the trial, Mary allowed Bothwell to carry the sceptre before her when she went to open the Parliament; that she there granted him a ratification of all the vast possessions and honours which she had conferred upon him; and that, when Sir James Melville warned her of the danger which would attend a marriage with that nobleman, she not only disregarded his admonition, but discovered to Bothwell what had passed. But, as to the carrying of the sceptre, it was surely not to be expected, that after a full acquittal, without even the shadow of evidence being advanced against him, Mary could have ventured to refuse his accustomed honours to the most powerful noble in the realm. As to the Parliamentary ratification of “all the vast possessions and honours which she had conferred upon him,” the misrepresentation is glaring in the extreme; for she never conferred on Bothwell any vast possessions and honours, and the ratification alluded only to certain lands which were given him, to defray his charges in keeping the Castle of Dunbar.[213] Bothwell no doubt enjoyed “vast possessions and honours;” but they were mostly hereditary, or had been obtained by him before Mary came into the kingdom. And as to the manner in which Mary took Sir James Melville’s warning,—the facts were these:—Sir James received a letter out of England, from a person of the name of Bishop, telling him that it had been rumoured (and there is no wonder, considering the bond which had been previously obtained from the nobility) that Bothwell was to be married to her Majesty, and assuring him, that if she consented to such an alliance, it would be much against her own reputation and interest. When Sir James showed this letter to Mary, she immediately sent, not for Bothwell, but for Secretary Maitland, to whom she handed it, expressing her surprise at its contents, and her suspicion that it was only a device on the part of some of Bothwell’s enemies, who wished to ruin him in her estimation. She afterwards took an opportunity to speak of it to Bothwell himself, who affected to be highly indignant, and was so enraged against Melville, that, had not Mary interfered, he would have forced him to fly from the Court to save his life. Bothwell’s rage is easily accounted for, considering the designs he then had in view, and the necessity for concealing them. But had he known that Mary was disposed to favour them, he would of course have taken the whole matter much more coolly. When Melville came upon the subject with Mary, she assured him that she did not contemplate any such alliance, and she had in like manner previously told Lord Herries, that “there was no such thing in her mind.”[214] If deductions like those of Robertson, so contrary to the premises on which they are founded, be allowed, it is impossible to say to what belief they may not be made to lead.