“What we appear is subject to the judgment
Of all mankind; and what we are, of no man.”
Schiller in “Mary Stuart.”
These lines upon the lips of Elizabeth Tudor are her condemnation in the judgment of all mankind. Short sighted, indeed, and headed directly towards the rapids of the all revealing Real is the mortal who thus honors appearances.
Elizabeth would have Mary Stuart put to death, but would seem to have tried to save her: Elizabeth would sign the death warrant, but would seem to have been constrained, to have done so regretfully, to have recalled the fatal sentence when, alas! too late. But all this flimsy Seeming has been blown away by the rugged years; and that which this Machiavellian queen thought subject to the judgment of no man has become her condemnation in the eyes of all.
So close they lie together now in old Westminster Abbey—these rival queens who once so cordially feared and hated one another! and for whose conflicting ambitions all Britain was not room enough, but one must die! How ignoble seems now the strife, how despicable the deed of culminant hate, how diaphanous all the Seeming! Was it worth while?
The death of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the hands of her cousin Queen Elizabeth aroused a feeling of angry indignation in every court of Europe. France, Spain, and the Vatican, openly denounced the deed. And it was, in great measure, in execration of this unnatural cruelty that Pope Sextus V. espoused the cause of Philip II. of Spain and urged and aided the invasion of England.
Strange that such men as Edmund Spenser, author of Færie Queen and Sir Walter Raleigh, mirror of chivalry, should have been among the foremost to demand the death of the Scottish queen. But those were turbulent times. Life and death never played the mortal game more boldly and recklessly and desperately than in the sixteenth century. The magic of the New World was upon the old; the glamour of gem-lit El Dorados shimmered across the seas; and thither responsively rushed in shaky ships and leaky caravels those whom the gods would destroy made mad by the bite of the gold-tarantula. “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land”, shouted Sir Humphrey Gilbert as his frail bark was lost in the storm; as his deck lights rose high and dashed low and darkened far down ’neath the sea-lashing storm.
And night with wondering stars looked down upon De Soto’s lordly grave. And then as now and even throughout the historic ages, the prehistoric, the geologic—the thundering waters fell and formed Niagara Falls. In silvery moonlight, in dazzling sun-radiance rainbow-frilled, in blinding white of winter, in rainy spring, in saber flashing summer storm—the thunder-waters fell; they fall; they shall fall.