Because of that experience, because of the feeling I have for Queen Mary, I have never landed upon St. Serf's island. It has happened, quite without my making intentional pilgrimage, that I have been in many places where Queen Mary has been; and willingly I have made my accidental pilgrimages of loyalty. I have stood in the turret at Roscoff where she landed when only five, hurried from Scotland that she might escape sinister England; in the chapel in Notre Dame where she was married to the Dauphin; in the château at Orleans where she lived with him much of that brief happy French life she loved so dearly; in the two small garret chambers where she lodged in Coventry; in Hardwick Hall, where Bess of Hardwick was her stern jailer; at Fotheringay where nothing remains of that ensanguined block but a low heap of stones which the grass covers; in Peterborough where she found her first resting place; in Westminster her last final resting place; and in many and many a haunted place of this Scottish land.
DRAWING-ROOM, LINLITHGOW PALACE, WHERE QUEEN MARY WAS BORN.
And just before starting north I made a little journey to Linlithgow which lies twenty miles west of Edinburgh. The palace overlooks a quiet blue loch, a blue smiling bit of water, on which much royalty has looked forth, and on which the eyes of Mary first looked. There, in the unroofed palace of Linlithgow, in the "drawing-room," in December, 1542, was born that queen who ever since has divided the world.
"Of all the palaces so fair
Built for the royal dwelling,
In Scotland far beyond compare
Linlithgow is excelling.
And in the park in jovial June
How sweet the merry linnet's tune,
How blithe the blackbird's lay."
It was the dower-house of Scottish queens, and hither James V brought Mary of Lorraine after he had married her at St. Andrews. (I wondered if there was any haunting memory of Margaret of Denmark who sat here sewing when the nobles raged through the palace seeking the life of James III. Or of Margaret of England as she sat here waiting for James IV to return from Flodden.)
Of the regency of Mary of Lorraine, when James V died and Mary was a baby, Knox spluttered that it was "as semlye a sight (yf men had eis) as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrowly kow." Knox did not pick his language with any nicety when he said his say of women and the monstrous regiments of them. And to his Puritan soul there could come no approval of the love affairs of Mary of Lorraine, such as that one sung by the Master of Erskine, who was slain at Pinkiecleuch—
"I go, and wait not quhair,
I wander heir and thair,
I weip and sichis rycht sair
With panis smart;
Now must I pass away, away,
In wilderness and lanesome way,
Alace! this woeful day
We suld departe."
And now there is neither Margaret nor Mary, neither regent nor reformer, palace of neither Linlithgow nor Leven. How the destructions of man have thrown palaces and doctrines open to the winds of heaven. And how purifying this destruction. And what precious things have passed with them, what tears of women have been shed, and how are the mouths of men become dust.
Loch Leven has one lovely gracious memory of Mary in the days before everything was lost. She was lodging here, and had sent for Knox to come from Edinburgh.