Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

by Mrs. Oliphant

The events of the time, however, permitted no such dignified and calm conclusion. One can imagine the horror and dismay with which the little community at St. Andrews heard the dreadful news, carried far and wide on every breeze, with every kind of whispered comment and suggestion—soon to be no longer whispered with pale face and bated breath, but proclaimed from the housetops—of Darnley's murder. Buchanan had poured forth his celebrations of Mary's marriage and of the birth of the heir while still a member of her household. And no doubt he had become aware of the dissensions in that royal house, of Darnley's ingratitude and folly and the Queen's impatience, before he escaped from all the talk and endless gossip to the quiet of his college. But it would seem equally clear that when the action of the sombre tragedy quickened he was absent from the scene and knew of it only by the rumours and reports that came across the Firth. First Rizzio's murder, which the distant spectators would discuss, no doubt, with a thrill not entirely of horror, a stern sense that justice had been done, a satisfied prejudice—and no doubt some patriotic, if still prejudiced, hope that now the Italian was removed there would be less of foreign policy, and a more entire regard for the welfare of affairs at home. Then would come the rumours of the Queen's vengeance, lightly held at first, of Bothwell always in the foreground, her chief supporter and partisan—Bothwell who, though loved by nobody, was yet a Protestant, and therefore not altogether beyond hope. And then with ever-quickening haste event after event—the murder of the King, for whom no one would have mourned much had it been attended by circumstances less terrible; the mad proceedings of the Queen, whether constrained or free, her captivity, outrage, or conspiracy, whichever it was, her insane and incomprehensible marriage, which no force or persuasion could account for. As the posts arrived at uncertain intervals, delayed by weather, strong winds and heavy seas, by breaking down of conveyances, by the very agitations and tumults in the capital which made them so terribly interesting, the eager spectators in Fife must have congregated to await their arrival with an intensity of excitement, of which, with our endless sources of information and constant communication, we can form little idea now.

And there would seem to be no doubt of the strong immediate feeling which arose against the Queen, the instant conclusion of the bystanders as to her guilt. There have been no greater fluctuations in historical opinion than those that have arisen around the facts of Mary's life. Historians of the eighteenth century considered it as a test of a man's moral sanity whether he persisted in believing in Mary's innocence or not. Among her contemporaries the progress of time which softened impression, and the many pathetic situations of her later history, the terrible misfortunes under which she fell, her endless miseries and troubles, and the brave spirit with which she met them, turned some hearts again towards her, an ever-troubled but ever-devoted body of partisans. But at the moment when these terrible events occurred there can be little doubt that the horror and condemnation were almost unanimous. No reasoning could explain away those wild and mad acts, no discussion of probability come in. The mob in Edinburgh which raged against her was checked in its fierceness and subdued to pity at sight of the wretched lady in her despair, at that awful moment when she appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away, recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result—and their hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding that pity and all the innate chivalry which her sufferings called forth, Edinburgh and Scotland, the whole alarmed and terrified nation, believed at first the evidence of their senses. There seems nothing more distinct than this fact throughout all the trouble and tumult of the moment. It is not to be taken as an absolute proof of Mary's guilt. Such impressions have existed in other though less conspicuous cases and have been proved untrue. But that it did exist universally there can be little doubt.

The scene at the window of the Provost's lodging where the unfortunate Queen was lodged, near the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, when brought back from Dunbar after the flight of Bothwell by the angry lords, with the mob clamouring underneath, and her enemies holding her fate in their hands, seems to me one of the most significant in her history. No woman was ever in circumstances more terrible. The situation is stronger if we suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit carried away by passion—that something beyond reason, beyond all human power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain, and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the other side to an impatience almost maddening, by the injuries, follies, treacheries, and universal provocation of her unworthy husband, until the force of the bewildering current carried her in a disastrous moment over a precipice worse than any Niagara, in a headlong course of mingled misery, exasperation, love, and despair. Before she had even accomplished the terrible circle of events, and become Bothwell's wife, it requires no strong effort of the imagination to perceive that the despair might well have come uppermost, and that Mary fully recognised, not only the horror, but the futility and wretched failure into which she had plunged. We do not pretend to believe that there was much to cause remorse in the mind of such a woman in such an age in the death, however brought about, of the miserable Darnley. Mary could have brushed him from her memory like a fly, had that been all. But the rage of despair and failure was in her soul when she raved like a caged lion from door to window, imprisoned, trapped, and betrayed, expressing her incoherent transport of pain to the mob which would have had her blood, but which, overcome by the spectacle of that supreme and awful passion, became silent with awe or hushed by a spasm of pity and tears.

So it has remained, a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity for happiness and making happy, for wise action and beneficent dealing, for boundless influence and power—why such youth, such strength, such spirit, equal to every enterprise, should they have been swept away by that remorseless fate? We can still see the trapped and ruined Queen—exasperated still further by the consciousness that many of the men now holding her in bonds were at least as guilty as she, guilty of Darnley's blood, guilty if not of favouring yet of fearing Bothwell and yielding their countenance to his plans—pacing that chamber, appearing at that window, her loveliness, her adornments, and all the wiles of triumphant beauty forgotten, throwing forth to the earth that was as brass and the skies that were as iron, like a wild animal in its torment, her hoarse inarticulate cry. And, whatever we may think of her merits, that terrible spectacle is more than flesh and blood can bear. Pity takes the place of wrath and indignation that she alone should suffer: why not Lethington, Huntly, Athole, and the rest, all those stern peers who counselled with her upon the most effectual way of having Darnley removed, the thankless fool who disturbed every man's peace—why were not they tried along with her, they who took such high ground as her judges? Why should she bear the brunt of all? Even Bothwell had escaped, and Mary stood at the bar of the world alone.

But such thoughts would not seem to have moved the first spectators, to whom all that damning sequence of events, one precipitated on the heels of another, came fresh as they occurred day by day. As for Buchanan, he would be less prone to doubt than any. He knew something of the Court of France and of the atmosphere in which Mary had received her training. He was acquainted with many a royal scandal, and had much experience of a world in which vice was the rule and good behaviour a mere exception, due to a cold temperament, or a wariness uncongenial to generous youth. Such an old man of the world is slow to believe in innocence at all, and it is very likely that to him who knew her so well it was impossible to conceive of Mary as an example of weak but spotless virtue. The Principal of St. Leonard's went over to Edinburgh a few days after the completion of that tragic chapter, when Mary had been consigned to Lochleven, and Murray had assumed the Regency. The city was still agitated by much discussion of the dreadful questions which occupied all minds yet was slowly calming down like an angry sea, with long seethings and swellings of excitement. The object of Buchanan's visit was not curiosity or desire to be in the centre of that excitement, but a simpler matter, which has drawn many a Principal of St. Andrews since to the capital of Scotland, an Assembly of the Church, which opened "in the Nether Tolbooth" on the 25th of June. Of this Assembly he, though a layman, was appointed Moderator "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning"—a curious motive, which proves at least that his contemporaries had great confidence in his judgment, and also that the passion of this excited and tumultuous time ran so high in the Church that a stronger authority than usual was wanted to keep it within bounds. The sentiment of the Church, or at least of the dominant party in it, would seem to have been rather satisfaction that the Sovereign, foreign alike in training and religion, had been set aside than any distress at the cause. The Assembly congratulates itself that "this present has offered some better occasion than in times bygane, and has begun to tread down Satan under foot," which is not a very amiable deliverance: but kindness and charity were not the Christian virtues most approved in those days.

From this time Buchanan took up with vehemence, and indeed with violence, the prosecution of Mary, acting often as her accuser, and always as an active agent, secretary, or commissioner, in the conduct of the indictment against her. He has been subject on this account to very hard treatment especially from the recent defenders of the Queen. Mr. Hosack, in his able book Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers, denounces him as having offered verses and adulations to the Queen at a time when, according to his own after-statement, everybody knew her to be living in shameless vice and corruption. This, however, is not at all a necessary inference. It might, on the contrary, very well have lent bitterness to Buchanan's historical record, written after the dreadful catastrophe which so many accepted as a revelation of Mary's real character, that he had himself been one of the deceived, who for years had entertained no suspicion, but accepted the fair seeming as truth. Such a sentiment is one of the most common in human nature. The friend deceived becomes the bitterest enemy; and he who has been seduced into undeserved approval is apt to go farther than the fiercest adversary when he learns that his own utterances have helped to veil the crime which he had never suspected the existence of. This motive is enough, we think, to account for the special virulence with which Buchanan certainly does assail the Queen, and the passion which thrills through the Detectio, a sort of fury and abhorrence which makes every paragraph tingle. She had done nothing to Buchanan to rouse any desire for individual vengeance; and it is more rational, certainly, to believe that the horror of the discovery inspired with a sort of rage the bosom of the scholar—rage which was perfectly genuine in its beginning, though it might, no doubt, be raised to whiter heat by the continually increasing fervour of partisanship. The curious description of him given by Sir James Melville (the courtier, not the divine) that "he was easily abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted for the time, which made him factious in his old days; for he spoke and writ as they that were about him for the time informed him," would, if accepted, give a still easier solution to this question. But it is a little difficult to accept such a character of Buchanan, who does not seem to have been a man easily put off from his own way, especially when taken in conjunction with the Assembly's minute, recording his election as president "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning." It is more easy to believe the statement that he was "extreme vengeable against any man that offended him, which was his greatest fault."

The much darker accusation against Buchanan, that he was a party to, or indeed the most active agent in, the forging of certain letters reported to have been sent by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley's murder, and known far and wide as the Casket Letters, seems to rest upon nothing but conjecture. He was one of the few members of the party who possessed the literary gift, the only one, perhaps, except Lethington, whom Mr. Skelton has presented to us as not only a very enlightened statesman, but at all times the faithful servant of Mary, but who is accused by earlier writers of much tergiversation and falsehood. He it was, according to Chalmers, who was the forger, reaching the summit of wickedness "in forging his mistress's handwriting for the odious purpose of convicting her of the crime of aggravated murder." Chalmers was as sturdy a champion of Mary's innocence in the eighteenth as Mr. Skelton is in the nineteenth century, but the conduct of historical research has very much altered in the meantime. The changes have been rung between Lethington and Buchanan by various critics, but the last light upon the subject seems to be that there is none, and that if the letters were forged the forger at least cannot be identified by any art known to history.

It is unnecessary to pursue the question, or to bring further arguments to prove that nothing else in Buchanan's writings indicates the possession of such dramatic and constructive power as would be necessary for the production of such a letter as that professedly written from Glasgow, which is by far the most important of the contents of the Casket. A woman's distracted soul, divided between passion and shame, the very exaltation of guilty self-abandonment and the horror of conscious depravity and despair, is not a thing which can be imagined or embodied by the first ready pen, or even able intellect. No one of all the tumultuous band that directed affairs in Scotland has given us any reason to suppose that he was capable of it. Its very contradictions, those changes of mood and feeling which the most ignorant reader can perceive, are quite beyond the mark of ordinary invention. Mr. Froude has said that only Shakespeare or Mary Stewart could have written it—at all events the writer, supposing it to be forged, must have been of unquestionable imaginative genius. It is one of the most wonderful compositions ever given to the world. We look on with awe while those dark secrets of the heart are unfolded. The revelation is too tremendous, too overwhelming, and far too true to nature, to call forth mere horror and condemnation. It is a proof of the often-repeated statement that could we but see into the heart of the greatest criminal pity would mingle with our judgment. Nothing could be more criminal and horrible than the acts therein anticipated, yet we think it would be impossible for any unbiassed mind to read this letter for the first time without an increase at least of interest in the writer, so transported by her love, ready almost to brag of the falsehood and treachery into which it leads her, till sick shame and horror of herself breathes over her changing mood, and she feels that even he for whose love all is undertaken must loathe her as she loathes herself. To imagine Buchanan, an old man of the world, somewhat coarse, fond of a rough jest, little used to women, and past the age of passion, as producing that tragical and terrible revelation, is almost more than impossible, it is an insult to the reader's intelligence. And accordingly the latest writers on this subject have relinquished that accusation; they no longer charge the old pedagogue with such an effort of genius; they confine themselves to accusing him of ingratitude towards his benefactress, which is as much as to say that a little personal favour, even when well earned, is to compel a man to shut his eyes henceforward to the character and conduct of the person who has conferred it, and that both patriotic feeling and political policy are to be quenched by a pension, which is a strange view.

There can be no doubt, however, that Buchanan made out the case against the Queen with all the rhetorical force of which he was capable; that the accusation was bitter, as of a man who had been personally deceived and injured, as indeed it is quite possible that he may have felt himself to be; and that there was no pity, no mercy, nor compunction towards her, such as arose in many men's bosoms after a little time, and have been rife ever since both in writers and readers. The Detection is without ruth, and assumes the most criminal and degrading motives throughout. Its intention clearly is to convince Scotland, England, and the world of Mary's utter depravity, and the impossibility of any excuse for her or argument in her favour. The strong and fiery indignation in it is indeed lessened in effect, at least to us in these latter days, by the over strength of the indictment; and the reader who turns from the perusal of the Glasgow letter—which damns indeed yet rouses a world of conflicting feelings, awe and terror and pity for the lost soul thus tragically self-condemned—to the historical document in which the charges against the Queen are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this there is nothing wonderful, nothing out of the common course of nature, which is prone to make every indictment more bitter than the facts that prove it.

But it may well be believed that it was something of a fierce consolation to the high-tempered and strong-speaking Scots, in the rush of universal popular condemnation, to believe and assert that the Queen, who had so disappointed and disenchanted all her well-wishers, had been bad through and through, indecent and shameless. The inclination, almost the wish, to think the worst of every fallen idol has not died out with the generation which condemned Mary Stewart; and Buchanan was the spokesman, the advocate of the other party, whose conduct could only be justified by the establishment of her guilt. If she were not guilty, they were traitors. If all the proof against her was but a mass of distorted facts and false swearing, nothing in the way of punishment was too bad for her unfaithful subjects. A mistake was impossible, the struggle was one of life and death. The spokesman in such a tremendous issue, the narrator and setter forth of the terrible question, especially if he is a person whose trade it is to write, and who can be accused of doing his work for hire, is always at a disadvantage. It can never be proved to the vulgar mind that he has not formed his opinions to order, that he does not give them out to the world according as they may best benefit and satisfy his employers. His masters may be hated, but he is both hated and despised. If it could be proved that Murray was solely actuated by ambition and the hope of getting the throne for himself, he would still be a belligerent with the honours of war due to him; but the scribe, the hireling who is employed to state the whole matter, has no position but that of a venal dependant ready to set forth whatever is for his master's interests. Thus the historian of a party, who makes money by his work, the literary advocate whose office it is to make the strongest statement possible of his employer's case, is subject—or at least was subject in more primitive times—to the worst reproaches. His testimony was seldom taken as conscientious or true.