She said, "Wae be to ye, Wariestoun,
I wish ye may sink for ain;
For I hae been your gudwife35
These nine years, running ten;
And I never loved ye sae weill
As now when you're lying slain."
* * * * * * *
"But tak aff this gowd brocade,
And let my petticoat be,40
And tie a handkerchief round my face,
That the people may not see."
THE QUEEN'S MARIE.
Of this affecting ballad different editions have appeared in Scott's Minstrelsy, Sharpe's Ballad Book, p. 18, Kinloch's Scottish Ballads, and Motherwell's Minstrelsy. There is also a fragment in Maidment's North Countrie Garland, which has been reprinted in Buchan's Gleanings, p. 164, and a very inferior version, with a different catastrophe, in Buchan's larger collection, (ii. 190,) called Warenston and the Duke of York's Daughter. [Kinloch's copy] may be found with [Maidment's fragment], in the Appendix to this volume: [Motherwell's] immediately after the present.
Sir Walter Scott conceives the ballad to have had its foundation in an event which took place early in the reign of Mary Stuart, described by Knox as follows: "In the very time of the General Assembly, there comes to public knowledge a haynous murther, committed in the court; yea, not far from the Queen's lap; for a French woman, that served in the Queen's chamber, had played the whore with the Queen's own apothecary. The woman conceived and bare a childe, whom, with common consent, the father and mother murthered; yet were the cries of a new
-borne childe hearde, searche was made, the childe and the mother were both apprehended, and so were the man and the woman condemned to be hanged in the publicke street of Edinburgh. The punishment was suitable, because the crime was haynous. But yet was not the court purged of whores and whoredoms, which was the fountaine of such enormities: for it was well known that shame hasted marriage betwixt John Sempill, called the Dancer, and Mary Levingston, sirnamed the Lusty. What bruit the Maries, and the rest of the dancers of the court had, the ballads of that age doe witnesse, which we for modestie's sake omit. Knox's History of the Reformation, p. 373.