At the end of B the king tells Mary Hamilton to come down from the scaffold, but she scorns life after having been put to public shame. So in D, with queen for king.
In A a 4, b 4, 13, G 5 the queen is “the auld queen,” and yet Mary Stuart.
E, from 16, F, from 19, are borrowed from No 95, ‘The Maid freed from the Gallows:’ see II, 346. G 8 (and I 13, taken from G) is derived from ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,’ D a 11, e 10, g 11: see II, 187, 196, 197. The rejection of black and brown, A 7, C 9, D 13, etc., or of green, K 6, is found in the same ballad, C 10, E 16, F 12, 15, etc., B 20. B 21 is perhaps from ‘The Laird of Waristoun:’ see further on, A 9, B 10, C 4. I 12, 14 look like a souvenir of ‘Fair Janet,’ No 64.
There are not a few spurious passages. Among these are the extravagance of the queen’s bursting in the door, F 8; the platitude, of menial stamp, that the child, if saved, might have been an honor to the mother, D 10, L 3, O 4; the sentimentality of H 3, 16.
Allan Cunningham has put the essential incidents of the story into a rational order, that of A, for example, with less than usual of his glistering and saccharine phraseology: Songs of Scotland, I, 348. Aytoun’s language is not quite definite with regard to the copy which he gives at II, 45, ed. 1859: it is, however, made up from versions previously printed.
When Mary Stuart was sent to France in 1548, she being then between five and six, she had for companions “sundry gentlewomen and noblemen’s sons and daughters, almost of her own age, of the which there were four in special of whom every one of them bore the same name of Mary, being of four sundry honorable houses, to wit, Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton of Creich; who remained all four with the queen in France during her residence there, and returned again in Scotland with her Majesty in the year of our Lord 1561:” Lesley, History of Scotland, 1830, p. 209. We still hear of the Four Maries in 1564, Calendar of State Papers (Foreign), VII, 213, 230; cited by Burton, IV, 107. The ballad substitutes Mary Hamilton and Mary Carmichael for Mary Livingston and Mary Fleming; but F 3, 12 has Livingston. N, of late recitation, has Heaton for Seton and Michel for Carmichael.
D 4, etc. In ‘Tam Lin,’ No 39, Janet pulls the rose to kill or scathe away her babe; A 19, 20, F 8, I 24, 25 (probably repeated from A). In G 18, 19, the herb of 15 and the rose of 17 becomes the pile of the gravil green, or of the gravil gray; in H 5, 6 Janet pulls an unspecified flower or herb (I, 341 ff).
We have had in ‘The Twa Brothers,’ No 49, a passage like that in which Mary begs sailors and travellers not to let her parents know that she is not coming home; and other ballads, Norse, Breton, Romaic, and Slavic, which present a similar trait, are noted at I, 436 f, II, 14. To these may be added Passow, p. 400, No 523; Jeannaraki, p. 116, No 118; Sakellarios, p. 98, No 31; Puymaigre, 1865, p. 62, Bujeaud, II, 210 (Liebrecht); also Guillon, p. 107, Nigra, No 27, A, B, pp. 164, 166, and many copies of ‘Le Déserteur,’ and some of ‘Le Plongeur,’ ‘La ronde du Battoir.’
Scott thought that the ballad took its rise from an incident related by Knox as occurring in “the beginning of the regiment of Mary, Queen of Scots.” “In the very time of the General Assembly,” says Knox, “there comes to public knowledge a heinous murder committed in the court, yea, not far from the queen’s own 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 child, whom, with common consent, the father and the mother murdered. Yet were the cries of a new-born bairn heard; search was made, the child and mother was both deprehended, and so were both the man and the woman damned to be hanged upon the public street of Edinburgh.”[[246]] “It will readily strike the reader,” says Scott, “that the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition; the French waiting-woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the queen’s apothecary[[247]] into Henry Darnley. Yet this is less surprising when we recollect that one of the heaviest of the queen’s complaints against her ill-fated husband was his infidelity, and that even with her personal attendants.” This General Assembly, however, met December 25, 1563, and since Darnley did not come to Scotland until 1565, a tale of 1563, or of 1563–4, leaves him unscathed.
Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in his preface to A, Ballad Book, 1824, p. 18, observes: “It is singular that during the reign of the Czar Peter, one of his empress’s attendants, a Miss Hamilton, was executed for the murder of a natural child.... I cannot help thinking that the two stories have been confused in the ballad, for if Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely that her relations resided beyond seas; and we have no proof that Hamilton was really the name of the woman who made a slip with the queen’s apothecary.” Sharpe afterwards communicated details of the story[[248]] to Scott, who found in them “a very odd coincidence in name, crime and catastrophe;” Minstrelsy, 1833, III, 296, note. But Sharpe became convinced “that the Russian tragedy must be the original” (note in Laing’s edition of the Ballad Book, 1880, p. 129); and this opinion is the only tenable one, however surprising it may be or seem that, as late as the eighteenth century, the popular genius, helped by nothing but a name, should have been able so to fashion and color an episode in the history of a distant country as to make it fit very plausibly into the times of Mary Stuart.