8
The drums they did beat and the trumpets they did sound,
And the great guns they did rattle as they put him in the ground.
173. Mary Hamilton.
P. 382. The passages following relate to the affair of the Frenchwoman and the apothecary. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1563. (Indicated to me by Mr Andrew Lang.)
The Queen’s apothecary got one of her maidens, a Frenchwoman, with child. Thinking to have covered his fault with medicine, the child was slain. They are both in prison, and she is so much offended that it is thought they shall both die. Randolph to Cecil, Edinburgh, 21 Dec., 1563, p. 637. The apothecary and the woman he got with child were both hanged this Friday. Randolph to Cecil, Dec. 31, 1563, p. 650.
The heroine of this ballad is Mary Hamilton in all copies in which she has a full name, that is, twelve out of the twenty-four which have any name; Mary simply, or Mary mild,[127] is found in eleven copies, and Maisry in one. Finding in the history of the court of Peter the Great an exact counterpart of the story of the ballad with a maid of honor named Mary Hamilton filling the tragic rôle, and “no trace of an admixture of the Russian story with that of the Frenchwoman and the queen’s apothecary,” I felt compelled to admit that Sharpe’s suggestion of the Russian origin of the ballad was, however surprising, the only tenable opinion (III, 382 f.). Somewhat later a version of the ballad (U) was found at Abbotsford in which there is mention of the apothecary and of the practices for which he suffered in 1568, and this fact furnished ground for reopening the question (which, nevertheless, was deferred).
Mr Andrew Lang has recently subjected the matter of the origin of the ballad to a searching review (in Blackwood’s Magazine, September, 1895, p. 381 ff.). Against the improbability that an historical event of 1718-9 should by simple chance coincide, very minutely and even to the inclusion of the name of the principal actor, with what is related in a ballad ostensibly recounting an event in the reign of Mary Stuart, he sets the improbability that a ballad, older and superior in style to anything which we can show to have been produced in the 18th, or even the 17th century,[128] should have been composed after 1719, a ballad in which a contemporary occurrence in a foreign and remote country would be transferred to Scotland and Queen Mary’s day, and so treated as to fit perfectly into the circumstances of the time: and this while the ballad might entirely well have been evolved from a notorious domestic occurrence of the date 1563, the adventure of Queen Mary’s French maid and the apothecary—which has now turned out to be introduced into one version of the ballad.[129]
I wish to avow that the latter improbability, as put by Mr Lang, has come to seem to me considerably greater than the former.
The coincidence of the name of the heroine is indeed at first staggering; but it will be granted that of all the “honorable houses” no one might more plausibly supply a forgotten maid of honor than the house of Hamilton. The Christian name is a matter of course for a Queen’s Mary.