predeceased her, although her two grandchildren, James I, son of Lord Darnley, and Arabella Stuart [q. v.], daughter of Charles, fifth earl of Lennox, survived. Chequered as her life had been by disappointment and sorrow, in its main purpose it was successful, for her grandson, James VI, succeeded to the proud inheritance of the English as well as the Scottish crown. To the very last she sacrificed her own comfort and happiness to effect this end. Whatever might have been her opinions as to Mary's innocence or guilt, she would have refrained from expressing them so long as she thought her main purpose could have been promoted by friendship with Elizabeth. In her last years she ceased to seek Elizabeth's favour, and after her restoration to liberty was not permitted even to hold her Yorkshire estates in trust for her grandson. Mary Queen of Scots, in an unfinished will in 1577, formally restored to her ‘all the rights she can pretend to the earldom of Angus,’ and in September of this year the countess made a claim for the inheritance of the earldom of Lennox for her granddaughter the Lady Arabella (Cal. State Papers, Scotch Ser. i. 395), but the latter claim achieved as little for her as Mary's empty expression of her sovereign wishes. At her death her poverty was so extreme that she was interred at the royal cost. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in the vault of her son Charles. An elaborate altar-tomb with her statue recumbent on it, and a pompous recital of her relationships to royal personages, was erected to her by James VI, after his accession to the English throne, who also ordered the body of Lord Darnley to be exhumed and reinterred by her side. Lady Lennox caused to be painted a curious family group, representing herself, the Earl of Lennox, Lord Charles, the infant James VI, kneeling before the altar, and a cenotaph of Darnley, who is extended on an altar-tomb raising the hands to heaven, words being represented as issuing from the mouths of each crying for vengeance on his murderers. The picture was in the possession of Queen Victoria, and has been engraved by Vertue. A similar picture without Lady Lennox is at Hampton Court Palace. The original portrait by Sir Antonio More, three-quarter length, dated 1554, which was formerly at Hampton Court Palace, has been removed to Holyrood, where it stands in Darnley's presence-chamber. It has been engraved by Rivers and reproduced in lithograph by Francis Work. At Hampton Court there is still a full-length by Holbein with the date 1572.
[Cal. State Papers during the reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth; Lemon's State Papers; Ellis's Original Letters; Haynes's State Papers; Murdin's State Papers; Holinshed's Chronicle; Stow's Annals; Camden's Annals; Keith's Hist. of Scotland; Sir James Melville's Memoirs; Fénelon's Correspondance; Labanoff's Lettres de Marie Stuart; A Commemoration of the Right Noble and Vertuous Ladye Margaret Douglas's Good Grace, Countess of Lennox, by John Phyllips. Imprinted at London by John Charlewood, dwelling in Barbican at the signe of the Half Eagle and Key; Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep.; William Fraser's The Lennox (privately printed); Miss Strickland's Queens of Scotland, vol. ii.; Histories of Tytler, Hill Burton, and Froude.]
DOUGLAS, NEIL (1750–1823), poet and preacher, born in 1750, was educated at the university of Glasgow. He does not seem to have ever belonged to the Scotch establishment, but has been well described as a ‘wavering nonconformist.’ As an author he first appears in the character of a minister of the Relief Church at Cupar Fife in ‘Sermons on Important Subjects, with some Essays in Poetry,’ pp. 508, 12mo, Edinburgh, 1789. Among the poems are two extremely loyal ‘odes’ on the king's illness and recovery, which their author referred to nearly thirty years afterwards when charged with disaffection to the reigning family. Under the pseudonym of ‘Britannicus’ Douglas next issued ‘A Monitory Address to Great Britain; a Poem in six parts. To which is added Britain's Remembrancer [by James Burgh],’ Edinburgh, 1792. This goodly 8vo of 481 pages is addressed ‘To the King,’ and is a call upon his majesty to abrogate the anti-christian practices of the slave trade, duelling, and church patronage; also to put in force his own proclamation against vice, which is here reprinted. A preface follows, the burden of which is a lament upon the degeneracy of the times. His powerful verse and no less powerful prose commentary show Douglas as a social reformer far in advance of his day. By 1793 Douglas had removed to Dundee, where he officiated as a minister of Relief Charge, Dudhope Crescent. He there startled the world with ‘The Lady's Scull; a Poem. And a few other select pieces,’ 12mo, Dundee, 1794. The chief piece is a sermon in verse upon the text ‘A place called the place of a skull,’ &c. A shorter poem under the same title had appeared in his ‘Monitory Address.’ In the preface we learn that the reformer's writings had fallen stillborn from the press. In the summer of 1797 Douglas, who was a thorough master of Gaelic, went on a mission to the wilds of Argyllshire, having first collected some funds by preaching at Dundee and Glasgow ‘Messiah's glorious Rest in the Latter Days; a
