her defence; but none could have been more unluckily characteristic
and significant. When Burghley brought against her the
unanswerable charge of having at that moment in her service,
and in receipt of an annual pension, the instigator of a previous
attempt on the life of Elizabeth, she had the unwary audacity
to cite in her justification the pensions allowed by Elizabeth to
her adversaries in Scotland, and especially to her son. It is
remarkable that just two months later, in a conversation with
her keepers, she again made use of the same extraordinary
argument in reply to the same inevitable imputation, and would
not be brought to admit that the two cases were other than
parallel. But except for this single instance of oversight or
perversity her defence was throughout a masterpiece of indomitable
ingenuity, of delicate and steadfast courage, of womanly
dignity and genius. Finally she demanded, as she had demanded
before, a trial either before the estates of the realm lawfully
assembled or else before the queen in council. So closed the
second day of the trial; and before the next day’s work could
begin a note of two or three lines hastily written at midnight
informed the commissioners that Elizabeth had suddenly determined
to adjourn the expected judgment and transfer the place
of it to the star-chamber. Here, on the 25th of October, the
commissioners again met; and one of them alone, Lord Zouch,
dissented from the verdict by which Mary was found guilty of
having, since the 1st of June preceding, compassed and imagined
divers matters tending to the destruction of Elizabeth. This
verdict was conveyed to her, about three weeks later, by Lord
Buckhurst and Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council. At
the intimation that her life was an impediment to the security
of the received religion, “she seemed with a certain unwonted
alacrity to triumph, giving God thanks, and rejoicing in her
heart that she was held to be an instrument” for the restoration
of her own faith. This note of exultation as in martyrdom was
maintained with unflinching courage to the last. She wrote to
Elizabeth and the duke of Guise two letters of almost matchless
eloquence and pathos, admirable especially for their loyal and
grateful remembrance of all her faithful servants. Between the
date of these letters and the day of her execution wellnigh three
months of suspense elapsed. Elizabeth, fearless almost to a
fault in face of physical danger, constant in her confidence even
after discovery of her narrow escape from the poisoned bullets
of household conspirators, was cowardly even to a crime in face
of subtler and more complicated peril. She rejected with
resolute dignity the intercession of French envoys for the life
of the queen-dowager of France; she allowed the sentence of
death to be proclaimed and welcomed with bonfires and bell-ringing
throughout the length of England; she yielded a respite
of twelve days to the pleading of the French ambassador, and
had a charge trumped up against him of participation in a
conspiracy against her life; at length, on the 1st of February
1587, she signed the death-warrant, and then made her secretaries
write word to Paulet of her displeasure that in all this
time he should not of himself have found out some way to shorten
the life of his prisoner, as in duty bound by his oath, and thus
relieve her singularly tender conscience from the guilt of bloodshed.
Paulet, with loyal and regretful indignation, declined the
disgrace proposed to him in a suggestion “to shed blood without
law or warrant”; and on the 7th of February the earls of
Shrewsbury and Kent arrived at Fotheringay with the commission
of the council for execution of the sentence given against
his prisoner. Mary received the announcement with majestic
tranquillity, expressing in dignified terms her readiness to die,
her consciousness that she was a martyr for her religion, and
her total ignorance of any conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth.
At night she took a graceful and affectionate leave of her attendants,
distributed among them her money and jewels, wrote out
in full the various legacies to be conveyed by her will, and charged
her apothecary Gorion with her last messages for the king of
Spain. In these messages the whole nature of the woman was
revealed. Not a single friend, not a single enemy, was forgotten;
the slightest service, the slightest wrong, had its place assigned
in her faithful and implacable memory for retribution or reward.
Forgiveness of injuries was as alien from her fierce and loyal
spirit as forgetfulness of benefits; the destruction of England
and its liberties by Spanish invasion and conquest was the
strongest aspiration of her parting soul. At eight next morning
she entered the hall of execution, having taken leave of the
weeping envoy from Scotland, to whom she gave a brief message
for her son; took her seat on the scaffold, listened with an air
of even cheerful unconcern to the reading of her sentence,
solemnly declared her innocence of the charge conveyed in it
and her consolation in the prospect of ultimate justice, rejected
the professional services of Richard Fletcher, dean of Peterborough,
lifted up her voice in Latin against his in English
prayer, and when he and his fellow-worshippers had fallen duly
silent prayed aloud for the prosperity of her own church, for
Elizabeth, for her son, and for all the enemies whom she had
commended overnight to the notice of the Spanish invader;
then, with no less courage than had marked every hour and
every action of her life, received the stroke of death from the
wavering hand of the headsman.
Mary Stuart was in many respects the creature of her age, of her creed, and of her station; but the noblest and most noteworthy qualities of her nature were independent of rank, opinion or time. Even the detractors who defend her conduct on the plea that she was a dastard and a dupe are compelled in the same breath to retract this implied reproach, and to admit, with illogical acclamation and incongruous applause, that the world never saw more splendid courage at the service of more brilliant intelligence, that a braver if not “a rarer spirit never did steer humanity.” A kinder or more faithful friend, a deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or to desire. Passion alone could shake the double fortress of her impregnable heart and ever-active brain. The passion of love, after very sufficient experience, she apparently and naturally outlived; the passion of hatred and revenge was as inextinguishable in her inmost nature as the emotion of loyalty and gratitude. Of repentance it would seem that she knew as little as of fear, having been trained from her infancy in a religion where the Decalogue was supplanted by the Creed. Adept as she was in the most exquisite delicacy of dissimulation, the most salient note of her original disposition was daring rather than subtlety. Beside or behind the voluptuous or intellectual attractions of beauty and culture, she had about her the fresher charm of a fearless and frank simplicity, a genuine and enduring pleasure in small and harmless things no less than in such as were neither. In 1562 she amused herself for some days by living “with her little troop” in the house of a burgess of St Andrews “like a burgess’s wife,” assuring the English ambassador that he should not find the queen there,—“nor I know not myself where she is become.” From Sheffield Lodge, twelve years later, she applied to the archbishop of Glasgow and the cardinal of Guise for some pretty little dogs, to be sent her in baskets very warmly packed,—“for besides reading and working, I take pleasure only in all the little animals that I can get.” No lapse of reconciling time, no extent of comparative indulgence, could break her in to resignation, submission, or toleration of even partial restraint. Three months after the massacre of St Bartholomew had caused some additional restrictions to be placed upon her freedom of action, Shrewsbury writes to Burghley that “rather than continue this imprisonment she sticks not to say she will give her body, her son, and country for liberty”; nor did she ever show any excess of regard for any of the three. For her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of action, she cared much; for her creed she cared something; for her country she cared less than nothing. She would have flung Scotland with England into the hell fire of Spanish Catholicism rather than forgo the faintest chance of personal revenge. Her profession of a desire to be instructed in the doctrines of Anglican Protestantism was so transparently a pious fraud as rather to afford confirmation than to arouse suspicion of her fidelity to the teaching of her church. Elizabeth, so shamefully her inferior in personal loyalty, fidelity and gratitude, was as clearly her superior on the one all-important point of patriotism. The
