The Female Portrait Gallery/Mary Queen of Scots

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

THE ABBOT.

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No. 19. — MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.

"Her name is a note of the nightingale." What the troubadour minstrel said of his mistress may be also said of Mary Stuart. Beauty, and all the prestige that birth gives to beauty, the far deeper interest that attends misfortune, and the abiding terror of a violent death; all these invest the memory of the ill-fated queen with a sad charm, felt to the present hour. "No man," says Brantome, "ever beheld her without love and admiration, or thought of her fate without sorrow and pity." From the cradle an evil fortune attended upon her. The birth of a first and royal child, which should have awakened joy and hope, only added keener anxiety to the death-bed of her father. "The kingdom came with a woman," said the dying monarch, dying beneath the pressure of defeat and despair, "and it will go with a woman." He knew the strong hand that was needed to curb the turbulent spirit of the time; if it had been too much for himself, who wore spur and sword, what would it be to one made for the lute and distaff. "Let not," says the young Indian mother, in the 'Prairie,' "let not my child be a girl, for very sorrowful is the lot of woman." If this be true, and few will deny it, it is more than true in the lot of the royal orphan. The chronicles of the house of Stuart would almost justify the Grecian belief in fatality. Their doom was with them: the state—the scaffold—imprisonment and exile, crowd the annals of their race; on each high brow of their fated house is the shadow of the coming evil—the deep melancholy eyes are dark with the hours to come. It would seem as if inanity and worthlessness were their sole exemptions; the only kings whom destiny rejected as unworthy victims, were the weak James, and the profligate Charles; but in Mary, the rarest qualities and the worst fortunes of her house were united. A child, she became an exile from her native soil. In the very lowest class it is well to be bred up amid those scenes wherein our future is cast; nothing ever supplies the place of those early associations—nothing ever knits the heart to the place of its birth like the remembrances of childhood—nothing can give the entire knowledge of a people, but having been brought up among them. This is no place to enter into the long disputed question of Mary's guilt or innocence. If, as Wordsworth says,

⁠"————It is a joy
To think the best we can of human kind."

it must be one to think the "best we can" of a creature so gifted. Where we cannot excuse, we may at least extenuate; palliating the faults of others is a different thing from palliating our own. Mary was brought up in a bad school. History has no darker period than the annals of the era over which Catherine presided; it combined the fiercer crimes with the meaner vices; craft and cruelty went hand in hand. From her cradle, Mary was taught to dissemble, and taught it as a science wherein superiority was matter of mental triumph. As the author of "Devereux" truly says, "it is through our weaknesses that our vices punish us." Now the great evil of Mary's life was her choice of Darnley as a husband—a choice solely dictated by his personal appearance. Had she chosen more wisely, how different might her career have been! She was too clever herself not to have felt superiority, and she had too much of the yielding natural to woman, not to have been influenced by one who had possessed that moral strength which is the secret of supremacy. Scott's picture is but a fragment—yet how finished—how excellently in keeping with our previous historical conception! We are taken in the "strong toil of grace"—we feel how surpassingly lovely was the ill-fated queen—we do not wonder at the fascination that she exercised over all that came within her "charmed circle." How well, too, the thoughtlessness, the impetuosity, and the imprudence are indicated, rather than expressed. She encourages the attachment between Catherine Seyton and Roland Gramme, without one moment's consideration of what the consequent unhappiness may be from the difference in their station: she cannot repress the biting sarcasm, though next to madness in her position; and the tendency to dissemble is shown in those slight things which are the stepping-stones to more important acts. The scene where Mary signs the papers of her abdication is among Scott's very finest. The relenting of the rough old earl is full of humanity; it shows also, most strikingly, the influence of Mary's fascination. But the authority, dependent on such fascination, builds its tower of strength on the sand; favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; such an empire calls forth too much passion, and too many weaknesses; false hopes are entertained, jealousies arise, and envyings and bitterness remain—a foe is more easily made than a friend; and how difficult, or rather how impossible, so to apportion smile and word as to please rivals stimulated by every variety of vanity! It was with Mary Stuart as with Marie Antoinette, the loveliness became a snare, and hatred grew more envenomed, because made personal, from the mortification of unreasonable expectation. When the Scottish queen said "Adieu, plaissant pays de la France," she knew not that she bade adieu to her youth, and all youth's careless gladness: she knew not that she went to dwell among a people for whose habits her education had entirely unfitted her. We can imagine how unpopular the manner of her French attendants would be, with all their gaiety and light gallantry, among the stern and staid people of Scotland; how much of that unpopularity would reflect upon their mistress. Moreover, there is no difference so bitter as religious difference. Mary's catholic faith was then an object of positive horror; much, therefore, that has been alleged against her may well be set down to the violent exaggeration of party spirit; but, even were it otherwise, pity, even to pain, is the only feeling with which we can think of the melancholy prisoner, the best of whose years passed under watch and ward in the gloomy castles of Lochlevin and Fotheringham.

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