University of Virginia Library

LEGENDS
OF
SCOTLAND.

PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF MARY STUART.

CHASTELAR.

The last flush of day had not yet faded from the west, although
the summer moon was riding above the verge of the
eastern horizon, in a flood of mellow glory, with the diamond-spark
of Lucifer glittering in solitary brightness at her side.
It was one of those enchanting evenings which, peculiar to the
southern lands of Europe, visit, but at far and fleeting intervals,
the sterner clime of Britain. Not Italy, however, could herself
have boasted a more delicious twilight than this, which
now was waning into night, above the rude magnificence of
Scotland's capital. The fantastic dwellings of the city, ridge
above ridge, loomed broadly to the left, partially veiled by those
wreaths of vapor, which have been the origin of its provincial
name; while, far above the misty indistinctness of the town,
the glorious castle towered aloft upon its craggy throne, displaying
a hundred fronts of massive shadow, and as many salient
angles jutting abruptly into sight. The lovely vale of the

King's park, with its velvet turf and shadowy foliage, shone out
in quiet lustre from beneath the dark-gray buttresses of Arthur's
seat; while from the trim alleys and pleached evergreens,
which at that day formed a belt of lawn, and shrubbery, and
royal garden, around the venerable pile of Holyrood, the rich
song of the throstle — the nightingale of Scotland — came in
repeated bursts upon the ear.

Delightful as such an evening must naturally be to all who
have hearts awake to the influence of sweet sounds and lovely
sights, how inexpressibly soothing must it seem to one who,
languishing beneath the ungenial atmosphere of a northern region,
and sighing for the bluer skies and softer breezes of his
fatherland, feels himself at once transported, by the unusual
aspect of the heavens, to the distant home of his regrets! It
was, perhaps, some fancied similarity to the nights in which
he had been wont to court the favor of the high-born dames of
France with voice and instrument, that had awakened the melody
of some foreign cavalier, more suitable perchance to the
light murmurs of the Seine than to the distant booming of the
seas that lash the coasts of Scotland. Such, however, was the
illusion produced by the unwonted softness of the hour, that the
tinkling of a lute and the full, manly voice of the singer did not
at the moment seem so inconsistent to the spirit of the country
and of the times as in truth it was. The words were French,
and the air, though sweet, so melancholy, that it left a vague
sensation of pain upon the listener — as though none but a heart
diseased could give birth to notes so plaintive. “Pensez à moi!
pensez à moi! — noble dame — Pensez à moi!” — the burden
of the strain swelled clearly audible in the deepest tones of
feeling, although the intermediate words were lost amid the
accompaniment of the silver strings. Never, perhaps, since
the unfortunate Chatelain de Concy first chanted his extemporaneous
farewell to the lady of his heart, had his simple words

been sung with taste or execution more appropriate to their subject.
In truth, it was impossible to listen to the lay without
feeling a conviction that the heart of the minstrel was in his
song. There were, moreover, moments in which a practised
ear might have discovered variations, not in the tune only, but
in the words, as the singer exerted his unrivalled powers to
adapt the text, which he had chosen, to his own peculiar circumstances;
nor would it have required more than a common
degree of fancy to have traced the sounds, “O Reine Marie!”
mingling with the proper refrain of the chant, although it would
have been less easy to distinguish whether the fervent expression
with which the words were invested was applied to an object
of mortal idolatry or of immortal adoration. It would seem, however,
that there were listeners near, to whom this doubt had
not so much as once occurred; for in a shadowy bower, not far
distant from the spot where the concealed musician sang, there
stood a group of ladies, drinking with breathless eagerness every
note that issued from his lips. Foremost in place, as first
in rank, was one whose charms have been said and sung, not
by the poet and the romancer only, but by the muse of history
herself, who almost seems to have dipped her graver pencil in
the hues of fiction when describing Mary Stuart of Scotland.
Her form, rather below than above the middle stature of the
female form, was fashioned with such perfect elegance, that it
was equally calculated to exhibit the extremes of grace and
majesty. Her ringlets of the deepest auburn, glancing in the
light with a glossy, golden lustre, and melting into shadows of
dark chestnut; the statue-like contour of her Grecian head;
her eyes, on which no man had ever gazed with impunity to
his heart — more languid and at the same time far more brilliant
than those of created beauty; her mouth, whose wreathed smile
might have almost tempted angels to descend and worship; her
swan-like neck of dazzling whiteness; and, above all, the glorious
blending of feminine ease with regal dignity — of condescension
and affability toward the meanest of her fellow-men,
with the exalted consciousness of all that was due, not to her
rank, but to herself — combined to render her perhaps the loveliest,
as after-events proved her beyond a doubt the most unfortunate,
of queens or women. Sorrow at this time had scarcely
cast a shadow on that transparent brow; or, if an occasional recollection
of the ill-fated Francis did leave a trace behind, it was
a sadness of that gentle and spiritualized description which is,
perhaps, a more attractive expression to be marked in the features
of a lovely woman, than the full blaze of happiness and self-enjoyment.
Simple almost to plainness in her attire, the queen
of Scotland moved before her four attendant Maries, ten thousand
times more lovely from the contrast of her unadornment to
the gorgeous dresses of those noble dames, who had been selected
to be near her person, with especial regard, not to exalted
rank alone, or to the distinctive name, which they bore
in common with their royal mistress, but to intellect, and beauty,
and all those accomplishments which, general as they are in
our day, were then at least as highly valued for their rarity, as
for their intrinsic merits. A robe of sable velvet, with the
closely-fitted corsage peculiar to the age in which she lived,
a falling ruff from the fairest looms of Flanders, and the picturesque
head-gear which has ever borne her name, with its double
tressure of pearls, and a single string of the same precious
jewels around her neck, completed Mary's dress, while rustling
trains of many-colored satin, guarded with costly laces and
stomachers studded with gems, bracelets, and carcanets, and
chains of goldsmith's work, gleamed on the persons of her ladies.
Still the demeanor of the little group was more in accordance
to the simplicity of the mistress than to the splendor
of the others. No rigid etiquette was there; none of that high
and haughty ceremonial which, in the courtly festivals of the
rival queen of England, froze up the feelings even of those trusted
few who bore with the caprices, in seeking for the favors, of
Elizabeth. The titles of grace and majesty were lisped indeed
by the lips of the fair damsels, but the character of their remarks,
the polished raillery, the light laugh, and the freedom
of intercourse, were rather those of the younger members of a
family toward an elder sister, than of a court-circle toward a
powerful queen. As the last notes of the song died away, she
who was nearest to Mary's person whispered in a sportive
tone, “Your grace has heard that lute before —”

“In France, Carmichael,” answered Mary, with a breath so
deeply drawn as almost to resemble a sigh, “in our beautiful
France; when, when shall I look upon that lovely land again.”

While she was yet speaking the music recommenced. A
dash of impatience was mingled with the plaintive sweetness
of the strain, and the words “pensez à mon” swept past their ears
with all the energy of disappointed feelings.

“It is the voice —”

“Of the sieur de Chastelar,” interrupted the queen; “we
would thank the gentleman for his minstrelsey. Seyton, ma
mignonne, hie thee across yon woodbine-maze, and summon
this night-warbler to our presence.”

With an arch smile the lively girl bounded forward, and was
for an instant lost among the foliage of the garden.

“Dost thou remember, Carmichael,” said the queen, whose
thoughts had been reflected by the well-remembered strains —
“dost thou remember our sylvan festivals in the lovely groves
of Versailles, with hound and hawk for noonday pastime, and
the lute, the song, and the unfettered dance upon the green
sward, beneath moons unclouded by the hazy gloom of this
dark Scotland's?”

“And does your grace remember,” laughed the other in reply,
“a certain fête in which the palm of minstrelsey was awarded

by your royal hand to a masked hunter of the forest? Yet
was his bearing somewhat gentle for a ranger of the green-wood,
and his hand was passing white to have handled the
tough bow-string? Does your grace's memory serve to recall
the air whose executions gained that prize of harmony? Methinks
it did run somewhat thus,” — and she warbled the same
notes which had formed the burthen of the serenade.

Whether some distant recollections conjured up the mantling
color to the cheeks of Mary, or whether she dreaded the misconstruction
of the serenader, on his hearing his own tender
words repeated in a voice of female melody, it was with brow,
neck and bosom of the deepest crimson that she turned to
Mary Carmichael —

“Peace, silly minion!” she said, with momentary dignity;
“wouldst have it said that Mary of Scotland is so light of bearing
as to trill love-ditties in reply to unseen ballad-mongers?”
Nay, weep not neither, Marie; if I spoke somewhat shortly,
't was that the gentleman was even then approaching. Cheer
up, my girl; thou hast, we know it well, a kind, a gentle, and
a trusty heart, though nature has coupled the gift to that of
a thoughtless head and random tongue. Take not on thus,
or I shall blame myself in that I checked thee, though surely
not unkindly. Mary of Stuart loves better far to look upon a
smiling lip than a wet eye, even if it be a stranger's — much
less that of one whom she loves — as I love thee, Carmichael.”

There was, perhaps, no circumstance more remarkable than
the power which, at every period of her momentous life, Mary
appears to have possessed of winning, as it were at a glance,
the affections of all who came in contact with her. The deep
devotion, not of the barons and the military chiefs alone, who
bled in defence of her cause, but of the ladies, the pages, the
chamberlains of her court, nay, of the very grooms and servitors,

with whom she could have held no intercourse beyond a
smile or inclination of the head, in return for their lowly obeisance,
was ever ready for the proof, when circumstances
might demand its exercise. Not shown by outward acts of heroism
only, or by those deeds which men are wont to perform,
no less at the instigation of their wishes for renown, or of rivalry
with some more famed competitor, this devotion was constantly
manifested in the eagerness of all around her to execute
even the most menial duties to Mary's satisfaction; in the
promptness to anticipate her slightest wish; in the lively joy
which one kind word from her could awaken, as if by magic,
on every brow; and, above all, in the utter despondency which
seemed to sink down upon those whom she might deem it necessary
to check, even with the slightest remonstrance. In the
present instance the sensitive girl, to whom the queen had uttered
her commands in the nervous quickness of, excitement,
rather than with any feeling of harshness or offended pride, felt,
it was evident, more bitterness of grief at the rebuke of one whom
she loved no less than she revered, than she would have experienced
beneath the pressure of some real calamity. As quickly,
however, as the sense of sorrow had been excited, did it pass
away, before the returning smiles, the soft caresses, and the
winning manners of the most fascinating of women the most
amiable of superiors.

Scarcely had the tears of Mary Carmichael ceased to flow,
when the footsteps, which for some moments previously had
been heard approaching, sounded close at hand; the branches
of the embowering shrubbery were gently put asunder, and the
lady Seyton stood again before the queen, attended by a gentleman
of noble aspect, and whose very gesture was fraught
with that easy and graceful politeness which, perhaps, showed
even more to advantage in that iron age and warlike country,
displayed, as it often was, in contrast to the rude demeanor and

stern simplicity of the warrior lords of Scotland, than in his
native France.

The sieur de Chastelar was at this time in the very prime
of youthful manhood, and might have been some few years, and
but few, the senior of the lovely being before whose presence
he bent in adoration humbler, and more fervently expressed,
than the reverence due from a mere subject to a mortal queen.
Tall and fairly-proportioned, with a countenance in which
almost feminine softness of expression was blended, with an
aspect of the eye and lip, which proved the vicinity of bolder
and more manly qualities, slumbering but not extinct, he seemed
at the first glance a man most eminently qualified to win a female
heart. And who, that looked upon the broad and massive
brow, and the quick glance of that eye, fraught with intelligence,
could doubt but that the mind within was equal to the more
perishable beauties of the form in which it was encompassed?
And when to all this was added, that the sieur de Chastelar
had already won a name in his green youth that ranked with
those of gray-haired veterans in the lists of glory; that in all
manly exercises, as in all softer accomplishments, he owned
no superior; that the most skilful master of defence, the far-famed
Vicentio Saviola, confessed De Chastelar his equal in the
quickness of eye, the readiness of hand and foot which had
combined to render him the most distinguished swordsman of
the day; that the wildest and most untameable chargers that
ever were compelled to undergo the manége, might as well
have striven to shake off a portion of themselves, as to dismount
De Chasteler by any display of violence and power; that his
hand could draw the clothyard arrow to the head, and speed it
to its aim as truly as the fleetest archer that ever twanged a bow
in Sherwood; that he moved in the stately measure of the pavon,
or the livelier galliarde, with that grace peculiar to his nation;
that, in the richness of his voice, his execution and taste on

lute or guitar, he might have vied with the sons of Italy herself;
in short, that all perfections which were deemed most requisite
to form a gentleman were united in De Chastelar, what
female heart, that was not proof to all the allurements of love
or fancy, could hope to make an adequate resistance? Young,
handsome, romantic, ardent in his hopes, enthusiastic almost to
madness in his affections, he had been captivated years before
in the gay salons of the French capitol, by the beauty and irresistible
fascinations of the princess.

In the intercourse of French society, which even in the
times of the Medici, as it has been in all succeeding ages, was
far more liberal in its distinctions, and less restricted by the
formalities of etiquette, than in any other court, a thousand opportunities
had occurred, by which the youthful cavalier had
profited to rivet the attention of the princess; at every carousel
he bore her colors; in every masque he introduced some delicate
allusion, some soft flattery, palpable to her alone; in every contest
of musical skill, which yet survived in Paris, the sole remnant
of the troubadours, some covert traces of his passion might
be discovered, if not by every ear, eat least by that of Mary.
Intoxicated as she was, at this stage of her life, by the adulation
of all, by the consciousness of beauty, power, and rank, far
above all her fellows, the queen of Scotland owed much of her
misery in after-years to the unclouded brilliancy of her youthful
prospects, and to the wide distinction between the manners
of that court, in which her happiest hours were spent; and of
her northern subjects, by whom her gaieté de cour, her love for
society less formal than the routine of courts, and her predilections
for all innocent amusements, were ever looked upon in
the light of grave derelictions from decorum and morality.

That she had regarded the gallant boy, whose accomplishments
were so constantly before her eyes, with favorable inclinations
was not to be doubted; and that at times she had lavished

upon him marks of her good will in rather too profuse a
degree, was no less true; but whether this line of conduct was
dictated merely by a natural impulse, which ever leads us to
distinguish those whom we approve from the common herd of
our acquaintance, or by a warmer feeling, can never now be
ascertained. It mattered not, however, to the youth, from
which cause the conduct of the lovely princess was derived;
it was enough for him that she had marked his attentions, that
she had deigned to look upon him with favorable eyes, that she
might at some future period learn to love.

Not long, however, was it permitted to him to indulge in
those fair but fallacious dreams; the marriage of the Scottish
princess with the royal Francis was ere long publicly announced,
the ceremonies of the betrothal, and lastly of the wedding itself,
were solemnized with all the pomp and splendor of the mightiest
realm in Europe, and the aspirations of the united nations
ascended in behalf of Francis and his lovely bride.

It was then, for the first time, that Mary was rendered fully
aware of the misery which her unthinking freedom had entailed
upon the ardent nature of De Chastelar; it was then, for the
first time, that she learned how deep and powerful had been
the passion which he had nourished in his heart of hearts — that
she was awakened to a consciousness that she was loved, not
wisely, but too well. Heretofore she had believed, that the
eagerness of the gay and gallant Frenchman to display his
equestrian skill, his musical accomplishments, before her presence,
and as it were in her behalf, and the devotedness with
which he turned all his powers to a single object, were rather
to be attributed to a desire of gaining general approbation as a
gentle cavalier, a slave to beauty, and a favored servant of
earth's loveliest lady, than to a passion, the romance of which,
considering the wide distinction of their sphere, would have
amounted to actual insanity. Now she perceived, to her deep

regret, that the arrow had been shot home, and that the barb
had taken hold too firmly to be disengaged by a sudden effort,
how vehement soever. She saw, in the pale cheek and hollow
eye, that he had cherished hopes which reason and reality
must bid him discard, at once and for ever; but which he
yet had not the fortitude to tear up by the roots, and cast
into oblivion. For a time he had wandered about, a spectre
of his former person, among the festivities and happiness
of all around him, paler every day, and more abstracted in
his mien; then he had exiled himself at once from rejoicings
in which he could have no share, and had buried his hopes,
his anxieties, his misery, in the loneliness of his own secluded
chamber.

Thus had passed weeks and months; and when at length he
had come forth again to join the world and all its vanities, he
was, as it seemed to all, a wiser and a sadder man. The
queen, ever kind and affectionate in her disposition, imagining
that he had struggled with the demon which possessed him,
and cast his hopeless love behind him, met his return to the
courtly circle with her wonted condescension. On his preferring
his request to be installed her chamberlain, willing to
mark her high sense of his imagined integrity, in thus manfully
shaking off his weakness, she granted his request; and
trusting that his own acuteness would readily perceive the distinction
between royal favor to a trusted servant and feminine
affections to a preferred lover, assumed nothing of formality or
etiquette, more than had characterized their former days of unrestricted
intercourse. Her own first trial followed; the first
year of her nuptials had not yet flown, when the gallant Francis,
the earliest, the worthy object of her young love, sickened
with a disease which from its very commencement permitted
but slight hopes of his recovery. Then came the wretchedness
of anxiety, hoping all things, yet too well aware that all

was hopeless; the watchings by his feverish bed, when watching,
it was too obvious, could be of no avail; the agony when
the announcement that all was over, long foreseen, but never
to be endured, burst on her mind; the long, heart-rending sorrow,
the repinings after pleasures that were never to return;
and, last of all, the cold, stern carelessness of despair. She
awoke at length from her lethargy of wo; awoke to leave the
lovely climate which she had learned almost to deem her own;
to be torn from the friends whom she had loved, and the society
of which she had been the brightest gem, to return to a country
which, though it was the country of her birth, had never conjured
up to her imagination any pictures save of a gloomy hue
and melancholy nature.

A few who had served her in the sunny land of France adhered
to her with unshaken resolution, despising all inconveniences,
setting at naught all dangers, save that separation from
a mistress, whom, to have attended once, was to love for ever.
Among those few was De Chastelar. The alteration in her
condition had undoubtedly suggested to the widowed queen the
necessity of an alteration in her conduct toward De Chastelar,
particularly when it was added, that familiarity between a creature
so young and lovely as herself and a gentleman so noble,
even in his melancholy, as the chamberlain, would have at
once excited the indignation of her stern and rigid subjects.
In these circumstances it would perhaps have been a wiser,
though not a more considerate plan, to have confided the cause
of her embarrassment to the causer of it, and to have requested
his absence from her court. It was not, however, in Mary's
nature to give pain, if she could possibly avoid it, to the meanest
animal, much less to a friend valued and esteemed, as he
who was the innocent cause of her anxiety. She adopted,
therefore, what, being always the most easy, is ever the most
dangerous, an intermediate course. In public De Chastelar

received no marks of approbation from the queen, much less of
regard from the woman; but in her hours of retirement, when
surrounded by the ladies of her court, the most of whom had
followed her footsteps northward from gay Paris, she delighted
to efface from his mind the recollections of neglect before
the eyes of the censorious Scots, by a delicacy of attention,
and a warmth of friendship, which, while it fully answered
her end of soothing his wounded feelings, led him to
cherish ideas most fatal in the end to his own happiness, and
to that of the fair being whom he so adored. It was with a
heightened color and throbbing breast that Mary turned to address
her unconfessed lover, yet there was no flutter in the
clear, soft voice with which she spoke.

“We would thank,” she said, “the sieur de Chastelar for
the delightful sounds by which he has rendered our walk on
this sweet evening even more agreeable than the mild air and
cloudless heaven could have done without his minstrelsey. Yet
't was a mournful strain, De Chastelar,” she continued, “and one
which, if we err not, flows from a wounded heart. Would that
we knew the object of so true a servant's worship, that we
might whisper our royal pleasure in her ear, that she should
list the suit of one whom we regard so highly. Is she in
truth so obdurate, this fair of thine, De Chastelar? she must
be hard of heart to slight so gallant a cavalier.”

“Not so, your grace,” replied the astonished lover, in a
voice scarcely less sonorous than the music he had made so
lately. “She to whom all my vows are paid, she who has
ever owned the passionate aspirations of a devoted heart, is as
pre-eminently raised in all the sweet and amiable sentiments
of the mind as is unrivalled beauty above all mortal beings.”

For an instant the queen was dumb; she had hoped, by
affecting ignorance of his sentiments, that she should have
been enabled to make him comprehend the madness, the utter

inutility of his passion, and she felt that she had failed; that
words had been addressed to her, which, however she might
feign to others that she had not perceived their bearing, he
must be well aware she could not possibly have failed to understand.
It was with an altered mien, and with an air of
cold and haughty dignity, that she again addressed him as she
passed onward toward the palace.

“We wish thee, then, fair sir, a better fortune hereafter, and
until then good night.” Without uttering a syllable in reply,
he bowed himself almost to the earth; nor did he raise his head
again until the form he loved to look upon had vanished from
his sight: then slowly lifting his eyes he gazed wistfully after
her, dashed his hand violently upon his brow, and turning
aside rushed hastily from the spot.

An hour had scarcely elapsed before the lights were extinguished
throughout the vaulted halls of Holyrood; the guards
were posted for the night, the officers had gone their rounds,
the ladies of the royal circle were dismissed, and all was darkness
and silence. In Mary's chamber a single lamp was burning
in a small recess, before a beautifully-executed painting
of the virgin, but light was not sufficient to penetrate the obscurity
which reigned in the many angles and alcoves of that
irregular apartment, although the moonbeams were admitted
through the open casement.

Her garb of ceremony laid aside, her lovely shape scantily
veiled by a single robe of spotless linen, her auburn tresses
flowing in unrestrained luxuriance almost to her feet, if she had
been a creature of perfect human beauty, when viewed in all
the pomp of royal pageantry, she now appeared a being of supernatural
loveliness. Her small white feet, unsandalled,
glided over the rich carpet with a grace which a slight degree
of fancy might have deemed the motion peculiar to the inhabitants
of another world. For an instant, ere she turned to her

repose, she leaned against the carved mullions of the window,
and gazed pensively, and it might be sadly, upon the garden,
where she had so lately parted from the unhappy youth, whose
life was thus embittered by that very feeling which, above all
others, should have been its consolation. Withdrawing her
eyes from the moonlit scene, she knelt before the lamp and the
shrine which it illuminated, and her whispered orisons arose
pure as the source from which they flowed; the prayers of a
weak and humble mortal, penitent for every trivial error, breathing
all confidence to Him who alone can protect or pardon;
the prayers of a queen for her numerous children, and last, and
holiest of all, a woman's prayers for her unfortunate admirer.
Yes, she prayed for Chastelar, that strength might be given to
him from on high, to bear the crosses of a miserable life, and
that by Divine mercy the hopeless love might be uprooted from
his breast. The words burst passionately from her lips, her
whole frame quivered with the excess of her emotion, and the
big tears fell like rain from her uplifted eyes. While she was
yet in the very flood of passion a sigh was breathed, so clearly
audible, that the conviction flashed like lightning on her soul,
that this most secret prayer was listened to by other ears than
those of heavenly ministers. Terror, acute terror took possession
of her mind, banishing, by its superior violence, every less
engrossing idea. She snatched the lamp from its niche, waved
it slowly around the chamber, and there, in the most hallowed
spot of her widowed chamber, a spy upon her unguarded
moments, stood a dark figure. Even in that moment of astonishment
and fear, as if by instinct, the beautiful instinct of purely
female modesty, she snatched a velvet mantle from the seat on
which it had been cast aside, and veiled her person even before
she spoke — “O God! it is De Chastelar!”

“Sweet queen,” replied the intruder, “bright, beautiful ruler
of my destinies, pardon —”

“What ho!” she screamed, in notes of dread intensity, “à
moi, à moi mes Français. My guards! Seyton! Carmichael!
Fleming! will ye leave your queen alone! alone with treachery
and black dishonor! Villain! slave!” she cried, turning
her flashing eyes upon him, her whole form swelling as it were
with all the fury of injured innocence, “didst thou dare to think
that Mary — Mary, the wife of Francis — the anointed queen
of Scotland, would brook thine infamous addresses? Nay,
kneel not, or I spurn thee! What ho! will no one aid in mine
extremity?”

“Fear naught from me,” faltered the wretched Chastelar, but
with a voice like that of some inspired Pythoness she broke
in — “Fear! thinkst thou that I could fear a thing, an abject
coward thing like thee? a wretch that would exult in the infamy
of one whom he pretends to love? Fear thee! by heavens!
if I could have feared, contempt must have forbidden it.”

“Nay, Mary, hear me! hear me but one word, if that word
cost my life —”

“Thy life! hadst thou ten thousand lives, they would be but
a feather in the scale against thy monstrous villany. What
ho!” again she cried, stamping with impotent anger at the delay
of her attendants, “treason! my guards! treason!”

At length the passages rang with the hurried footsteps of the
startled inmates of the palace; with torch and spear, and brandished
blades, they rushed into the apartment; page, sentinel,
and chamberlain, ladies with dishevelled hair, and faces
blanched with terror. The queen stood erect in the centre of
the room, pointing, with one white arm bare to the shoulder,
toward the wretched culprit, who, with folded arms, and head
erect, awaited his doom in unresisting silence. His naked
rapier, with which alone he might have foiled the united
efforts of his enemies, lay at his feet; his brow was white as
sculptured marble, and no less rigid, but his eyes glared

wildly, and his lips quivered as though he would have
spoken

The queen, still furious at the wrong which he had done her
fame, marked the expression. “Silence!” she cried — “degraded!
wouldst thou meanly beg thy forfeit life? Wert thou my
father, thou shouldst die to-morrow! Hence with the villain!
Bid Maitland execute the warrant. Ourself — ourself will sign
it — away! Chastelar dies at daybreak!”

“'Tis well,” replied he, calmly, “it is well — the lips I love
the best pronounce my doom, and I die happy, since I die for
Mary. Wouldst thou but pity the offender, while thou dost
doom the offence, De Chastelar would not exchange his shortened
span of life, and violent death, for the brightest crown in
Christendom. My limbs may die — my love will live for
ever! Lead on, minions; I am more glad to die than ye to
slay! Mary, beautiful Mary, think — think hereafter upon
Chastelar!”

The guards passed onward; last of the group, unfettered and
unmoved, De Chastelar stalked after them. Once, ere he
stooped beneath the low-browed portal, he paused, placed both
hands on his heart, bowed lowly, and then pointed upward, as
he chanted once again the words, “Pensez à moi, noble dame,
pensez à moi.” As he vanished from her presence she waved
her hand impatiently to be left alone — and all night long she
traversed and re-traversed the floor of her chamber, in paroxysms
of the fiercest despair. The warrant was brought to her
— silently, sternly, she traced her signature beneath it; not a
sign of sympathy was on her pallid features, not a tremor shook
her frame; she was passionless, majestic, and unmoved. The
secretary left the chamber on his fatal errand, and Mary was
again a woman. Prostrate upon her couch she lay, sobbing
and weeping as though her very soul was bursting from her
bosom, defying all consolation, spurning every offer at remedy.

“'Tis done!” she would say, “'tis done! I have preserved my
fame, and murdered mine only friend!”

The morning dawned slowly, and the heavy bells of all the
churches clanged the death-peal of De Chastelar. The tramp
of the cavalry defiling from the palace-gates struck on her heart
as though each hoof dashed on her bosom. An hour passed
away, the minute-bells still tolling; the roar of a culverin swept
heavily downward from the castle, and all was over. He had
died as he had lived, undaunted — as he had lived, devoted!
“Mary, divine Mary,” were his latest words, “I love in
death, as I loved in life, thee, and thee only.” The axe drank
his blood, and the queen of Scotland had not a truer servant
left behind than he, whom, for a moment's frenzy, she was
compelled to slay. Yet was his last wish satisfied; for though
the queen might not relent, the woman did forgive; and in
many a mournful hour did Mary think on Chastelar.

RIZZIO.

The shadows of an early evening, in the ungenial month of
March, were already gathering among the narrow streets and
wynds of the Scottish metropolis. There was a melancholy
air of solitude about the grim and dusky edifices, which towered
to the height of twelve or thirteen stories against the gray
horizon. No lights streamed from the casements, no voices
sounded in loud revelry or chastened merriment from the dwellings
of the gloomy quarter in which the scene of our narrative
is laid. The cheerless aspect of the night, together with the
drizzling rain, which fell in silent copiousness, had banished
every human being from the streets; and, except the smoke
which eddied from the dilapidated chimneys, and was instantly
beat down to earth by the violence of the shower, there was no
sign of any other inhabitants, than the famished dogs which
were snarling over the relics of some thrice-picked bone.
Suddenly the sharp clatter of hoofs, in rapid motion over the
broken pavement, rose above the splashing of the flooded gutters,
betokening the approach of men; and ere a minute had
elapsed two horsemen, gallantly mounted, rode hotly up the
street. The foremost bestriding, with the careless ease of an
accomplished rider, a jennet, whose thin jaws, expanded nostril,
and flashing eye, no less than the deerlike springiness of
its gait, and its unrivalled symmetry, proclaimed it sprung from
the best blood of the desert, was of a figure that could not be

looked upon, however slightly, without awakening a sense of
interest, perhaps of admiration, in all beholders.

His countenance, of an oval form, and of a darker hue than
the blue-eyed sons of northern latitudes are wont to exhibit —
the full and somewhat wild expression of his dark eye, the
melancholy smile which played upon his curling lip, pencilled
mustache, and the peaked beard — contributing to form a face
that Antonio Vandyke would have loved to paint, and after
ages to admire, when invested with the life of his rich coloring.
His dress of russet velvet slashed with satin, his feathered
cap, with its gay fanfarona[1] and enamelled medal, his jeweled
rapier, and the bright spurs in his falling buskins, were well
adapted to the agile limbs and slender, though symmetrical
proportions of the horseman.

The second rider was a boy, whose black and scarlet liveries
— the well-known colors of all servitors of the Scottish crown
— were but imperfectly hidden by the frieze cloak which had
been cast over them, evidently for the purposes of concealment,
rather than of comfort; yet he, too, like the gallant whom
he followed — if any faith was to be placed in the evidence of
raven hair and olive complexion — owed his birth to some
more southern clime.

After winding rapidly through several dim and unfrequented
lanes, the leading horseman, checking his speed, gazed around
him with a doubtful and bewildered eye.

“Madre di Dio,” he exclaimed at length, “what a night is
here; a thousand curses on this learned fool, that he must
dwell in such a den of thieves as this; or rather a thousand
curses on the blind and heretical Scots, that drive a man of
wisdom, beyond their shallow comprehension, to bed with the

very outcasts of society. Pietro, what ho!” and he raised his
voice above the key in which he had pitched his soliloquy,
“knowest thou the dwelling of this sage — this Johan Damietta?
methought that I had noted the spot, yet have these
sordid lanes banished the recollection. Presto, time fails
already.”

Without uttering a syllable in reply, the page sprung from
his horse, and pointed to the doorway of a mansion, dilapidated
even more than those in its vicinity, yet bearing in its site the
marks of having been constructed in former days for the residence
of some proud baron. Nor even now — although all the
appliances of comfort were utterly neglected, although the
casements were void of glass, and the chimneys sent up no
volumes from a cheerful hearth — were the external defences
of the pile forgotten; heavy bars of iron crossed and recrossed
the deep-set embrasure which once had held the windows, and
the oaken gate was clenched with many a massive nail and
plate of rusted iron. The cavalier alighted, cast the rein to
his servitor, and with the single word “Prudence,” ascended
the stone steps, and struck thrice at measured intervals upon
the wicket with his rapier's hilt. The door flew open, but
without the agency, as it appeared, of any living being, and, as
the visiter entered, was closed again behind him with a heavy
crash.

A narrow passage was before him, scarcely rendered visible
by the flickering light of a cresset suspended from the ceiling,
and nourished, as it seemed, with spirit, rather than with the
richer food of oil. Uncertain, however, as was the illumination,
it served to show a second door, even more strongly constructed
than the first, fronting the intruder at the distance of
some ten paces; while the wall, perforated with loops for musketry,
or more probably, if the remote antiquity of the building
were considered, for arrows, proved that the hostile intruder

had effected but little in forcing his way through the outward
entrance. It would be wrong, in the description of this difficult
passage, to omit the mention of certain orifices, or slits,
extending in length from the floor even to the ceiling of the
side-walls, but not exceeding a single inch in width, as they
may tend perhaps to cast some light upon an invention of the
darkest ages of Scottish history, the reality of which has been
considered doubtful by acute antiquarians. From the upper
extremity of these slits protruded on either side the blades of
six enormous swords, which, being placed alternately, and
worked by some concealed machinery, must inevitably hew to
atoms, when once set in motion, any obstacle to their appalling
sway. This was the dreaded swordmill first discovered by
the wizard baron Soulis, and thence invested with superstitious
error, which was needless, at the least, when the actual horrors
of the engine were considered. It is, however, probable, that
these gigantic relics of an earlier age were no longer capable
of being rendered available at the period of which we
write; at all events they hung in rusty blackness, suspended
like the sword of Damocles above the head of the intruder,
rendering his position awful, at least, if not in reality insecure.

Notwithstanding the warlike and turbulent character of
Scotland during the reign of Mary, there was nevertheless
enough of the uncommon in the defences of this dark and dangerous
entrance to have riveted the attention of a man less anxiously
engaged than was the foreign cavalier. Apparently undismayed
by the wild contrivances around him, the gallant strode
forward to repeat his signal on the inner wicket, when a broad
glare of crimson light, produced by some chemical preparation,
considered in that dark age supernatural, was shot into his very
face from an aperture above, clearly displaying to some concealed
observer the form and features of his visiter.

“Ha!” cried a voice so shrill and grating as to produce a

painful impression on the nerves of the hearer. “Thou art
come hither, Sir Italian; enter, then — enter in the name of
Albunazar! — enter, the hour is propitious, and thou art waited
for!”

The door revolved noiselessly on its hinges, and a few steps
brought the Italian to the chamber of the sage. It was a small
and central cell, without the slightest visible communication
with the outward air. Books of strange characters and instruments
of singular device were scattered on the floor, the tables,
and the seats; astrolabes, globes of the terrestrial and celestial
world, crucibles, and vials of rare and potent mixtures, lay beside
discolored bones, reptiles, and loathsome things from tropical
climes, some stuffed, and others carefully preserved in
spirit. A huge furnace glimmered in the corner, covered with
vessels containing, doubtless, alembics of unearthly power; a
large black cat — to which inoffensive animal wild notions of
infernal origin were then attached — and a gigantic owl, perched
on a fleshless skull, completed the ornaments of this receptacle
of superstitious quackery, which was rendered as light as day
by the aid of some composition, burning in a lamp so brilliantly
as to dazzle the firmest eye. In the midst of this confused assemblage
of things, useless and revolting alike to reason and
humanity, the master-spirit of his tribe was seated — a small
old man, whose massive forehead, pencilled with the deep lines
of thought, would have betokened a profound and powerful
mind, had not the quick flash of the small and deeply-seated
eye belied, by its crafty and malignant glances, all symptoms
of a noble nature.

“Hail, Signor David!” he said, but without raising his eyes
from the retort over which he was poring. “Hail! methought
that thou didst hold the wisdom of the sage mere quackery!
Ha! out upon such changeful, feather-pated knaves, who scoff
before men at that which they respect — ay, which they tremble

at in private! — tremble! well mayst thou tremble — for thy
doom is fixed! See,” he cried, in a fearfully unnatural tone,
as he raised the metallic rod with which he had been stirring
the contents of the glass vessel, and exhibited it dripping with
some crimson-colored liquid — “see! it is gore — thy gore, Signor
David! — ha, ha, ha!” and he laughed with fiendish glee at
the evident discomposure of his guest.

“Nay, nay, good father —” he began, when the other cut
him off abruptly —

“`Good father!' — ha, ha, ha! Good devil! Fool, dost think
that thou canst change the destinies that were eternal, before
so vain a thing as thou wast in existence, by thine unmeaning
flatteries? I spit upon such courtesies! `Good father!' listen
to my words, and mark if I be good. Thou hast risen by meanness,
and flattery, and cringing, and vice; thou hast disgraced
thy rise by insolence and folly — weak, drivelling folly; and
thou shalt fall — ha, ha, ha! — fall like a dog! Look to thyself!
— `Good father!' Begone, or thou shalt hear more, and
that which thou wilt like even less than this — begone!”

“I meant not to offend thee,” replied the astonished courtier,
“and I pray thee be not distempered. I have broken in on
thy retirement to witness that unearthly skill of which men
speak, and I would ask of thee in courtesy mine horoscope,
that I may so report thee —”

“Thou! thou report me, David Rizzio! the wire-pinching,
sonned-jingling, base-born scullion, report of Johan Damietta!
Get thee away! I know thee! Begone — nay, if thou wilt
have it, listen: bloody shall be thine end, and base. A bastard
foeman is in thy house of life. Tremble at the name —”

“Rather,” interrupted the Italian, enraged at the language of
the conjurer, “rather let that bastard tremble at the name of
Rizzio; and thou, old man, I leave thee as I came, undaunted
by thy threats, and unconvinced by thy jugglery.”

“To-night! to-night!” hissed the old man, in notes of horrible
malignity — “to-night shalt thou know if Damietta be a
juggler! If thou wouldst live — for I would have thee live,
poor worm — fly from the hatred of the Scottish nobles! —
away!”

“Know'st thou,” asked Rizzio, tauntingly, “a Scottish proverb
— if not, I will instruct thee — framed, if I read it rightly,
to express the character of their own factious brawlers? `The
bark is aye waur than the bite.' Adieu, old man! to-morrow
thou shalt learn if Rizzio fears or thee or thy most doughty
brawlers.”

“Ha, ha, ha! — to-morrow! mark that — to-morrow!” and a
yell of laughter burst from every corner of the chamber; the
mixture in the retort exploded with a stunning crash, the lights
were extinguished, and, without being aware of the manner of
his exit, the royal secretary found himself beyond the outer
gate of the wizard's dwelling, with a throbbing pulse and swimming
brain, but still, to do him justice, undismayed by that
which his naturally incredulous and sneering turn of mind, rather
than any clear conviction of the truth, led him to consider
as a mere imposture.

Without replying a syllable to the inquiries of the terrified
page, who had heard the frightful sounds within, he flung himself
into his saddle, plunged the rowels into the flanks of the
jennet until she reared and plunged with terror, and dashed
homeward at a fearful rate through alleys now as dark as midnight.
Nor did he draw his bridle till he had passed the
guarded portals of the palace, and galloped into the inmost
court of Holyrood: there indeed he checked his courser with
a violence which almost hurled her on her haunches, sprang
from her back, and, without looking round, hurried into the
most private entrance, and disappeared.

Scarcely had he passed through the gateway, and ere yet

the page had left the courtyard with the horses, when the sentinel,
who had permitted the well-known secretary of the queen
to pass unquestioned, brought down his partisan to the charge,
and challenged, as a tall figure, whose clanging step announced
him to be sheathed in armor cap-à-pie, muffled in a dark mantle,
with a hood like that worn by the Romish priesthood drawn
close around his head, approached him.

“Stand, ho! the word —”

“Another word, and thou never speakest more!” replied the
other, in a hoarse, rapid whisper, offering a petronel, cocked,
and his finger on the trigger, at the very throat of the astonished
soldier; “the king requires no password!”

“The king?” replied the sentinel, doubtfully, “the king? —
I know not, nor would I willingly offend; but thou art not, methinks,
his majesty.”

“Take that, thou fool, to settle all thy doubts!” cried the
other, in the same deep whisper as before; while, casting his
weapon into the air, he caught it by the muzzle as it turned
over, and sunk the loaded butt deep into the forehead of the
unwary sentinel. The whole was scarcely the work of an instant;
and ere the heavy body could fall to earth, the ready
hand of the assailant had caught it, and suffered it to drop so
gently as to create no sound. In another moment he was
joined by three or four other persons similarly disguised, and
followed by a powerful guard of spearmen. A heavy watch of
these was posted at the principal gateway, and knots of others
were disposed around the court at every private entrance, with
orders to let none pass on any pretext whatsoever. “Warn
them to stand back twice! the third time kill!” was the muttered
order of the chief actor in the previous tragedy. “So
far, my liege, all's well!” he continued, turning with an air of
some respect to another of the muffled figures, of a port somewhat
less commanding than his own huge proportions; “and

Morton must, ere this, have seized all the remaining avenues.”
While he was yet speaking, a slight bustle was heard at a
distance, and in a second's space they were joined by him of
whom they spoke.

“How goes the business, Morton?” said the first speaker.

“All well! — the gates are ours, and not a soul disturbed;
the villain sentinels laid down their arms at once, and are even
now in ward! Let us be doing: a deed like this permits of
no delay!”

“On, friends! Be silent, and be certain!”

And one by one they filed through the same portal by which
the Italian had, so short a time before, sped to the presence of
his royal mistress.

In the meantime, unconscious of the fearful tragedy that was
even then in preparation the lovely queen, with her most
trusted servants, the devoted David, and the noble countess of
Argyle, had retired from the strict ceremonies of the court circle
to the privacy of her own apartments.

In a small antechamber, scarcely twelve feet in width, communicating
with the solitary chamber of the queen — solitary,
for the notorious profligacy and insolent neglect of Darnley had
left her an almost widowed wife — the board was spread, glittering
with gold and crystal, and covered with the delicacies
of the evening meal.

The beautiful queen, freed from the galling chains of ceremony,
her robes of state thrown by, and attired in the elegant
simplicity of a private lady, sat there — her lovely features
beaming with condescension and with unaffected pleasure, conversing
joyously with those whom she had selected from her
court as worthiest of her especial favor. Bitterly, cruelly had
she been deceived in the character of him whom she had in
truth made a king; for whose gratification she had almost exceeded
the rights of her prerogative, and given deep offence to

her haughty and suspicious nobles; having discovered, when
too late, that, while possessed of all the graces and accomplishments
that constitute an elegant and agreeable admirer, Henry
Darnley was deficient, miserably deficient, in all that can render
a man eligible as a friend and husband. Deserted, neglected,
outraged in a woman's tenderest point, almost before the
first month of her nuptials had elapsed, the flattering dream had
passed away which had promised years of happy, peaceful communion
with one loved and loving partner. Ever preferring
the society of any other fair one to that of the lovely being to
whom he should have been bound by every tie of love and
gratitude, the king had early left his disconsolate bride to pine
in total seclusion, or to seek for recreation in the society of
those whose qualities of mind, if not their rank, might render
them fit companions for her solitude; and she, poor victim of a
brutal husband, and unhappy mistress of a turbulent and warlike
nation, fell blindly but most innocently into the snare of her
unrelenting enemies.

Of all who were around her person, Rizzio alone was such
by habits, education, and accomplishments, as could lend attraction
to the circle of a gay and youthful queen. Accustomed,
from her earliest youth, to the elegant and polished manners
of the French nobility, the rude and illiterate barons — with
whom the highest grade of knowledge was the marshalling of
a host for the battle-field, and the highest merit the fighting in
the front rank when marshalled — could appear to her in no
other light than that of brutal and uneducated savages. What
wonder, then, that a youth well skilled as David Rizzio in all
the arts and elegances most suitable to a noble cavalier, handsome
withal and courteous, attentive even to adoration to her
slightest wish, and ever contrasting his cultivated mind with the
untutored rudeness of the warrior-lords of Scotland, should have
been admitted to a degree of intimacy by his forsaken mistress,

innocent, undoubtedly, and pardonable, even should we be disposed
to admit that it was imprudent?

Two menials in the royal livery waited upon that noble company,
but without the servile reverence which was exacted at
the public festivals of royalty. The fair Argyle, who, in any
other presence than that of her unrivalled mistress, would have
been second to none in loveliness, jested and smiled with Mary
more in the manner of a beloved companion than that of an attendant
to a queen. But on the brow of David there was a
deep and heavy gloom; and when he answered to the persiflage
and polished railleries of the queen or that young countess,
although his words were gay, and at times almost tender, the
tones of his voice were grave almost to sadness.

“What has befallen our worthy secretary?” said Mary, after
many fruitless efforts to inspire him with livelier feelings.
“Thou art no more the gay and gallant Signor David of other
days than thou resemblest the stern and steel-clad —”

Even as she spoke, it seemed as though her words had conjured
up an apparition: for a figure, sheathed in steel from
crest to spur, strode, with a step that faltered even amid its
pride, from out the shadows of her private chamber into the full
glare of the lamps. The vizor was raised, and the pale brow
and haggard eye, the uncombed beard, and the corpse-like hue
of the whole visage, better beseemed the character of some
foul spirit released from its peculiar place, than of a noble baron
in the presence of his queen. A loud shriek from the terrified
Argyle first called the attention of Mary to the strange intruder.
But David sat with his eye glaring, in a horrible mixture of
personal apprehension and superstitious dread, upon the person
of his deadliest foeman.

“Arise, David, thou minion! arise, and quit the presence to
which thou art a foul and plague-like blot!” cried the deep

voice of Ruthven, ere a word had yet found its way to the lips
of the indignant queen

“Sir Patrick Ruthven — if our eyes deceive us not,” she said
at length, erecting her noble figure to its utmost, and bending
upon him a glance which, hardened as he was in crime and
cruelty, he could no more have met with his than the vile raven
have gazed upon the noonday sun — “Sir Patrick Ruthven, we
would learn what means this insolent intrusion?”

“It means, fair madam,” replied Darnley — who now followed
his savage instrument, accompanied by his no less fierce accomplices,
the base-born Douglas, the brutal Ker of Fawdonside,
in bearing and in manners fitted rather for the guardhouse
than the court, and the most thorough ruffian of the party, Patrick
de Balantyne — “it means that your vile minion's race is
run!”

“Ha! comes the blow from thee? — I might indeed have
deemed it so,” she replied, calmly but scornfully. “What is
your grace's pleasure?” and she smiled in beautiful contempt.

“My pleasure is that he — you base Italian, you destroyer
of my honor, and of yours — of your honor, madam, if you know
such a word — shall perish!”

“Never, Henry Darnley! mine own life sooner!” And she
confronted him with flashing eyes and heightened color, her
whole frame quivering with resolve and indignation. “Thinkst
thou to put a stain like this upon the honor of a queen, and that
queen, too, thine own much-injured wife? Out, out upon thee,
for a heartless, coward thing! A man, a brute, hath some affection,
hath some touch of love for those who have loved him, as
I have once loved thee; of gratitude toward those who have
elevated him — not, no! not as I have elevated thee — for never
yet did woman lavish honor, power, kingdom, upon mortal man,
as I have lavished them on thee! Away, insolent and ungrateful,
hence! Thinkst thou to do murder, foul murder, in the

presence of a woman, of a wife — a wife soon, wretch that she
is, to be the mother of a child — of thy child, Henry? Hence,
and I will forgive thee all — even this last offence! Banish
these murderous ruffians from my presence; spare an honest
and a noble servant — one who hath never, never wronged thee
or thine! spare him, and I will take thee yet again unto my
heart, and love thee, as I have loved thee ever, even when thou
hast been most cruel — ever, Henry Darnley, ever!”

The king was moved, his lips quivered, and he would have
spoken: all might still have been explained, all might have
been forgiven; but it was not so decreed.

“Tush, we but dally,” cried the brutal Ruthven, “we but
dally! On, gentlemen, and drag the villain from the presence!”

Foremost himself, he strode to seize the unarmed wretch,
who, broken in spirits, and appalled more perhaps by the recollection
of the wizard's doom than by the sordid fear of death,
clung to the robe of his adored mistress, poor wretch, as though
the altar itself would have been to him a sanctuary against his
ruthless murderers.

“Mercy!” shrieked the miserable queen; “mercy, for the
love of Him that made you! mercy, Henry — mercy, for my
sake, or, if not for mine, mercy for thine unborn infant's sake!
Ruthven — villain, false knight, uncourteous traitor — forego thy
hold!” and she struggled madly with the assassins. “To arms!”
she screamed in shrilled tones, “to arms! — O God! O God!
have I no guards, no friends, no husband? Oh, that I had been
born a man, and ye should rue this day — ay, and ye shall
rue it!”

Ruthven had clutched his victim with a grasp of iron, and,
whirling him from his frail tenure, cast him to the attendant
murderers. “Spare him!” she shrieked once more; “spare
him, and I will bless you! Ay, strike!” she continued in calmer
tones, as the ruffian Ker brandished his naked dagger at her

throat; “and thou, too, fire — fire upon thy mistress and thy
queen!” Maddened by her resistance, and fearful that the citizens
might rise in her behalf, Balantyne cocked his petronel.
“Fire, thou coward! why dost thou pause? I am a woman,
true — a queen, a wife — about to be a mother; but what is that
to such as thee? Fire, and make your butchery complete!”

But, as the words passed from her lips, the bloody deed was
over. Even in the presence of the queen, dirk after dirk was
plunged into the unresisting wretch. Long after life was extinguished,
the maddened assassins continued to mangle the
senseless clay with their bloodthirsty weapons. So long as
life remained, and so long as the horrid strife was doubtful, did
Mary's fearful cries for mercy ring upon the ears of those who
neither heard nor heeded her. The massacre was ended, and,
with a degree of unmanly insensibility that would alone have
stamped him the worst and fiercest of his race, Ruthven seated
himself before the outraged woman, the insulted queen, and
calmly wiped his brow, still reeking with her favorite's life-blood.
“My sickness,” he said, “must pardon me for sitting
in your presence. I had arisen from my bed to do this deed,
and am now somewhat weary and o'erspent. I pray your highness
command your minions to bear yon winecup hither.”

Without regarding for an instant this fresh insult, she dried
her streaming eyes. “We have demeaned ourselves to pray
for mercy from butchers. Tears are for men! I have one
duty left me, and I will fulfil it — one aim to my existence, one
study for my ingenuity, and one prayer to my God: my duty,
mine aim, my study, and my prayer, shall be, to be avenged!”

THE KIRK OF FIELD.

It was a dark and stormy night without, such as is not unfrequent,
even during the height of summer, under the changeable
influences of the Scottish climate. The west wind, charged
with moisture collected from the vast expanse of ocean it had
traversed since last it had visited the habitations of man, rose
and sank in wild and melancholy cadences; now howling violently,
as it dashed the rain in torrents against the rattling casements;
now lulling till its presence could be traced alone in
the small, shrill murmur, which has been compared so aptly to
the voice of a spirit. The whole vault of heaven was wrapped
in blackness, of that dense and smothering character which
strikes the mind as pertaining rather to the gloom of a closed
chamber than to that of a midnight sky.

Yet within the halls of Holyrood neither storm nor darkness
had any influence on the excited spirits of the guests who were
collected there to celebrate, with minstrelsey and dance, the
marriage of Sebastian. Hundreds of lights flashed from the
tapestried walls; wreaths of the choicest flowers were twined
around the columns; rich odors floated on the air; and the voluptuous
swell of music entranced a hundred young and happy
hearts with its intoxicating sympathies. All that there was of
beautiful and chivalrous in old Dunedin thronged to the court

of its enchanting queen on that eventful evening; and it appeared
for once as though the hate of party and the fierce zeal
of clashing creeds had for a time agreed to sink their differences
in the gay whirl of merriment. The stern and solemn
leaders of the covenant relaxed the austerity of their frown;
the enthusiastic chieftains of the Romish faith were content to
mingle in the dance with those whom they would have met as
gladly in the fray.

With even more than her accustomed grace, brightest and
most bewitching where all were bright and lovely, did Mary
glide among her high-born visiters; no shade of sorrow dimmed
that transparent brow, or clouded the effulgence of that dazzling
smile; it was an evening of conciliation and rejoicing — of forgiveness
for the past, and hope rekindled for the future. There
was no distinction of manner as she passed from one to another
of the animated groups that conversed, or danced, or hung in
silent rapture on the musicians' strains, on every side. Her
tone was no less bland, as she addressed the gloomy Morton,
or the dark-browed Lindesay, but now returned from exile in
the sister-kingdom, than as she turned to her gayer and more
fitting associates. Never was the influence of Mary's beauty
more effective than on that occasion; never did her unaffected
grace, her sweet address, her courtesy bestowed alike on all,
exert a mightier influence over the minds of men than on the
very evening when her hopes were about to be for ever blighted,
her happiness extinguished, her very reputation blasted, by the
villany of false friends, and the violence of open foes.

The weak and vicious Darnley yet lingered on his bed of
sickness, but with the vigor of health many of the darker shades
of his character had passed away; and Mary had again watched
beside the bed of him whose foul suspicions and unmanly violence
— no less than his scandalous neglect of her unrivalled
charms, his low and infamous amours, his studied hatred of all

whom she delighted to honor — had almost alienated the affections
of that warm heart which once had beat so tenderly, so
devotedly, and, had he but deserved its constancy, so constantly
for him. Oh, how exquisite a thing is woman's love! how
beautiful, how strange a mystery, is woman's heart! 'T was
but a little month ago that she had almost hated. Neglect had
chilled the stream of her affections: that he whom she had
made a king, whom she had loved with such total devotion of
heart and mind — that he should repay her benefits with outrage,
her affections with cold, chilling, insolent disdain — these were
the thoughts that had worked her brain to the very verge of
madness and of crime.

The “glorious, rask, and hazardous”[2] young carl of Orkney
had ever in these hours of bitter anguish been summoned, she
knew not how, to her imagination: the warm yet delicate attentions,
the reverential deference to her slightest wish, the
dignified and chaste demeanor, through which gleamed ever
and anon some flash of chivalrous affection — some token that
in the recesses of his heart he worshipped the woman as fervently
as he served the sovereign truly; the overmastering passion
always apparent, but so apparent that it seemed involuntarily
present; the eye dwelling for ever on her features, yet
sinking modestly to earth, as shamed by his own boldness, if
haply it met hers; the hand that trembled as it performed its
office; the voice that faltered as it answered to the voice he
seemed to love so dearly — all these, all these, had they been
multiplied a hundred-fold, and aided by the deepest magic, had
effected nothing to wean her heart from Darnley, had not his
own infatuated cruelty furnished the strongest argument in favor
of the young and noble Bothwell. As it was, harassed by the
deepest wrongs from him who was most bound to cherish and
support her, and assailed by the allurements of one who coupled

to a beauty equal to that of angels a depth of purpose and dissimulation
worthy of the fiend, Mary had tottered on the precipice's
verge! Darnley fell sick, and she was saved! Him
whom she had almost learned to hate while he had rioted in
all the insolence of manly strength and beauty, she now adored
when he was stretched languid and helpless on the bed of anguish.
She had rushed to his envenomed chamber, she had
braved the perils of his contagious malady; her hand had
soothed his burning brow, her lip had tasted the potion which
his feverish palate had refused; day and night she had watched
over him as a mother watches over her sick infant, in mingled
agonies of hope and terror; she had marked the black sweat
gathering on his brow, and the film veiling his bright eye, and
she had felt that her very being was wound up in the weal or
wo of him whose death, one little month before, she would have
hailed as a release from misery. She had noted the dawn of
his recovery, she had fainted from excess of happiness; she had
pardoned all, all his past misdoings; she was again the doting,
faithful, single-hearted wife of her repentant Henry.[3]

Now in the midst of song, and revelry, and mirth, while the
gay masquers passed in gorgeous procession before her eyes,
her mind was far away in the chamber of her recovered lord,
within the solitary kirk of Field. The masque had ended, and
the hall was cleared; the wedding-posset passed around, beakers
were brimmed, and amid the clang of music the toast went
round — “Health to Sebastian and his bride!” The hall was
cleared for the dance: a hundred brilliant couples arose to lead
the Branle; the minstrels tuned their prelude; when the fair
young bride, blushing at the boldness of her own request, entreated
that her grace would make her condescension yet more

perfect by joining in that graceful measure which none could
lead so gracefully.

If there was one failing in the character of Mary, which
tended above all others to render her an object for unjust suspicions,
and a mark for cruel reverses, it was an inability to refuse
aught that might confer pleasure on any individual, however
low in station — a gentle failing, if it indeed be one, but
not the less pernicious to the fortunes of all, and above all of
kings. With that ineffable smile beaming upon her face, she
rose; and as she rose, Bothwell sprang forth, and in words of
deep humility, but tones of deeper passion, besought the queen
to make her slave the most happy, the most exalted of mankind,
by yielding to him her inestimable hand, even for the
space of one short dance.

For a single moment Mary paused; but it was destined that
she should be the victim of her confidence, and she yielded.
Never, never did a more perfect pair stand forth in lordly hall,
or on the emerald turf, than Mary Stuart and her destroyer.
Both in the flush and flower of gorgeous youth: she invested
with beauty such as few before or since have ever had to show,
with grace, and symmetry, and all that nameless something
which goes yet further to excite the admiration, and call forth
the love of men, than loveliness itself; he strong, yet elegant
in strength — proud, yet with that high and spiritual pride which
had nothing offensive in his display — taller and more stately
than the noblest barons of the court — they were indeed a pair
unmatched amid ten thousand; so rich in natural advantages,
so exquisite in personal attractions, that the tasteful splendor
of their habits was as little marked as is the golden halo which
encompasses but adds no glory to the sainted heads of that delightful
painter whose name so aptly chimes with the peculiar
sweetness of his sublime creations.

Even the iron brow of Ruthven — for he, too, was there —

relaxed as, leaning on her partner's extended hand, she passed
him with a smile of pardon, and he muttered to his dark comrade,
Lindesay of the Byres — “She were in sooth a most fair
creature, if that her mind might match the beauties of its mansion.”
As he spoke, the measured symphony rang out, and in
slow order the dancers moved forward; anon the measure
quickened, and the motions of the young and beautiful obeyed
its impulses. It was a scene more like some fairy dream than
aught of hard, terrestrial reality: the waving plumes, the glittering
jewels, the gorgeous robes, and, above all, the lovely
forms, which rather imparted their own brilliancy to these
adornments than borrowed anything from them, combined to
form a picture such as imagination can scarcely depict, much
less experience suggest, from aught beheld in ballrooms of the
present day, wherein the stiff and graceless costume of modern
times is but a poor apology for the majestic bravery of the sixteenth
century.

Suddenly, while all were glancing round in the swiftest
mazes of the dance, those who stood by observed the blood
flash with startling splendor over brow, neck, and bosom of the
youthful queen; nay, her very arms, white in their wonted hue
as the snow upon Shehallion, crimsoned with the violence of
her emotions. Her eyes sparkled, her bosom rose and fell
almost convulsively, her lips parted, but it seemed as though
her words were choked by agitation. For a single instant she
stood still; then bursting through the throng, she sank nearly
insensible upon one of the many cushioned seats that girded
the hall; but, rallying her spirits, she murmured something of
the heat and the unusual exercise, drained the goblet of pure
water presented by the hand of Orkney, and again resumed her
station in the dance.

“Pardon, pardon, I beseech you,” whispered the impassioned
tones of the tempter — “pardon, sweet sovereign, the boldness

that was born but of a moment's madness. Believe me — I
would tear my heart from out my bosom, did it cherish one
thought that could offend my mistress — my honored, my
adored —

“Hush! oh, hush! for my sake, Bothwell — for my sake, if
for naught else, be silent! I do believe that you mean honestly
and well; but words like these 'tis madness in you to utter,
and sin in me to hear them! Bethink you, sir,” she continued,
gaining strength as she proceeded, and speaking so low that no
ear but his might catch a solitary sound amid the quick rustle
of the “many twinkling feet,” and the full concert — “bethink
you! you address a wife — a wedded, loyal wife — the wife of
your lord, your king. I know that you are my most faithful
servant, my most trusted friend; I know that these words,
which sound so wildly, are not to be weighed in their full
sense, but as a servant's homage to his liege-lady: yet think
what you stern Knox would deem, think of the wrath of Darnley
—”

“If there were naught more powerful than Darnley's wrath,”
he muttered, in the notes of deep determination, “to bar me
from my towering hopes, then were I blest beyond all hopes
of earth, of heaven — supremely blest!”

“What mean you, sir? We understand you not! What
should there be more powerful than the wrath of thy lawful
sovereign? Speak; I would not doubt you, yet methinks your
words sound strangely. What be these towering hopes of
thine? Pray God they tower not too high for honesty or honor!
Say on, we do command thee!”

“I will say on, fair queen,” he replied, in a voice trembling
as it were with the fear of offending and the anxiety of love —
“I will say on, so you will hear me to the end, nor doubt the
most devoted of your slaves!”

“Hear you?” she replied, considerably softened by his humility,

“when did ever Mary Stuart refuse to hear the meanest
of her subjects, much less a trusted and a valued friend, as thou
hast ever been to her, as thou wilt ever be to her — wilt thou
not, Bothwell?”

There was a heavenly purity, a confidence in his integrity,
and a firm and full reliance on her own dignity, in every word
she uttered, that might have converted the wildest libertine
from his career of sin; that might have confirmed the wariest
and most subtle spirit that its guilty craft could never prevail
against a heart fortified against its attacks by purity and by the
stronger and more holy influences of wedded love; but on the
fixed purpose, on the interminable pride, the desperate passion,
and the unscrupulous will of Bothwell, every warning was lost.

“I have adored you,” he said, slowly and impressively —
“adored you, not as a queen, but as a woman. Mary, angelic
Mary, pardon — pity — and oh, love me! You do, you do already
love me! I have read it in your eye, I have marked it
in your flushing cheek, in your heaving bosom! If this night
you were free, would you not, sweet lady, lovely queen, would
you not reward the adoration, the honest adoration of your devoted
Bothwell?”

“Stand back, my lord of Bothwell!” cried the now indignant
queen, “stand back! your words are madness! Nay, but we
will be heard,” she continued, with increasing impetuosity, as
he endeavored again to speak. “Thinkest thou, vain lord, that
I — I, Mary of France and Scotland — because I have favored
and distinguished a subject, who, God aid me, merited not favor
nor distinction — thinkest thou that I, a queen anointed — a
mother and a wife — that I could love so wantonly as to descend
to thee? Back, sir, I say! and if I punish not at once
thy daring insolence, 'tis that thy past services, in some sort,
nullify thy present boldness. Oh, my lord!” she proceeded, in
a softer tone, and a big tear-drop trembled in her bright eye as

she spoke, “Mary has miseries enough, that thou shouldst
spare to add thy quota to the general ingratitude. If thou didst
love me, as thou sayest, thy love would be displayed as that of
a zealous votary to the shrine at which he worships; as that
of the magi bending before their particular star — not as that of
a wild and wicked wanton to a frail, fickle woman!”

It may be that the words with which Mary concluded her
reproof kindled again the hope which had well nigh passed
away from Bothwell's breast.

“Nay, Mary, say not thus. Do I not know thy trials? have
I not marked thy miseries? and will I not avenge them? If
thou wert free — did I say, if? By Heaven, fair queen, those
locks of thine, that flow so unrestrained down that most glorious
neck, are not more free than thou art! Did I not hear thy
cry for vengeance on the slaughterers of hapless Rizzio? did I
not hear, and have I not achieved the deed that secures at once
thy freedom and thy vengeance?”

The spell was broken on the instant: the soft, the tender-hearted,
the most gentle of women, was aroused almost to
frenzy. The blood rushed in torrents to her princely brow,
and left it again pale as the sculptured marble, but to return
once more in deeper hues of crimson. Her eyes flashed with
unnatural brightness; her bosom heaved and fell like that of a
young priestess laboring with the throes of prophetic inspiration;
she shook the tresses, he had dared to praise, back from
her lovely face, and stamping her delicate foot in the passion
of the moment on the oaken floor —

“A guard!” she cried, in notes that might have vied with the
clangor of a trumpet, so shrilly did they pierce the ears of all;
“a guard for my lord of Bothwell!”

Had the thunder of heaven darted its sulphurous and scathing
bolt into the midst of that assembly, a greater change its terrors
could not have effected than did that thrilling cry. A hundred

rapiers flashed in the bright torchlight, as with bent brows and
angry voices the barons of the realm rushed to the aid of their
liege-lady. An air of cool defiance sat on the massive forehead
of the culprit; his eye was fixed upon the queen in sorrow, as
it would seem, rather than in anger; his sword lay quietly in
his scabbard, although there were a hundred there with weapons
thirsting for his blood, and hearts burning with the insatiable
hate of ancient feuds. Murray and Morton, speaking
eagerly and even sternly to the queen, urged his immediate
seizure; and the gray-haired duke of Lennox, clutching his
poniard's hilt with the palsied gripe of eighty years, awaited
but a sign to slay, he knew not and he recked not why, the
ancient foeman of his race.

But so it was not fated! Before a word was spoken, the
deep and sullen roar as of an earthquake burst upon their ears,
and stunned their very hearts; a second din, as of some mighty
tower rushing from its base, succeeded, ere the casements had
ceased to rattle with the shock of the first.

“God of my fathers!” shouted Murray, “what means that
din? Treason, my lords, treason! Look to the queen — secure
the traitor! Thou, duke of Lennox, with thy followers,
haste straight to the kirk of Field! Without, there — let my
trumpets sound to horse! By Him that made me,” he continued,
“the populace are rising!” — for the deep swell of voices,
that rose without, announced the presence of a mighty multitude.

In an instant the vaulted arches of the palace echoed with
the flourished cadences of the royal trumpets, the ringing steps
of steel-clad men, the tramp of hoofs in the courtyard, the
gathering cries of the followers of each fierce baron, succeeding
wildly to the soft breathings of minstrelsey and song.
At this instant Murray had resolved himself to act, and, with
his hand upon the pommel of his sword, slowly but resolutely

stepped forward. “Yield thee!” he said, in stern, low tones;
“yield thee, my lord of Bothwell! Hence from this presence
thou canst not pass until all this night's strange occurrences be
fully manifested; ay, and if there be guilt — as I misdoubt me
much there is — till it be fearfully avenged!”

The touch of Murray on his shoulder, lightly as it fell, and
grave as were the words of that high baron, aroused the reckless
disposition of Bothwell almost to madness. “Thou liest,
lord!” he shouted, in the fierce impulse of the moment — “thou
liest, if thou dare to couple the name of guilt with Bothwell!
Forego thy hold, or perish!” — and his dagger's blade was seen
slowly emerging from its sheath, while his clinched teeth and
the starting veins of his broad forehead spoke volumes of the
bitterness of his wrath. Another second, and blood, the blood
of Scotland's noblest, would have been poured forth like water,
and in the presence of the queen; the destinies of a great kingdom
would have perchance been altered, and the history of
ages changed, all by the madness of a single moment. In the
fearful crisis, a wild shriek was heard from the upper end of
the hall, to which the ladies of the court had congregated, round
the queen, like the songsters of spring when the dark pinions
of the hawk are casting down a shadow of terror on their peaceful
groves.

“Help! help! — her grace is dying!” And, in truth, it did
seem as though she were about to pass away. Better, a thousand
times better, and happier, had it been for her, to have then
died quietly in the palace of her forefathers, with the nobles
of her land around her, than to have borne, for many an after-year,
the chilling miseries which were showered by pitiless
fortune on her head, till that most fatal hour of her tragic life
arrived, and Mary was at length at rest!

Murray relaxed his hold, turned on his heel, and strode abruptly
to the elevated dais, on which the queen had sunk in

worn-out nature's weariness. For a minute's space Bothwell
glared on him as he strode away, like a tiger balked of his dear
revenge. It was most evident he doubted — doubted whether
he should set all, even now, upon a cast, strike down a foeman
in the very fortress of his power, and if he must die, like the
crushed wasp, sting home in dying. Prudence, however, conquered:
he also turned upon his heel, and with a glance of the
deepest scorn and hatred on the baffled lords, who, in the absence
of their master-spirit, had lost all unison, stalked slowly
through the portal of the hall, and disappeared.

Before ten seconds had elapsed, the rapid clatter of hoofs, the
jingling of mail, and the war-cry — “A Bothwell! ho! a Bothwell!”
proclaimed that he had escaped the toils, and was surrounded
by his faithful followers.

When Murray reached the couch on which the queen was
extended, gasping as though in the last extremity, her case indeed
was pitiable. Her long locks had burst from their confinement,
and flowed over her person like a veil; her corsage
had been cut asunder by the damsels of her court, and her
bosom, bare in its unspeakable beauty, was disclosed to the
licentious gaze of the haughty nobles. An angle of the couch,
as she had fallen, had grazed her temple, and the blood streamed
down her cheek and neck, giving, by the contrast of its dark
crimson, an ashy, deathlike whiteness to her whole complexion.

“Ha!” he whispered, with deep emotions, “what means
this? Back, back, my lords, for shame, if not for pity! would
ye gaze upon your sovereign, in the abandonment of utter grief,
as though she were a peasant-quean? Stand back, I say, and
let the halls be cleared; and hark thee, Paris,” he continued,
as a cringing, terrified-looking Frenchman entered the apartment,
“bid some one call Galozzi hither: the poison-vending,
cozening Tuscan hath skill at least, and it shall go hardly with
him so he exert it not! But ha! what ails the man? St. Andrew,

he will faint! What ails thee, craven? Speak, speak,
or I shake the coward soul from out thy carcass!” — and he
shook the trembling servitor fiercely by the throat.

“The king — the king —” he faltered forth at length, terrified
yet more by the wrath of Murray than by the scene which
he had witnessed.

“What of the king, thou dastard? Speak — I say, what of
Henry Darnley?”

“Murdered, your highness — murdered!”

“Nay, thou art made to say it!”

“He speaks too truly, Murray,” cried Morton, entering, with his
bold visage blanched, and his dark locks bristling with unwonted
terror; “the king is murdered — foully, most foully murdered!”

“By the villain Bothwell!” muttered Murray, between his
hard-set teeth; “but he shall rue the deed! But say on, Morton,
say on: how knowest thou this? Say on — and you, ladies,
attend the queen.”

“I saw it, Murray — with these eyes I saw it — the cold,
naked, strangled corpse — flung, like a carrion-carcass, on the
garden-path; and the kirk of Field a pile of smoking and steaming
ruins — blown up with gunpowder, to give an air of accident
to this accursed treason. I tell you, man,” he continued,
as he saw Murray about to speak, “I tell you that I saw, in
that drear garden, cast like a murrained sheep upon a dike, all
that remained of Henry Darnley!”

“'T is false!” shrieked the wretched Mary, starting to her
feet, with the wild glare of actual insanity in her eye; “who
saith I slew him? Henry Darnley! 'S death, lords! — the
king, I say — the king! Now, by my halydom, he shall be
king of Scotland! Dead — dead! who said the earl of Orkney
was no more? Faugh! how the sulphur steams around us!
It chokes — it smothers! Traitor, false traitor! know, earl, I
will arraign thee. What! kill a king? whisper soft, low words

to a queen? Hoa! this is practice, my lord duke, foul practice;
and deeply shall you rue it if you but hurt a hair of Darnley!
— Nay, Henry, sweet Henry, frown not on me! Oh! never
woman loved as I love thee, my Darnley! Rizzio — ha! what
traitor spoke of Rizzio? But think not of it, Henry: the faithful
servant is lost, but 't was not thou that did it. Lo! how
dark Morton glares on me! Back, Ruthven, fiend! wouldst
slay me? But I forgive thee all — all — Henry Darnley, all!
Live — only live to bless my longing sight! No! no!” she
shrieked more wildly, “he is not dead! to arms! what, ho! —
to arms! a king, and none to rescue him! To arms, I say! I
will myself to arms! Fetch forth my Milan harness; saddle
me Rosabelle! French — Paris, aho! my petronels! And ye,
why do ye linger, wenches — Seyton, Carmichael, Fleming? —
my head-gear and my robes! The queen goes forth to day!
To horse, and to the rescue!”

She made a violent effort to rush forward, but staggered, and
if her brother had not received her in his arms, she would have
fallen again to the earth. “Bear her hence, ladies; bear her
to her chamber! — thou hast a heavy weird — poor sister! —
What ponder you so, Morton? you would not mark her words:
't is sheer distraction — the distraction of most utter sorrow!”

“Distraction! I say ay! but sorrow, no! Sorrow takes it
not on thus wildly. It savors more of guilt, Lord Murray —
dark, damning, bloody guilt! Heard ye not what she said of
Orkney? Distraction, but no sorrow: guilt, believe me, guilt!”

“Not for my life would I believe it, nor must thou: if Morton
and Murray hunt henceforth in couples — hark in thine ear!” —
and he whispered, glancing his eyes uneasily around, as though
the very stones might bear his words to other listeners. A grim
smile passed athwart Morton's visage; he bowed his head in
token of assent. They passed forth from the banquet-hall together,
and Mary was left to her misery.

BOTHWELL.

The summer sun was pouring down a flood of lustre over
wood and moorland, tangled glen, and heathery fells, with the
broad and blue expanse of the German ocean sparkling in ten
thousand ripples far away in the distance. But the radiance
of high noon fell not upon the forest and the plain in their solitary
loveliness, but on the marshalled multitudes of two vast
hosts, arrayed in all the pomp and circumstance of antique warfare,
glittering with helms and actons, harquebuss and pike, and
waving with a thousand banners, of every brilliant hue and
proud device. On a gentle eminence, the very eminence on
which, a few short years before, the English Somerset had
posted his gallant forces, lay the army of the queen, its long
front bristling with rows of the formidable Scottish spear, its
wings protected by chosen corps of cavalry, the firm and true
adherents of the house of Stuart, or the daring, though licentious
vassals of the duke of Orkney, and the royal banner, with
its rich embroidery, floating in loud supremacy. Yet, gay and
glorious as it showed upon its ground of vantage, and gallantly
as it might have contested that field against even superior numbers,
that array was but in name an army. Thousands were
there who, though they had flocked with bow and arrow to the
call of their sovereign, felt not distaste alone, but actual disgust
to the services on which they were about to be employed; and
not a few were among them who knew too well how little was
the probability that they, a raw, tumultuary force, led on by

men of gallantry indeed, but not of that well proved experience
which, to a leader, is more than the truncheon of his command,
should come off with victory, or even without defeat, from an
encounter with veteran troops, retainers of the most warlike
lords in Scotland, marshalled by soldiers with whose fame the
air of every European kingdom was already rife — soldiers such
as Lyndesay of the Byres, Kirkaldy of the Grange, Murray
of Tullibardin, and a hundred others of reputation, if second,
second to none but these. Nor was this all; voices were not
wanting, even in the army of the queen, to exclaim, that if the
royal banner were displayed, its purity was sullied by the
presence of a murderer; and that success could never be hoped
for, so long as Bothwell rode by the right hand of Mary.
One exception there was, however, to this general feeling of
dissatisfaction, if not of despair. A band of determined men,
whose scar-seamed visages and stern demeanor, no less than
the splendid accuracy of their equipments, and the admirable
discipline with which they maintained their post, far in advance
of the main body, and exposed to inevitable destruction on the
advance of the confederated forces, should they be suffered, as
it appeared too probable that they would, to remain unsupported
against such desperate odds. But these were men to whom
the most deadly conflict was but a game of chance; inured from
their youth upward to deeds of blood and danger — lawless and
licentious in time of peace, even as they were cruel, brave,
and fearless in the fight — the picked retainers, the desperate,
of the duke of Orkney.

Dark glances of contempt, if not of hatred, were shot ever
and anon from beneath the scowling brows of these wild desperadoes
toward the wavering ranks of the main army, as, unrestrained
by the exhortations or menaces of their officers —
unmoved by the eloquent beauty of Mary herself, who rode
among the trembling ranks, praying them, as they loved their

country, as they valued honor, as they would not see their
wives, their mothers, and their daughters, delivered to the
malice of unrelenting foemen, to strike one blow for Scotland's
crown — to give once, once only, their voices to the exulting
clamor, “God and the queen” — troop after troop broke away
from the rear, and scattering themselves, singly, or in parties
of two or three, over the open country, sought for that safety in
mean and dastard flight, which they should have asked from
their own bold hearts and strong right hands.

It was at this moment that the heads of the confederated
columns were seen advancing, in dark and dense masses, at
three different points, against the front, which was still preserved
in Mary's army by the strenuous exertions of the leaders,
rather than by any soldierly feelings on the part of the
common herd. So nearly had they advanced to the royal lines
that the stern and solemn countenances of the leaders, as they
rode in complete steel, but with their vizors raised, each at the
head of his own leading, were visible, feature for feature. The
matches of the arquebusses might be clearly distinguished,
blown already into a bright flame, while the pieces themselves
were evidently grasped by ready and impatient hands, and the
long spears of the vanguard were already lowered; but not a
movement of eagerness, not a murmur, or a shout, was heard
throughout the thousands, whose approach was ushered to the
ears alone by the incessant trampling sound, borne steadily onward,
like the flow of some great river, occasionally broken by
the shrill neighing of a charger, or the jingling clash of arms.

The borderers of Bothwell, on the contrary, as they noted
the advance, raised, from time to time, the wild and fearful
yells with which it was their custom to engage, brandishing
their long lances, and giving the spur to their horses, till they
sprang and bolted like hunted deer; and it required all the influence
of hereditary chiefs to restrain these savage moss-troopers

from rushing headlong with their handful of men against
the unbroken line of the confederate pikes, which swept onward,
sullen and steady as the tide when it comes in six feet
abreast. The effect of such a movement would have been at
once fatal to their wretched mistress. It was too evident that,
for a wavering, coward multitude, like that arrayed beneath the
banner of the queen, there could be no hope to fight against men
such as those who were marching, in determined resolution, up
that gentle eminence; and all that now remained was an attempt
at negotiation.

It was at this moment, when the advanced guard of the two
armies were scarcely ten spear's-lengths asunder, when the determination
or wavering of every individual might be read by
the opposite party in his features as clearly as in the pages of
a book, that a single trumpet from the centre of the queen's
army broke the silence with a wild and prolonged flourish. It
was no point of war, however, that issued from its brazen
mouth, no martial appeal to the spirits and courage of either
host, but the prelude to a pacific parley — and straightway the
banners throughout the host were lowered, and a white flag
was waved aloft, in place of Scotland's blazonry. The ranks
were slowly opened, and from their centre, with trumpeter and
pursuivant, and king-at-arms, rode forth Le Croc, the French
embassador. This movement, as it seemed, was wholly unexpected
by the confederate lords; at least, the ranks continued
their deliberate advance unchecked by the symbols of peace
that glittered above the weapons of the rival host, till suddenly
a foaming horse and panting rider furiously galloped from the
rear. A single word was uttered, in a low, impressive whisper;
it passed from mouth to mouth like an electric spark; and,
as though it were but a single man, that mighty column halted
on the instant. There was no confusion in the manœuvre, no
hurry, nor apparent effort: the long lines of lances, so beautifully

regular in their advance, sank as regularly to their rest;
and, but for the fluttering of their plumage in the summer air,
those beings, strangely composed of every vehement and stirring
passion, might have have passed for images of molten
steel. But a few seconds had elapsed, and the flourish of the
peaceful trumpets was yet ringing in the ears of all, when a
dozen horsemen proceeded slowly forward, to meet the royal
cavalcade.

It was a singular and most impressive spectacle, that meeting.
It was, as it were, the fearful pause between life and
death — the moment of breathless silence that precedes the first
crash of the thunderstorm. Every eye was riveted in either
army on those two groups; every heart beat thick, and every
ear tingled with excitement. And, even independent of the
appalling interest of the crisis, there was much to mark, much
to admire, in the handful that had come together to speak the
doom of thousands; to decide whether hundreds and tens of
hundreds of those living creatures, who stood around them now,
so glorious in the pride, the beauty, and the strength of manhood,
should, ere the sun might sink, be as the clods of the
valley; to decree, with their ephemeral breath, whether the
soft west wind, that wafted now the perfumes of a thousand
hills to their invigorated senses, should, ere the morrow, be
tainted like the vapor from some foul charnel-house!

On the one side, on his light and graceful Arab, champing its
gilded bits and shaking its velvet housings, sat the gay and gallant
Frenchman — his long, dark locks uncovered, and his fair
proportions displayed to the best advantage in his rich garb of
peace. No weapon did he bear — not even the rapier, without
which no gentleman of that period ever went abroad — but
which, the more fully to manifest the candor and sincerity of
his instructions; a handsome page held by his master's stirrup.
Behind him, with pale visages and anxious mien, Marchmont,

and Bute, and Islay, and the lion King, awaited the result of
this their last resource.

On the other hand, distinguished from their followers only
by the beauty of their powerful chargers, and their own knightly
bearing, halted the rebel chiefs. Plain almost to meanness in
his attire, with his armor stained and rusty, and his embroidered
baldrick frayed and rent, Lord Lyndesay of the Byres was
foremost in the group. Morton was there, and Murray, all
steel from crest to spur; the best warrior, where all were good,
the noblest spirit, the most upright man, Kirkaldy of the Grange.

“Nobles and knights of Scotland,” said the proud envoy, in
a tone so calm and yet so clear that every accent could be
noted far and wide, “I come to ye — a gentleman of France —
the servant of a mighty monarch, unbought by friendship and
unprejudiced by favor. For myself, or for my royal master, it
recks us little whether or not ye choose to turn those swords,
which should be the bulwarks of your country, against her
vitals. Yet should it not be said that Scottishmen, like ill-trained
dogs of chase, prefer to turn their fangs against each
other, than to chase a nobler quarry. Ye are in arms against
your queen — nay, interrupt me not, my lords — against your
queen, I say! or, as perchance ye word it, against her counsellors.
That ye complain of grievances I know, and, for aught
I know, justly complain. Yet pause, brave gentlemen, pause
and reflect which is the greater grievance — a country torn with
civil factions, internal war with all its dread accompaniments
of massacre and conflagration, or those ills which now have
stung you to exchange your loyalty for rebel arms? Bethink
ye, that in such a cause as this it matters not who wins — to
vanquish countrymen and brothers is but a worse and deadlier
evil than defeat by foreign foemen. Think ye this fatal field
of Pinkie, whereon ye are arrayed, hath not already drunk
enough of Scottish blood, that ye we would deluge it again? —

or that its name is not yet terrible enough to Scottish ears, that
ye would now bestow a deeper blazonry of sin and shame?
Brave warriors, noble gentlemen, forbear! Let the sword of
civil discord, I beseech you, enter its scabbard for once bloodless;
let amicable parley gain the terms which bloodless news
purchased! Strive ye for your country's glory? — lo, it calls
on you to pause! For your own peculiar fame? — it bids ye
halt while there is yet the time, lest neither birth, nor rank, nor
valor, nor high deeds, nor haughty virtues, preserve ye from
the blot which lies even yet, though ages have passed, on those
who have warred against their country! Is it terms, fair terms,
for which ye crowd in arms around yon awful banner?” — pointing
to the colors of the rebel lords, emblazoned with the corpse
of the murdered Darnley, and his orphan infant praying for
judgment and revenge — “lo, terms are here! Peace, then,
my lords; give peace to Scotland, and eternal credit to yourselves.
Her majesty bears not the wonted temper, the stern
resentment of offended kings: even now she offers peace and
amity, pardon for all offences — ay, and the hand of friendship,
to all who will at once retire from this sacrilegious field. Subjects,
your queen commands you; nobles and knights, a lady,
the fairest lady of her sex, appeals to your chivalry and honor.
Hear, and be forgiven! —”

“Forgiven!” shouted Glencairn, in tones of deep feeling and
yet deeper scorn — “forgiven! we came not here to ask for
pardon, but for vengeance, and vengeance will we have! The
blood of Darnley craves for punishment upon his murderers!
We are come to punish; not to sue for pardon, not to return in
peace, until our end is gained, and Scotland's slaughtered king
avenged!”

“Fair sir,” cried Morton — calmer, and for that very reason
more to be dreaded, than his impetuous comrades — “fair sir,
we rear no banner and we lift no blade against her grace of

Scotland! Against her husband's murderer have we marched,
nor will we turn a face, or draw a bridle, till that murderer lies
in his blood, or flies for ever from the land he has polluted by
his unnatural homicide! Thou hast thine answer, sir. Yet
thus much for our ancient friendship, and to testify our high
esteem for the noble monarch whom thy services here represent:
here will we pause an hour. That passed, our word is,
`Forward! forward!' and may the God of battles judge between
us! Brothers in arms, and leaders of our host, say, have I
spoken fairly?”

“Fairly hast thou spoken, noble Morton; and as thou hast
spoken, we will it so to be. An hour we pause, and then forward!”
The voices of the barons, as they replied, gave no
signs of hesitation; there was no faltering in their tones, no
wavering in their fixed and steady glances. At once the gallant
mediator saw that he had failed in his appeal, and that all
further words were needless. Slowly and disconsolately he
bent his way back to the royal armament, where the miserable
Mary awaited, in an agony of shame and anguish, the doom, for
such in truth it was, of her rebellious subjects.

On the summit of a little knoll she sat, girt by the few undaunted
spirits who clung to the last to Mary's cause, and who
were ready at her least word to perish, if by perishing they
might preserve her. Lovely as she had seemed in the gay
halls of Holyrood, her brow beaming with rapture, innocence,
majesty, far lovelier was she now in pale and hopeless sorrow.
In the vain hope of inspiring ardor to her dispirited and coward
forces, she had girt her slender form in glittering steel. A
light, polished cavinet reflected the bright sunshine above her
auburn tresses, and a cuirass of inlaid and jewelled metal flashed
on her bosom. Not a warrior in either host sat firmer or more
gracefully upon his destrier than Mary upon Rosabelle. A
demipique of steel and loaded petronels, with the butt of which

her fingers played in thoughtless nervousness, had replaced the
rich housings of that favored jennet; but though arrayed in all
the pride and pomp of war, there was neither pride nor pomp
in the expression of that pallid cheek and quivering lip.

“Noble Le Croc,” she cried, breathless with eagerness as
he approached her presence, “what tidings from our misguided
subjects? will they depart in peace? Speak out, speak fully:
this is no time for well-turned sentences or courteous etiquette.
Say, is it peace or war?”

With deep feeling painted on his dark lineaments, the Frenchman
answered: “War, your grace, war to the knife; or peace
on terms such as I dare not name to you.”

“Then be it war!” cried she, the eloquent blood mantling to
her cheeks in glorious indignation, her eyes flashing, and her
bosom heaving with emotion; “then be it war! We have
stooped low enough in suing thus for peace from those whom
we are born to govern, and we will stoop no longer. Better to
die, to fall as our gallant father fell, leading his faithful countrymen,
devoted subjects, against enemies not half so fierce as
these, who should be brothers. Sound trumpets, advance our
guards! Seyton, Fleming, Huntley, to your leadings, and advance!
ourselves will see the tourney.”

“Your grace forgets,” replied the experienced leader to whom
she first addressed herself, “your grace forgets that not one
dastard of this fair army, as it shows upon this ground of vantage,
will advance one lance's length against the foe. Some
scores there are, in truth, followers oft tried and ever-faithful
of mine own, and some if I mistake not of the earl of Orkney,
who will fight well when shaft and steel-point hold together;
but 't were but butchery to lead the rugged vassals upon certain
death! for what are scores to thousands such as stand thirsting
for the battle yonder — thousands led on, too, by the first martialists
of Europe? Nevertheless, say but the word, and it is

done. Seyton hath ever lived for Stuart — it rests but now
to die!” He paused — but in an instant, taking his cue from
Mary's extended nostril and still-flashing eye, he shouted, in a
voice of thunder: “Mount, mount, and make ready! A Seyton,
a Seyton for the Stuart!” Already had he dashed the
rowels into his steed, and another instant would have precipitated
his little band upon the inevitable destruction that awaited
them in the crowded ranks which, at the well-known sound of
that wild slogan, had brought their lances to the charge, and
waited but a word to bear down all opposition.

Happily, so miserable a consummation was warded off. The
earl of Orkney, who had stood silent and thunder-stricken by
the side of his lovely bride, sprang forward, and grasping with
impetuous vehemence the bridle-rein of Seyton —

“Not so!” he hissed through his set teeth, “not so, brave
baron; this is my quarrel now, mine only; and dost think that
I will veil my crest to mortal man? Lo! in yonder lines the
haughty rebels have drawn their weapons, and against me only
shall they wield them! What, ho there, heralds! take pursuivant
and trumpet, and bear my gauntlet, the carl of Orkney's
gauntlet, to yonder misproud caitiffs: say that Bothwell defies
them — defies them to the mortal combat, here before this company,
here in the presence of men and angels, to prove his innocence,
their bold and overweening treason!” — and he hurled
his ponderous glove to earth.

“Well said and nobly, gallant earl!” cried Seyton; “so shall
this foul calumny be stayed, and floods of Scottish blood be
spared. On to thy devoir, and God will shield the right.”

And at the word the heralds rode forth again, the foremost
bearing the glove of the challenger high on a lance's point.
Again the trumpets flourished, but not now as before, in peaceful
strains. At the loud clangor of defiance, the confederate
chiefs again strode to the front, their horses led behind them by

page or squire; and as the menace of the challenger was proclaimed
loudly and clearly by the king-at-arms, a smile of fierce
delight flashed over every brow.

“I claim the privilege of battle!” shouted the impetuous Glencairn.

“And I!” — “And I!” — “And I!” rose hoarsely into air the
mingled tones of Morton, Lyndesay, and Kirkaldy, as each
sprang forth to seize the proffered gauntlet. “I am the senior
baron!” shouted one. “And I the leader of the van!” cried
another; and for a minute's space all was confusion, verging
fast toward strife, among those chiefs of late so closely linked
together — till the deep, sonorous voice of Murray, in after-days
the regent of the realm, was heard above the tumult.

“For shame, my lords, for shame! Seems it so much of
honor to do the hangman's office on a murderer, that ye would
mar our fair array with this disgraceful bruit for the base privilege?
By Heaven, should the duty fall on me, I should perform
it, doubtless, even as I would prefer the meanest work
that came before me under the name of duty; but, trust me, I
should hold the deed a blot upon mine ancient escutcheon,
rather than honor! But to the deed, my lords; the herald
awaits our answer. Lord Lyndesay, thine is the strongest
claim: if thou wilt undertake the deed, thou hast my voice.”

“As joyfully,” muttered Lyndesay beneath his grizzly mustache,
“as joyfully as to the banquet do I go forth against the
craven traitor! Morton, lend me thy falchion for the trial —
the two-handed espaldron which slew Spens of Kilspindie, at
the brook of Fala, in the hands of Archibald of Douglas, thy
renowned forefather. God give me grace to wield it, and it
shall do as trusty service on the carcass of yon miscreant!”

“It is decided, then,” cried Murray; and not a voice replied,
for none had the presumption to dispute the fitness of the choice
which thus had fallen on a leader so renowned for strength and

valor. “Herald,” he continued, “go bear our greeting to her
majesty of Scotland, and say to her, we do accept the challenge.
An hour's truce we grant — an equal field here, on this hill of
Carbury. The noble earl of Lyndesay will here prove, upon
the crest and limbs of that false recreant, James, some time the
earl of Bothwell, the justice of our cause: and so may God
defend the right!”

The shout which rang from earth to heaven, at the noble
confidence of Murray, bore to the ears of Mary and her trembling
followers the assurance that the challenge was accepted;
an assurance that sounded joyfully in every ear but that of his
who uttered the bravado. Many a time and oft had Bothwell's
crest shone foremost in the tide of battle; many a time had he
confronted deadliest odds with an undaunted visage and a victorious
blade. Yet now he faltered; his bold brow blanched
with sudden apprehension; his frame, muscular and lofty as a
giant's, actually shook with terror; and his quivering lip paled,
ere he heard the name of his antagonist. Whether it was that
guilt sat heavy on his heart, and weighed his strong arm down,
or that his soul was cowed by the consciousness that he was
unsupported and forsaken by all his friends, he turned upon his
heel, and, muttering some inarticulate sounds, half lost within
the hollows of his beaver, he strode to his pavilion, and thence
sent his squire forth, to say that he was ill at ease, and could
not fight until the morrow! Mary herself — the fond, confiding,
deceived Mary — burst on the instant into loud contempt at this
hardly-credible baseness.

“What! James of Bothwell false!” she cried; “then perish
hope! I yield me to the malice of my foes; I will resist no
longer. O man, man — base, coward, miserable man! — is it
for this we give our hearts, our lives, ourselves, to your vile
guidance? is it for this that I have given thee mine all — mine
honor, and, perchance, my soul? that thou shouldst cowardly

desert me at mine utmost need! Little, oh how little, doth the
cold world know of woman's heart and woman's courage! For
thee would I have perished, oh, how joyfully! — and thou, O
God! O God! it is a bitter, bitter punishment for my credulity
and love: but if I have deserved to suffer, I deserved it not at
thy hands, James of Bothwell! Seyton, true friend, to thee I
trust mine all. Go summon Kirkaldy to a parley: say Mary,
queen of Scotland, rather than look upon the blood of Scottishmen,
will grant to her rebellious lords those terms which they
desire! Nay, interrupt us not, Lord Seyton. We care not
what befall that frozen viper whom we warmed within our
bosom till he stung us! Away! — let Orkney quit our camp; for,
by the glorious light of heaven, we never will behold him more!”

She spoke with an elevated voice, and features glowing with
contending passions, till the faithful baron had departed on his
mission; but then, then the false strength yielded to despair,
and in an agony of unfettered grief she sank into the arms of
her attendants, murmuring amid her tears, “O God, how I did
adore that man!” and was borne, almost a corpse, into her tent.

An hour passed heavily away, and at its close Mary came
forth, with a brow from which, though pale as the first dawning,
every trace of grief had vanished. The terms had been
accepted. Without a tear she saw the man for whom she had
sacrificed all — all, to her very reputation — mount and depart
for ever! Without a tear she backed her own brave palfrey,
and rode, attended by a dozen servitors, faithful amid her sorrows
as they had been in brighter days, into the rebel host.
Little was there of courtesy, of that demeanor which becomes
a subject in presence of his queen, a true knight before a lady.
Amid the taunts and jeers of the vile soldiery, covered with
dust and humiliation, she entered upon that fatal progress which,
commencing in a conditional surrender, ended only when she
was immured, beyond a hope of rescue or redemption, within
the dungeon-towers of Loch Leven!

THE CAPTIVITY.

Eighteen long years of solitary grief — of that most wretched
sickness that arises, even to a proverb, from hope too long deferred
— had already passed away since, in the fatal action of
Langside, the wretched Mary had for the last time seen her
banner fall, and her adherents scattered like chaff before the
wind by the determined valor of her foes. All, all was lost!
It had been the work of months to draw that gallant army to a
head, of which so many now lay stark in their curdled gore;
while the miserable remnant were hunted like beasts of chase,
to perish, when taken, upon the ignominious scaffold. And
now, of all the noble gentlemen who had thronged to her bridle-rein
on that fatal morning, high in hope as in valor, the merest
had escaped to guard the person of that sovereign whom they
loved so truly, and in behalf of whom they had endured so
deeply. Her crown was lost for ever; nor her crown only, but
her country.

Of all the glorious gifts which, at an earlier period of her
eventful life, nature appeared to shower upon her head, freedom
alone remained. The palfrey which bore her from the battle-field
was now the sole possession of the titular monarch of three
fair domains; the wild moors, over which she fled in desperate

haste, her only refuge from persecutors the most unrelenting
that ever joined sagacity to hatred in the performance of their
plans; the dozen gallant hearts who rallied yet around their
queen, beneath the guiding of the stout and loyal Herries, her
only court, her only subjects. Still she was free; and to one
who for months before had never seen the blessed light of
heaven but its lustre was sullied by the dim panes through
which it forced its way, to lend no solace to her captivity, the
fresh breeze which eddied across the purple moorlands of her
native land had still the power to impart a sense of pleasure,
fleeting, it is true, and doubtful, but still, in all its forms and
essentials, absolute and real pleasure.

At the full distance of sixty Scottish miles from the accursed
field which had witnessed the downfall of all her hopes, worn
out in body and depressed in spirit, she paused to take, in the
abbey of Dundrennan, a few hours of that repose without which,
even in the most trying circumstances, the mind can not exist
in its undiminished powers. At this juncture, it appeared to
those about her person that Mary was utterly deserted by that
wonderful sagacity, that clear insight into the motives of others,
which had ever constituted one of the strongest points of her
character. The chief object of the faithful few, who had clung
to her with unblenching steadiness through this her last misfortune,
had been to bear her in security to some point whence
she might effect her escape to the sunny shores of that land
wherein she had passed the happiest, the only truly happy,
hours of her checkered existence. Queen-dowager herself of
France, knit by the closest ties of interest and friendship to the
court of Versailles — to which, moreover, Scotland had ever
been considered an auxiliar and well-affected state, no less than
an easy pretext for hostilities against its natural antagonist —
she had been there secure, not of safety only, but of the full
enjoyment of rank, and wealth, and dignity, and pleasure, if

indeed pleasure were yet within the reach of one who had herself
suffered, and who had beheld all those that loved her suffer,
as Mary the last queen of Scotland. Inclination, it would have
seemed, no less than policy, should have urged the hapless sovereign
to the measure advocated by each and all of her devoted
train; for but a few years had flown since she had felt all those
pangs which render exile to a delicate and sensitive mind the
heaviest of human punishments, on parting from the fair shores
of that land, which even then perhaps some prophetic spirit
whispered, she must behold no more! Herries, the bold and
loyal Herries, bent his knee, stiffened with years of toil and
exposure, to sue of his adored mistress the only boon of all his
labors, all his sufferings, that she would avoid the fatal soil of
England.

“Remember,” he had cried, in tones which seemed in after-days
of more than human foresight — “remember how the false
and wily woman, who sways the sceptre of England with absolute
and undisputed sway — remember, I say, with what unflinching
determination she has thwarted you in every wish of
your heart; with what depth of secret enmity she has at all
times, and in all places, cherished your foes, and injured all
who were most dear to you! and wherefore, oh wherefore, my
beloved mistress, wherefore should her course of action now
be altered, when she has no longer a powerful queen with
whom to strive, but rather a fugitive rival to oppress? Elizabeth
of England — believe me, noble lady — has marked this
crisis as it drew nigh, with that unerring instinct which directs
the blood-raven to its destined victim while life yet revels in its
veins; and surely, so surely as you enter her accursed eyry, shall
you feel her vulture-talons busy about your heartstrings! For
years, my noble mistress, has Herries been your servant; at
council or in field, with ready hand and true word, has he ever
served the Stuart. It becomes me not to boast, yet will I speak:

when Seyton, and Ogilvy, and Huntley, were dismayed — when
Hamilton himself hung back — Herries was ever nigh.”

“Ever, ever true and loyal!” cried the hapless queen, touched
even beyond the consideration of her own calamities by the
speech of the brave veteran — “my noble, noble Herries, and
bitter, most bitter has been the reward of truth and valor; but
so has it ever been with Mary. I tell thee, baron, for me to
love a bird, a tree, a flower, much less a creature such as thou
art, an honorable, upright, and devoted friend, was but that creature's
doom: all whom I have loved have I destroyed! Alas,
alas for the undaunted spirits that were severed from the forms
they filled so nobly, on that dark battle-field!”

“Think not of them, my liege — mourn not for them,” interrupted
the baron. “Knightly, and in their duty, have they
fallen. Their last blow was stricken, and their last slogan
shouted, in a cause the fairest that ever hallowed warrior's
blade. They are at rest, and they are happy. But think of
those who, having lost their earthly all to save thee, would yet
esteem themselves pre-eminently happy so they might see thee
free and in security. Oh! hear me, Mary — hear for the first,
last time — hear the prayer of Herries! Go not, go not — as
you love life, and dignity, and liberty — as you would prove
your faith to those who have never been faithless to you — go
not to this accursed England!”

But it had all been vain. The fiat had gone forth, and reason
had deserted, as it would seem, the destined victim. No
arguments, however lucid — no fears, however natural, could
divert her from this fatal project. With the choice of good and
evil fairly set before her — honor, and rank, and liberty, in
France, a prison and an axe in England — deliberately and resolutely
she rushed upon her fate! And when she might have
found a willing asylum in the arms of kindred monarchs, she
yielded herself to the tender mercies of a rival queen, a rival

beauty; a fierce, unforgiving, unfeminine foe; a being who, as
she aped the name, so also displayed the attributes and nature
of the lion! How could Mary — a professed foe, a claimant of
her crown, a woman fairer, and of brighter parts even than her
own — a mother, while she was but a barren stake — how could
Mary, with so many causes to awaken her deathless hostility,
hope for generosity or for mercy from a queen who could even
sacrifice without a pang her inclinations to her interest; whose
favors but marshalled those on whom they fell to the scaffold
and the block; whose dearest favorites, whose most faithful
servants had fallen, one by one, beneath the headsman's axe;
who had proved herself, in short, a worthy heiress to the soulless
tyrant from whom she had sprung, by the violence of her
uncurbed passions, and by the hereditary pleasure with which,
through all her long and glorious reign (glorious, as it is termed,
for with the multitude the ends will ever justify the means, and
foreign conquest hallow domestic tyranny), she rioted in innocent
and noble blood!

The Rubicon had been passed — and scarcely passed, before
Mary had discovered the entire justice, no less than the deep
love, manifested by the parting words of Herries. As her last
sovereignty, she had stepped aboard the barge that was to waft
her from her discontented and ungrateful subjects to a free and
happy home, as she too fondly hoped, in merry England. Girt
with the bills and bows which had battened so deeply and so
often in the gore of Scottishmen, gallantly dressed, and himself
of gallant bearing, Lowther, the sheriff of the marches, received
the royal fugitive. With every mark of deference that manly
strength is bound to show to female weakness, with all the chivalrous
respect a good knight is compelled by his order to display
to innocence and beauty — nay, more, with all the profound
humility of a subject before his queen — did he conduct the
hapless lady aboard his bark. Yet, while the words of welcome

were upon his tongue, while he dwelt with loyal eagerness
on the sincerity and love of England's Elizabeth toward
her sister-queen — by his refusal to admit above a limited and
trifling portion of her train to share the asylum of their mistress,
he had already drawn the distinction between the royal captive
and the royal guest.

And so it afterward appeared. In vain did Mary petition as
a favor, or claim as a right, an interview with her relentless
persecutor. She should have known that even if Elizabeth
could, by her constitution, have pardoned her assumption of the
style or titles of the English monarchy, she could yet never overlook,
never forgive her surpassing loveliness, her elegant accomplishments,
her brilliant wit, her more than mortal grace!
She might have condescended to despise the rival queen — she
could only stoop to hate the rival beauty. From castle to castle
had she been transferred, with no regard for either her rank
or convenience. From prison to prison, from warder to warder,
had she been conveyed, as each abode seemed in turn insecure
to the lynx-eyed jealousy of her tormentor, or every jailer in
turn sickened at the loathsome weariness of his hateful and degrading
employment. No better proof — if proof were needed
— could be adduced of Elizabeth's tyrannical and cruel despotism,
than the unconstitutional authority by which she forced
noble after noble, the very pride and flower of the English aristocracy,
to change their castles into prisonhouses, their households
into warders and turnkeys, their very lives into a state of
anxious misery, which could only be surpassed by that of the
unhappy prisoner they were, so contrary to their will, compelled
to guard.

After the base mockery of the trial instituted at York, but a
few months after her arrival — that trial wherein a brother was
brought forward to convict his sister of adultery and murder —
that trial which, though it pronounced the prisoner unconvicted,

yet inflicted on her all the penalties of conviction — it scarcely
appears that Mary ever entertained a hope of obtaining her liberty,
much less the station which was her right, from either the
justice or the generosity of the lion-queen. In vain had every
course been tried, in vain had every human means been employed.
In vain had Scotland sued; in vain had France and
Spain threatened, and even prepared to act upon their threats.
For Mary there was no amelioration, no change!

From day to day, from year to year, her hopes had fallen
away one by one. Her spirits, so buoyant and elastic once,
had now subsided into a heavy, settled gloom; her very charms
were but a wreck and shadow of their former glory. For a
time she had endeavored, by all those beautiful occupations of
the pencil, the needle, or the lyre, in which none had equalled
her in her young days of happiness, to while away the deep
and engrossing weariness which by long endurance becomes
even worse than pain. For a time she had been permitted to
vary the monotony of her domestic labors by her favorite exercises
in the field and forest. Surrounded by a train of mail-clad
horsemen, warders with bended bows and loaded arquebuses,
she had a few times been allowed to ride forth into the
free woodland, and to forget, amid the gay sights and heart-stirring
sounds of the chase, the cares that were heavy at her
heart. But how should that heart forget, when at every turn
it encountered the haggard eye of the anxious keeper — anxious,
for the slightest relaxation of his duty were certain death!
How should the ear thrill to the enlivening music of the pack,
or to the wild flourish of the bugles, when the clash of steel
announced on every side the minions of her oppressor? How
should the gallop over the velvet turf, beneath the luxuriant
shadow of the immemorial oaks, convey aught of freshness to
the spirit that was about to return thence to chambers no less a
dungeon for being decked with the mockeries of state, than

though they had presented to the eye those common accessories
of bar, and grate, and chain, which they failed not to set
before the mind? After a while, even these liberties were
curtailed! It seemed too much of freedom, that the titular sovereign
of three realms — the cynosure of every eye, the beauty
at whose very name every heart thrilled and every pulse
bounded — should be permitted to taste the common air of
heaven, even when hemmed in, without the possibility of escape,
by guards armed to the teeth, and sworn to exercise those
arms, not only against all who should attempt the rescue, but
against the miserable captive herself, should she attempt to
profit by any efforts made for her release!

And efforts were made — efforts by the best and noblest of
the British peerage — by men whose names were almost sufficient
to turn defeat to victory and shame to glory. Norfolk and
Westmoreland, and a hundred others, of birth scarcely less distinguished,
and of virtues no less brilliant, revolted from the
soul-debasing despotism of Elizabeth, and attempted, now by
secret stratagem, and now by open warfare, to force the victim
from the clutches of the lion. With the deepest regret did
Mary witness the destruction of so many noble spirits, and with
yet deeper fury did Elizabeth behold star after star of her
boasted galaxy of nobles shoot madly from their spheres in pursuit
of a meteor. Bitter were her feelings, and deadly was her
vengeance. The bloody reign of Mary might almost have been
deemed to have returned, as day by day the death-bells tolled,
as the traitor's gate admitted another and another occupant to
that above, whence the only egress was by the axe and scaffold.
Nor was this all. A thousand wild and fearful rumors
began to float among the multitude. The perils of a catholic
insurrection, the intended assassination of the queen, the establishment
of a papistical dynasty upon the throne of England,
were topics of ordinary conversation, but of no ordinary excitement.

At one time it was reported that a Spanish fleet was
actually in the channel; at another that the duke of Guise, with
a vast army, had effected a landing on the Kentish coast, and
might hourly be expected in the capital. Nor is it uncharitable
to suppose that these reports were designedly spread abroad,
this excitement purposely kept alive, by the wily ministers of
Elizabeth. That the despot-queen had long ago determined on
the slaughter of her rival, is certain; nor have we any just
cause for doubting that Bacon and Walsingham were men as
fully capable of goading the terrors of a multitude into fary as
was their mistress of recommending the private murder of her
hapless victim!

It was at this period that popular madness was raised to its
utmost height by the detection of Babington's conspiracy. Rich,
young, brave, and romantic; stimulated by the hope of gaining
the hand of Mary, forgetful that the personal loveliness for
which she had once been conspicuous must long have yielded to
the joint influence of misery and time; and deceived by the fatal
maxim, then too much in vogue, that means are justified by ends
— this gentleman resolved on bringing about the liberation of the
Scottish by the murder of the English queen. The affair was
not looked upon as so atrocious, but that twelve associates were
easily found for the execution of the plot; and it is barely possible
that, had they proceeded at once to action, their desperate
effort might have been crowned with success. They delayed
— they talked — they were discovered! Beneath the protracted
agonies of the question, one was found of these convicted traitors
who asserted the privity of Mary to the whole affair; and
at once, as though a torch had been applied to some train long
prepared, the whole of England burst forth into a perfect frenzy
of terror. A people are never so terrible, never so barbarous,
as when they are thoroughly and needlessly terrified. From
every quarter of the kingdom the cry was at once for blood;

and Elizabeth, looking in cool delight upon the tumult, perceived
that the moment had arrived when she might gratify,
without fear, her jealous thirst for her hated guest's destruction.
Addresses showered into either house of parliament, beseeching
the queen and her ministers to awaken themselves at once
to the perils of the people; to provide against the impended
dangers of a catholic succession; and to remove at once all
possibility of future conspiracies by the immediate removal of
her who was, as they asserted, not the cause only, but the principal
mover of every successive plot.

It is not to be supposed that, after pining so long in secret
for an opportunity of gratifying her malice, Elizabeth doubted
an instant. It is true indeed that, with a loathsome affectation
of tender-heartedness, she pretended to regret the stern necessity;
that she whined forth doleful remonstrances to her trusty
ministers, entreating them to discover some mode by which
she might herself be preserved from the risk of assassination,
without undergoing the misery of seeing her well-beloved cousin
of Scotland suffer in her stead! Well, however, did those ministers
know the meaning of the motives of their odious mistress;
well were they aware that there was no more of pity or reluctance
in the bosom of Elizabeth than there is of mirth in that
of the hyena when he sends forth his yells of laughter above
his mangled prey!

It was a lovely morning in the autumn; the sun was shedding
a mellow light upon the long glades and velvet turf of a
park-like lawn before the feudal towers of the earl of Shrewsbury.
Before the gate were assembled a group of liveried domestics,
with many a noble steed pawing the earth and champing
its foamy bits; hounds clamored in their couples, and falcons
shook themselves and clapped their restless wings in vain impatience.
It was evident that the attendants were but awaiting
the approach of some distinguished personage, to commence

their sports; and by their whispered conversation it appeared
that this personage was no other than the wretched Mary.
The castle-gates were thrown open; a heavy guard, with arquebuss,
and pike, and bow, filed through the gloomy gateway;
and then, leaning upon the arm of the still stately Shrewsbury,
the poor victim of inveterate persecution came slowly forward.
Several gentlemen in rich attire, and among them Sir Thomas
Georges, blazing in the royal liveries of England, yet bearing
on his soiled buskins and the bloody spurs that graced them
tokens of a long and hasty journey, followed; and another band
of warders brought up the rear.

The charms which had once rendered Mary the loveliest of
her sex, had faded, it is true; the dimpled cheek was sunken,
and its hues, that once had vied with the carnation, had fled
for ever; her tresses were no longer of that rich and golden
brown that had furnished subjects for a thousand sonnets, for
many a line of gray marked the premature and wintry blight
which had been cast upon her beauties by the sternness and
misery of her latter years. Still, there was an air of such
sweet resignation in every feature, such a dignity in the port
of her person — still symmetrical, though it had lost something
of its roundness — such a majesty in her still-brilliant eyes —
that even the wretches who had determined on her destruction
dared not meet the glance of her whom they so foully wronged.

She was already seated in the saddle, and the reins just
grasped in a delicate but masterly hand, when Georges, stepping
forward and bending a knee — almost, as it would seem,
in mockery — informed her that her confederates in the meditated
slaughter of Elizabeth were convicted; that it was the
pleasure of the queen that her grace of Scotland should proceed
at once to the sure castle of Fotheringay, and that it was resolved
that she should set forth upon the instant. For a moment,
but for a single moment, did Mary gaze into the eyes of

the courtly speaker, with a gaze of incredulity, almost of terror;
a quick shudder ran through every limb; and once she
wrung her hands bitterly — but not a word escaped her pallid
lips, not a tear disgraced her noble race.

“It is well, sir,” she said, “it is well. We thank you, no
less for your pleasant tidings, than the knightly considerations
which prompted you to choose so well your opportunity for conveying
them to our ear when we were about to set forth in
search of such brief pleasure as might for a moment gild the
monotony of a prisoner's life! We thank you, sir, most warmly,
and we doubt not your own noble heart will reward you by that
best of gifts, a happy and approving conscience! For the rest
— lead on! it matters little to the wretched and the captive by
what title the prison-bars, which shut them out from light, and
liberty, and hope, are dignified; and well do we know that for
us there is but one exit from our dungeon, or rest from our
calamities — the grave!”

She had commenced her speech in that tone of calm and
polished raillery for which she had in her earlier days been so
renowned, and which even pierced deeper into the feelings of
those who writhed beneath it than the most bitter sarcasm; but
her concluding sentences were uttered with deep feeling: and,
as she turned her liquid eyes toward heaven, it seemed most
wonderful that men should exist capable of exciting a single
pang in the heart of such a creature.

The gates of Fotheringay received her; and, as she rode beneath
the gloomy archway, a prophetic chill fell upon her soul,
and she felt that here her wanderings and her sorrows would
shortly be brought to a close! Scarcely had she reached the
miserable privacy of her chamber, when steps were heard without.
Mildmay, Paulet, and Barker, entered, and delivering a
letter full of hypocritical regrets and feigned affection, informed
her that the queen's commissioners were even then assembled

in the castle-hall, and prayed the lady Mary to descend and
refute the foul charges preferred against her name.

Enfeebled as she had been by sufferings and sorrows, wearied
by her long and rapid journey, and, above all things,
crushed by this last blow, it little seemed that so frail and delicate
a form could have contained a soul so mighty as flashed
forth in one blaze of indignation. Her pale cheek crimsoned,
her sunken eye glared with unwonted fire; she started upon
her feet, her limbs trembling, not with terror or debility, but
with strong and terrible excitement.

“Knows not your mistress,” she cried, in clear, high tones,
“that I, too, am a queen? or would she knowingly debase the
dignity which is common to her with me? Away! I will not
deign to plead! I — I, the queen of Scotland, the mother and
the wife of kings — I plead to mine inferiors? Go tell your
mistress that neither eighteen years of vile captivity, nor dread,
nor misery, has sunk the soul of Mary Stuart so low, that she
will speak one syllable to guard her life, save in the presence
of her peers! Let her assemble her high courts of parliament,
if she so will it: to them, and to them only, will I plead. Here
she may slay me, it is true; but she must slay me by the assassin's
knife, not by the prostituted sword of justice. I have
spoken!” — and she threw herself at once into a seat, immoveable
alike in position and in resolve.

Well had it been for her had she continued firm in that determination;
but what could a weak woman's unassisted intellect
avail against the united force of talents such as those of
Hatton and Burleigh? A thousand specious arguments were
summoned to overcome her scruples, but summoned all in vain,
till the last hint — that her unwillingness to plead could arise
only from a consciousness of guilt — aroused her. Pride, fatal
pride, determined the debate, and she descended. Eloquently,
sorrowfully, manfully, did she plead her cause, combating the

vile chicaneries, the extorted evidences, the absence or the
want of legal witnesses, with the native powers of a clear and
vigorous mind. Once during that judicial mockery did her passions
burst the control of her judgment, and she openly, in full
court, charged the secretary, Walsingham — and, as many now
believe, most justly charged him — with the forgery of the only
documents that bore upon her character, or on the case in point.
But all was fruitless! For what eloquence should convince
men resolved in any circumstances to convict? what facts
should clear away the imputed guilt of one whom it was fully
determined to destroy?

The trial was concluded. With the air of a queen she stood
erect, with a calm brow and serene eye, as the commissioners
departed, one by one. No doom had been pronounced against
her, but she read it in the eyes of all; and as she saw her misnamed
judges quit her presence, she muttered, in the low notes
of a determined spirit: “The tragedy is well nigh closed —
the last act is at hand! Peace — peace — I soon shall find
thee in the grave.”

THE CLOSING SCENE.

It was a dark, but lovely night; moonless, but liquid and
transparent; the stars which gemmed the firmament glittered
more brightly from the absence of the mightier planet, and from
the influence of a slight degree of frost upon the atmosphere,
although it was indeed so slight, that its presence could be
traced only in the crispness of the herbage, and in the uncommon
purity of the heavens. Beneath a sky such as I have
vainly endeavored to portray, the towers of Fotheringay rose
black and dismal above the ancestral oaks and sweeping glades
of its demesne. It would have appeared to a casual observer
that all were at rest, buried in utter forgetfulness of all their
hopes and sorrows, within that massive pile, save the lonely
sentinel, whose progress round the battlements, although invisible,
might be traced by the clatter of his harness, and the sullen
echoes of his steel-shod stride. But to a nearer and more
accurate survey, a single light, feebly twinkling through a casement
of the dungeon-keep, told a far different tale. At times
that solitary ray streamed in unbroken lines far into the bosom
of the darkness; at times it was momentarily obscured, as if by
the passage of some opaque body, though the transit, if such it
were, was too brief to reveal the form or motions of the obstacle.
Once, however, the shadow paused, and then, as its outlines
stood forth in strong relief against the illumination of the

chamber, the delicate proportions and musing attitude of a female
might be discerned with certainty. It was the queen of
Scotland. Her earthly sorrows were drawing to their close;
the peace, for which she had long ceased to look, save in the
silence of the tomb, was now within her grasp. Mary's last
sun had set.

Of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death
— the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard — dark,
mysterious, unknown death — had become to her an intimate,
and, as it were, familiar friend. It was not that she had lessoned
her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which
it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned
her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with
difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was
it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with
the stoic's apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that
absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation
of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive
temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing
contact with this world's idols, must seem a punishment
secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. Born to a
station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured
in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely
dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a
frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality,
she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled,
that the very qualities which should have ministered to
her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery
and pain. Attached to her native land with the Switzer's patriotism,
she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and
hatred. Full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest
of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had
recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head;

or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal of
benefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for
their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight
the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed.
If the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene
heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an
unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian
height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and
darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the
deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered
worshippers. She had been led step by step from the keenest
enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth;
she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to
languish for a second draught. Yet there was nothing of resentment,
nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings
with which she looked back on the world and its adorers.
She did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit
of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but
a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to
whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears
and of the shadow of death, had been a region of perpetual sunshine
and unclouded happiness.

From Mary's earliest years there had been a deep spring of
piety in her heart which, never utterly dried up, though choked
at times, and turned from its true course by the thorny cares
and troubles of life, had burst from the briers which so long concealed
it in redoubled purity as it flowed nearer to the close.
There was an innate tenderness in all her sentiments toward
all men and all things which could never degenerate into hatred,
much less into misanthropy. She looked then upon life in its
true light; as a mingled landscape, now obscured by clouds,
now called into glory by the sunshine; as a region, tangled here
with forests, and cumbered with barren rocks, there swelling

into hills of vintage, or subsiding into glens of verdure. And
if to her the landscape had been most viewed beneath the influence
of a dark and threatening sky — if to her life's path had
lain, for the most part, through the wilderness and over the
mountains — she knew that such was the result of her own misfortune,
perhaps of her own misconduct, not of defect in the
wonderful contrivance, or of improvidence in the all-glorious
contriver.

In proportion as she had learned to dwell on the insufficiency
of earthly good to satiate that deep thirst for happiness which
is not the least among the proofs of the soul's immortality, she
had come to look upon the void of futurity as the unexplored
region of bliss; upon death as the portal through which we
must pass from the desert of toil and sorrow to the Eden of
hope and happiness. That she was drawing rapidly near to
this portal she had for a long time been aware; and, during the
latter years of her captivity, she had longed to see the leaves
of that gate unfolded for her exit, with a sense of pining sickness,
similar to that of the imprisoned eagle. The mockery of
her trial she had beheld as the avenue through which she
should arrive, and that right shortly, at the desired end; and
although she knew that the scaffold and the axe, or the secret
knife of the assassin, must need be the key to that gate, she
recked but little of the means, so that the way of escape was left
open to her.

She had pleaded, it is true, with brilliant eloquence and earnestness,
in behalf, not of life, but of her honor. She wished
for death, and she cared not for the vulgar ignominy of the
scaffold; but she did care, she did shrink from the ignominy
of a condemnation — a condemnation not by the suborned commissioners,
not by the jealous rival, not by the perjured and
terror-stricken populace of the day, but by Time and by Eternity.
This was the condemnation from which she shrank;

this was the ignominy which she combated; this was the doom
which, by the masterly and dauntless efforts of her unassisted
woman heart, she turned not only from herself, but back upon
her murderers.

From the departure of the commissioners, she had been convinced
that she was hovering as it were on the confines of life
and immortality. Happy and calm herself, she had labored to
render calm and happy the little group of friends — for domestics,
when faithful, are friends — who still preserved their allegiance.
She craved no more the wanderings in the green-wood;
she had even refused to join in her once loved sports of
field and forest, which, denied to her when she would have
grasped the boon, were freely proffered now, as though her enemies,
with a far-reaching malignity that would stretch its arm
beyond the grave, had wished to reawaken in her bosom that
love for things of this life which had sunk to sleep, and to
sharpen the bitterness of death by the added tortures of regret.
If such, indeed, were their intentions — and who shall presume
to judge? — their barbarity was frustrated; and if they indeed
envied their poor victim the miserable consolation of passing
cheerfully and in peace from the sphere of her sorrows, we
may be assured that the frustration of their wicked views was
sufficient punishment to them while here, and none can even
dare to conjecture what will be their doom hereafter.

This night had brought at length the balm to all her cares
— the restless eagerness to be assured of that which was to
come was over — the goal was reached, the gates were half-unclosed,
and, to her enthusiastic and poetical imagination, the
hymns and harpings of expectant seraphs seemed to pour in
their soothing chimes, whispering of peace, pardon, and beatitude
for evermore between the parted portals. With a bigotry,
which in these days of universal toleration it is equally difficult
to conceive or to condemn sufficiently, it was denied to the departing

sinner — for who that is most perfect here is other than
a sinner — to enjoy the consolations of a priest of her own persuasion.
A firm and conscientious, though not a bigoted catholic,
it was a cruelty of the worst and most outrageous nature,
to deny her that which she deemed of the highest importance
to her eternal welfare, and which they could not deem prejudicial,
without being themselves victims of a superstition so
slavish as to disprove their participation in a faith which boasts
itself no less a religion of freedom than of truth.

Steadily refusing the aid of the protestant divines, who harassed
her with an assiduity that spoke more of polemical pride
than of Christian sincerity, she had performed her orisons with
deep devotion, and had arisen from their performance assured
of forgiveness, confident in her own repentance, and in the
mercy of Him who alone is perfect; in peace and charity even
with her direst foes, and happy in the anticipation of the morrow.
She had sat down to her last earthly meal with an appetite
unimpaired by the knowledge that it was to be her last;
she had conversed cheerfully, gayly, with her weeping friends;
she had drunk one cup of wine to their health and happiness,
and, in token of her own gratitude, to each she had distributed
some little pledge of her affectionate regard; and then — amid
the notes of dreadful preparation, the creaking of saws and the
clang of hammers, busily converting the castle-hall into a place
of slaughter, as it had been not long before a place of misnamed
justice — she had sunk to sleep so calmly, and slumbered on
with a countenance so moveless in its innocent repose, and
with a bosom so regular in its healthful pulsations, that her admiring
ladies began to look on her as one about to start upon
a pleasant voyage to the harbor of all her wishes, rather than
as one about to perish by a cruel and ignominious death on the
scaffold. Hours flew over the lovely sleeper, and the eyes of
her watchers waxed heavier, till they wept themselves to sleep;

and one — an aged woman, who had watched her infancy and
gloried in the promise of her youth — after her eyes were sealed
in sleep, yet continued, by the heavy sobs which burst from
the lips of the slumberer, to manifest the extent of that misery
which abode in all its vividness within the mind, although the
body was wrapt in that state which men have called oblivion.

Such had been the state of things in Mary's chamber from the
first close of evening to the dead hour of midnight; but ere the
east had begun again to redden with the returning glories of its
luminary, sleep, which still sat leadlike on the eyelids of her
attendants, forsook the hapless sovereign. Silently she arose,
and, throwing a single garment carelessly about her person,
passed from her sleeping-apartment into a little oratory adjoining,
without disturbing from her painful slumbers one of those
faithful beings to whom the distinct consciousness of waking
sorrow must have been yet more painfully acute.

Here, as with a quick but regular step she traversed the narrow
turret, she viewed as it were in the space of a single hour
the crowded events of a life which, unnaturally shortened as it
was about to be, yet contained naught of remote and rare occurrence,
but in rapid and complete succession — those events
which make an epoch and an era of every hour, and lengthen
years of time into ages of the mind.

Calmly, piously, without a shade of sorrow for the past or of
solicitude for the future, save that mysterious and yet natural
anxiety which must haunt every mind, however well prepared
to endure its final separation from the body, as the hour of dissolution
approaches, did she expect the morning. This anxiety
and this alone was blended with the various feelings which
coursed through the soul of Mary during this the last night of
her existence.

It was in such a frame of mind that Mary, in the solitude of
that last earthly night, diverting her attention entirely from the

terrible shock she was about to undergo on the morrow, thought
upon her native land, still dear though still ungrateful, a prey
to the fierce contentions of her own factious offspring — of her
son, torn at the earliest dawn of his affections from the arms of
a mother, nurtured among those who would teach him to eradicate
every warmer recollection — to pluck forth, as if it were
an offending eye, every lingering tenderness for that being,
who, amid all her sins and all her sorrows, had never ceased
to love him with an entire and perfect love. There is, in truth,
something more evidently divine, partaking more nearly of that
which we believe to be the very essence of Divinity, in a mother's
love, than in any other pang or passion — for every passion,
how sweet soever it may be, has something of a pang mingled
with it — in the human soul. All other love is liable to diminution,
to change, or to extinction; all other love may be alienated
by the neglect, chilled by the coldness, frozen to the core
by the worthlessness, of the object once beloved. All other
affections are influenced by a thousand trivial circumstances of
time and place: absence may weaken their influence, time obscure
their vividness, and, above all, custom may rob them of
their value. But on the love of a mother — commencing as it
does before the object of her solicitude possesses form or being;
springing from agony and sorrow; ripening in anxiety and care,
and reaping too often the bitter harvest of ingratitude — all incidental
causes, all external influences, are powerless and vain.
Time but excites her admiration, but increases her solicitude,
but redoubles her affections. Absence but causes her to dwell
with a more engrossing memory on him from whom her heart
is never absent. Custom but hallows the sentiment to which
nature has given birth. Neglect and coldness but cause her
to strain every nerve to merit more and more the poor return
of filial love — the solitary aim of her existence, if heartlessly
denied to her. Nay, worthlessness itself but binds her more
closely to him whom the hard world has cast aside, to find a
refuge in the only bosom which will not perceive his errors or
credit his utter destitution.

Thus it was with Mary! She knew that the child of her
affections regarded those affections as vile and worthless weeds!
She knew that he was selfish, vain, and heartless! She knew
that a single word from that child whom she still adored — if
conveyed to her persecutor in the strong language of sincerity
and earnestness — if borne, not by a fawning courtier, but by
one of those high spirits which Scotland has found ever ready
to her need — if enforced by threats of instant war — would
have broken her fetters in a moment, and conveyed her from
the dungeons of Fotheringay to the courts of Holyrood! All
this she knew, yet her heart would not know it! And when
all Europe rang with curses on the unnatural vacillation of that
son; when every Scottish heart, whatever might be its policy
or it party, despised his abject cringing; while Elizabeth herself,
while she flattered his vanity, and affected to honor and
esteem his virtue, scoffed in her royal privacy at the tool she
designed to use in public — Mary alone, Mary, the only sufferer
and victim of his baseness, still clung to the idea of his worth,
still adored the child who was driving her out, as the scape-goat
of the Jews, to expiate the sins of himself and his people
by her own destruction! But it was not on James alone that
her wayward memory was fixed. At a time when any soul
less dauntless, any spirit less exalted, would have failed beneath
its load of sorrows, Mary had a fond regret, a tear of
sorrow, a sigh of sincere gratitude, for every gallant life that
had devoted itself to ward from her that fate which their united
loyalty had availed only to defer, not to avert. Chastelar passed
before her, with his tones of sweetest melancholy, and that unutterable
love, which made him invoke blessings on her who
had doomed him to the block: and Darnley, as he had seemed

in the few short hours when he had been, when he had deserved
to be, the idol of her heart: and Bothwell, the eloquent,
the glorious, but guilty Bothwell, her ruin and her betrayer:
and Douglas, the noble, hapless Douglas, he who had riven the
bolts of Loch Leven, and sent her forth to a short freedom and
worse captivity: Huntley, and Hamilton, and Seyton, and Kirkaldy,
the most formidable of her foes until he became the firmest
of her friends — all passed in sad review before the eyes of
her entranced imagination.

Thus it was that the last queen of Scotland passed the latest
night of her existence. With no consciousness of time, with
no care for the present, no apprehension for the future, she had
paced the narrow floor of her apartment during the still hours
of midnight. Unperceived by her had the stars paled, then
vanished from the brightening firmament; unseen had the first
dappling of the east gone into the clear, cold light of a wintry
morning; unheeded had the castle clock sent forth its giant
echoes hour after hour, to be heard by every watcher over
leagues of field and forest. Another sound rose heavily, and
she was at once collected — time, place, and circumstances,
flashed fully on her mind — she was prepared to meet them: it
was the roar of the morning culverin; and scarcely had its
deafening voice passed over, before a single bell, hoarse, slow,
and solemn, pealed minute after minute, the signal of her approaching
dissolution.

Calmly, as if she were about to prepare for some gay festival,
she turned to the apartment where her ladies, overdone by
wo and watching, yet slumbered, forgetful of the dread occasion.

“Arise,” she said, in sweet, low tones; “arise, my girls, and
do your last of duties for the mistress ye have served so well!
Nay, start not up so wildly, nor blush that ye have slept while
we were watching. Dear girls, the time has come — the time

for which my soul so long has thirsted. Array me, then, as to
a banquet, a glorious banquet of immortality! See,” she continued,
scattering her long locks over her shoulders — “see,
they were bright of yore as the last sunbeam of a summer day,
yet I am prouder of them now, with their long streaks of untimely
snow — for they now tell a tale of sorrows, borne as it
becomes a queen to bear them. Braid them with all your skill,
and place yon pearls around my velvet head-gear. We will go
forth to die, clad as a bride; and now methinks the queen of
France and Scotland owns but a single robe of fair device.
Bring forth our royal train and broidered farthingale: it fits us
not to die with our limbs clad in the garb of mourning, when
Heaven knows that our heart is clothed in gladness!”

Tearless, while all around were drowned in lamentations,
she strove to cheer them to the performance of this last sad
office — not with the commonplace assurances, the miserable
resources of earthly consolation, much less with aught of heartless
levity, or of that unfeeling parade which has so often
adorned the scaffold with a jest, and concealed the anxiety of
a heart ill at ease beneath the semblance of ill-timed merriment
— but by suffering them to read her inmost soul; by showing
them the true position of her existence; by pointing out to
them the actual hardships of the body, and the yet deeper humiliations
of the soul, from which the door of her escape was
even now unclosing.

Scarcely had she completed her attire, and tasted of the consecrated
wafer — long ago procured from the holy Pius, and
preserved for this extremity — when the tread of many feet
without, and a slight clash of weapons at the door of the antechamber,
announced that the hour had arrived.

Once and again, ere she gave the signal to unclose the door,
she embraced each one of her attendants. “Dear, faithful
friends, adieu, adieu,” she said, “for ever; and now remember,

remember the last words of Mary. Weep not for me, and, if
ye love me, shake not my steadfastness, which, thanks to Him
who is the Father and the Friend of the afflicted, the fear of
death can not shake, by useless fear or lamentation. We would
die as a martyr cheerfully, as a queen nobly! Fare ye well,
and remember!” With an air of royal dignity she seated herself,
and, with her maidens standing around her chair, she bore
the mien of a high sovereign awaiting the arrival of some proud
legation, rather than that of a captive awaiting a summons to
the block. “And now,” she said, as she arranged her draperies
with dignified serenity, “admit their envoy.”

The doors were instantly thrown open as she spoke, the
sheriff uttered his ordinary summons, and without a shudder
she rose. “Lead on,” she said; “we follow thee more joyously
than thou, methinks, canst marshal us. Sir Amias Paulet,
lend us thine arm; it fits us not that we proceed, even to
the death, without some show of courtesy. Maidens, bear up
our train; and now, sir, we are ready.”

But a heavier trial than the axe awaited the unhappy sovereign;
for as she set her foot on the first step of the stairs,
Melville, her faithful steward, flung himself at her feet, with
almost girlish wailings. Friendly and familiarly she raised
him from the ground. “Nay, sorrow not for me,” she said,
“true friend. Subject for sorrow there is none, unless thou
grievest that Mary is set free — that for the captive's weeds she
shall put on a robe of immortality, and, for a crown of earthly
misery, the glory of beatitude.”

“Alas! alas! God grant that I may die, rather than look
upon this damned deed.”

“Nay, live, good Melville, for my sake live; commend me
to my son, and say to him, Mary's last thoughts on earth were
given to France and Scotland, her last but these to him: say,
that she died unshaken in her faith to God, unswerving in her

courage, confident in her reward. Farewell, true servant, take
from the lips of Mary the last kiss that mortal e'er shall take of
them, and fare thee well for ever.”

At this moment the earl of Kent stepped forward, and
roughly bade her dismiss her women also, “for the present
matter tasked other ministers than such as these.” For a
moment she condescended to plead that they might be suffered
to attend her to the last; but when she was again refused, her
ancient spirit flashed out in every tone, as she cried, trumpet-like
and clear, “Proud lord, beware! I too am cousin to your
queen — I too am sprung from the high-blood of England's royalty
— I too am an anointed queen. I say thou shalt obey, and
these shall follow their mistress to the death, or with foul violence
shall they force me thither. Beware! beware, I say,
how thou shalt answer doing me this dishonor!”

Her words prevailed. Without a shudder she descended,
entered the fatal hall, looked with an air of smiling condescension,
almost of pity, on the spectators crowded almost to suffocation,
and, mounting the scaffold, stood in proud and abstracted
unconcern, while, in the measured sounds of a proclamation,
the warrant for her death was read beside her elbow.

The bishop of Peterborough then drew nigh, and, in a loud
voice and inflated style, harassed her ears with an oration,
which, whatever might have been its merits, was at that time
but a barbarous and useless outrage.

“Trouble not yourself,” she broke in at length, disgusted
with his intemperate eloquence, “trouble not yourself any more
about this matter, for I was born in this religion, I have lived
in this religion, and in this religion I am resolved to die.” Turning
suddenly aside, as if determined to hear no further, she
knelt apart, fervently prayed, and repeatedly kissed the sculptured
image which she bore of Him who died to save. As
she arose from her orisons, the earl of Kent, her constant and

unrelenting persecutor, with heartless cruelty burst into loud
revilings against “that popish trumpery” which she adored.
“Suffer me now,” she said, gazing on him with an expression
of beautiful resignation, that might have disarmed the malice of
a fiend, “suffer me now to depart in peace. I have come
hither, not to dispute on points of doctrine, but to die.”

Without another word she began to disrobe herself; but
once, as her maidens hung weeping about her person, she
laid her finger on her lips, and repeated emphatically the
word “Remember.” And once again, as the executioner
would have lent his aid to remove her upper garments, “Good
friend,” she said, with a smile of ineffable sweetness, “we will
dispense with thine assistance. The queen of Scotland is not
wont to be disrobed before so many eyes, nor yet by varlets
such as thou.”

All now was ready. The lovely neck was bared. The
wretch who was to perform the deed of blood stood grasping
the fatal axe, and the fierce earl of Kent beat the ground with
his heel in savage eagerness. Without a sigh she knelt;
without a sign of trepidation, a quicker heave of her bosom, or
a brighter flush on her brow, she laid down her innocent head,
and without a struggle, or convulsion of her limbs, as the axe
flashed, and the life-blood spouted, did her spirit pass away.

A general burst of lamentation broke the silence; but amidst
that burst the heavy stride of Kent was heard, as he sprang
upon the scaffold, and raised the ghastly visage, the eyes yet
twinkling, and the lips quivering in the death-struggle. A single
voice, that of the zealot bishop, cried aloud, “Thus perish
all the foes of Queen Elizabeth.” But ere the response had
passed the lips of Kent, a shriller cry rang through the hall —
the sharp yell of a small greyhound, the fond companion of the
queen's captivity. Bursting from the attendants, who vainly
strove to hold her back, with a short, sharp cry she dashed

full at the throat of the astonished earl; but ere he could move
a limb the danger, if danger there were, was passed. The
spirit was too mighty for the little frame. The energies of the
faithful animal were exhausted, its heart broken, in that death-spring.
It struck the headless body of its mistress as it fell,
and in an agony of tenderness, died licking the hand that had
fed and cherished it so long. Wonderful, that when all men
had deserted her, a brute should be found so constant in its
pure allegiance! And yet more wonderful, that the same blow
should have completed the destiny of the two rival sovereigns!
and yet so it was! The same axe gave the death-blow to the
body of the Scottish, and to the fame of the English queen!
The same stroke completed the sorrows of Mary, and the infamy
of Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH'S REMORSE.

The twelfth hour of the night had already been announced
from half the steeples of England's metropolis, and the echoes
of its last stroke lingered in mournful cadences among the
vaulted aisles of Westminster. It was not then, as now, the
season of festivity, the high-tides of the banquet and the ball,
that witching time of night. No din of carriages or glare of
torches disturbed the sober silence of the streets, illuminated
only by the waning light of an uncertain moon; no music
streamed upon the night-wind from the latticed casements of
the great, who were contented, in the days of their lion-queen,
to portion out their hours for toil or merriment, for action or
repose, according to the ministration of those great lights which
rule the heavens with an indifferent and impartial sway, and
register their brief career of moments to the peer as to the peasant
by one unvarying standard.

A solitary lamp burned dim and cheerlessly before a low-browed
portal in St. Stephen's; and a solitary warder, in the
rich garb still preserved by the yeomen of the guard, walked to

and fro with almost noiseless steps — his corslet and the broad
head of his shouldered partisan flashing momentarily out from
the shadow of the arch, as he passed and repassed beneath the
light which indicated the royal residence — distinguished by no
prouder decorations — of her before whose wrath the mightiest
of Europe's sovereigns shuddered. A pile of the clumsy firearms
then in use, stacked beneath the eye of the sentinel, and
the dark outlines of several bulky figures outstretched in slumber
upon the pavement, seemed to prove that some occurrences
of late had called for more than common vigilance in the guarding
of the place.

The prolonged cry of the watcher, telling at each successive
hour that all was well, had scarcely passed his lips, before the
distant tramp of a horse, and the challenge of a sentry from the
bridge, came heavily up the wind. For a moment the yeoman
listened with all his senses; then, as it became evident that the
rider was approaching, he stirred the nearest sleeper with the
butt of his heavy halbert. “Up, Gilbert! up, man, and to your
tools, ere they be wanted. What though the earl's proud head
lie low? — he hath friends and fautors enough in the city, I
trow, to raise a coil whene'er it lists them!” The slumbers of
the yeomen were exchanged on the instant for the guarded
bustle of preparations; and, before the horseman, whose approach
had caused so much excitement, drew bridle at the
palace-gate, a dozen bright sparks glimmering under the dark
portal, like glow-worms beneath some bushy coppice, announced
the readiness of as many levelled matchlocks.

“Stand, ho! the word —”

“A post to her grace of England!” was the irregular reply,
as the rider, hastily throwing himself from off his jaded hackney,
advanced toward the yeoman.

“Stand there, I say! — no nearer, on your life! Shoot, Gilbert,
shoot, an' he stir but a hand-breadth!”

“Tush! friend, delay me not,” replied the intruder, halting,
however, as he was required to do; “my haste is urgent, and
that which I bear with me passeth ceremony — a letter to the
queen! On your heads be it, if I meet impediment! See that
ye pass it to her grace forthwith.”

“A letter? ha! There may be some device in this; yet
pass it hitherward” A broad parchment, secured by a fold of
floss silk, with its deeply-sealed wax attached, was placed in
his hand. A light was obtained from the hatch of a caliver,
and the superscription, evidently too important for delay, hurried
the guards to action. “The earl of Nottingham” — it ran
— “to his most high and sovereign lady, Elizabeth of England.
For life! for life! for life! — Ride and run — haste, haste, posthaste,
till this be delivered!”

After a moment's conference among the warders, the bearer
was directed to advance; a yeoman led the panting horse away
to the royal meuf; and the corporal of the guard, striking the
wicket with his dagger-hilt, shortly obtained a hearing and admission
from the gentleman-pensioner on duty. Within the
palace no result was immediately perceived from the occurrence
which had caused so much bustle outside the gates; the
soldiers on duty conversed for a while in stifled whispers, then
relapsed into their customary silence; the night wore on without
further interruption to their watch, and ere they were relieved
they had well nigh forgotten the messenger's arrival.

Not so, however, was the letter received by the inmates of
the royal residence. Ushers and pages were awakened, lights
glanced, and hurried steps and whispering voices echoed through
the corridors. The chamberlain, so great was considered the
urgency of the matter, was summoned from his pillow; and he
with no small trepidation proceeded at once to the apartment
of Elizabeth. His hesitating tap at the door of the ante-chamber
— occupied by the ladies whose duty it was to watch the

person of their imperious mistress by night — failed indeed to
excite the attention of the sleeping maidens, but caught at once
the ear of the extraordinary woman whom they served.

“Without there!” she cried, in a clear, unbroken tone, although
full sixty winters had passed over her head.

“Hunsdon, so please your grace, with a despatch of import
from the earl of Nottingham.”

“God's death! ye lazy wenches! hear ye not the man without,
that I must rive my throat with clamoring? Up, hussies,
up — or, by the soul of my father, ye shall sleep for ever!”
The frightened girls sprang from their couches at the raised
voice of their angry queen, like a covey of partridges at the
yelp of the springer, and for a moment all was confusion.

“What now, ye fools!” she cried again, in harsh and excited
accents, that reached the ears of the old earl without —
“hear ye not that my chamberlain awaits an audience? Fling
yonder robe of velvet o'er our person, and rid us of this night-gear
— so! — the mirror now! my ruff and curch! and now —
admit him!”

“Admit him! an' it list your grace, it were scarce seemly in
ladies to appear thus disarrayed —”

“Heard ye, or heard ye not? I say, admit him! Think ye
old Hunsdon cares to look upon such trumpery as ye, or must
I wait upon my wenches' pleasure? God's head, but ye grow
malapert!”

The old queen's voice had not yet ceased, before the door
was opened; and although the ladies had taken the precaution
of extinguishing the light, and seeking such concealment as the
angles of the chamber afforded, the sturdy old earl — who, notwithstanding
the queen's assertion, had as quick an eye for
beauty as many a younger gallant — could easily discover that
the modesty which had demurred to the admission of a man
was not by any means uncalled for or even squeamish. Had

he been, however, much more inclined to linger by the way
than his old-fashioned courtesy permitted, he must have been
a bold man to delay; for twice, ere he could cross the floor to
her chamber, did his name reach his ears in the impatient accents
of Elizabeth: “Hunsdon! I say — Hunsdon! 's death!
art thou crippled, man?”

There was little of the neatness or taste of modern days displayed
in the decorations of the royal chamber. Tapestries
there were, and velvet hangings, carpets from Turkey, and
huge mirrors of Venetian steel; but a plentiful lack of linen,
and of those thousand nameless comforts, which a peasant's
dame would miss to-day, uncared for in those rude times by
princesses. Huge waxen torches flared in the wind, which
found its way through the ill-constructed lattice; and a greater
proportion of the smoke, from the logs smouldering in the jams
of a chimney wider than that of a modern kitchen, reeked upward
to the blackened rafters of the unceiled roof.

Rigid and haughty, in the midst of this strange medley of
negligence and splendor, sat the dreaded monarch, approached
by none even of her most favored ministers save with fear and
trembling. Her person, tall and slender from her earliest years,
and now emaciated to almost superhuman leanness by the workings
of her own restless spirit, even more than by her years,
presented an aspect terrible, yet magnificent withal. It seemed
as though the dauntless firmness of a more than masculine soul
had won the power to support and animate a frame which it
had rescued from the grave; it seemed as though the years
which had blighted had failed in their efforts to destroy; it
seemed as though that faded tenement of clay might yet endure,
like the blasted oak, for countless years, although the summer
foliage, which rendered it so beautiful of yore, had long since
been scattered by the wild autumnal hurricane, or seared by
the nipping frosts of winter. Her eye alone, in the general

decay of her person, retained its wonted brilliancy, shining
forth from her pale and withered features with a lustre so remarkable
as to appear almost supernatural.

“So! give us the letter — there! Pause not for thy knee,
man; give us the letter!” — and tearing the frail band by which
it was secured asunder, she was in a moment entirely engrossed,
as it would seem, in its contents. Her countenance waxed
paler and paler as she read; and the shadows of an autumn
morning flit not more changefully across the landscape, as cloud
after cloud is driven over the sun's disk, than did the varying
expressions of anxiety, doubt, and sorrow, chase one another
from the speaking lineaments of Elizabeth.

“Ha!” she exclaimed, after a long pause, “this must be
looked to. See that our barge be manned forthwith, and tarry
not for aught of state or ceremony. Thyself will go with us,
and stop not thou to don thy newest-fashioned doublet: this is
no matter that brooks ruffling! — 'S death, man! 't is life or
death! And now begone, sir! we lack our tire woman's service!”

An hour had not elapsed before a barge — easily distinguished
as one belonging to the royal household, by its decorations, and
the garb of the rowers — shot through a side arch of Westminster
bridge, and passed rapidly, under sail and oar, down the swift
current of the river, now almost at ebb tide. It was not, however,
the barge of state, in which the progresses of the sovereign
were usually made; nor was it followed by the long train
of vessels, freighted with ladies of the court, guards, and musicians,
which were wont to follow in its wake. In the stern-sheets
sat two persons: a man advanced in years, and remarkable
for an air of nobility, which could not be disguised even
by the thick boat-cloak he had wrapped about him, as much
perhaps to afford protection against the eyes of the inquisitive
as against the dense mists of the Thames; and a lady, whose

tall person was folded in wrappings so voluminous as to defy
the closest scrutiny. At a short distance in the rear, another
boat came sweeping along, in the crew and passengers of which
it would have required a penetrating glance to discover a dozen
or two of the yeomen of the guard, in their undress liveries of
gray and black, without either badge or cognizance, and their
carbines concealed beneath a pile of cloaks.

It was Elizabeth herself, who, in compliance with the mysterious
despatch she had so lately received, was braving the
cold damps of the river at an hour so unusual, and in a guise
so far short of her accustomed state. The moon had already
set, and the stars were feebly twinkling through the haze that
rose in massive volumes from the steaming surface of the water,
but no symptoms of approaching day were as yet visible in the
east; the buildings on the shore were entirely shrouded from
view by the fog, and the few lighters and smaller craft, moored
here and there between the bridges, could scarcely be discovered
in time to suffer the barge to be sheered clear of their
moorings. It was perhaps on account of these obstacles that
their progress was less rapid than might reasonably have been
expected from the rate at which they cut the water.

Of the six stately piles which may now be seen spanning
the noble stream, but two were standing at the period of which
we write; and several long reaches were to be passed before
the fantastic mass of London bridge, with its dwelling-houses
and stalls for merchandise towering above the irregular thoroughfares
of the city, loomed darkly up against the horizon.
Scarcely had they threaded its narrow and cavern-like arches,
before a pale and sickly light, of a faint yellow hue, more resembling
the glare of torches than the blessed radiance of the
sun, gilded the decreasing fog-wreaths, and glanced upon the
level water. The sun had risen, and for a time hung blinking
on the misty horizon, and shorn of half his beams, till a fresh

breeze from the westward brushed the vapors aloft, and hurried
them seaward with a velocity which shortly left the scenery to
be viewed in unobscured beauty. Just as this change was
wrought upon the face of nature, the royal barge was darting,
with a speed that increased every instant, before the esplanade
and frowning artillery of the Tower; the short waves were
squabbling and splashing beneath the dark jaws and lowered
portcullis of the “Traitor's Gate,” that fatal passage through
which so many of the best and bravest of England's nobility
had entered, never to return!

Brief as was the moment of their transit in front of that sad
portal, Hunsdon had yet time to mark the terrible expression
of misery, almost of despair, that gleamed across the features
of the queen. She spoke not, but she wrung her hands with
a sigh, that uttered volumes of repentance and regret, too late
to be availing; and the stern old chamberlain, who felt his heart
yearn at the sorrows of a mistress whom he loved no less than
he revered, knew that the mute gesture and the painful sigh
were extorted from that masculine bosom only by the extremity
of anguish. She had not looked upon that “den of drunkards
with the blood of princes” since it had been glutted with its
last and noblest victim. Essex, the princely, the valiant, the
generous, and the noble Essex — the favorite of the people, the
admired of men, the idol, the cherished idol of Elizabeth — had
gone, a few short moons before, through that abhorred gateway
— had gone to die — had died by her unwilling mandate! Bitter
and long had been the struggle between her wounded pride
and her sincere affection; between her love for the man and
her wrath against the rebel: thrice had she signed the fatal
warrant, and as often consigned it to the flames; and when at
length her indignation prevailed, and she affixed her name to
the fell scroll — which, once executed, she never smiled again
— that indignation was excited, not so much by the violence

of his proceedings against her crown, as by his obstinate delay
in claiming pity and pardon from an offended but indulgent
mistress.

Onward, onward they went, the light boat dancing over the
waves that added to its speed, the canvass fluttering merrily,
and the swell which their own velocity excited laughing in
their wake. It was a time and a scene to enliven every bosom,
to make every English heart bound happily and proudly. Vessels-of-war,
and traders, galliot, and caravel, and bark, and ship,
lay moored in the centre of the pool and along the wharves, the
thousand dwellings of a floating city. All this Elizabeth herself
had done: the commerce of England was the fruit of her
fostering; the power of her courage and sagacity; the mighty
navy of her creation.

They passed below the dark broadsides and massive armaments
of forty ships-of-war, some of the unwonted bulk of a
thousand tons, with the victorious flags of Howard, Hawkins,
Frobisher, and Drake, streaming from mast and yard; but not
a smile chased the dull expression of fixed grief from the brow
of her who had “marred the Armada's pride;” nor did the
slightest symptom on board her three most chosen vessels —
the Speedwell, the Tryeright, or the Blak-Galley, the very
models of the world for naval architecture — show that the
queen and mistress of them all was gliding in such humble
trim below their victorious batteries.

The limits of the city were already left far behind; green
meadows and noble trees now filled the place of the crowded
haunts of wealth and industry, while here and there a lordly
dwelling, with its trim avenues, and terraced gardens sloping
to the water's edge, adorned the prospect. The turrets of Nottingham
house, the suburban palace of that powerful peer, were
soon in view; when a pageant swept along the river, stemming
the ebb tide with a proud and stately motion — a pageant which,

at any other period, would have been calculated, above all
things else, to wake the lion-like exultation of the queen, though
now it was passed in silence, and unheeded. The rover Cavendish
[4] — who, a few years before, a gentleman of wealth and
worship, had dissipated his paternal fortunes, and in the southern
seas and on the Spanish main had become a famous freebooter
— was entering the river with his prizes in goodly triumph.
The flag-ship, a caravel of a hundred and twenty tons
only, led the van, close-hauled and laden almost gunwale-deep
with the precious spoils of Spain. Her distended topsail flashed
in the sunlight like a royal banner, a single sheet of the richest
cloth of gold; her courses were of crimson damask, her mariners
clad in garments of the finest silk; banners flaunted from
every part of the rigging; and over all the “meteor flag of England,”
the red cross of St. George, streamed rearward, as if
pointing to the long train of prizes which followed. Nineteen
vessels, of every size and description then in use — carracks
of the western Indies, galleons of Castile and Leon, with the
flag of Spain, so late the mistress of the sea, disgracefully reversed
beneath the captor's ensign — sailed on in long and even
array; while in the rear of all, the remainder of the predatory
squadron, two little sea-wasps of forty and sixty tons burden,
presented themselves in proud contrast to their bulky prizes,
the hardy crews filling the air with clamors, and the light cannon
booming in feeble but proud exultation. Time was when
such a sight had roused her enthusiastic spirit almost to frenzy,
but now that spirit was occupied, engrossed by cares peculiarly
its own. The coxswain of the royal barge, his eye kindling
with patriotic pride, and presuming a little on his long and
faithful services, put up the helm, as if about to run alongside
of the leading galley; but a cold frown and a forward wafture
of the hand repelled his ardor; and the men their oars bending
to the work, the barge was at her moorings ere many minutes
had elapsed, by the water-gate of Nottingham-house — and the
queen made her way, unannounced and almost unattended, to
the chamber of the aged countess.

The sick woman had been for weeks wasting away beneath
a slow and painful malady; her strength had failed her, and for
days her end had been almost hourly expected. Still, with
that strange and unnatural tenacity through which the dying
sometimes cling to earth, even after every rational hope of a
day's prolonged existence has been extinguished — she had
hovered as it were on the confines of life and death, the vital
flame flickering like that of a lamp whose aliment has long
since been exhausted, fitfully playing about the wick which
can no longer support it. Her reason, which had been partially
obscured during the latter period of her malady, had been
restored to its full vigor on the preceding evening; but the only
fruit of its restoration was the utmost anguish of mental suffering
and conscientious remorse. From the moment when the
messenger, whose arrival we have already witnessed, had been
despatched on his nocturnal mission, she had passed the time
in fearful struggles with the last foe, wrestling as it were bodily
with the dark angel; now pleading with the Almighty, and adjuring
him by her sufferings and by her very sins, to spare her
yet a little while; now shrieking on the name of Elizabeth,
and calling her, as she valued her soul's salvation, to make no
long tarrying. In the opinion of the leeches who watched
around her pillow, and of the terrified preacher who communed
with his own heart and was still, her life was kept up only by
this fierce and feverish excitement.

At a glance she recognised the queen, before another eye

had marked her entrance. “Ha!” she groaned, in deep, sepulchral
tones, “she is come, before whose coming my guilty
soul had not the power to pass away! She is come to witness
the damnation of an immortal spirit! to hear a tale of sin and
sorrow that has no parallel! Hear my words, O queen! hear
my words now, and laugh — laugh if you can; for, by Him
who made us both, and is now dealing with me according to
my merits, never shall you laugh again! Hereafter you shall
groan, and weep, and tremble, and curse yourself, as I do!
Laugh, I say, Elizabeth of England — laugh now, or never
laugh again!”

For a moment the spirit of the queen, manly and strong as it
was, beyond perhaps all precedent, was fairly overawed and
cowed by the fierce intensity of the dying woman's manner.
Not long, however, could that proud soul quail to any created
thing.

“'Fore God, woman,” she cried, “thou art bewitched, or
desperately wicked! What, in the fiend's name, mean ye?”

“In the fiend's name truly, for he alone inspired me! Look
here — and then pardon me, Elizabeth; in God's name, pardon
me!”

As she spoke, she held aloft, in her thin and bird-like fingers,
a massive ring of gold, from which a sapphire of rare price
gleamed brilliantly, casting a bright, dancing spark of blue
reflection upon her hollow, ghastly features. “Know you,” she
screamed, “this token?”

“Where got you it, woman? Speak, I say, speak, or I curse
you! — where got you that same token?” The proud queen
shook and shuddered as she spoke, like one in an ague-fit.

“Essex!” sighed the dying countess, through her set teeth —
“the murthered Essex!”

“Murthered? God's death, thou liest! He was a traitor —
done to death! O God! O God! I know not what I say!”

and a big tear-drop — the first in many a year, the first perhaps
that ever had bedewed that iron cheek — slid slowly down the
face of Elizabeth, and fell heavily on the brow of the glaring
sufferer, who still held the ring aloft, in hands clasped close in
attitude of supplication. “Speak,” she said again, in milder
accents, “speak, Nottingham: what of — of Essex?”

“That ring he gave to me, to bear it to thy footstool, and to
pray a gracious mistress's favor to an erring but a grateful servant
—”

“And thou, woman — thou!” absolutely shrieked the queen.

“Gave it not to thee — that Essex might die, not live!” was
the steady reply. “Pardon me before I die; pardon me, as
God shall pardon thee! —”

“God shall not pardon me, woman! — neither do I pardon
thee! He, an' he will, may pardon thee; but that will I do
never! never! — by the life of the Eternal, NEVER!” — and, in
the overpowering fury and agitation of the moment, she seized
the dying sinner with an iron gripe, and shook her in the bed,
till the ponderous fabric creaked and quivered. Not another
word, not another sob passed the lips of the old countess: her
frame was shaken by a mightier hand than that of the indignant
queen; a deep, harsh rattle came from her chest; she
raised one skinny arm aloft, and after the jaw had dropped, and
the glaring eyeball fixed, that wretched limb stood erect, appealing
as it were from a mortal to an immortal Judge!

The paroxysm was over. Speechless, and all but motionless,
the miserable queen was borne by her attendants to the
barge; the tide had shifted, and was still in their favor, though
their course was altered. On their return, they again passed
the triumphant fleet of Cavendish, bearing the mightiest sovereign
of the world, the envied of all the earth — a wretched,
feeble, heart-broken woman, grovelling like a crushed worm
beneath the bitterest of human pangs, the agonies of self-merited

misery! A few hours found her outstretched upon the floor of
her chamber, giving away to anguish uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Refusing the earnest prayers of her women, and of
her physicians, to suffer herself to be disrobed, and to recline
upon her bed; feeding on tears and groans alone; uttering no
sound but the name of Essex, in one plaintive and oft-repeated
cry; mocking at all consolation; acknowledging no comforter
except despair — ten long days and nights she lingered thus, in
pangs a thousand times more intolerable than those which she
had inflicted on her Scottish rival: and when, at length, the
council of the state assembled, in her last moments, around the
death-bed of a sovereign truly and not metaphorically lying in
dust and ashes — she named to them, as her successor in the
kingdom, the son of that same rival. Who shall say that the
death of Mary Stuart went unavenged?

THE MOORISH FATHER.
A TALE OF MALAGA.

It was the morning of the day succeeding that which had
beheld the terrible defeat, among the savage glens and mountain
fastnesses of Axarquia, of that magnificent array of cavaliers
which, not a week before, had pranced forth from the
walls of Antiquera, superbly mounted on Andalusian steeds,
fiery, and fleet, and fearless, with helm and shield and corslet
engrailed with arabesques of gold, surcoats of velvet and rich
broidery, plumes of the desert bird, and all in short that can
add pomp and circumstance to the dread game of war. The
strife was over in the mountain valleys; the lonely hollows on
the bare hill-side, the stony channels of the torrent, the tangled
thicket, and the bleak barren summit, were cumbered with the
carcasses of Spain's most noble cavaliers. War-steeds beside
their riders, knights of the proudest lineage among their lowliest
vassals, lay cold and grim and ghastly, each where the
shaft, the stone, the assagay, had stretched beneath him, beneath
the garish lustre of the broad southern sun. The Moorish
foe had vanished from the field, which he had won almost
without a struggle — the plunderer of the dead plied his hateful
trade even to satiety, and, gorged with booty that might well

satiate the wildest avarice, had left the field of slaughter to the
possession of his brute comrades, the wolf, the raven, and the
eagle.

It was now morning, and the broad sun, high already, was
pouring down a flood of light over the giant crags, the deep precipitous
defiles, and all the stern though glorious features which
mark the mountain scenery of Malaga; and far beyond over
the broad, luxuriant Vega, watered by its ten thousand streams
of crystal, waving with olive-groves, and vineyards, and dark
woodlands; and farther yet over the laughing waters of the
bright Mediterranean. But one, who having found concealment
during that night of wo and slaughter in some dark cave,
or gully so sequestered that it had escaped the keen eyes of
the Moorish mountaineers, now plied his bloody spurs almost
in vain, so weary and so faint was the beautiful bay steed which
bore him. He paused not to look upon the wonders of his
road, tarried not to observe the play of light and shadow over
that glorious plain, although by nature he was fitted to admire
and to love all that she had framed of wild, of beautiful, or
of romantic. Nay more, he scarcely turned his eye to gaze
upon the miserable relics of some beloved comrade, who had
so often revelled gayly, and in that last awful carnage had
striven fearlessly and well, even when all was lost, beside him.
He was a tall dark-featured youth, with a profusion of black
hair clustered in short close curls about a high pale forehead;
an eye that glanced like fire at every touch of passion, yet
melted at the slightest claim upon his pity; an aquiline, thin
nose, and mouth well cut, but compressed and closely set, completed
the detail of his eminently handsome features. But the
dark curls — for he had been on the preceding day unhelmed
and slightly wounded — were clotted with stiff gore, matted
with dust, and bleached by the hot sun under which he had
for hours fought bareheaded. The keen, quick eye was dull

and glazed, the haughty lineaments clouded with shame, anxiety,
and grief, and the chiselled lips pale and cold as ashes.
His armor, which had been splendid in the extreme, richly embossed
and sculptured, was all defaced with dust and gore,
broken and dinted, and in many places riven quite asunder.
The surcoat which he had donned a few short days before, of
azure damask, charged with the bearings of his proud ancestral
race, fluttered in rags upon the morning breeze — his shield was
gone, as were the mace and battle-axe which had swung from
his saddle-bow — his sword, a long, cross-handled blade, and
his lance, its azure pennoncelle no less than its steel head,
crusted and black with blood, alone remained to him. The
scabbard of his poignard was empty, and the silver hilt of his
sword, ill-matched with the gilded sheath, showed plainly that
it was not the weapon to which his hand was used. Yet still,
though disarrayed, weary, and travel-spent, and worn with wo
and watching, no eye could have looked on him without recognising
in every trait, in every gesture, the undaunted knight
and the accomplished noble.

Hours had passed away, since, with the first gray twilight
of the dawn he had come forth from the precarious hiding-place
wherein he had spent a terrible and painful night; and so far
he had seen no human form, living at least, and heard no human
voice! Unimpaired, save by the faintness of his reeling
charger, he had ridden six long leagues over the perilous and
rugged path by which, late on the previous night, the bravest
of the brave, Alonzo de Aguilar, had by hard dint of hoof and
spur escaped from the wild infantry of El Zagal to the far walls
of Antiquera; and now from a bold and projecting summit he
looked down upon the ramparts of that city, across a rich and
level plain, into which sloped abruptly the steep ridge on which
he stood, at less than a league's distance. Here, for the first
time, since he had set forth on his toilsome route, the knight

drew up his staggering horse — for the first time a gleam of
hope irradiating his wan brow — and, as a pious cavalier is
ever bound to do, stretched forth his gauntleted hands to
Heaven, and in a low, deep murmur breathed forth his heartfelt
thanksgivings to Him, who had preserved him from the clutches
of the pitiless heathen. This duty finished, with a lighter
heart he wheeled his charger round an abrupt angle of the
limestone-rock, and, plunging into the shade of the dense cork-woods
which clothed the whole descent, followed the steep
and zigzag path, by which he hoped ere long to reach his
friends in safety. His horse, too, which had staggered wearily
and stumbled often, as he ascended the rude hills, seemed to
have gained new courage; for as he turned the corner of the
rock, he pricked his ears and snorted, and the next moment
uttered a long, tremulous, shrill neigh, quickening his pace —
which for the last two hours he had hardly done at the solicitation
of the spur — into a brisk and lively canter. Before,
however, his rider had found time to debate upon the cause of
this fresh vigor, the neigh was answered from below by the
sharp whinny of a war-horse, which was succeeded instantly
by the clatter of several hoofs, and the long barbaric blast of a
Moorish horn. The first impulse of the cavalier was to quit
the beaten path, and dashing into the thickets to conceal himself
until his foemen should have passed by. Prudent, however,
as was his determination, and promptly as he turned to
execute it, he was anticipated by the appearance of at least
half a score of Moorish horsemen — who, sitting erect in their
deep Turkish saddles, goring the sides of their slight Arabian
coursers with the edges of their broad sharp stirrups, and brandishing
their long assagays above their heads, dashed forward
with their loud ringing Lelilies, to charge the solitary Spaniard.
Faint as he was, and in ill-plight for battle, there needed
but the sight of the heathen foe to send each drop of his
Castilian blood eddying in hot currents through every vein of
the brave Spaniard. “St. Jago!” he cried, in clear and musical
tones, “St. Jago and God aid!” and with the word he
laid his long lance in the rest, and spurred his charger to the
shock. It was not, however, either the usual mode of warfare
with the Moors, or their intent at present to meet the shock of
the impetuous and heavily armed cavalier. One of their number,
it is true, dashed out as if to meet him — a spare gray-headed
man, whose years, although they had worn away the
soundness, and destroyed the muscular symmetry of his frame,
had spared the lithe and wiry sinews; had dried up all that
was superfluous of his flesh, and withered all that was comely
of his aspect; but had left him erect, and strong and hardy as
in his youngest days of warfare. His dress, caftan and turban
both, were of that dark-green hue, which bespoke an emir, or
lineal descendant of the prophet — the only order of nobility
acknowledged by the Moslemin — while the rich materials of
which they were composed, the jewels which bedecked the
hilt and scabbard of both cimeter and yatagan, the necklaces of
gold which encircled the broad glossy chest of his high-blooded
black Arabian, proved as unerringly his wealth and consequence.
Forth he dashed then, with the national war-cry, “La illah
allah la!” brandishing in his right hand the long, light javelin,
grasped by the middle, which his countrymen were wont to
hurl against their adversaries, with such unerring accuracy
both of hand and eye; and swinging on his left arm a light round
buckler, of the tough hide of the African buffalo, studded with
knobs of silver; while with his long reins flying as it would
seem quite loose, by aid of his sharp Moorish curb, he wheeled
his fiery horse from side to side so rapidly as quite to balk
the aim of the Spaniard's level lance. As the old mussulman
advanced, fearlessly as it seemed, against the Christian knight,
his comrades galloped on abreast with him, but by no means
with the same steadiness of purpose, the track was indeed so
narrow that three could hardly ride abreast in it; yet narrow as
it was, the nearest followers of the emir did not attempt to
keep it; on the contrary, giving their wild coursers the sharp
edge of their stirrups, they leaped and bolted from one side to
the other of the path now plunging into the open wood on either
hand, and dashing furiously over rock and stone, now pressing
straightforward for perhaps a hundred yards as if to bear down
bodily on their antagonist. All this, it must be understood,
passed in less time than it has taken to describe it; for though
the enemies, when first their eyes caught sight of one another,
were some five hundred yards apart, the speed of their fleet
horses brought them rapidly to close quarters. And now they
were upon the very point of meeting — the Spaniard bowing
his unhelmed head behind his charger's neck, to shield as best
he might that vital part from the thrust of the flashing assagay
with his lance projecting ten feet at the least, before the chamfront
which protected the brow of his barbed war-horse, and
the sheath of his twohanded broadsword clanging and rattling
at every bound of the horse against the steel-plates which protected
the legs of the man-at-arms! — the Moor sitting erect,
nay, almost standing up in his short stirrups, with his keen, black
eye glancing from beneath the shadow of his turban, and his
spear poised and quivering on high. Now they were scarce a
horse's length asunder, when, with a shrill, peculiar yell, the
old Moor wheeled his horse out of the road, and dashed into
the wood, his balked antagonist being borne aimlessly right
onward into the little knot of men who followed on the emir's
track. Not far, however, was he borne onward; for, with a
second yell, even shriller than before, the moslem curbed his
Arab, till he stood bolt upright, and turning sharp round, with
with such velocity that he seemed actually to whirl about as if
upon a pivot, darted back on him, and with the speed of light
hurled the long assagay. Just at that point of time the lance
point of the Spaniard was within a hand's breadth of the buckler
— frail guard to the breast — of the second of those eastern
warriors, but it was never doomed to pierce it. The light reed
hurtled through the air, and its keen head of steel, hurled with
most accurate aim, found a joint in the barbings of the war-horse.
Exactly in that open and unguarded spot, which intervenes
between the hip-bone and the ribs, it entered — it drove
through the bright and glistening hide, through muscle, brawn,
and sinew — clear through the vitals of the tortured brute, and
even — with such tremendous vigor was it sent from that old
arm — through the ribs on the farther side. With an appalling
shriek, the agonized animal sprung up, with all his feet into
the air, six feet at least in height, then plunged head foremost!
Yet, strange to say, such was the masterly and splendid horsemanship,
such was the cool steadiness of the European warrior,
that, as his charger fell, rolling over and over, writhing
and kicking in the fierce death-struggle, he alighted firmly and
fairly on his feet. Without a second's interval, for he had cast
his heavy lance far from him, while his steed was yet in air,
he whirled his long sword from its scabbard, and struck with
the full sweep of his practised arm at the nearest of the Saracens,
who were now wheeling round him, circling and yelling
like a flock of sea-fowl. Full on the neck of a delicate and
fine-limbed Arab, just at the juncture of the spine and skull, did
the sheer blow take place; and cleaving the vertebræ asunder,
and half the thickness of the muscular flesh below them, hurled
the horse lifeless, and the rider stunned and senseless to the
earth at his feet. A second sweep of the same ponderous blade
brought down a second warrior, with his right arm half-severed
from his body; a third time it was raised; but ere it fell, another
javelin, launched by the same aged hand, whizzed through the
air, and took effect a little way below the elbow-joint, just
where the brassard and the gauntlet met, the trenchant-point
pierced through between the bones, narrowly missing the great
artery, and the uplifted sword sunk harmless! A dull expression
of despair settled at once over the bright expressive features,
which had so lately been enkindled by the fierce ardor
and excitement of the conflict. His left hand dropped, as it
were instinctively, to the place where it should have found the
hilt of his dagger; but the sheath was empty, and the proud
warrior stood, with his right arm dropping to his side, transfixed
by the long lance, and streaming with dark blood, glaring,
in impotent defiance, upon his now triumphant enemies. The
nature of the Moorish tribes had been, it should be here observed,
very materially altered, since they had crossed the
straits; they were no longer the cruel, pitiless invaders offering
no option to the vanquished, but of the Koran or the cimeter;
but, softened by intercourse with the Christians, and having
imbibed, during the lapse of ages spent in continual warfare
against the most gallant and accomplished cavaliers of Europe,
much of the true spirit of chivalry, they had adopted many of
the best points of that singular institution. Among the principal
results of this alteration in the national character was this
— that they now no longer ruthlessly slaughtered unresisting
foes, but, affecting to be guided by the principles of knightly
courtesy, held all to mercy who were willing to confess themselves
overcome. When, therefore, it was evident that any
farther resistance was out of the question, the old emir leaping
down from his charger's back, with all the agility of a boy,
unsheathed his Damascus cimeter, a narrow, crooked blade,
with a hilt elaborately carved and jewelled, and strode slowly
up to face the wounded Christian.

“Yield thee,” he said, in calm and almost courteous tones —
using the lingua Franca, or mixed tongue, half Arabic, half
Spanish, which formed the ordinary medium of communication

between the two discordant races which at that time occupied
the great peninsula of Europe — “yield thee, sir knight! thou
art sore wounded, and enough hast thou done already, and
enough suffered, to entitle thee to all praise of valor, to all
privilege of courtesy.”

“To whom must I yield me, emir?” queried the Christian,
in reply; “to whom must I yield? since yield I needs must;
for, as you truly say, I can indeed resist no longer. I pray
thee, of thy courtesy, inform me?”

“To me — Muley Abdallah el Zagal!”

“Nor unto nobler chief or braver warrior could any cavalier
surrender. Therefore, I yield myself true captive, rescue or
no rescue!” and as he spoke he handed the long silver-hilted
sword, which he had so well wielded, to his captor. But the
old Moor put aside the proffered weapon. “Wear it,” he said,
“wear it, sir, your pledged word suffices that you will not unsheath
it. Shame were it to deprive so good a cavalier of the
sword he hath used so gallantly! But lo! your wound bleeds
grievously. I pray you sit, and let your hurt be tended — Ho!
Hamet, Hassan, lend a hand here to unarm this good gentleman.
I pray you, sir, inform me of your style and title.”

“I am styled Roderigo de Narvaez,” returned the cavalier,
“equerry and banner-bearer to the most noble Don Diego de
Cordova, the famous count of Cabra!”

“Then be assured, Don Roderigo, of being, at my hands,
entreated with all due courtesy and honor — till that the good
count shall arrange for thy ransom or exchange.”

A little while sufficed to draw off the gauntlet, to cut the
shaft of the lance, where the steel protruded entirely through
the wounded arm, and to draw it out by main force from between
the bones, which it had actually strained asunder. But
so great was the violence which it was necessary to exert, and
so great was the suffering which it caused, that the stout warrior

actually swooned away; nor did he altogether recover his
senses, although every possible means at that time known were
applied for his restoration, until the blood had been stanched,
and a rude, temporary litter, framed of lances bound together
by the scarfs and baldrics of the emir's retinue, and strewn
with war-cloaks was prepared for him. Just as this slender
vehicle was perfected and slung between the saddles of four
warriors, the color returned to the pallid lips and cheeks of the
brave Spaniard, and gradually animation was restored. In the
meantime, the escort of El Zagal had been increased by the
arrival of many bands of steel-clad warriors, returning from the
pursuit of the routed Spaniards; until at length a grand host
was collected, comprising several thousands of soldiery, of
every species of force at that time in use — cavalry, archers,
infantry, arrayed beneath hundreds of many colored banners,
and marching gayly on to the blithe music of war-drum, atabal,
and clarion: The direction of the route taken by this martial
company was the same wild, desolate, and toilsome road, by
which Don Roderigo had so nearly escaped that morning. All
day long did they march beneath a burning sun and cloudless
sky, the fierce heat insupportably reflected from the white
limestone crags, and sandy surface of the roads; and so tremendous
were its effects, that many of the horses and mules, laden
with baggage, which accompanied the cavalcade, died on the
wayside; while the wounded captive, between anxiety and
pain, and the incessant jolting of the litter, was in a state of
fever bordering nearly on delirium, during the whole of the
long march.

At length, just when the sun was setting, and the soft dews
of evening were falling silently on the parched and scanty herbage,
the train of El Zagal reached the foot of a rugged and precipitous
hill, crowned by a lofty watch-tower. Ordering his
troops to bivouac as best they might, at the base of the steep

acclivity, the old Moor spurred up its side with his immediate
train and his enfeebled captive. Just as he reached the brow
the gates flew open, and the loveliest girl that ever met a sire's
embrace, rushed forth with her attendants — the sternness
melted from the old warrior's brow, as he clasped her to his
bosom, before he entered the dark portal. Within that mountain
fortalice long lay the Christian warrior, struggling midway
between the gates of life and death; and when at length he
awoke from his appalling dreams, strange visions of dark eyes
compassionately beaming upon his, soft hands that tended his
worn limbs, and shapes angelically graceful floating about his
pillow, were blent with the dark recollections of his hot delirium,
and that too so distinctly, that he long doubted whether
these too were the creations of his fevered fancy. Well had
it been for him, well for one lovelier and frailer being, had they
indeed been dreams; but who shall struggle against his destiny!

Hours, days, and weeks, rolled onward; and, as they fled,
brought health and vigor to the body of the wounded knight;
but brought no restoration to his overwrought and excited mind.
The war still raged in ruthless and unsparing fury, between the
politic and crafty Ferdinand, backed by the chivalry of the most
puissant realm of Europe, and the ill-fated Moorish prince, who,
last and least of a proud race, survived to weep the downfall of
that lovely kingdom which he had lacked the energy to govern
or defend. Field after field was fought, and foray followed
foray, till every streamlet of Grenada had been empurpled by
the mingled streams of Saracen and Christian gore, till every
plain and valley had teemed with that rank verdure, which betrays
a soil watered by human blood. So constant was the
strife, so general the havoc, so wide the desolation, that those
who fell were scarcely mourned by their surviving comrades,
forgotten almost ere the life had left them. Hardly a family in

Spain but had lost sire, son, husband, brother; and so fast came
the tidings in, of slaughter and of death, that the ear scarce
could drink one tale of sorrow, before another banished it.
And thus it was with Roderigo de Narvaez. For a brief space,
indeed, after the fatal day of Axarquia, his name had been syllabled
by those who had escaped from the dread slaughter,
with those of others as illustrious in birth, as famous in renown,
and as unfortunate, for all believed that he had fallen in the catastrophe
of their career. For a brief space his name had
swelled the charging cry of Antiquera's chivalry, when thirsting
for revenge, and all on fire to retrieve their tarnished laurels,
they burst upon their dark-complexioned foemen. A brief
space, and he was forgotten! His death avenged by tenfold
slaughter — his soul redeemed by many a midnight mass — his
virtues celebrated, and his name recorded, even while yet he
lived, on the sepulchral marble, and the bold banner-bearer
was even as though he had never been. Alone, alone in the
small mountain tower, he passed his weary days, his long and
woful nights. Ever alone! He gazed forth from the lofty
lattices over the bare and sun-scourged summits of the wild
crags of Malaga, and sighed for the fair huertas, the rich vineyards,
and the shadowy olives of his dear native province. He
listened to the clank of harness, to the wild summons of the
Moorish horn, to the thick-beating clatter of the hoofs, as with
his fiery hordes old Muley el Zagal swooped like some bird of
rapine from his far mountain eyry on the rich booty of the vales
below; but he saw not, marked not, at least, the gorgeousness
and pomp of their array; for, when he would have looked forth
on their merry mustering, his heart would swell within him as
though it would have burst from his proud bosom — his eyes
would dazzle and grow dim, filled with unbidden tears, that his
manhood vainly strove to check — his ears would be heavy
with a sound, as it were of many falling waters. Thus, hour
by hour, the heavy days lagged on, and though the flesh of the
imprisoned knight waxed stronger still and stronger, the spirit
daily flagged and faltered. The fierce old emir noted the
yielding of his captive soul, noted the dimness of the eye, the
absence of the high and sparkling fire, that had so won his admiration
on their first encounter; he noted, and to do him justice,
noted it with compassion; and ever, when he sallied forth
to battle, determined that he would grasp the earliest opportunity,
afforded by the capture of any one of his own stout adherents,
to ransom or exchange his prisoner. But, as at times,
things will fall out perversely, and, as it were, directly contrary
to their accustomed course; though he lost many by the
lance, the harquebus, the sword, no man of his brave followers
was taken; nay more, so rancorous and savage had the war
latterly become, that Moor and Spaniard now, where'er they
met, charged instantly — with neither word nor parley — and
fought it out with murderous fury, till one or both had fallen.
And thus it chanced, that, while his friends esteemed him
dead, and dropped him quietly into oblivion, and his more generous
captor would, had he possessed the power, have sent
him forth to liberty on easy terms of ransom, fate kept him still
in thrall.

After a while, there came a change in his demeanor; the
head no longer was propped listlessly from morn to noon, from
noon “to dewy eve,” upon his burning hand; the cheek regained
its hue, the eye its quick clear glance, keen and pervading
as the falcon's; the features beamed with their old energy
of pride and valiant resolution; his movements were elastic,
his step free and bold, his head erect and fearless; and the old
Moor observed the change, and watched, if he perchance
might fathom the mysterious cause, and queried of his menials;
and yet remained long, very long, in darkness and in doubt.

And what was that mysterious cause, that sudden overmastering

power, that spell, potent as the magician's charm, which
weaned the prisoner from its melancholy yearnings; which
kindled his eye once again with its old fire; which roused him
from his oblivious stupor, and made him bear himself once
more, not as the tame heart-broken captive, but as the free,
bold, dauntless, energetic champion; clothed as in arms of
proof, in the complete, invulnerable panoply of a soul; proud,
active, and enthusiastic, and, at a moment's notice, prepared
for every fortune? What should it be but love — the tamer of
the proud and strong — the strengthener of the weak and timid
— the tyrant of all minds — the change of all natures — what
should it be but love?

The half-remembered images of his delirium — the strong
and palpable impressions, which had so wildly floated among
his feverish dreams, had been clothed with reality — the form,
which he had viewed so often through the half-shut lids of
agony and sickness, had stood revealed in the perfection of
substantial beauty before his waking eyesight; the soft voice,
which had soothed his anguish, had answered his in audible
and actual converse. In truth, that form, that voice, those lineaments,
were all-sufficient to have spell-bound the sternest and
the coldest heart, that ever manned itself against the fascinations
of the sex. Framed in the slightest and most sylph-like
mould, yet of proportions exquisitely true, of symmetry most
rare, of roundness most voluptuous, of grace unrivalled, Zelica
was in sooth a creature, formed not so much for mortal love as
for ideal adoration. Her coal-black hair, profuse almost unto
redundancy, waving in natural ringlets, glossy and soft as silk
— her wild, full, liquid eyes, now blazing with intolerable lustre,
now melting into the veriest luxury of languor; her high,
pale, intellectual brow; her delicately-chiselled lineaments, the
perfect arch of her small ruby mouth, and, above all, the fleet
and changeful gleams of soul that would flit over that rare face

— the flash of intellect, bright and pervading as the prophet's
glance of inspiration; the sweet, soft, dream-like melancholy,
half lustre and half shadow, like the transparent twilight of
her own lovely skies; the beaming, soul-entrancing smiles,
that laughed out from the eyes before they curled the ever-dimpling
lips — these were the spells that roused the Christian
captive from his dark lethargy of wo.

A first chance interview in the small garden of the fortress
— for in the smallest and most iron fastnesses of the Moors of
Spain, the decoration of a garden, with its dark cypresses, its
orange-bowers, its marble fountains, and arabesque kiosk among
its group of fan-like palms, imported with great care and cost
from their far native sands, was never lacking — a first chance
interview, wherein the Moorish maiden, bashful at being seen
beyond the precincts of the harem unveiled, and that too by a
giaour, was all tears, flutter, and dismay; while the enamored
Spaniard — enamored at first sight, and recognising in the fair,
trembling shape before him the ministering angel who had
smoothed his feverish pillow, and flitted round his bed during
those hours of dark and dread delirium — poured forth his
gratitude, his love, his admiration, in a rich flood of soul-fraught
and resistless eloquence: a first chance interview led
by degrees, and after interchange of flowery tokens, and wavings
of white kerchiefs by hands whiter yet, from latticed
casements, and all those thousand nothings, which, imperceptible
and nothing worth to the dull world, are to the lover confirmations
strong as proofs of Holy Writ, to frequent meetings
— meetings sweeter that they were stolen, fonder that they
were brief, during the fierce heat of the noontide, when all
beside were buried in the soft siesta, or by the pale light of
the amorous moon, when every eye that might have spied out
their clandestine interviews was sealed in deepest slumber.

Hours, days, and weeks, rolled onward, and still the Spanish

cavalier remained a double captive in the lone tower of El
Zagal. Captive in spirit, yet more than in the body — for,
having spent the whole of his gay youth, the whole of his
young, fiery manhood, in the midst of courts and cities; having
from early boyhood basked in the smiles of beauty, endured
unharmed the ordeal of most familiar intercourse with the most
lovely maids and matrons of old Spain, and borne away a
heart untouched by any passion, by any fancy, how transient
or how brief soever; and having, at that period of his life
when man's passions are perhaps the strongest, and surely the
most permanent, surrendered almost at first sight his affections
to this wild Moorish maiden — it seemed as if he voluntarily
devoted his whole energies of soul and body to this one passion;
as if he purposely lay by all other wishes, hopes, pursuits;
as if he made himself designedly a slave, a blinded
worshipper.

It was, indeed, a singular, a wondrous subject for the contemplation
of philosophy, to see the keen, cool, polished courtier,
the warrior of a hundred battles, the cavalier of the most
glowing courts, the bland, sagacious, wily, and perhaps coldhearted
citizen of the great world, bowing a willing slave,
surrendering his very privilege of thought and action, to a mere
girl, artless, and frank, and inexperienced; devoid, as it would
seem, of every charm that could have wrought upon a spirit
such as his; skilled in no art, possessing no accomplishment,
whereby to win the field against the deep sagacity, the wily
worldly-heartedness of him whom she had conquered almost
without a struggle. And yet this very artlessness it was
which first enchained him; this very free, clear candor, which,
as a thing he never had before encountered, set all his art at
nothing.

Happily fled the winged days in this sweet dream; until at
length the Spaniard woke — woke to envisage his position; to

take deep thought as to his future conduct; to ponder, to resolve,
to execute. It needed not much of the deep knowledge
of the world for which, above all else, Roderigo was so famous,
to see that under no contingency would the old Moor — the
fiercest foeman of Spain's chivalry, the bitterest hater of the
very name of Spaniard — consent to such a union. It needed
even less to teach him that, so thoroughly had he enchained
the heart, the fancy, the affections of the young Zelica, that
for him she would willingly resign, not the home only, and the
country, and the creed of her forefathers, but name and fame,
and life itself, if such a sacrifice were called for. Fervently,
passionately did the young Spaniard love — honestly too, and
in all honor; nor would he, to have gained an empire, have
wronged that innocent, confiding, artless being, who had set all
the confidence of a young heart, which, guileless in itself,
feared naught of guile from others, upon the faith and honor of
her lover. At a glance he perceived that their only chance
was flight. A few soft moments of persuasion prevailed with
the fair girl; nor was it long ere opportunity, and bribery, and
the quick wit of Roderigo, wrought on the avarice of one, the
trustiest of old Muley's followers, to plan for them an exit from
the guarded walls, to furnish them with horses and a guide,
the very first time the old emir should go forth to battle.

Not long had they to wait. As the month waned, and the
nights grew dark and moonless, the note of preparation once
again was heard in hall, and armory, and stable. Harness was
buckled on, war-steeds were barbed for battle, and, for a foray
destined to last three weeks, forth sallied El Zagal.

Three days they waited, waited in wild suspense, in order
that the host might have advanced so far, that they should risk
no interruption from the stragglers of the rear. The destined
day arrived, and slowly, one by one, the weary hours lagged
on. At last — at last — the skies are darkened, and Lucifer,

love's harbinger, is twinkling in the west. Three saddled
barbs, of the best blood of Araby, stand in a gloomy dingle,
about a bow-shot from the castle-walls, tended by one dark,
turbaned servitor. Evening has passed, and midnight, dark,
silent, and serene, broods o'er the sleeping world. Two figures
steal down from the postern gate: one a tall, stately form,
sheathed cap-à-pie in European panoply; the other a slight
female figure, veiled closely, and bedecked with the rich, flowing
draperies that form the costume of all oriental nations.
'T is Roderigo and Zelica. Now they have reached the horses;
the cavalier has raised the damsel to her saddle, has vaulted to
his demipique. Stealthily for a hundred yards they creep
away at a foot's pace, till they have gained the greensward,
whence no loud clank will bruit abroad their progress. Now
they give free head to their steeds — they spur, they gallop!
Ha! whence that wild and pealing yell — “La illah, allah la!”
On every side it rings — on every side — and from bush, brake,
and thicket, on every side, up spring turban, and assagay, and
cimeter — all the wild cavalry of El Zagal!

Resistance was vain; but, ere resistance could be offered,
up strode the veteran emir. “This, then,” he said, in tones
of bitter scorn, “this is a Christian's gratitude — a Spaniard's
honor! — to bring disgrace — ”

“No, sir!” thundered the Spaniard, “no disgrace! A Christian
cavalier disgraces not the noblest demoiselle or dame by
offer of his hand!”

“His hand?” again the old Moor interrupted him; “his
hand — wouldst thou then marry — ”

“Had we reached Antiquera's walls this night, to-morrow's
dawn had seen Zelica the all-honored bride of Roderigo de
Narvaez!”

“Ha! is it so, fair sir?” replied the father; “and thou, I
trow, young mistress, thou too art nothing loath?” and taking

her embarrassed silence for assent — “be it so!” he continued,
“be it so! deep will we feast to-night, and with to-morrow's
dawn Zelica shall be the bride of Roderigo de Narvaez!”

Astonishment rendered the Spaniard mute, but ere long
gratitude found words, and they returned gay, joyous, and supremely
happy, to the lone fortress.

There, in the vaulted hall, the board was set, the feast was
spread, the red wine flowed profusely, the old Moor on his
seat of state, and right and left of him that fair young couple;
and music flowed from unseen minstrels' harps, and perfumes
steamed the hall with their rich incense, and lights blazed high,
and garlands glittered: but blithe as were all appliances, naught
was so blithe or joyous as those young, happy hearts.

The feast was ended; and Abdallah rose, and filled a goblet
to the brim — a mighty goblet, golden and richly gemmed —
with the rare wine of Shiraz. “Drink,” he said, “Christian,
after your country's fashion — drink to your bride, and let her
too assist in draining this your nuptial chalice.”

Roderigo seized the cup, and with a lightsome smile drank
to his lovely bride — and deeply he quaffed, and passed it to
Zelica; and she, too, pleased with the ominous pledge, drank
as she ne'er had drank before, as never did she drink thereafter!

The goblet was drained, drained to the very dregs; and,
with a fiendish sneer, Muley Abdallah uprose once again.

“Christian, I said to-morrow's dawn should see Zelica Roderigo's
bride, and it shall — in the grave! To prayer — to
prayer! if prayer may now avail ye! Lo! your last cup on
earth is drained; your lives are forfeit — nay, they are gone
already!”

Why dwell upon the hateful scene — the agony, the anguish,
the despair? For one short hour, in all the extremities of
torture, that hapless pair writhed, wretchedly convulsed, before

the gloating eyes of the stern murderer! Repressing each all
outward symptoms of the tortures they endured, lest they
should add to the dread torments of the other — not a sigh, not
a groan, not a reproach was heard! Locked in each other's
arms, they wrestled to the last with the dread venom; locked
in each other's arms, when the last moment came, they lay
together on the cold floor of snowy marble — unhappy victims,
fearful monuments of the dread vengeance of a Moorish
father!