University of Virginia Library

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.