Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
Elizabeth Cudor & Mary Stuart,
1568. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
Elizabeth Cudor & Mary Stuart,
1568.
The greatest and most fortunate of queens—the loveliest and
most hapless of women. They might have been friends and
sisters, as they were sister queens of one fair island, then, for
the last time, divided; fortune and fate, and that worst curse of
sovereigns as of nations, religious dissension, rendered them enemies;
and, as in such case ever must be, the weaker of the two
was shipwrecked in the strife. They were, moreover, nearly
akin; and this, which should have been a source of amity and
good will, was, on the contrary, the cause of rivalry, hostility,
suspicion, and finally of the death of one, and of a dark blot
on the escutcheon of the other.
Elizabeth, the second daughter of the most arbitrary and
absolute king who ever sat upon the throne of England, Henry
VIII., and of his favorite wife, who was the people's favorite
also, ascended the throne of England—after the successive deaths
of her brother Edward VI., a weak minor, and her elder sister
Mary, a hard-hearted bigot, whose memory is to this day a reproach
to England and accursed of her people—amidst the
general acclamations and sincere delight of all classes. Her
accession had been long looked forward to as the oil that was to
assuage the troubled sea of contending factions, the sweet balm
that was to heal the wounds of persecution. She found a people
Mary, while they had but increased the zeal, and added the
prestige of martyrdom to the cause of the protestants, had
alienated the moderate catholics; and, indeed, disgusted all
classes of Englishmen, with whom religious toleration, and even
indifference, had been a more usual phase of the public sentiment
than anything leaning towards cruelty or coercion. Thus,
both religious parties greeted her advent to the throne, and
that sincerely; for the catholics apprehended, as a body, no
severe retaliation from the hands of a princess known to be moderate
and politic, rather than splenetic and rash; and the protestants
were too happy at obtaining quiet, peace, and toleration,
to desire in their turn to become persecutors. Compassion,
moreover, was a further sentiment in her favor; for she
had conducted herself with rare prudence during her sister's
reign; and the imminent and instant peril in which she lived
until Mary's death had rendered her an object of general sympathy,
even among the catholic party.
She came to the throne at the age of twenty-six years, the
whole of which time she had passed in a subordinate, always
humiliating, and often dangerous, position. No adulation of
courtiers, no loud lip-loyalty of shouting thousands, had fostered
her youthful mind's worst passions. Neglected, scorned as
illegitimate, imperilled as heretic, she had lived with her studies,
had communed with herself and the world of the mighty dead,
more than with modern men or manners. Her tutor had been
the famous Roger Ascham; and, although the education which
he bestowed upon her was, of a surety, what we should now
deem better suited for the male than for the female sex, it cannot
be denied that it was such as befitted one who was to fill
the place of a king in England, and to contend against the
and her country's liberties.
Already, when she climbed the steps of that proud throne,
had she learned one mighty lesson, had proved herself capable
of one grand triumph: major adversis[1]
she had shown herself
already; the harder task lay yet behind, to exhibit herself, as
so few have done of mortals, par secundis.[2]
In person she was tall, well formed, and majestic rather than
graceful in carriage and demeanor; her features, which it
were impossible to call handsome, were still striking, from
the great intelligence and power of mind which they evinced;
and although her hair was, in truth, of that hue which men
call red, there were not wanting poets—according to Homer,
they should have been gods—to celebrate it in immortal verse
as golden. To conclude, it may be said that Elizabeth, even as
a private woman, would probably, in any society, have attracted
attention by the graces of her person only; although, assuredly,
no one in his senses would have dreamed of calling her beautiful,
or of choosing her as his wife for her personal or mental
loveliness. Her character is a strange one; and one especially,
that cannot be summed up in a sentence. In order to attempt
to do so, I must be paradoxical, and assert that, in her virtues
she was purely masculine, and feminine only in her vices. Of
male virtues she lacked not one; of female virtues she scarce
possessed any. She had courage, fortitude, patience, shrewdness,
sagacity; was not without a sort of lion-like generosity,
and would not have deserted a friend, or betrayed her country,
to be the winner of eternal empire. Gentleness, softness, tenderness,
compassion, mercy, sympathy—of these words she
scarce seems to have known the meaning. Dependence, trust,
reliance, save in herself and her own matchless powers, she
measure and overflowing. Vain as the silliest coquette that
flirts and languishes her hour in any modern ball-room; capricious
as the moon, and yet more changeful; irascible as the
Dead Sea; jealous, exacting, amorous at once and cold; fawning
with the cat's velvet touch, and anon scathing with the tiger's
unsheathed talons.
Her passions were her armory—fatal to others, powerless against
herself. Her love of power was her ruling masculine propensity.
To it, manlike, she sacrificed affection, the love of progeny,
the delights of home; yet womanlike, she pined for them, even
while she sacrificed them; and, doubly womanlike, she hated
all those who adopted and enjoyed them; and avenged upon
more than one of her best servants his entering on the to her
forbidden pleasures of the married life, with a malignity and
spite that, on any other grounds, are inexplicable. As a man
she had been, perhaps, the greatest who ever trod the earth;
for, as I have said, all her vices, all her crimes, arose from the
natural strugglings and eruptions of a feminine nature, smothered
beneath the iron will, and conquered by the indomitable
ambition, of a masculine mind. Yet that feminine nature was
ineradicable still, and was only the more distorted and depraved
as it was wrested the further from its true and legitimate direction.
As a woman, in private life, had she closely resembled what
she was in public, she had been simply hateful, odious, and contemptible;
but probably she had not been such. As it is, the
fairest way of judging her appears to be, as Hume has observed
with his usual shrewdness, to consider her simply as a person
of strong common sense, placed in authority over a great nation
in very dangerous times, and doing her duty to that nation
manfully always, and, in the main, honestly and truly; but, by
unfitting herself for private life; and therefore, in her private
relations, unamiable, imperious, cruel, false, capricious, and
a tyrant unto death.
Nursed, from her cradle to her womanhood, in the rough
arms of adversity, she was thenceforth to her death the child
of authority and fortune. Yet did she live, did she die happy?
Her rival, Mary, was in all respects nearly her opposite. Her
father, James V., of Scotland, was the son of that unhappy
James IV. who fell at Flodden, and Margaret, the eldest sister
of Henry VIII., and therefore was the first cousin of Elizabeth.
He espoused the Duchess of Longueville, the sister of the great
Duc de Guise, and the others of that powerful and almost regal
house, which during so many reigns held the reins of the French
government; and, after a disturbed and unhappy reign, being
defeated, through the disaffection of his nobles, at the battle of
Solway, by a mere handful of English spears, fell into a hopeless
languor and decline, so that his life was despaired of. At
this sad juncture, news was brought to him, he then having no
living issue, that his queen was safely delivered; whereon he
asked, was it a male or a female child? and, being informed
that it was the latter, he turned his face to the wall, exclaiming
as it is said, “The crown cam' wi' a lassie, and it will awa' wi'
a lassie;” and in a few days expired, leaving those last prophetic
words as a sad legacy to his infant heiress.
No sooner was James dead than, precisely as he expected,
Henry determined on annexing Scotland to the English crown
as an appanage, by means of a marriage between his young son
Edward and the infant princess; and, at first, fortune seemed
completely to favor his plans. By means of the Scottish nobles,
many of whom, and of high rank, had fallen into his hands at
the disastrous rout of Solway, he succeeded in negotiating this
had, it is said, forged a will in the name of the late king, appointing
himself regent, with three other nobles, during Queen
Mary's minority, was overpowered and committed to the custody
of Lord Seton; while James Hamilton, Earl of Arran,
was declared governor. It was thereafter agreed that the queen
should remain in Scotland until she should reach the age of ten,
when she should be sent to England to be educated and betrothed
to the Prince of Wales. Six hostages were to be
delivered to Henry for the faithful performance of this contract,
and it was stipulated that Scotland, notwithstanding its
union with England, should retain all its own laws and privileges.
Well had it been for the young princess, well for her native
land, well for the world at large, had that contract held good!
Long years of intestine strife—the curse of religious factions
rabidly warring amid the feuds of hostile houses, the savage
bickerings of rival clans, the fierce and persecuting zeal of ignorant
and intolerant preachers, had been spared to Scotland;
nay, even to England, it may be, the miseries and civil wars,
induced by the accession of the hapless and imbecile house of
Stuart, in its most odious and imbecile member, might have
passed over; and, assuredly, that infant queen had escaped a
life of misery, a death of horror.
Scotland was, however, at this time altogether catholic; the
reformation, which soon afterwards outstripped with rampant
strides its progress in the neighboring kingdom, taking the hard
stern rule of Calvin, instead of the mild form of Lutheran dissent,
had scarcely drawn as yet to any head. Naturally,
therefore, the pope and the whole of catholic Europe, fearful
of the spread of Henry's recent heresy, were willing to go every
length to preserve Scotland to the discipline of the true church.
Beaton escaped from custody—the ecclesiastics lent him all their
the martial Scottish nobles; the hostages were denied, although
the captive nobles had been suffered to go free on their parole
of honor, which they all broke, with one honorable exception,
Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, who, true to his word, returned and
surrendered himself to Henry—an honorable action, honorably
rewarded by that monarch, who at once set him free without
condition. Enraged beyond all bonds of moderation by this
duplicity, Henry threw himself into the arms of the emperor,
declared war at once on Francis and on Scotland, and waged it
unremittingly, but with varied success, during the remainder of
his life.
After Henry's decease, and the accession of Edward, the Protector
Somerset prosecuted the Scottish war with such ability
and success that, after the victory of Pinkie Cleugh, one of the
most disastrous to the Scottish ever fought on the soil of Scotland,
it was perceived at once, by the queen dowager and the
French party, that the only safety for their cause lay in transporting
the young queen to France. Even the rival faction was
brought to accede to this plan, by the consideration that the
presence of the queen was the real cause of the English war,
and by the natural animosity created among the warlike and
high-spirited nobles, by the devastating and cruel war which
raged incessantly on the frontiers. When little more than six
years old, then, the queen was conveyed by Villegaignon, with
four galleys under his command, to France, where she was at
once betrothed to the dauphin, son of Henry II., of France, and
Catharine de Medicis—afterwards, for a short space, Francis II.
This was the commencement—this, in truth, the cause, of
all her subsequent misfortunes, of all her crimes, of all her sorrows,
of her long imprisonment, and of her miserable death. A
queen of Scotland, she was brought up from her earliest childhood,
a country which, ere she returned to dwell in it, and nominally
to rule it, had become obstinately, bigotedly, zealously, I might
almost say fiercely, calvinistic, she was brought up, from her
earliest childhood, an ultra catholic—a catholic of the school
and house most detested by the protestants throughout Europe,
“the bloody stock,” as the covenanters termed it, “of the accursed
Guises.” Queen of a country whose inhabitants were,
by their physical nature, grave, stern, solemn, precise, and whom
the new tenets rendered surly and morose, she was brought up,
from her earliest childhood, a queen, as it were, of love and
beauty, a creature of levity and mirth, a being to whom music
and minstrelsy, the dance, the pageant, the carousal, and the
tournament—things abominable and rank in the nostrils of her
puritanic lieges—were as the breath of life. Last, and not least,
queen of a country the most rigidly moral in Europe, except in
the article of feudal homicide and vengeful bloodshedding, she
was brought up in a land where to love par amours was scarcely
held dishonorable to either sex; where poisoning, in the most
artful and diabolical methods, was an everyday occurrence;
where, in a word, adultery and murder were the rules, and not
the exceptions of society.
On this period I have been compelled to dwell, to the detriment,
I am aware, of the picturesqueness of my narrative; for
it is, if I mistake not, the clue and the key to all that follows.
On the accession of Elizabeth to the crown of England, Mary,
then but sixteen years of age, was already married to Francis,
the dauphin of France; and, failing Elizabeth and her issue,
was next in true line of blood, as grand-daughter of Margaret,
Henry VIII.'s eldest sister; although that wilful and capricious
monarch had passed their house in his testament, and settled
the succession on his second sister's posterity. And her it
had caused Elizabeth to be declared, by act of parliament, illegitimate—and
in his unaccountable caprice, though he afterwards
caused the succession to be entailed on her after Edward
and Mary, he never would permit the repeal of the act of illegitimacy.
Consequently, Elizabeth being illegitimate, Mary was, by the
strict letter, de jure queen of England. And on this pretext,
Henry II., at the instigation of the Guises, forced his son and
Mary, nothing loth, to assume both the arms and title of king
and queen of England. A woman so jealous, and a sovereign
so shrewd, as Elizabeth, was not to be misled or deluded as to
the object of such a measure. She knew that this pretension
was intended, on opportunity, to be converted into a challenge
of her legitimacy and title to her crown.
From that moment she was seized with the keenest jealousy
against Mary; the jealousy of a queen, and of a woman, wronged
in the tenderest point, in either quality—her crown disputed, and
her honorable birth denied. To this were also added the true
small woman's jealousy and spite against a woman fairer, more
beloved, more graceful. For Mary was, indeed, lovely beyond
the poet's, painter's, sculptor's dream of loveliness; the perfect
symmetry of form and stature, the swanlike curve of the long
slender neck, the inimitable features—and yet by Hans Holbein
how admirably imitated—the smooth expanse of the bland forehead,
the pencilled curve of the dark brows, the melting lustre of
the deep hazel eyes, the luxuriance of the rich auburn tresses, are
as familiar to us all, of this distant day, as though we had ourselves
beheld them—and, to this hour, at the mere name of
Mary Stuart, not a man's heart, who has a touch of romance
or chivalry within him, but beats something quicker, as if he
were in the very presence, and breathing the very atmosphere,
were Mary's enemies—in the end were, perhaps, her judges,
executioners.
But my limits warn me that I must not linger by the way.
Henry II. fell, in a tournament, by a chance thrust of the splintered
truncheon of a lance in the hand of Montgomery; and
Francis II. was, for a little space, the King of France, and Mary
was his queen, and, for that little space, the happiest of the
happy. But still, alas! for her, she quartered the three English
Lions with the Fleurs de Lis of France—still adhered to the
fatal style of Queen of France and England!
In proportion as the Scottish character, when left in repose, is
calm, grave, resolute, and thoughtful, so is it, when agitated
by persecution, or lashed into anger, vehement, enthusiastic,
bigoted, savage in its mood. And such it had now become on
both sides. The rage was terrible, the hatred insatiable, the
strife incessant; and, as is usual in equally balanced civil or
religious factions, each looked abroad for aid—the catholics to
France, the protestants to England. And, on the instant,
discerning her peril while it was yet far aloof, sagacious,
prompt, and possessing the advantage—immense in warfare—
of proximity, Elizabeth lent aid so prompt, so powerful, and so
effectual, that the French auxiliaries were compelled to evacuate
Scotland, never to return thither in force; and the reformers
gained such an ascendency that they were never again, for
any considerable period, overawed by the catholic party, which
thenceforth waned in Scotland daily.
By these most wise and politic steps, Elizabeth not only
secured the safety of her own realm against the peril of a joint
French and Scottish war, brought to bear on her only assailable
point, the northern marches, and her own title against the
claims of Mary, but she created for herself a powerful party in
indeed, she was in Switzerland, Holland, Germany, nay, in the
Huguenot provinces of France itself—as the friend and protectress
of the protestant religion.
Her conquering fleet and army compelled the treaty of Edinburgh,
in which it was stipulated, among other provisions highly
favorable to England, “that the King and Queen of France
should thenceforth abstain from bearing the arms of England,
or assuming the title of that kingdom.”
At this critical moment, Francis II. died of a sudden disorder,
and Mary was left a lovely, youthful widow of nineteen. She
desisted, it is true, after the death of Francis, from bearing the
arms of England; yet, with inconceivable obstinacy and pride,
she refused to ratify the treaty of Edinburgh, thereby giving
mortal and personal offence to the most powerful and most
unforgiving of queens or women.
Shortly after this event, her residence in France being rendered
unpleasant by the demeanor of the queen-mother, who
hated her, she determined to return home, and asked, through
D'Oisel, the French ambassador, a safe conduct through England
to her own dominions. This Elizabeth very naturally
refused until she should ratify the treaty of Edinburgh, and so
demonstrate that she had relinquished her injurious pretensions
to the crown of England.
Stung to the quick, high-spirited, and full of youthful fire,
Mary delivered a reply to Throckmorton, the English ambassador,
which, though mingled with courteous expressions, savored
too much of a defiance to have any effect but that of increasing
the animosity and indignation of Elizabeth, who at once
equipped a fleet, with the avowed intent of putting down piracy
in the Channel, but, doubtless, with the real purpose of intercepting
Mary on her homeward voyage.
Phrase it as they might, the kinswomen were now rival
queens, rival beauties; for Elizabeth, too, fancied herself a
beauty. The cousins were thenceforth—until death, that great
disseverer of friendships, that sole conciliator of feuds, should
separate them—mortal enemies.
A fog favored her evasion; and the galley which bore her
sailed unchallenged through the centre of the English fleet. It
is said that she was affected with a strange melancholy, a dim
foreboding of future woe, as she sailed from Calais. She gazed
on the land which had, in truth, been her country, until its
outlines were lost in the haze of falling night; and then, ordering
her couch to be spread on the deck al fresco, commanded
the pilot to awaken her should the coast be in sight at daybreak.
The night was calm and breezeless, and the ship had made so
little way that the first sunbeams fell upon the sand-hills nigh
to Calais. Her parting words are yet remembered with which
she bade farewell to the land in which alone she knew one hour
of happiness: “Adieu, belle France; adieu, France, bien chérie!
Jamais, jamais, ne te je reverrai plus!”
Her sad forebodings were but too fatally confirmed; the
sullen, mutinous brutality of the calvinistic rabble, the fierce
and atrocious insolence of John Knox, the rude and unknightly
ferocity of the reforming nobles, rendered her court a very dungeon.
Although she made no effort to restore the ancient religion
or arrest the march of reformation, her own profession of
the Romish creed condemned her in the eyes of those stern religionists;
and her very graces and accomplishments, her youthful
gaiety and natural love of innocent pleasures, caused the
ranting preachers of the calvinistic church to denounce her to
her face, as a “painted Jezebel,” a “dancing Herodias,” a
“daughter of Belial;” and it is doubtless, to their unprovoked
insolence and unchristian fury that must be ascribed her after
it is history, not fiction, that I am now writing—crimes.
Who knows not the dreadful provocations she received—the
cruel and ungrateful neglect of the stupid and unworthy Darnley—the
base and bloody butchery, before her eyes, of the
“Italian minion,” Rizzio—when, to the woman's natural weakness,
was added the debility of one about to be a mother?
Who knows not the horrible catastrophe of the Kirk of Field,
and Darnley's miserable murder, contrived, unquestionably, by
that black-hearted wretch, Bothwell, thereafter Duke of Orkney?
Who knows not the sad and guilty tale, how the confederate
lords first called on her to punish, then recommended her, under
their written signatures—such of them, at least, as could write—
to marry, that same Bothwell? How he abducted her by force,
and then set her free unscathed? How she espoused him, and
was then dethroned, and imprisoned in the dreary fortress of
Lochlorn, by the very lords who had counselled her to wed
him; by her own base-born brother, the wise, but wicked,
regent Murray? How she escaped thence by the devotion of
George Douglas, fought the disastrous battle of Langside, only
to see her last friends fall around her, battling to the last in vain
for Mary and the church, for “God and the Queen,” their chivalrous,
their loyal, and their solemn war-cry?
She fled to England, to Elizabeth, who had shown sympathy
thus far, shown even generosity, in her behalf, and interposed
her offices to deliver her from imprisonment; though she had
hesitated to declare war on the regent, fearing, as she avowed,
lest open war should drive him to extremity. In this I believe
she spoke truly. For it suited not her policy to allow the spectacle
of subjects dethroning a lawful sovereign to come before
the eyes of the world.
When once, however, she had the hapless Mary in her power,
was no longer the sister queen, the cousin, and the ally. No;
if not yet the embittered and jealous woman, the enemy determined
on her victim's death, she was, at least, simply and
solely the Queen of England; the resolute, hard-minded, politic,
ambitious queen, with her country's interests pre-eminent,
above all things, at her heart; the woman, who—to use her
own noble words delivered to her troops at Tilbury, when the
vast arms of the Invincible Armada were outstretched to encircle
her England, and the unconquered infantry of Castile were
revelling already, in anticipation, in the beauty and the wealth
of London—if she were a woman, “had yet the heart of a man
within her, and that man a King of England.”
In the first instance, it is probable that, in persuading Mary
to undergo the degradation of standing trial for the assassination
of her husband, against her own rebellious subjects, her
object was solely to gain the eminent position of being selected
arbitress between a sovereign realm and its dethroned and fugitive
princess; and that she had, as yet, decided nothing of her
future movements.
Mary's grand error, or rather the grand error of her counsellors,
was the submitting to the trial, under any show or pretext.
As to the trial itself, it seems to have been conducted
fairly, so far as we can judge; and, as it was broken off by Mary's
own action, we must admit that it was going unfavorably for
her. Yet it is difficult not to doubt, not almost to believe, that
the letters, produced so late in the day by the regent, were, as
they are always alleged by Mary's defenders to have been, forgeries.
In this state of the case, the trial being broken off by Mary's
own refusal to proceed, Elizabeth dismissed the regent, pronouncing
no judgment on the cause, refused to see Mary, or
to honorable free custody, then to close custody, and, lastly, to
strict and absolute imprisonment.
What could she do? What should she have done?
She could have received her in her court as a sister, an
honored and invited guest. Against this was the plea that she
could not extend the hand of friendship to one suspected, and
almost convicted, of petty treason in the assassination of a
husband.
She could, perhaps, have reinstated her vi et armis in her
own seat of power. Against this was the plea that she could
not, in common policy, beat down a protestant power for the
benefit of a catholic power, a friendly Scottish power for the
benefit of a hostile French power.
She could have dismissed her, as she claimed to be dismissed,
and suffered her to return to her loved, her almost native
France. Against this was the plea that she could not, in justice
to herself, to England, permit a princess almost French to return
to hostile France, in order to set forth anew—as undoubtedly
she would have set forth—her title to the English crown; and
to enforce it, perhaps, by a united crusade of France and Spain,
now closely allied, against the liberties, against the religion of
England.
What should she have done?
Alas! what should she! Had they been both private persons,
the question is answered without a thought: she should
have been generous, and dismissed her. But have kings—they
to whom the charge of the life, the happiness, of millions is
intrusted—have kings the right to indulge in the luxury of
generosity, when that generosity must needs entail destruction
on thousands alive and happy? I answer confidently, they
have not the right. But Elizabeth was not generous. She
unjustly, in accordance with right and law—justly, in accordance
with true policy, and the welfare of her own country and
the world at large.
The question of the execution is less doubtful. That Mary was
privy to Norfolk's, to Babington's plot is, I fear, proved beyond
a doubt. It was a question of life and death between the two,
and nothing but the axe or the knife could end it. The axe
ended it; and we cannot, I think, regret the catastrophe, however
much we may deplore the fate of the lovely, the miserable,
the deeply-injured Mary—however much we may condemn the
perfidiousness, the cold-blooded duplicity, the bitter malignity,
the hard-hearted policy of Elizabeth.
Yet she, too, was avenged. For who can doubt that the
death of Elizabeth—agonized by secret remorse, refusing sustenance
or aid of medicine, groaning her soul away in undiscovered
sorrow for ten whole nights and days of unknown anguish,
perishing like a gaunt, old, famished lioness, in despair at the
deeds herself had done—was more tremendous fifty-fold, and
fifty-fold less pitied, than that of her discrowned rival?
| Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |