Mary Stuart
Of all unsolved problems of history, says Lyman Abbott, there is none more perplexing, none more seemingly insoluble, than that afforded by the career and character of Mary Queen of Scots. Time has done nothing to detract from the peculiar witchery of her charms, or the romantic interest which attaches to her strange adventures. Her admirers are as enthusiastic three centuries removed from her as were those who fell beneath the peculiar spell of her presence—a spell which few were ever able wholly to resist. The controversy which waged about her while living continues as hot, and almost as bitter, over her grave. History can come no nearer a verdict than could her own contemporaries. Its only answer, like theirs, is, “We cannot agree.”
The difficulties which beset any attempt to tell correctly the story of her career, to analyze aright her character, are very great. The student of history finds no impartial witness; few in her own time who are not ready to tell and to believe about her the most barefaced lies which will promote their own party. During her life she was calumniated and eulogized with equal audacity. Since her death the same curiously contradictory estimates of her character have been vigorously maintained—by those, too, who have not their judgment impaired by the prejudices which environed her. On one hand, we are assured that she was “the most amiable of women;” “the upright queen, the noble and true woman, the faithful spouse, and affectionate mother;” “the poor martyred queen;” “the helpless victim of fraud and force;” an “illustrious victim of statecraft,” whose “kindly spirit in posterity and matchless heroism in misfortune” award her “the most prominent place in the annals of her sex.” On the other hand, we are assured by men equally competent to judge, that she was “a spoiled beauty;” “the heroine of an adulterous melodrame;” “the victim of a blind imperious passion;” an “apt scholar in the profound dissimulation of that school of which Catherine de Medici was the chief instructor;” “a bad woman disguised in the livery of a martyr,” having “a proud heart, a crafty wit, and indurate mind against God and his truth;” “a bold, unscrupulous, ambitious woman,” with “the panther’s nature—graceful, beautiful, malignant, untamable.”
Dr. Abbott thus summarizes a net-work of evidence: A wife learns to loathe her husband; utters her passionate hate in terms that are unmistakable; is reconciled to him for a purpose; casts him off when that purpose is accomplished; makes no secret of her desire for a divorce; listens with but cold rebuke to intimations of his assassination; dallies while he languishes upon a sick-bed so long as death is near; hastens to him only when he is convalescent; becomes, in seeming, reconciled to him; by her blandishments allays his terror and arrests his flight, which nothing else could arrest; brings him with her to the house chosen by the assassins for his tomb—a house which has absolutely nothing else to recommend it but its singular adaptation to the deed of cruelty to be wrought there; remains with him till within two hours of his murder; hears with unconcern the story of his tragic end, which thrills all other hearts with horror; makes no effort to bring the perpetrators of the crime to punishment; rewards the suspected with places and pensions, and the chief criminal (Bothwell) with her hand in marriage while the blood is still wet on his.
Before the murder of Darnley it was the misfortune of Mary’s life that stories against which a fair reputation should be a sufficient defence stick to her like burs to a shaggy coat; stories of unwomanly intimacy first with Chastelar, then with Rizzio, and then with Bothwell. She was certainly careless, if not criminal. At least, so thought John Knox and the straiter sect of the Covenanters.