The book of the ladies

I also learned much from a book which has been published, entitled “The Martyrdom of the Queen of Scotland, Dowager of France.” Alas! that being our queen did her no service. It seems to me that being such they ought to have feared our vengeance for putting her to death; and they would have thought a hundred times before they came to it, if our king had chosen to take the initiative. But, because he hated the Messieurs de Guise, his cousins, he took no pains except as formal duty. Alas! what could that poor innocent do? This is what many asked.

Others say that he made many formal appeals. It is true that he sent to the Queen of England M. de Bellièvre, one of the greatest and wisest senators of France and the ablest, who did not fail to offer all his arguments, with the king’s prayers and threats, and do all else that he could; and among other things he declared that it did not belong to one king or sovereign to put to death another king or sovereign, over whom he had no power either from God or man.

I have never known a generous person who did not say that the Queen of England would have won immortal glory had she used mercy to the Scottish queen; and also she would be exempt from the risk of vengeance, however tardy, which awaits her for the shedding of innocent blood that cries aloud for it. It is said that the English queen was well advised of this; but not only did she pass over the advice of many of her kingdom, but also that of many great Protestant princes and lords both in France and Germany, – such as the Prince de Condé and Casimir, since dead, and the Prince of Orange and others, who had subscribed to this violent death while not expecting it, but afterwards felt their conscience burdened, inasmuch as it did not concern them and brought them no advantage, and they did it only to please the queen; but, in truth, it did them inestimable detriment.

They say, too, that Queen Elizabeth, when she sent to notify that poor Queen Marie of this melancholy sentence, assured her that it was done with great and sad regret on her part, under constraint of Parliament which urged it on her. To which Queen Marie answered: “She has much more power than that to make them obedient to her will when it pleases her; for she is the princess, or more truly the prince, who has made herself the most feared and reverenced.”

Now, I rely on the truth of all things, which time will reveal. Queen Marie will live glorious in this world and in the other; and the time will come in a few years when some good pope will canonize her in memory of the martyrdom she suffered for the honour of God and of his Law.

It is not to be doubted that if that great, valiant, and generous prince, the late M. de Guise, the last [Henri, le Balafré, assassinated at Blois], was not dead, vengeance for so noble a queen and cousin thus murdered would not still be unborn. I have said enough on so pitiful a subject, which I end thus: —

This queen, of a beauty so incomparable,Was, with too great injustice, put to death:To sustain that heart of faith inviolableCan it be there are none to avenge the wrong?

One there is who has written her epitaph in Latin verses, the substance of which is as follows: “Nature had produced this queen to be seen of all the world: with great admiration was she seen for her beauty and virtues so long as she lived: but England, envious, placed her on a scaffold to be seen in derision: yet was well deceived; for the sight turned praise and admiration to her, and glory and thanksgiving to God.”

I must, before I finish, say a word here in reply to those whom I have heard speak ill of her for the death of Chastellard, whom the queen condemned to death in Scotland, – laying upon her that she had justly suffered for making others suffer. Upon that count there is no justice, and it should never have been made. Those who know the history will never blame our queen; and, for that reason, I shall here relate it for her justification.

Chastellard was a gentleman of Dauphiné, of good family and condition, for he was great-nephew on his mother’s side of that brave M. de Bayard, whom they say he resembled in figure, which in him was medium, very beautiful and slender, as they say M. de Bayard had also. He was very adroit at arms, and inclined in all ways to honourable exercises, such as firing at a mark, playing at tennis, leaping, and dancing. In short, he was a most accomplished gentleman; and as for his soul, it was also very noble; he spoke well, and wrote of the best, even in rhyme, as well as any gentleman in France, using a most sweet and lovely poesy, like a knight.

He followed M. d’Amville, so-called then, now M. le Connétable; but when we were with M. le Grand Prieur, of the house of Lorraine, who conducted the queen [to Scotland] the said Chastellard was with us, and, in this company became known to the queen for his charming actions, above all for his rhymes; among which he made some to please her in translation from Italian (which he spoke and knew well), beginning, Che giova posseder città e regni; which is a very well made sonnet, the substance of which is as follows: “What serves her to possess so many kingdoms, cities, towns, and provinces, to command so many peoples, and be respected, feared, admired of all, if still to sleep a widow, lone and cold as ice?”

He made also other rhymes, most beautiful, which I have seen written by his hand, for they never were imprinted, that I know.

The queen, therefore, who loved letters, and principally poems, for sometimes she made dainty ones herself, was pleased in seeing those of Chastellard, and even made response, and, for that reason, gave him good cheer and entertained him often. But he, in secrecy, was kindled by a flame too high, the which its object could not hinder, for who can shield herself from love? In times gone by the most chaste goddesses and dames were loved, and still are loved; indeed we love their marble statues; but for that no lady has been blamed unless she yielded to it. Therefore, kindle who will these sacred fires!

Chastellard returned with all our troop to France, much grieved and desperate in leaving so beautiful an object of his love. After one year the civil war broke out in France. He, who belonged to the Religion [Protestant], struggled within himself which side to take, whether to go to Orléans with the others, or stay with M. d’Amville, and make war against his faith. On the one hand, it seemed to him too bitter to go against his conscience; on the other, to take up arms against his master displeased him hugely; wherefore he resolved to fight for neither the one nor yet the other, but to banish himself and go to Scotland, let fight who would, and pass the time away. He opened this project to M. d’Amville and told him his resolution, begging him to write letters in his favour to the queen; which he obtained: then, taking leave of one and all, he went; I saw him go; he bade me adieu and told me in part his resolution, we being friends.

He made his voyage, which ended happily, so that, having arrived in Scotland and discoursing of his intentions to the queen, she received him kindly and assured him he was welcome. But he, abusing such good cheer and seeking to attack the sun, perished like Phaëton; for, driven by love and passion, he was presumptuous enough to hide beneath the bed of her Majesty, where he was discovered when she retired. The queen, not wishing to make a scandal, pardoned him; availing herself of that good counsel which the lady of honour gives to her mistress in the “Novels of the Queen of Navarre,” when a seigneur of her brother’s Court, slipping through a trap-door made by him in the alcove, seeking to win her, brought nothing back but shame and scratches: she wishing to punish his temerity and complain of him to her brother, the lady of honour counselled her that, since the seigneur had won nought but shame and scratches, it was for her honour as a lady of such mark not to be talked of; for the more it was contended over, the more it would go to the nose of the world and the mouth of gossips.

Our Queen of Scotland, being wise and prudent, passed this scandal by; but the said Chastellard, not content and more than ever mad with love, returned for the second time, forgetting both his former crime and pardon. Then the queen, for her honour, and not to give occasion to her women to think evil, and also to her people if it were known, lost patience and gave him up to justice, which condemned him quickly to be beheaded, in view of the crime of such an act. The day having come, before he died he had in his hand the hymns of M. de Ronsard; and, for his eternal consolation, he read from end to end the Hymn of Death (which is well done, and proper not to make death abhorrent), taking no help of other spiritual book, nor of minister or confessor.

Having ended that reading wholly, he turned to the spot where he thought the queen must be, and cried in a loud voice: “Adieu, most beautiful, most cruel princess in all the world!” then, firmly stretching his neck to the executioner, he let himself be killed very easily.

Some have wished to discuss why it was that he called her cruel; whether because she had no pity on his love, or on his life. But what should she have done? If, after her first pardon she had granted him a second, she would on all sides have been slandered; to save her honour it was needful that the law should take its course. That is the end of this history.

“Well, they may say what they will, many a true heart will be sad for Mary Stuart, e’en if all be true men say of her.” That speech, which Walter Scott puts into the mouth of one of the personages in his novel of “The Abbot” at the moment when he is preparing the reader for an introduction to the beautiful queen, remains the last word of posterity as it was of contemporaries, – the conclusion of history as of poesy.

Elizabeth living triumphed, and her policy after her lives and triumphs still, so that Protestantism and the British empire are one and the same thing. Marie Stuart succumbed, in her person and in that of her descendants; Charles I. under the axe, James II. in exile, each continued and added to his heritage of faults, imprudences, and calamities; the whole race of the Stuarts was cut off, and seems to have deserved it. But, vanquished in the order of things and under the empire of fact, and even under that of inexorable reason, the beautiful queen has regained all in the world of imagination and of pity. She has found, from century to century, knights, lovers, and avengers. A few years ago, a Russian of distinction, Prince Alexander Labanoff, began, with incomparable zeal, a search through the archives, the collections, the libraries of Europe, for documents emanating directly from Marie Stuart, the most insignificant as well as the most important of her letters, in order to connect them and so make a nucleus of history, and also an authentic shrine, not doubting that interest, serious and tender interest, would rise, more powerful still, from the bosom of truth itself. On the appearance of this collection of Prince Labanoff, M. Mignet produced, from 1847 to 1850, a series of articles in the “Journal des Savants,” in which, not content with appreciating the prince’s documents, he presented from himself new documents, hitherto unpublished and affording new lights. Since then, leaving the form of criticism and dissertation, M. Mignard has taken this fine subject as a whole, and has written a complete narrative upon it, grave, compact, interesting, and definitive, which he is now publishing [1851].

In the meantime, about a year ago, there appeared a “History of Marie Stuart” by M. Dargaud, a writer of talent, whose book has been much praised and much read. M. Dargaud made, in his own way, various researches about the heroine of his choice; he went expressly to England and Scotland, and visited as a pilgrim all the places and scenes of Marie Stuart’s sojourns and captivities. While drawing abundantly from preceding writers, M. Dargaud does them justice with effusion and cordiality; he sheds through every line of his history the sentiment of exalted pity and poesy inspired within him by the memory of that royal and Catholic victim; he deserves the fine letter which Mme. Sand wrote him from Nohant, April 10, 1851, in which she congratulates him, almost without criticism, and speaks of Marie Stuart with charm and eloquence. If I do not dwell at greater length upon the work of M. Dargaud, it is, I must avow, because I am not of that too emotional school which softens and enervates history. I think that history should not necessarily be dull and wearisome, but still less do I think it should be impassioned, sentimental, and as if magnetic. Without wishing to depreciate the qualities of M. Dargaud, which are too much in the taste of the day not to be their own recommendation, I shall follow in preference a more severe historian, whose judgment and whose method of procedure inspire me with confidence.

Marie Stuart, born December 8, 1542, six days before the death of her father, who was then combating, like all the kings his predecessors, a turbulent nobility, began as an orphan her fickle and unfortunate destiny. Storms assailed her in her cradle, —

“As if, e’en then, inhuman Fortune

Would suckle me with sadness and with pain,”

as an old poet, in I know not what tragedy, has made her say. Crowned at the age of nine months, disputed already in marriage between the French and English parties, each desiring to prevail in Scotland, she was early, through the influence of her mother, Marie de Guise (sister of the illustrious Guises), bestowed upon the Dauphin of France, the son of King Henri II. August 13, 1548, Marie Stuart, then rather less than six years old, landed at Brest. Betrothed to the young dauphin, who, on his father’s death became François II., she was brought up among the children of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, and remained in France, first as dauphine, then as queen, until the premature death of her husband. She lived there in every respect as a French princess. These twelve or thirteen years in France were her joy and her charm, and the source of her ruin.

She grew up in the bosom of the most polished, most learned, most gallant Court of those times, shining there in her early bloom like a rare and most admired marvel, knowing music and all the arts (divinæ Palladis artes), learning the languages of antiquity, speaking themes in Latin, superior in French rhetoric, enjoying an intercourse with poets, and being herself their rival with her poems. Scotland, during all this time, seemed to her a barbaric and savage land, which she earnestly hoped never to see again, or, at any rate, never to inhabit. Trained to a policy wholly of the Court and wholly personal, they made her sign at Fontainebleau at the time of her marriage (1558) a secret deed of gift of the kingdom of Scotland to the kings of France, at the same time that she publicly gave adherence to the conditions which the commissioners from Scotland had attached to the marriage, conditions under which she pledged herself to maintain the integrity, the laws, and the liberties of her native land. It was at this very moment that she secretly made gift to the kings of France of her whole kingdom by an act of her own good-will and power. The Court of France prompted her to that imprudent treachery at the age of sixteen. Another very impolitic imprudence, which proclaimed itself more openly, was committed when Henri II., on the death of Mary Tudor, made Marie Stuart, the dauphine, bear the arms of England beside those of Scotland, thus presenting her thenceforth as a declared rival and competitor of Elizabeth.

When Marie Stuart suddenly lost her husband (December 5, 1560), and it was decided that she, a widow at eighteen, should, instead of remaining in her dowry of Touraine, return to her kingdom of Scotland to bring order to the civil troubles there existing, universal mourning took place in the world of young French seigneurs, noble ladies, and poets. The latter consigned their regrets to many poems which picture Marie Stuart to the life in this decisive hour, the first really sorrowful hour she had ever known. We see her refined, gracious, of a delicate, fair complexion, the form and bust of queen or goddess, – L’Hôpital himself had said of her, after his fashion, in a grave epithalamium: —

“Adspectu veneranda, putes ut Numen inesse:

Tantus in ore decor, majestas regia tanta est! —

of a long hand, elegant and slender (gracilis), an alabaster forehead dazzling beneath the crape, and with golden hair – which needs a brief remark. It is a poet (Ronsard) who speaks of “the gold of her ringed and braided hair,” and poets, as we know, employ their words a little vaguely. Mme. Sand, speaking of a portrait she had seen as a child in the English Convent, says, without hesitation, “Marie was beautiful, but red-haired.” M. Dargaud speaks of another portrait, “in which a sunray lightens” he says rather oddly, “the curls of her living and electric hair.” But Walter Scott, reputed the most correct of historical romance-writers, in describing Marie Stuart a prisoner in Lochleven Castle, shows us, as though he had seen them, her thick tresses of “dark brown,” which escaped now and then from her coif. Here we are far from the red or golden tints, and I see no other way of conciliating these differences than to rest on “that hair so beautiful, so blond and fair” [si blonds et cendrés] which Brantôme, an ocular witness, admired, – hair that captivity whitened, leaving the poor queen of forty-six “quite bald” in the hands of her executioner, as l’Estoile relates. But at nineteen, the moment of her departure from France, the young widow was in all the glory of her beauty, except for a brilliancy of colour, which she lost at the death of her first husband, giving place to a purer whiteness.

Withal a lively, graceful, and sportive mind, and French raillery, an ardent soul, capable of passion, open to desire, a heart which knew not how to draw back when flame or fancy or enchantment stirred it. Such was the queen, adventurous and poetical, who tore herself from France in tears, sent by politic uncles to recover her authority amid the roughest and most savage of “Frondes.”

Scotland, since Marie Stuart left it as a child, had undergone great changes; the principal was the Reformed religion which had taken root there and extended itself vigorously. The great reformer Knox preached the new doctrine, which found in Scotland stern, energetic souls ready made to receive it. The old struggle of the lords and barons against the kings was complicated and redoubled now by that of cities and people against the brilliant beliefs of the Court and the Catholic hierarchy. The birth of modern society, of civil equality, of respect for the rights of all was painfully working itself out through barbaric scenes, and by means of fanaticism itself. Alone and without counsel, contending with the lords and the nobility as her ancestors had done, Marie Stuart, quick, impulsive, subject to predilections and to antipathies, was already insufficient for the work; what therefore could it be when she found herself face to face with a religious party, born and growing during recent years, face to face with an argumentative, gloomy party, moral and daring, discussing rationally, Bible in hand, the right of kings, and pushing logic even into prayer? Coming from a literary and artificial Court, there was nothing in her that could comprehend these grand and voiceless movements of the people, either to retard them or turn them to her own profit by adapting herself to them. “She returned,” says M. Mignet, “full of regrets and disgust, to the barren mountains and the uncultured inhabitants of Scotland. More lovable than able, very ardent and in no way cautious, she returned with a grace that was out of keeping with her surroundings, a dangerous beauty, a keen but variable intellect, a generous but rash soul, a taste for the arts, a love of adventure, and all the passions of a woman joined to the excessive liberty of a widow.”

And to complicate the peril of this precarious situation she had for neighbour in England a rival queen, Elizabeth, whom she had first offended by claiming her title, and next, and no less, by a feminine and proclaimed superiority of beauty and grace, – a rival queen capable, energetic, rigid, and dissimulating, representing the contrary religious opinion, and surrounded by able counsellors, firm, consistent, and committed to the same cause. The seven years that Marie Stuart spent in Scotland after her return from France (August 19, 1561) to her imprisonment (May 18, 1568) are filled with all the blunders and all the faults that could be committed by a young and thoughtless princess, impulsive, unreflecting, and without shrewdness or ability except in the line of her passion, never in view of a general political purpose. The policy of Mme. de Longueville, during the Fronde, seems to me of the same character.

As to other faults, the moral faults of poor Marie Stuart, they are as well known and demonstrated to-day as faults of that kind can well be. Mme. Sand, always very indulgent, regards as the three black spots upon her life the abandonment of Chastellard, her feigned caresses to the hapless Darnley, and her forgetfulness of Bothwell.

Chastellard, as we know, was a gentleman of Dauphiné, musician and poet, in the train of the servitors and adorers of the queen, who at first was very agreeable to her. Chastellard was one of the troop who escorted Marie Stuart to Scotland, and sometime later, urged by his passion, he returned there. But not knowing how to restrain himself, or to keep, as became him, to poetic passion while waiting to inspire, if he could, a real one, he was twice discovered beneath the bed of the queen; the second time she lost patience and turned him over to the law. Poor Chastellard was beheaded; he died reciting, so they say, a hymn of Ronsard’s, and crying aloud: “O cruel Lady!” After so stern an act, to which she was driven in fear of scandal and to put her honour above all attainder and suspicion, Marie Stuart had, it would seem, but one course to pursue, namely: to remain the most severe and most virtuous of princesses.

But her severity for Chastellard, though shown for effect, is merely a peccadillo in comparison with her conduct to Darnley, her second husband. By marrying this young man (July 29, 1565), her vassal, but of the race of the Stuarts and her own family, Marie escaped the diverse political combinations which were striving to attract her to a second marriage; and it would have been, perhaps, a sensible thing to do, if she had not done it as an act of caprice and passion. But she fell in love with Darnley in a single day, and became disgusted in the next. This tall, weakly youth, timid and conceited by turns, with a heart “soft as wax,” had nothing in him which subjugates a woman and makes her respect him. A woman such as Marie Stuart, changeable, ardent, easily swayed, with the sentiment of her weakness and of her impulsiveness, likes to find a master and at moments a tyrant in the man she loves, whereas she soon despises her slave and creature when he is nought but that; she much prefers an arm of iron to an effeminate hand.

Less than six months after her marriage Marie, wholly disgusted, consoled herself with an Italian, David Riccio, a man thirty-two years of age, equally well fitted for business or pleasure, who advised her and served her as secretary, and was gifted with a musical talent well suited to commend him to women in other ways. The feeble Darnley confided his jealousy to the discontented lords and gentlemen, and they, in the interests of their faction, prodded his vengeance and offered to serve it with their sword. Ministers and Presbyterian pastors took part in the affair. The whole was plotted and managed with perfect unanimity as a chastisement of Heaven, and, what is more, by help of deeds and formal agreements which simulated legality. The queen and her favourite, apparently before they had any suspicions, were taken in a net. David Riccio was seized by the conspirators while supping in Marie’s cabinet (March 9, 1566), Darnley being present, and from there he was dragged into the next room and stabbed. Marie, at this date, was six months pregnant by her husband. On that day, outraged in honour and embittered in feeling, she conceived for Darnley a deeper contempt mingled with horror, and swore to avenge herself on the murderers. For this purpose she bided her time, she dissimulated; for the first time in her life she controlled herself and restrained her actions. She became politic – as the nature is of passionate women – only in the interests of her passion and her vengeance.