The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

Unless volumes were written upon the subject, it would be an impossibility to give a clear recital of the statements made by the partisans and defamers of Mary Stuart. According to one side, the famous “Silver-casket Letters” are proved by acts of the Scottish Parliament and many eminent authorities to have been forgeries; and the whole scheme of Rizzio’s and Darnley’s murder to have been concocted in the English cabinet. According to other acts of Parliament and other eminent authorities, the famous “Silver-casket Letters” are pronounced genuine and convincing proofs of Mary’s guilt of conniving at Darnley’s murder, and most shamelessly marrying his murderer.

Now if the “Casket Letters” are genuine, there indeed remains no doubt of Mary’s guilt. But if the act of the Scottish Parliament, framed Dec. 20, 1567, for Bothwell’s forfeiture, which act of Parliament was signed by James Makgill, clerk-register (and which document, it is stated, may be consulted in the register-house, Edinburgh, in the original Latin), be genuine, the “Casket Letters” must be spurious, and Mary’s innocence would be proved. It is only upon these “Silver-casket Letters” that her defamers rest the most important proof of her abetting Darnley’s death and marrying Bothwell willingly, knowing that he was her husband’s murderer. In these forged letters, Mary is made to plan with Bothwell the death of Darnley, and her own abduction with a man who had not yet procured a divorce from his wife, whom only six months before he had married with the queen’s most open consent.

This act of Parliament for the forfeiture of Bothwell and sixty-four of his accomplices, after reciting his murder of the “late King Henry,” proceeds in these words: “And also for their treasonable interception of the most noble person of our most illustrious mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, on her way from Linlithgow to the town of Edinburgh, near the bridges vulgarly called ‘Foul Bridges,’ besetting her with a thousand armed men, equipped in manner of war, in the month of April last. She suspecting no evil from any of her subjects, and least of all from the Earl of Bothwell, toward whom she had shown as great offers of liberality and benevolence as prince could show to good subject, – he by force and violence treasonably seized her most noble person; put violent hands upon her, not permitting her to enter her own town of Edinburgh in peace, but carried her away that same night to the Castle of Dunbar, against her will; and there detained her as his prisoner for about twelve days.”

This act of Parliament, after specifying the nefarious crime committed against her, in more explicit language, recites: “That, after detaining Queen Mary’s most noble person by force and violence twelve days, or thereabouts, at Dunbar Castle, Bothwell compelled her by fear, under circumstances such as might befall the most courageous woman in the world, to promise that she would as soon as possible contract marriage with him, – all which things were plotted and planned by the said earl and the persons aforesaid, of long time before, even before their aforesaid conspiracy and parricide (the murder of Darnley), notwithstanding that at the same time James, Earl of Bothwell, was bound in marriage to an honorable lady, Janet Gordon, from whom not only was he not divorced, but no process of divorce was begun. And in his nefarious and treasonable crimes and purposes continuing and persevering, he kept and detained the most noble person of our said dearest mother in firm custody and durance, by force and masterful hand of his armed friends and dependants, until the sixth day of May last past; on which day, still accompanied by a great number of armed men, he carried her to the Castle of Edinburgh, which was then in his power, and there imprisoned her, and compelled her to remain until the eleventh of the said month, on which day, still accompanied by a great number of armed men, that he might better color his treasonable and nefarious crimes and purposes, he carried her to our palace of Holyrood, and so within four days compelled her to contract marriage with him.”

Regarding this act of Parliament, Agnes Strickland, the English historian, says: “The facts chronicled in the parliamentary record, which are officially attested by the signature of James Makgill of Rankeillour, the clerk-register, demonstrate at once the falsehood of his patron, the Earl of Murray’s journal, of Buchanan’s ‘Detection’ and history of Mary’s reign, of the absurd paper published by Murray under the name of ‘French Paris’s Second Confession,’ and the supposititious letters produced by Morton for the defamation of the queen. These are all refuted by the act of Parliament, which asserts the treasonable constraint that was put on the queen’s will; and that act, be it remembered, was framed, and more than that, proclaimed by the heralds in the ears of the people, six months after the date assigned by Morton to the discovery of the letters which he produced as evidences of a guilty collusion and correspondence between the queen and Bothwell. The act was framed within seven months after the offence was perpetrated; and it behooved to be correct, because several persons assisted in that Parliament, as Huntley, Lethington, Sir James Melville, and others, who were not only present when the abduction was effected, but were carried away with their royal mistress as prisoners to Dunbar.”

Now let it be remembered that these witnesses for her innocence were, with the exception of the faithful Sir James Melville, and perhaps one or two others, no friends of Mary, Queen of Scots, but were the very parties in league with the English cabinet for her overthrow; and as Bothwell was not in this league, but was plotting only for his own scheme of being raised to the throne by marriage with Mary Stuart, these framers of this act of Parliament, exonerating Mary and denouncing Bothwell, were not acting through favor of her; and therefore this strong and overwhelming evidence comes from her very foes.

The following letter is from Mary Stuart to the Pope when she was at last out of the power of Bothwell. This letter is from the collection of Prince Labanoff: “Lettres de Marie Stuart, from the Secret Archives of the Vatican at Rome,” – and will reveal Mary’s feelings on the subject: “Tell to his Holiness,” writes she to her accredited envoy, “the grief we suffered when we were made prisoner by one of our subjects, the Earl of Bothwell, and led as prisoner with the Earl of Huntley the Chancellor, and the nobleman, our Secretary, together to the Castle of Dunbar, and after to the Castle of Edinburgh, where we were detained against our will in the hands of the said Earl of Bothwell, until such time as he had procured a pretended divorce between him and the sister of the said Lord of Huntley, his wife, our near relative; and we were constrained to yield our consent, yet against our will, to him. Therefore your Holiness is supplicated to take order on this, that we are made quit of the said indignity by means of a process at Rome, and commission sent to Scotland, to the bishops and other Catholic judges as your Holiness seemeth best.”

On the other hand, Mr. Froude, the English historian, does not refute this act of Parliament, but as evidence of Mary’s guilt, which he most vehemently declares, cites another act of Parliament, and states the following: —

“The Parliament met on the 15th of December. A series of acts embodying the resolutions of the Council were prepared by the Lords of the Articles, – among them were Huntley and Argyle. The abdication of Lochleven, the coronation of James, and the regency of Murray were successively declared to have been lawful; and lastly, in an act ‘anent the retention of their sovereign Lord’s mother’s person,’ the genuineness of the evidence by which her share in the murder was proved was accepted as beyond doubt or question.

“When the measure was laid before Parliament, Lord Herries, with one or two others, protested, not against the truth of the charges, but ‘against an act which was prejudicial to the honor, power, and estate of the Queen.’ But their objections were overruled. The acts were passed; the last and most important declaring that ‘the taking of arms by the lords and barons, the apprehension of the queen’s person, and generally all other things spoken and done by them to that effect, since the 10th of February last period, were caused by the said queen’s own default.’ It was most certain, from divers her privy letters, written wholly with her own hand, to the Earl of Bothwell, and by her ungodly and dishonorable proceeding to a pretended marriage with him, that she was privy art and part of the device and deed of the murder, and therefore justly deserved whatever had been done to her. Indirect counsel and means had been used to hold back the knowledge of the truth, yet all men were fully persuaded in their hearts of the authors and devisers of the fact. The nobility perceiving the queen so thrall and so blindly affectionate to the tyrant, and perceiving also that both he and she had conspired together such horrible cruelty, they had at length taken up arms to punish them.”

Surely both of these acts of Parliament cannot be trustworthy. Froude refers to Anderson’s Collection as his authority; Miss Strickland, to the register-house, Edinburgh, where the act may be seen in the original Latin. According to one, Mary, Queen of Scots is most clearly proven innocent; according to the other, Mary is most clearly proven guilty. The question therefore rests on the validity of the two acts. The reader may choose between them.

Regarding the famous “Silver-casket Letters,” these two English authorities thus comment. Miss Strickland says: “Several hundreds of Mary Stuart’s genuine letters are now before the public, commencing with those she wrote to her mother in her artless childhood. Not one of these bears the slightest analogy, either in style, sentiment or diction, with the eight suspicious documents she is alleged to have written. But argument is rendered unnecessary by the fact that the discovery of letters so discrepant with anything ever written, ever said or done, by Mary Stuart, rests solely on the testimony of Morton, one of the conspirators in the murder of Darnley. Prince Labanoff, who has devoted his life to the collection and verification of Mary Stuart’s letters, rejects this supposititious series, because, as he briefly observes, ‘there is nothing to prove their authenticity’; while the elder Tytler, who, as a lord of session, or judge, had been accustomed to study and collate evidences in the criminal courts of Scotland, has written two able volumes to expose their fallacies, under the title of ‘A Critical Enquiry into the Evidences.’”

Dr. Henry, the historian of England and Scotland, gave his private and most impartial opinion on this controversy in a letter to William Tytler, printed in “Transactions of Scottish Antiquarian Society,” in these words: “I have been long convinced that the unfortunate Queen Mary was basely betrayed and cruelly oppressed during her life, and calumniated after her death. Many things contributed to involve her in difficulties and dangers on her return to Scotland; her invincible adherence to her religion, her implicit submission to the dictates of her French friends, her having roused the jealousy of Elizabeth by assuming the English arms, the ambition of her brother James, and the faithless, plotting characters of others near her person, – in a word, an invisible political net seemed to have been spread around her, from which it was hardly possible for her to escape. Your efforts, sir, to relieve the memory of a much injured princess from a load of calumny are generous and commendable, and I can assure you they have not been unsuccessful. There is a great and general change in the sentiments of the public on that subject. He would be a bold man who should publish a history of Queen Mary now in the same strain with our two late historians, – Malcolm Laing and Robertson, whose sophistries were rightly estimated by that clear-headed and honest historian, Dr. Henry. Dr. Johnson, a person of a very different way of thinking from either, pronounced a most decided opinion in favor of Mary’s innocence, and expressed his firm conviction ‘that the Silver-casket Letters were spurious, and would never again be brought forward as historic evidences.’”

Regarding these same “Silver-casket Letters,” Froude says: “These letters were found in the celebrated casket with the others to which reference was made in the preceding volume; I accept them as genuine, because, as will be seen, they were submitted to the scrutiny of almost the entire English peerage, and especially to those among the peers who were most interested in discovering them to be forged, and by them admitted to be indisputably in the handwriting of the Queen of Scots; because the letters in the text especially refer to conversations with Lord Huntley, who was then and always one of Mary Stuart’s truest adherents, – conversations which he could have denied had they been false, and which he never did deny; because their contents were confirmed in every particular unfavorable to the queen by a Catholic informant of the Spanish ambassador, who hurried from the spot to London immediately after the final catastrophe for which they prepared the way; and lastly, because there is no ground whatever to doubt the genuineness of the entire set of the casket-letters, except such as arises from the hardy and long-continued but entirely baseless denial of interested or sentimental partisans.”

But in connection with Mr. Froude’s declaration that his faith rests on them because they were submitted to the English Peerage, impartial statement of evidence demands another comparison between these conflicting testimonies upon a different link in the chain of evidence for and against the guilt of Mary Stuart. Randolph was the English ambassador at the court of Scotland, and in some of his letters to Leicester he has revealed the English plotting and connivance in the scheme to ruin Mary, Queen of Scots. Regarding this point Miss Strickland says: —

“In the selfsame letter which records the round of banquets, masks, and princely pleasures, the English Mephistopheles, Randolph, exultingly unfolds to Leicester the items of the black budget prepared with his approval, against the meeting of the Scottish Parliament, by the unscrupulous coalition of traitors who were secretly allied with their sovereign’s husband and his father in a dastardly bond for murder, premeditated in cold blood, and intended to be perpetrated in the presence of their queen; and the crime was to be justified, as such deeds generally are, by slander.

“‘I know now for certain,’ writes he, ‘that this queen repenteth her marriage, – that she hateth him and all his kin. I know that he knoweth himself that he hath a partner in play and game with him. I know that there are practices in hand, contrived between the father and the son, to come by the crown against her will. I know that if it take effect, which is intended, David, with the consent of the king, shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many thing grieveouser, and worse than these are brought to my ears, yea, of things intended against her own person, which, because I think better to keep secret than to write to Mr. Secretary, I speak not of them, but now to your lordship.’ By one of the secret articles of the atrocious pact to which our worthy ambassador alludes, the life-long imprisonment of Mary was agreed, and her death, in case of her attempting to resist the transfer of the whole power of the crown to the ungrateful consort she had associated in her regality; and to this wrong Cecil, Bedford, and Elizabeth tacitly consented.”

Such was the villanous treachery of Darnley and his father, leagued with the English ministers and malcontents in Scotland, headed by Murray, the plotting half-brother of the queen, against Mary Stuart, who time and again received her inconstant and petulant husband into favor, forgiving his outrageous behavior towards her. But Darnley little knew the schemes of his vile fellow-conspirators. They but used him as a tool, as long as he could avail their purposes, and then blew him up with gunpowder, when they had matured their infamous plans, so that his death should seemingly be the work of his shamefully abused and marvellously forbearing wife.

Miss Strickland further says: —

“A startling light is thrown by a careful collation of the above letters of Randolph to Leicester and Throckmorton on the agency, as well as the incentives, employed in the successive Edinburgh assassinations of Mary Stuart’s faithful and incorruptible minister, David Rizzio, in March, 1566, and that of her husband in February, 1567, which led to the deposition of that unfortunate princess and the transfer of the government of Scotland to the sworn creatures of the English sovereign, a great but diabolical stroke of policy. The cool revelation of our unscrupulous ambassador, that the faithful minister who would not barter his royal mistress’s interests for English gold, ‘would have his throat cut within ten days,’ is sufficient proof of his iniquitous coalition in the murderous confederacy against the first victim of the English cabinet. His hostile expressions regarding Mary’s husband, with whom he was at that very moment enleagued in the secret intrigues for obtaining the signatures of Murray and the banished lords to the bond for the murder of Rizzio, are no less worthy of observation, together with his earnest deprecation of Mary and her husband ever succeeding to the throne of England, and the emphatic desire he expressed to Throckmorton that ‘something may be done to preclude the possibility of such a contingency.’

“This subtle diplomatist first excited and then worked on the natural fears of better men than either himself, Leicester, or Throckmorton, to wink at, if not to sanction, the systematic train of political villany to which David Rizzio, Henry Stuart, and Mary Stuart were the successive victims. After the consummation of these astute schemes of wickedness – when Rizzio and Darnley were festering in their untimely graves, and the more pitiable survivor, Mary Stuart, languishing in her damp, noisome prison-room in Tutbury Castle, her infant son set up as a puppet king, to color the usurpation of the murderers of his father and her defamers, and her realm convulsed with civil strife – ‘then,’ observes Sir James Melville, ‘as Nero stood upon a high part of Rome to see the town burning, which he had caused to be set on fire, so Master Randolph delighted to see such fire kindled in Scotland, and by his writings to some in the court of England, glorified himself to have brought it to pass in such sort that it could not be easily slokened (slaked) again.’”

In proof of the importance of this link in the chain of evidence, we will quote Mr. Froude’s own words: “As the vindication of the conduct of the English government proceeds on the assumption of her guilt, so the determination of her innocence will equally be the absolute condemnation of Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s advisers.”

There is only one other point in this evidence for and against the guilt of Mary Stuart, which will be cited. Regarding the famous confessions of Paris, Mr. Froude says: —

“Nicholas Hubert, alias French Paris, was Bothwell’s page. He was taken privately to St. Andrews, where the Regent happened to be, and examined by George Buchanan, Robert Ramsey, Murray’s steward, and John Wood, his confidential secretary. Paris made two depositions: the first not touching Mary Stuart, the second fatally implicating her. This last was read over in his presence. He signed it, and was then executed, that there might be no retraction or contradiction.”

Regarding these confessions, Agnes Strickland says: —

“Nothing can, in fact, afford clearer evidence of Mary’s ignorance of the plot of her husband’s murder than this first confession of Hubert. Malcolm Laing, the most able of all the writers who have adopted the self-interested calumnies of the conspirators against Mary, put forth by their venal organ, Buchanan, and the political agents of Cecil, insists on the authenticity and credibility of this document. It contains, indeed, such strong internal evidences of reality that we fully coincide with him in its being genuine evidence, and for this reason reject the so-called second confession of Nicholas Hubert, or French Paris, as spurious, because one or the other must be false, and the second is palpably a fabrication between Murray and his secretary, Alexander Hay, to bolster up the forged letters and defame the queen. As poor Hubert could not write, it was unlikely he could read the paper to which Murray’s secretary made him put his mark. He had no trial, and though Queen Elizabeth requested he might be sent to London, Murray hanged him, that he might not contradict what had been put forth in his name.”

We mention Agnes Strickland, in these comparisons with the testimony of Froude, because she was also an English writer; and she quotes from the very same authorities, for nearly all of the historians, letters, state papers, and authorities are cited by Miss Strickland which are used by Froude in proof of his statements. We also quote Agnes Strickland because her works are within the reach of every one, and those desiring to investigate the evidences on both sides will find her authorities in the foot-notes of her “English and Scottish Queens,” and in separate lives of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth, in her historical series. It is not the authority of Agnes Strickland as against that of Froude, but the weight of the many authorities and state papers which both refer to, as evidence in proof of the different sides they take upon this perplexing question. Froude pronounces Mary Stuart as probably innocent of all evil intent regarding Rizzio, and exonerates her of any improper conduct with him further than a good-natured condescension towards one in her employ. But if Mary Stuart’s guilt with Bothwell is proven, it is idle to talk of her innocence with Rizzio.

Mary Stuart was rescued from the power of the infamous Bothwell, and he was obliged to flee the country, and died in exile ten years after. But poor abused Mary was not yet free from her enemies. The very men who rescued her from Bothwell were leagued with England, with the ambitious Murray at their head. Their plan was now to get rid of the queen and get hold of the baby prince, that they might in his name get possession of the government. And with this scheme England and Elizabeth were well pleased, forsooth, for by bribes and threats the regent of the baby king could be held in England’s power. As these nefarious schemers planned, so did they execute. Queen Mary was apparently aided by them to escape the power of Bothwell, but so cruelly was she treated that it was but an exchange of jailors. Poor, slandered, persecuted queen, thinking good of every one, she was betrayed on every hand. Husband, father-in-law, half-brother, Scottish ministers, and England’s courtiers, incited by a jealous cousin-queen, all plotted and counter-plotted and wove the web so closely around her that there was no escape. She was betrayed by one party, only to find herself more cruelly betrayed by her supposed deliverers.

To whom could she turn? Elizabeth had treacherously and hypocritically sympathized with her terrible woes. Elizabeth was a woman, and a cousin, and a queen; would she not succor her? and so the confiding heart of Mary, Queen of Scots, thinking no evil of those who professed kindness, fled to England and delivered herself unwittingly into the hands of her very worst foe. The poor fly now was entrapped, and the wily spider prepared her final doom.

The captive Queen of Scots had been transferred from prison to prison, each day more closely confined, each day treated with less respect and greater cruelty. At length Mary, Queen of Scots, was brought to trial and accused of high treason. Mary Stuart had neither advocates, counsel, nor documents; no one was allowed to plead for her, but notwithstanding, for two days, the ablest lawyers in England were held in check by her wit, skill, and marvellous presence of mind. Mary demanded to be heard by Parliament, and to be permitted to see the queen in person. But this was denied her, and sentence of death was passed upon her. It was at this time that Henry III., of France, endeavored to awaken in the heart of James VI., of Scotland, some sentiments of regard for his helpless mother. If the conduct of the King of Scotland shocked the son of Catherine de’ Medici, what severer condemnation of the unnatural treatment of James VI. can be required?