was in her, as in others of her race who preceded and followed her, a rashness of conduct, a recklessness as to its results, a self-will and obstinacy, that often rendered altogether useless the counsels of wisdom and the suggestions of prudence; and, to these were added a continued contemptuous defiance of public opinion that rendered altogether useless at times the best exertions of her friends, and made generally successful the many appeals to arms of her enemies. But we are not to judge of the Sovereigns of three centuries since as, by the restraints of the law, we find them now their rule of right, which they considered as a right divine, was to rule as despotically as they could, without any let or hindrance from their subjects to do whatever they pleased, and to possess themselves of whatever they coveted. It was, indeed, a continual fierce struggle between the only two powers in the State that could bring armies into the field, the king and the nobles, for the possession of irresponsible power-for the allowed exercise of authority that should be amenable to no law. Of the five kings who preceded Mary upon the Scottish throne, the deaths of four were occasioned by their disputes with the nobles for political supremacy; and her own father, who had set his heart and staked his fortunes upon effectually humbling the feudal nobility of his kingdom, died from the fever of vexation that their desertion of him in the day of battle brought upon him. Mary, therefore, inherited these feelings from her forefathers; and in the Court of France, where she passed her young life, they were greatly strengthened and encouraged. Her mother, moreover, was Mary of Lorraine, a sister of the Duke of Guise; and from such tutors nothing less could be expected than a pupil aptly instructed in king-craft in its then understood sense of use and acceptation. Mary employed it, and considered it as properly of right from the position belonging to her. Sovereigns, in the opinion of all sovereigns then, were in nothing whatever responsible to their subjects; and any interference with their policy or their pleasure, with their fancies or extravagancies, was resisted and resented as impertinent, unwarrantable, and rebellious. Nor could the Stuarts, to the last of their line, ever be persuaded out of these old-times notions: their own will was, in their own opinion, the best in the world; and in their struggle to make it superior to all law, and to carry it out in full force against the will of the nation, one of their race in this kingdom lost his life and his descendant the throne. We have no right, therefore, in these times to single out Mary's case as peculiarly objectionable, or to blame her for her frequent conflicts with her nobles, or for her resolute purpose to bring them into subjection to her will. History cannot in all this lay anything justly to her charge, since, in truth, she had no other resource but to bow her neck to their will or to bend them to her purpose. She very naturally chose the latter alternative, and it was from no want of courage or of talent, of energy or of perseverance, that she did not succeed in her object. Her difficulties were undoubtedly very great, and she was thwarted and coerced in various ways by very opposite and powerful influences; but the greatest hindrance to her success was her own imprudence, and the chief opponent to her happiness was undoubtedly herself. We must tread softly, however, upon ground so tender as that is upon which we are walking the reputation of a woman and a Queen is to be considered as unsullied until indisputable evidence can be adduced convicting her of the crimes and the imprudences with which she is charged. No man of right feeling would ever desire to strain the evidence brought forward to the prejudice of the accused, or to give a colouring to the proofs higher than what originally belonged to them; and there is scarcely an instance in history of a public character calling for more merciful consideration than that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Her life, as Mr. Mignet says, was a tissue of misfortunes from beginning to end: she was scarcely six days old when she was called to the throne: soon compelled to fly from her kingdom, she early married the heir to the crown of France and was a widow in her eighteenth year. Presently driven from France, she returned most unwillingly to Scotland, where she found the ancient untractableness of the feudal barons greatly increased by the wildest fanaticism of the nation respecting its recent change in religious belief. After a very few years, passed in almost continual warfare with her nobles, she was at length imprisoned by them, then deposed, and finally proscribed; and, in attempting to regain her liberty and her lost authority, she hastily threw herself into the hands of her powerful and jealous neighbour Elizabeth, who kept her in captivity for nineteen years, and then beheaded her in the very hall of her residence. Our sympathies are naturally excited towards a woman and a Queen who suffered so much from the turbulence of her subjects-who underwent so many and so great indignities and insults in her own capital on a subject on which she felt the greatest interest, that of her religion-and who found no repose, no happiness, no resting place, in any of the three countries in which the years of her very eventful life were passed; and we read in consequence, with the greater VOL. XXXI.-L delight that Mr. Mignet, in the second page of his history, professes to be altogether free from all prepossession on either side: "I shall be (he says) neither the apologist nor the traducer of this lovely Queen. I shall not judge Mary Stuart as she would be judged by a Catholic or a Protestant, by a Scotchman or an Englishman; but with the calm impartiality of history. I shall strive to show how far her misfortunes were merited, and how far they were the results of necessity, by giving such an explanation of her position and her conduct as shall be devoid at once of indulgence and of harshness." Mr. Mignet opens his subject by a brief but very able description of the political state of Scotland prior to the reign of this their first reigning Queen, and concludes his first chapter in this summing up of Scotland's condition at Mary's accession: had "Of the five kings who occupied the throne before Mary Stuart, two had been assassinated, James I. and James III.; two had fallen in battle, James II. and James IV.; and the last, James V., died of despair at beholding himself deserted by his nobility, whom he had hoped to subjugate, and at finding himself defeated at the moment when he believed his triumph secure. All the five had fallen victims to the antagonism of the Scottish aristocracy or to the hostility of England. Placed in circumstances too powerful for them to resist, they had all, while still young, lost their lives in battle or by conspiracy. The eldest of them had not completed his forty-first year, and all had left infants to succeed them. During five successive and prolonged minorities, there had been not merely a suspension of the royal work, but even a paralysis of the monarchy; for the sucsessive kings, having no public influence to support them in their attempts to crush the nobility, nor any revenues of their own to support permanent troops, nor any regular administration which they could substitute for the various chieftains' disorderly authority, were compelled to employ the territorial barons against each other, dispossessing those who opposed them, and aggrandising those who were favourable to them. They thus varied the distribution of the power of the aristocracy, without, as a whole, weakening it; and, instead of breaking in pieces the framework of feudalism, they filled it up in a different manner. The consequence was that they merely changed their antagonists. They had, indeed, endeavoured to render the royal domain inalienable-to recover the usurped rights of the crown-to abolish the hereditary guardianship of the frontiers-to diminish as much as possible the number of hereditary offices, and to interdict all confederations of the barons; but, yielding to the irresistible influence of usage and necessity, they had distributed the property which they had confiscated, restored the titles which they had withdrawn, continued the hereditary offices which they had abolished, and most of them had found themselves unable to prevent the leagues which they had condemned. The nobles regained, during the minorities, all the power they had lost, and Scotland continually relapsed into her former disorders. It was thus that, in spite of their plans and efforts, these five kings, by allowing the same state of society to subsist, handed down to each other the same dangers. And these dangers were multiplied in the case of Mary Stuart, during whose minority such a revolution was effected in the religious belief of the nation as added fresh causes of insubordination and conflict to those already in existence, the Protestant Reformation occurring to strengthen and extend the anarchy of the aristocracy." Mary Stuart was crowned Queen of Scotland in 1543 when nine months old, and very soon her person and her inheritance were eagerly sought for by both England and France. England was first in the field, and a treaty was presently concluded by Henry VIII. and the Regent the Earl of Arran for the marriage of Mary to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. But the impetuosity and actions of Henry had alarmed and disgusted the Scottish nation, which in five months annulled this treaty and entered into a very close alliance with France. This provoked Henry to declare war against Scotland, and the result of this war was that Mary, when six years old, was sent over to France to be affianced to the young Dauphin, of the same age as herself. When six more years had passed away, Mary of Lorraine, mother of the young Queen Mary, obtained the regency of Scotland upon the surrender of it by the Earl of Arran; and, in 1558, she had the satisfaction of marrying her daughter to the most powerful prince in Europe -of placing Scotland under the protection of France—and of securing to herself, as she thought, the regency of Scotland for her life. The most brilliant prospects now opened for Mary Stuart-Queen de facto of one kingdom-Queen, by marriage, of another-by all her subjects in both beloved and honoured and admired. With power almost absolute, and influence almost unlimited, her career promised to be one of unusual endurance and happiness and prosperity. What causes, therefore, can be assigned that this young and lovely and fortunate possessor of two crowns of the most warlike kingdoms in Europe should, within ten years of her marriage, lose them both; and, from the very consequence that she had once possessed both, should finally lose her head? Calamities of this overwhelming kind never happen but from some very sufficient reason. Monarchs are not deprived of their thrones, or their heads, from no motive whatever; and it is the business of history, distinctly, fully, and impartially, to say what causes occasioned such national confusion and disasters-what faults brought on such misfortunes-what errors in conduct what malignancy or treachery-what falsehood, or violence, or deceit what passion or prejudices-what folly, or viciousness, or obstinacy in wrong, in the Sovereign or her subjects, separately or collectively, led to such dire results in this instance as in the dethronement of a Queen, and her execution by another Queen, for plotting, as it was said, against her crown and her existence. It has been decidedly Mr. Mignet's purpose to trace out these causes clearly and fairly. To him it mattered nothing what the records of archives might say upon the matter; or whether they proved the great guilt of all the many murders and assassinations of those times to rest on the house of Tudor or the house of Stuart; and what he has revealed is the utter absence of anything like religious principle in all the parties concerned All were false and unfaithful: they would swear to any thing to-day and act directly contrary to it to-morrow: honesty and veracity, faithfulness and justice, were appealed to by all and were scouted by all; and we can neither wonder nor lament that such universal duplicity and falsehood, such treachery and injustice, should bring down some measure of ruin upon all, and chiefly upon those whose every act was deceitful and whose every word was untruthful. Whatever might have been, from her Stuart pedigree, Mary's love of truth or her instinctive contempt of it, it is certain that she had from her earliest youth very sorry advisers and very bad examples continually before her. Even previous to the day of her marriage, and from the very act of it, she was taught and made to practise the grossest deception upon her Scottish subjects. Her promise to them had been to preserve the integrity of the kingdom and to observe the ancient laws and liberties; but fifteen days previously she had attached her signature to two deeds, one of which was to charge Scotland with a debt of one million pieces of eight to the King of France and to give to him the possession of the kingdom until the debt was paid, which, under the then circumstances of Scotland, was giving it for a perpetuity; but even this did not satisfy the French King, who laid before her another deed which she signed, and which was a full and free donation of Scotland to the Kings of France for ever; her uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, counselling her in the master. But to commit her still further, and to implicate her in this system of fraud, she was further required on the same day to sign another deed, in which she protested against all that she should promise to the Scots in her marriage contract, and beforehand annulled all the conditions they might require of her for their consent to her marriage with the Dauphin: she being desirous (she says) |