Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/235

Rh whom James would no longer endure, she drove off in one of the king's coaches, and took refuge in the convent of St Cecilia on the 15th of November, 1725. Inverness in his account of this affair says, "it is a matter the king is very easy about, since he sees plainly that the queen has been drawn into this step, and m;ule subservient to a project of Marr's which has been laid those several years." Whatever opinion the king might have of the causes which had brought about this strange resolution of the queen, it evidently, and indeed it could not be otherwise, gave him no little trouble. "The queen is still in the convent," he writes to one of his correspondents, "and her advisers continue still under a false pretence of religion, to procure my uneasiness from the pope to such a degree, that I wish myself out of his country, and I won't fail to do my endeavours to leave it, which I am persuaded will tend to the advantage of my affairs.' This, however, is evidently the ebullition of a weak mind, attempting to hide from itself its own weakness, and there can be no doubt, as one of his best friends remarked at the time, that this extraordinary proceeding gave a terrible shock to his affairs, lowered his character in the judgment both of friends and foes, and highly displeased the continental princes, many of whom were nearly related to the queen. At the same time, whether Marr, as was given out by one side of the Jacobite interest, was really the author of all this mischief, is a question that we think admits of being very fairly disputed. That Inverness and his lady had attained to the absolute sway of James's affections, does not appear to admit of a doubt. How they attained to this envied superiority is not so easily to be accounted for. "His lordship," according to Lockhart of Carnwath, "was a cunning, false, avaricious creature, of very ordinary parts, cultivated by no sort of literature, altogether void of experience in business, and his insolence prevailing often over his little stock of prudence, he did and said many unadvised ridiculous things, that with any other master would soon have stript him of that credit which, without any merit, at the expense of the king's character and the peace of his family, he maintained, in opposition to the remonstrances of several potentates, and his majesty's best friends at home and abroad. His lady was a mere coquette, tolerably handsome, but withal prodigiously vain and arrogant" and he adds, what appears to be the true solution of the mystery, though he affects at the same time to make light of it, "It was commonly reported and believed, that she was the king's mistress, and that the queen's jealousy was the cause of the rupture." That it was so we have the testimony of the queen herself: "Mr Hay and his lady are the cause," she says, writing to her sister, "that I am retired into a convent. I received your letter in their behalf, and returned you an answer only to do you a pleasure, and to oblige the king, but it all has been to no purpose, for instead of making them my friends, all the civilities I have shown them have only served to render them more insolent. Their unworthy treatment of me has in short reduced me to such an extremity, and I am in such a cruel situation, that I had rather suffer death than live in the king's palace with persons that have no religion, honour, nor conscience, and who, not content with having been the authors of such a fatal separation betwixt the king and me, are continually teasing him every day to part with all his best friends and most faithful subjects. This at length determined me to retire into a convent, there to spend the rest of my days in lamenting my misfortunes, after having been fretted for six years together by the most mortifying indignities and insults that can be imagined." That Marr, beholding such conduct on the part of these worthless favourites, and the uneasiness of the queen under it, should have laboured for the preventing of such a fatal catastrophe, to have them removed, is rather a bright spot upon a character which, it must be owned, had few redeeming qualities.