Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/528

Rh 504 SCOTLAND [HISTORY. 1563-1567. and celebrating the mass. Yet Knox's comment in his History is, " This conference we have inserted to let the world see how Marie queen of Scotland can dissemble, and how that she could cause men to think that she bore no indignation for any controversy in religion, while that yet in her heart was nothing but venom and destruction, as short after that did appear." She was in fact corre- sponding with her uncle the cardinal of Lorraine, with the pope, with Philip II., testifying her steadfast attachment to Papacy and her desire to restore the Catholic faith. At a last conference Kncx remonstrated against her marriage, then thought imminent, with a Papist, claiming the right of a subject " to speak out on this topic which so nearly concerned the commonwealth," remaining unmoved by the last argument of a woman, which he savagely describes as "howling and tears in greater abundance than the matter required." Nothing but perusal of the conversations can bring before us this pregnant passage of history the abase- ment of the Scottish monarchy before the religious de- mocracy of the woman forced to dissemble and weep be- fore the stern man believing he delivered a message from God to the head of a corrupt court. Something was allowed to Knox's sincere outspokenness. He moved men and women alike by words which, like Luther's, go straight to the realities of life. He is the typical Scottish divine framed on the model of the Hebrew prophets, and often reproduced in weaker copies. The Reformation in Scotland, in both its strength and its weakness, was his work more than that of any other man. The Presbyterian form of government, of which his friend Calvin was the author, was introduced by Knox from Geneva and con- tinued for long to enforce discipline, first by censure and then, if need be, by excommunication and temporal punish- ment, entirely in his spirit. Mary's Not only to Knox and the Reformers but to all classes marriage the question of the day was the queen's marriage. Apart f rom h er Deaut y> her political position rendered her hand of importance to the balance of power. It held not only the dowry of France and the possession of Scotland but a claim, which might be at any moment asserted, to the English crown. She avowed her inclination to marry, and indeed she required a man to put her in possession of her kingdom. Don Carlos, the archduke of Austria, son of Philip of Spain, Charles IX. of France, the kings of Denmark and of Sweden, the archduke Charles, second son of the emperor, were all passed in review but rejected. Elizabeth pressed the claim of her favourite Leicester, a project supported by Cecil and Moray. In the end the fair face and fine figure of her young cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, carried the day. A party of the Scottish nobles Athole, himself a Stuart, Morton, Crawford, Eglin- ton, and Cassilis favoured the alliance. David Rizzio, the queen's foreign secretary, who already had great in- fluence with her, promoted it. But it was her own act, the most dangerous of many false steps in her life. Shortly before the marriage (29th July 1565) Moray attempted to seize Darnley and the queen a"s they rode from Perth to Callendar near Falkirk. When it was accomplished he rose in arms with the duke of Chastelherault, the head of the Hamiltons, Argyll, and Rothes ; but Mary' with a large force pursued them from place to place in the Roundabout Raid, from the neighbourhood of Edinburgh through Fife, where she levied fines, and finally to Dumfries, from which Moray fled to England. He had been secretly but not vigorously supported by Elizabeth, who, when she heard of his flight, recalled her orders to Bedford, then on the marches, to place troops at the disposal of the insurgents. Mary still retained some of the popularity of a young queen, and fostered it by an apparent desire to humour the Re- formers. For the first time she attended a Protestant ley. sermon. But the consequences of a union between a high- spirited woman, active in mind and body beyond her sex and years, with a vain and dissolute youth were soon seen. His alienation from the queen, the murder of Rizzio, with the intrigues that preceded and followed it, the rapid growth of Bothwell's influence, the pitiable vacillations of Darnley, and his murder at Kirk of Field (10th February Murder 1567) have been sketched in the article MAKY (vol. xv. of Dam- p. 596 sq.). The authors of the last crime were Bothwell, ley< who devised it, and his servants, who executed it. Their confessions leave no doubt of their own guilt. Who were their accomplices has from that day to this been debated without conclusive answer. The great controversy is whether the nobles with Moray at their head had bound themselves to support Bothwell, as he and Mary after- wards declared, or whether Mary, possessed with passion for Bothwell and hate of Darnley, herself instigated her husband's murder. Some have thought both the queen and the nobles were implicated. The casket letters, alleged to have been found in a coffer that was given to Morton by Dalgleish when intrusted with it by Sir James Balfour for its delivery to Bothwell, must be left out in any fair examination of this question. The mode of their recovery and their production, first partially and secretly before Elizabeth's commissioners at York, then with apparent but not real publicity at Westminster (for Mary's counsellors were not allowed to see them), their contents, so different from her known writings, and the disappearance of the originals render their evidence inadmissible. What weighs most against Mary is her subsequent conduct, explicable only in favour of innocence if she was absolutely in Both- well's power from the time of the murder to the defeat of Carberry, an hypothesis not borne out by facts. Though Lennox and his wife urged that the murderers be brought to justice, there was delay till 13th April, when Bothwell was at last brought before an assize. The trial was a sham, and his acquittal on the pretence that there was no accuser could deceive no one. The strange wooing which commenced when Darnley was Mary's just buried, if not before, was continued by the seizure of relation Mary by Bothwell near Cramond and her captivity in her ^ own castle of Dunbar a pretence according to her adver- saries, an opportunity for an outrage from which marriage was the only escape according to her defenders at last culminated in the marriage at six in the morning, at Holy- rood, on the 15th of May 1567. It was the month when wicked women marry, said the people, writing Ovid's line on the Tolbooth walls. Before it took place she created Bothwell duke of Orkney, and pardoned him for any violence. She also wrote in palliation of his conduct to the French king. His divorce from Lady Jane Gordon had been hurried through both the bishops' court and that of the Protestant commissaries, in the former on the false pretence that there had been no papal dispensation for his marriage to one of near kin, and in the latter on the ground of adultery. Mary had been more than once warned of the consequences of such a marriage by Lord Herries, by the faithful Melville, and by Craig, the minister who, with the utmost reluctance, proclaimed the banns. It was an act which required no warning. She had no alternative, urge her vindicators, to save her honour, and her tears on the morning of marriage are proof that she was forced; but the more scrupulous admit she should have preferred death to union with a man she must at least have known was not clear of Darnley's murder. Her enemies said then, and historians who take their side repeat, that it was the mad- ness of a passion she could not resist. The view most consistent with the facts seems to be that she accepted, not without fits of remorse, the service of the strongest sword at her disposal on the only terms on which she